Bios
Margaret Sweatman
Margaret Sweatman is a playwright, poet, performer and novelist. Her plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed (songs and spoken word) with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra and the National Academy Orchestra, as well as with her own Broken Songs Band. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.
Sweatman is the author of the novels Fox, Sam and Angie, and When Alice Lay Down with Peter, which won several awards including the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. Her recent novel, The Players, is published by Goose Lane Editions (Fall 2009). With Glenn Buhr, Sweatman won a Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film (When Wintertime from the film Seven Times Lucky: music by Buhr; Sweatman lyrics).
Glenn Buhr, Broken Songs Composer/Music-Director/Pianist
Glenn Buhr is a composer, music curator and producer, band leader, and improvisational pianist. He became well known in Canada as co-founder with conductor Bramwell Tovey of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival. He is Professor of Music Composition and Improvisation in the Contemporary Music Program at Wilfrid Laurier University and also Artistic Director of NUMUS Concerts in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Buhr has toured Canada twice as a jazz artist, and has recently performed his 2nd Piano Concerto with both the Esprit Orchestra and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. His music has been performed all over the world by such diverse ensembles as the London Sinfonia, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Penderecki String Quartet, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, pianist Louis Lortie, soprano Tracy Dahl and many others. His Symphony no. 3 (a choral symphony) was premiered by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in February 2008 with pop singer Sarah Slean as soloist. In 2003, his full length ballet Beauty and the Beast was premiered by the Birmingham Royal Ballet in Birmingham, England. The work has since toured the UK (three times), Hong Kong, Japan and mainland China for a total of more than 100 performances.