There are few Canadian playwrights as talented as Daniel MacIvor when it comes to crafting stories hinged on characters’ inner workings and emotional states - and he reaffirms that fact with his latest offering as a writer and director; Communion, now playing at the Tarragon Theatre.
Seven people are preparing to jump off the south side of the Vancouver Public Library. About 300 people have begun to gather, watching in anticipation. There are no paramedics on site, no safety nets have been deployed. Tension mounts. Children fidget and start to cry. Groups of friends huddle, clutching their daily dose of Starbucks.
Finally, the music starts and the dancers begin to saunter across the face of the library, held safely in place, mid-air, by rock climbing gear rigged to the top of the building. The dancers’ majestic movements are choreographed by Julia Taffe,...
Odysseus Chaoticus indeed. This piece is visually compelling, innovative, surprising, intimate, vulnerable, riotous, bawdy, eloquent and well executed to boot! A liberal dose of nourishing comedy for us heroes of the day-to-day.
The Chutzpah! Festival coninues: on March 8th Sidra Bell Dance and Gallim Dance of New York presented a double-bill performance. Though vastly different in style, neither Sidra's Bell's “Anthology” nor Gallim Dance's “I Can See Myself in Your Pupil” overtly showed their conceptual underpinnings. Both companies focused on the purely physical rather than intellectual. Sidra Bell Dance explored polarities, representing the body as sultry and mechanical, while Gallim Dance shook things up with a wild, free-for-all performance.
Felix Culpa has done an admirable job with a challenging script. Playwright Tom Cone's latest opus, Donald and Lenore, is a surreal journey with two characters going nowhere in a made-up paradise of sorts. Set in a Polynesian-inspired Tiki Room underneath an unnamed airport, ex-con Donald performs nightly in a tiki room act with his boss Lenore. Depending on her mood, she calls him either "Jailbait" or "Donald #7". They seem to have creative differences - Donald wants to share his highly inappropriate stand-up act about his former cellmate Hernando while Lenore insists on pretending it is their big...
Billy Marchenski & Linda Quibell as Donald & Lenore
There are the words and the melodies I write, and there are the fusions that I create between ethnic groups, between currents and between people, and in the encounter between them everything is open ~ Idan Raichel
On March 4th the Chutzpah! Festival kicked off its tenth anniversary with a performance by the Idan Raichel Project, which treated visitors to the Chan Shun Concert Hall to a taste of the jazz inflected world music that is its forte. The Idan Raichel Project is known for fusing Israeli pop with music from around the world, from Ethiopia to Morocco and...
Strange to say, but the more dance I see, the more I like dance that focuses less on performance and more on transcendence. I suppose I wouldn’t like to see, for example, a Shamanistic ritual onstage at the Playhouse Theatre, where I’d paid a substantial sum for my ticket unless it had really great aesthetics, but I’ll take some kind of soulful, interior journey made aesthetic over the impulse to perform for the sake of performing any day. Cloud Gate Theatre’s Moon Water was the kind of show that was so finely crafted that it seemed to emerge naturally...
Megan: Is Delusion a piece of art you can say to like or dislike? I thought it was more living it than liking it. Maybe that's because I didn't like it very much. I needed more narrative and character to hang on to here.
Kirstie: I guess I was sold on the combination of intimacy and spectacle that Delusion offered. My feeling was "Wow. Why can't I see this every Friday night, instead of going to the latest blockbuster movie or an open mic night?" Anderson seemed wed these unlikely extremes.
The Magnetic Fields are one of those rare bands don’t neatly fall into a clearly defined category or genre, nor have they been adopted and defended by any single generation or demographic.
