Stitch is, in vocalist Christine Duncan’s words, “a one-act experimental sewing opera.” That may sound daunting, stern or even rich, but Duncan, especially when describing the genesis of the project — part of the two-week “Free Fall” festival of interdisciplinary Canadian performance works that opens this weekend — characterizes it primarily as fluid, and a lot of fun.

“It started out as a very loose, conceptual thing,” she explains. “There were four of us, Anna [Chatterton], Juliet [Palmer], Christie Pearson and myself working in a theatre space with a couple of sewing machines. We were improvising: with the imagery, sound, fabric — all of the elements that make up the manufacturing of clothing and that define women and their relationship to these kinds of objects. We explored a more emotional or psychological landscape with it, and then these little vignettes emerged.”

Chatterton eventually wrote the libretto, and Palmer the music; Duncan was joined by two other vocalists, Patricia O’Callaghan and Neema Bickersteth, and then director Ruth Madoc-Jones, choreographer Marie-Josée Chartier and set designers Sarah Armstrong and Kimberly Purtell stepped in. (Pearson is, together with Palmer, part of urbanvessel, whose mandate is to get the ball rolling on new performance works like Stitch.)

The process that led this klatch of creative women to their final product is not, of course, unlike the history of communal work they explore within it. Stitch, however, is not just about the folk traditions — group singing, for instance — that distinguish pre-industrial sewing; it is about the advent of the sewing machine and its subsequent effect on these traditions. As Duncan notes, this was both a good and a bad thing: the sewing machine allowed women to be more efficient in their work, giving them time to do other things, but it also led to sweatshops, a phenomenon explored throughout Stitch.
“The interesting thing is that before [the sewing machine], when women used to work in the fields and elsewhere, it was a much slower pace, a much quieter environment,” says Duncan. “There wasn’t this industrial noise. So communication is definitely a part of it. But the thing is the more facility there is to do work quickly, the higher the bar is raised; no matter if it’s the 19th or 21st century, you’re still barely able to eke [a living] out and meet the standard.”

One of Duncan’s roles in Stitch is playing a “domineering” sweatshop supervisor, though there are also elements she’s contributing that cast the sewing machine oppositely: she does an extended voice piece, for instance, in which she improvises along with the sound of the machine, which she loves. Other songs in the show, such as the hilarious “Chain Stitch, Lock Stitch, Whip Stitch,” further indicate the ambiguous power that society tends to bestow on sewers.

“We very quickly came to the conclusion that, given the kind of stuff we were doing with this equipment, it was much, much safer not to use any needles and threads,” says Duncan. “Real sewing is very intense, specific work. You have to pay attention and focus. You could take your fingers off.”