ILLUMINATE – Polaris Music Prize Presents: Runout Grooves, A Chat with Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland
September 20, 2026 | 3:00 PM–5:00 PM | It’s OK* Studios, 468 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON| All Ages | Free w/ RSVP
In celebration of the 2026 Polaris Festival, presented by SiriusXM Canada, Polaris presents Runout Grooves, A chat with Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland. An intimate afternoon conversation with Beverly and Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland, and host Melissa Vincent.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is a month-long celebration of Canadian music as art, bringing together concerts, salons, listening sessions, conversations, artist development initiatives, and the Polaris Concert & Award Ceremony at Massey Hall. Through the Festival, Polaris creates space for audiences to listen differently, gather around important Canadian albums, and explore how music shapes culture, identity, memory, and belonging.
Reserve Your Spot for Runout Grooves
Runout Grooves is a conversation about music, memory, creative life, and the long afterlives of songs.
Taking place at It’s OK* Studios, the event invites audiences into a more intimate setting with Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland for a reflective conversation moderated by Melissa Vincent.
The title takes inspiration from the runout groove: the space at the end of a vinyl record where the needle continues to circle after the music has finished. In that final loop, there is still movement, resonance, and possibility. This conversation asks what continues to echo after a song, album, or artistic life enters public memory.
Known for a body of work that moves across folk, jazz, electronic, spiritual, classical, and experimental forms, Beverly Glenn-Copeland has created music that resists easy categorization. His 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies has become a landmark work of Canadian music, recognized for its warmth, futurity, and deeply human approach to electronic sound.
Featured Guests
Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a visionary composer, singer, and trans elder whose career spans more than five decades of pioneering work across folk, electronic, and spiritual music. A classically trained musician who studied at McGill University, his practice has continually evolved, guided by a deep commitment to emotional truth, storytelling, and spiritual inquiry.
His 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies, created using early synthesizers in rural Ontario, experienced an extraordinary global rediscovery decades after its release. Once a little-known cassette, it is now widely regarded as a foundational work in ambient and experimental music, earning the Polaris Prize Heritage Award and inspiring a new generation of artists and listeners
worldwide.
In recent years, Glenn-Copeland’s influence has expanded through collaborations with artists including Sam Smith, Blood Orange, Bon Iver, and Jeremy Dutcher, who have helped bring his work to broader international audiences. His music continues to bridge genres and generations, drawing from diverse traditions while remaining unmistakably his own.
Elizabeth Copeland
Elizabeth Copeland is a multi-disciplinary artist whose career over the past 50 years has evolved at the intersection of arts and activism. She is an author, a performing artist, producer and arts educator who has worked around the world. Performance credits include playing the Witch in Hansel and Gretl with the Honolulu Symphony, touring with Second City doing improv comedy, and more recently, producing and performing with her husband, Beverley Glenn-Copeland. As an author, she has written poetry, short stories and articles that have been published in Resilience Magazine and Deep Times Journal, to name a few. Her book of narrative eco-poetry, Daring to Hope at the Cliff’s Edge was the result of a year-long odyssey on the Fundy shores of Nova Scotia.
Melissa Vincent
Melissa Vincent is a music journalist, researcher, strategist, and former Polaris Music Prize Jury Foreperson. For Runout Grooves, she will guide the conversation through questions of artistic memory, Canadian music history, creative practice, and the ways songs continue to live in public and personal archives.
About It’s OK* Studios
It’s Ok* Studios is an independent Black-led and operated, interdisciplinary, multipurpose arts space. Transformed from a vacant retail building in the historic Queen West district, the space is a hub for artistic growth and development, a vibrant gathering place for Toronto’s Black artistic community.
About Polaris Music Prize
Polaris Music Prize is a Canadian charitable arts organization honouring music as art. Through its Album, Song, and Heritage Prizes, Polaris amplifies Canadian artists based on artistic merit.
The 2026 Polaris Festival is presented by SiriusXM Canada and made possible through the support of Experience Ontario, Ontario Creates, the City of Toronto’s Cultural Festivals Funding Program, FACTOR, the Government of Canada, Canada’s private radio broadcasters, and the Festival’s many community and venue partners.
