Circle of grief

Chantal Kreviazuk is probably my favourite Canadian singer and, though she's been around since the early 90s, that's a claim I make based on the extraordinary impact of a single song & video. The details of her successful career are fairly well documented, with her recording, song-writing and soundtracks successes known here and internationally.

She is a national treasure (though lately fading). But, again, I doubt I'd be saying any of this were it not for her "Surrounded", a beautifully lyrical and psychologically complex portrayal (the best I've seen) of grief. The YouTube version is, in fact, a poem. Music, movement, and setting are a mantra. A circle (an oft-repeated word) in which she's caught forever. Even when I don't see her, I envisage the singer repeating (and having had to repeat many times over) this terrible ritual: this terrible death spiral, in fact, in order to live. Antigone is the pattern of Kreviazuk's song.

A young woman's tragedy that neither she nor the consolations of lyrics and dance can adequately name but which is to be felt in the piano's broken rhapsody & the wound of death's first time etched in her voice. The figures in her eyes are hard to watch, too, and the blind window & amulet, the bomb and toppling libraries. All of it.

But she knows we can and we do watch, even 3 decades after the song's first appearance. And that she'll never go through this alone, again. Chantal's worth it.