George Elliott Clarke's Qu�b�cit� is a three-act multicultural romance set in modern-day Quebec. It tells the story of two interracial couples whose blossoming relationships expose the perils and possibilities of loving across racial and cultural lines. Qu�b�cit� is an expanded, poetic rendering of a libretto George Elliott Clarke wrote at the request of the Guelph Jazz Festival, with music composed by Juno award-winning pianist D.D. Jackson. The opera will debut in Guelph during this year's festival (September 3 to 7) with a cast including Haydain Neale, Kiran Ahluwalia, Yoon Choi and Dean Bowman. As Clarke writes in his prelude: \"This libretto is for connoisseurs. Its stanzas were sculpted of the aggravated gravitas of Miles Davis's trumpet, the scalacious solace of James Brown's howls, the fearless laissez-faire of Oscar Peterson's piano, and the oceanic n�gritude of Portia White's contralto. I confess: it is also a callaloo confection -- or gumbo concoction -- of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) and films by Marcel Camus, Jacques Demy and Mira Nair. Given these traditions, plus my own tendencies, eccentricities, affinities -- lugubrious, lubricious, lubricated -- this production accepts that History is a slaughterhouse, Poetry is an opera house, and that only Love allows us to distinguish Beauty from its exinguishing.\" \"Opera has always been about grand-scale gestures, about excess, about staging the spectacular. Throw jazz into the mix and what you get is [...] a gumbo concoction: one where hope and imagination rainbow over orthodoxy, where improvisation and the capacity to dream reinvigorate our commitment to new understandings of identity, belonging, and collective social responsibility.\" -- Ajay Heble in the Canadian Theatre Review