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“Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world.
Lost and Found, Tales of the Travelling Doll is a music work by Toronto-based writer Liza Balkan and composer Njo Kong Kie, about love, loss, and transformation. Created for for young audiences and families, it is inspired by an apocryphal story involving Franz Kafka helping a young child navigate through their grief when a favourite doll goes missing. In the legend, Kafka comes upon a young girl in a park in Berlin who is devastated by the loss of their most beloved doll. Trying to comfort her, Kafka contrives a series of stories over several days, about the doll having gone on extended travels. He writes letters on the doll's behalf to share with the young girl during each of their several visits to the park. The doll's adventures capture the girl's heart and imagination. Eventually, Kafka tells her the doll has returned and he presents a new doll to her. The girl is dubious; The doll looks so different from when she had first gone missing. Kafka explains that her travels had changed her. The little girl understands that this might indeed be possible. Years later, the girl, now an adult, finds a note stuffed inside the replacement doll that contains the deeply resonant words, "Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form". Kong Kie and Liza have re-imagined the setting for the story as a present-day community within the various complexities of a large Canadian city, similar indeed to many cities in North America and elsewhere. The location of the storytelling should/can indeed be adapted to the communities, cities and countries in which this work plays. The protagonists become a little child and their older sibling, with other members of the neighbourhood slowly finding themselves compelled to join in the storytelling of the doll's adventures. For each run of the show, Balkan and Njo envision holding creation workshops with the help of a local facilitator with a group of students/young people within the community or school. This will ensure the text reflects and include elements specific to the locality. The workshop participants will also then be involved in the performance. The piece will be approximately 50 minutes, adaptable for indoors and outdoors or a combination of both. The intended audiences are grades 3 to 7. The story is told by 4 singers playing multiple roles. An accordionist provides the instrumentation. Half of the score has been created, with the first draft of the complete score expected by the summer of 2025. We are looking for co-commissioners for the premier productions of the work. Below are some excerpts of the work - taken from 2023 workshop archival recording.
LOST AND FOUND: A Tale of the Traveling Doll
Opening Scene Time: Late Spring/Early Summer. Mid-Morning. Location: A park and well–used community space somewhere in the heart of the city. Example: West End/Parkdale in Toronto. The park is alive with daily activity: someone is digging in the community garden area, a kid on a skateboard whizzes by now and then, attempting some flip tricks. A couple walks by, both focused on their own phones. Someone is alone on a bench – reading. Or staring up at the world. Pedestrians are on their way to their next destination in various states of hurry. In the play area, A child laughs as they travel down the slide a few final times before running off. Amidst it all is a 7-year-old is frantically searching for something. Their older sibling who is 14 or 15 years old, is supposed to be watching out for the little child. Instead, they are angrily texting away. It is an all-encompassing argument with someone they care about who is clearly being total shithead in this moment. The little child suddenly stops searching and leans against a tree and begins to wail. Little Child
The boy on the skateboard whizzes by. Little Child
A parent and a child walk by the other way, the child continues to look at the little girl as she and her parent walk by. Little Child
The Little Child continues to cry. Somewhere during the above, the Older Sibling looks up reluctantly, resenting this distraction from their fierce round of life-or-death texting. They stomp over to their younger sibling and yell. Older Sibling
Little Child
The little child whimpers. Little Child
Older Sibling
Little Child
Older Sibling
Their cell vibrates and they answer:
To the Little Child
Little Child
Older Sibling (on their Cell)
Little Child
Older Sibling
The older sibling “hangs up” Little Child
Older Sibling
The Little Child has cried themselves out. For the moment. They quietly gulp air The Older Sibling is fuming. They are pissed off at their friend on the phone And angry at the Little Child for being a pain in the ass. The Little Child sits down on the ground. The Older Sibling, still fuming, looks at their younger sibling and softens, only just enough to offer, begrudgingly...(Cont’d) CREATORS' BIOS
Her work as a librettist includes the text for composer Brian Current’s multi - Dora Award – nominated opera Gould’s Wall, produced by Tapestry Opera/Koerner Hall/RCM/21C Festival in August 2022. With composer Lembit Beecher, she co-created the song cycle Looking at Spring, which premiered in Vermont in 2014. They also collaborated on I Missed the Beginning, premiering in NYC in 2017, and After the Fires, which premiered in May 2022 in Brooklyn, New York and had a subsequent production at The Royal Conservatory of Music/Koerner Hall in 2023.Liza has also written text for several short opera works produced by Tapestry Opera ,Bicycle Opera Project, and Opera McGill. In 2020, inspired by a desire to keep practicing and creating through the first year of the pandemic, as well as thanking the community in which she lived during this time of isolation, Liza co-created, directed and wrote the lyrics for the song cycle, So, how’s it been? The text for this show incorporated the words garnered from multiple interviews with residents of all ages and backgrounds living in the small city of Stratford Ontario. It was performed outdoors to sold out houses at Here for Now Theatre in Stratford during the summer of 2021. Liza’s more recent directing credits include Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare in High Park/Canadian Stage), The Canadian premiere of the children’s opera Frog Song (Here for Now Theatre, Stratford Ontario) Every Brilliant Thing (Grand Theatre London), Mustard ( University of Waterloo), the premiere stage production of Stephanie Martin’s opera Llandovery Castle (Opera Laurier), the Canadian Premiere of Louis Andriessen’s chamber opera Anais Nin , starring Wallis Giunta, (Koerner Hall /RCM), The Brothers Grimm (Canadian Opera Company Ensemble), Montsalvatge’s El Gato con Botas and Berio’s Folk Songs ( GGS/RCM ), and Bicycle Opera Project’s 2 summer seasons as well as their performance at 21C Festival (Koerner Hall). Her career as an actor has included multiple productions, in a wide variety of genres, across Canada and in the US. She received Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Award for her performance in Still the Night (Theatre Passe Muraille/Tapestry) and a nomination for Calgary’s Betty Mitchel Award during the show’s Cross –Canada tour. Other favourite credits include: KISS (Canadian Stage /ARC ), The Winter’s Tale (National Arts Centre ) Pomona ( ARC – Ensemble Dora Nomination ), It’s All True (Great Canadian Theatre Company) Awake and Sing ( People’s Light and Theatre Company- US), Little Black Fish ( Theatre for the New City , NYC) She had the great privilege of working with Jerome Robbins, playing the role of Anybodys in West Side Story (Kennedy Centre, Wash. DC) Liza also appeared in the First Canadian National Tour of Cats. Liza ‘s most recent Canadian film /TV credits include Atom Egoyan’s feature film Remember and has appeared in the celebrated TV series, Murdoch Mysteries. She has also been the voice of Sailor Mercury in the anime series Sailor Moon. Liza continues to be devoted to her busy practice as an educator and mentor. She is presently on faculty at Sharjah Performing Arts Academy in the UAE and has been an instructor at the Don Wright Faculty of Music/Western, University of Waterloo, Humber College, George Brown College, University of Windsor, Royal Conservatory of Music/Glenn Gould School, Laurier University, Ryerson, Randolph Academy, CCPA (Victoria) and the Birmingham Conservatory at the Stratford Festival. Liza is committed to inclusionary practices, communication, and building confident, joyful, respectful, healthy, and courageous spaces in which to create with others. She received her MFA through the Canadian Stage/York University Graduate Studies in Directing and is a member of the Association for Acting Coaches and Educators (AACE)
Kong Kie creates chamber operas dissecting topics ranging from same-sex marriage (knotty together) to human organ trafficking (The Futures Market). His music theatre piece Mr. Shi and His Lover is the first-ever Chinese language production at Canada’s National Arts Centre. The work was a feature Canadian presentation at the Cervantino Festival in Mexico in 2019 and toured to Estonia in March 2020. Its impending premier in Paris unfortunately was cancelled due to COVID. Outside of his own creations, Kong Kie lends his skills to collaborations, including incidental music to Hannah Moscovitch’s play infinity, Sunny Drake’s No Strings Attached, Ian Kamau’s Loss and Marjorie Chan’s The Year of the Cello. Kong Kie was the long-serving music director and pianist of La La La Human Steps and has produced four albums of soundtrack for their shows featuring works of David Lang and Gavin Bryars. In 2021, Kong Kie was the music director and arranger for I Am William at Stratford Festival and is engaged to create incidental music to their 2024 production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Kong Kie has licensed compositions to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Ballet BC, Singapore Dance Theatre and has created original soundtrack for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Point View Art Association (Macau) and for choreographers Anne Plamondon and Marcio Silveira (Montreal). Kong Kie has contributed music to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), the web site of Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake, the soundtrack of Edouard Lock's film Amelia and the CBC documentary series China Rises. He has worked with Alejandro Alvarez for his award-winning short film Deep Sleep, the CBC short doc Untitled Portrait as well as the web series Off Kilter; and has recently composed and performed in John Greyson’s short film Death Mask.
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Liza Balkan is an accomplished, multi-disciplinary theatre artist with a career that spans over 40 years. Originally from Canada, her professional practices include extensive work as an actor, director, creator, librettist, educator, as well as dancer and singer – each discipline informing the other. She began her Conservatory training and then professional work as an actor in New York City in the late 70’s/early 80’s, returning to Ontario eight years later to continue developing and expanding her practices in the theatre.
Liza had an extended residency with The Theatre Centre in Toronto between 2008 -2012. Through this residency, she developed, co-produced and then directed her documentary/verbatim project Out the Window. This project, investigating policing, Use of Force, mental health, racism, and the justice system, had several public iterations on its journey toward a production at Toronto’s International Luminato Festival in 2018. Out The Window was published by Sirocco Drama in the Fall of 2022.
Njo Kong Kie is a composer, pianist and music-theatre creator. Music Picnic, the collective that Kong Kie founded, was company-in-residence at Canadian Stage in the 2017-2019 seasons. During that time, Kong Kie presented two music-focused interdisciplinary work, Picnic in the Cemetery, a concert-theatre and I swallowed a moon made of iron, a staged song cycle, which has just completed its tours of South East Asia and Australia.