Past Event

September Song

Name: September Song
Start: 2021-09-11T18:00:00.000000Z
End: 2021-09-11T22:00:00.000000Z
Location: Harbourfront Centre

Harbourfront Centre Event

Event Location: Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Old Toronto, M5V 3A6

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Sep. 11 2021, 2:00 p.m - 6:00 p.m

Sep. 12 2021, 2:00 p.m - 6:00 p.m

Sep. 15 2021, 4:00 p.m - 8:00 p.m

Sep. 16 2021, 4:00 p.m - 8:00 p.m

Sep. 17 2021, 4:00 p.m - 8:00 p.m

Sep. 18 2021, 2:00 p.m - 6:00 p.m

Sep. 19 2021, 2:00 p.m - 6:00 p.m

September Song by Heather Nicol

Due to COVID-19 safety precautions, every visitor needs to book a ticket in advance, and will be asked to show it upon entry. Reserve your free ticket here.

Created 20 years after the events of 9/11, September Song is an immersive visual and sound installation based on Heather Nicol’s first-hand experience and lingering memories of that cataclysmic morning in Lower Manhattan. Haunting sounds, images and imagined scenarios distilled over many years are at the core of September Song.

A spatialized audio score for September Song is performed by absent, ghost players. Featuring a baby grand piano suspended overhead, captured as if in a photograph, the menacing object references Damocles’ sword, the origin story of the phrase “dangling by a thread.” Once a focal point in public and domestic gathering places, pianos are now being tossed away. Delicately cascading bits of paper flicker, and a lone figure sweeps the detritus.

The passage of time is gently embedded in the commemoration of 9/11 so many years later; there is a distant, frozen-moment aspect to the fall of the “Twin Towers.” Some are too young to remember that day at all. The installation is an invitation to the public to safely gather and collectively reflect on that disruptive event of 20 years ago, its links and resonance with our current pandemic times, and to remember those lost.

Heather Nicol is a Toronto-based artist whose practice includes sculpture, installation, sound works and participatory actions. Nicol has worked with actors, musicians, choreographers, educators and fabricators throughout her interdisciplinary practice. Her site-specific interventions explore the architectural, sonic, historical and operational conditions of her locations. These have included enormous concourse atriums such as Brookfield Place in Toronto (architect Santiago Calatrava) and New York’s Winter Garden (architect César Pelli), both Arts Brookfield commissions. Other site interventions include two former rail terminals (ZK/U Berlin, Germany and Eastern Terminal, Buffalo, New York), a decommissioned theme park (Ontario Place, in/future), Château de Courances (Milly-la-Forêt, France), a multistory parking garage (SculptureCenter, New York), a historic carriage house (Hudson, New York), Toronto’s downtown transit hub (Union Station, Nuit Blanche) and a storage locker facility (Art Spin, Toronto). She has exhibited in Toronto, Ottawa, New York City, Ann Arbor and Berlin. This is Nicol’s first site incursion in a theatre.