Artists’ Statement

Composer Lorae Farrell and playwright Elaine Ávila arrived at the Caetani Centre in June, 2025 to work on composing a play with songs, about the woman who inspired Farrell to found her jazz orchestra, Hypatia.

Hypatia was the first known female scientist and a renown philosopher, mathematician and astronomer.

Ávila recently received a BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant to Creative Writers to write the play. 

This grant is to support the creation, development, arrangement and rehearsal of the music for the play, as well as for future, separate performances and recordings of the music. 

“I have a number of songs written for the orchestra, but need to write several songs in response to the themes of Ávila’s play, and arrange and re-conceptualize the music,” says Lorae. “I will re-establish my ensemble in Vancouver, and hold six rehearsals, over a period of six months, to further develop the music and arrangements.”

Artistic vision on Hypathia: Hypatia was integral to the invention of geometry (the work she was a part of hasn’t changed in 23 centuries). She was one of first female university professors, astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers and users of the astrolabe (which she taught her students to construct), a tool which made it possible to measure the trajectory of the stars and led us to be able to travel the globe. 

She was also brutally murdered. As described in Lapham Quarterly, in the year 415, in the city of Alexandria, “the philosopher Hypatia was murdered by a mob of Christian men. These men, the parabalani, were a volunteer militia of monks serving as henchmen to the archbishop…. ….At the urging of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, they had already destroyed the remains of the Library of Alexandria….They pulled the elderly teacher (Hypatia) from her chariot as she rode through the city and dragged her to a temple. She was stripped naked, her skin flayed with jagged pieces of oyster shells, her limbs pulled from her body and paraded through the streets.” Her remains were publicly burned.

The play will focus on the events leading up to her murder, on Hypatia’s joy of learning and creation, but also explore the need to address the rise of ignorance and hatred to women and other under-represented groups, a threat for us in contemporary times.  

This project addresses inequity for women (both trans and cis), as our numbers are still so woefully unrepresented in science, theatre, music, jazz, composing, and literature. The goal is for more people to be aware of the contributions women (trans and cis) have made historically, are capable of making in the present, in order to inspire a more equitable future.