KM: Why is it important to celebrate women in electronic music with events like the Utopia Festival?
Cris Derksen: I think it's important to celebrate all woman in music, I find the female perspective often gets deeper in artistic emotion then guys usually allow themselves to go. It's also super important to inspire the younger generation of women in music as it's not the easiest job in the world, but you can find so much strength and satisfaction and self- gratification = self esteem in creating something new.
On March 4th I attended the Turning Point Ensemble’s presentation of Firebird 2011, their take on the 1910 ballet of the same name. The first act was a new arrangement of Stravinsky’s Firebird by Michael Bushnell and the second was an interpretation of the original story, choreographed by Simone Orlando. Orlando's piece, called Luft, featured local choreographer Josh Beamish of MOVE: the company, as well as Alison Denham, Heather Dotto, Cai Glover, and Matjash Mrozewski. Luft (which means air, not red – in case...
Check Plank this weekend for reviews from the Utopia Festival and Conference, taking place at W2 on May 5. Live blogging from the event will be available here.
As part of the 2011 Vancouver International Dance Festival, Battery Opera offered a duet simply titled "Lee Su-Feh and Chung Jung-Ah," which is inspired by "the encounter by two women [...] with hyphens in their names." I entered into the evening thinking "this is a pretty abstract point of entry into a non-verbal work of art -- practically speaking, what does this mean?"
Photographing one's mother is an intimate act. It is also very intimate to photograph a corpse. I imagine that photographing ones own dead mother must feel doubly intimate. It seems to me that when composing your mother’s dead body for a shot, the photographic act becomes an act of love while also being an act of preservation and abstraction. Complex emotions are present, albeit mitigated by the realities of lens and lighting as well as the structures of aesthetics.
If originality is the measure of excellent choreography, then Rami Be'er of Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company surely deserves the highest recognition for his achievement with his piece Ekodoom. Add to that the fact that all of the (numerous) dancers in his company are themselves outstanding artists, and you have a completely absorbing piece of dance that transported me well outside the confines of the ordinary.
So before you read this, I must warn you -- I didn't actually make it through the whole show. I had a few pre-show cocktails at the Alibi Room (a must do for anyone attending a performance at the Firehall) and my bladder simply couldn't contain itself for the entire hour. I was alright until 8:37 (the first time I checked the time on my phone) but my last note about the show simply says I HAVE TO PEE at 8:46. At this point I not so stealthily made my way out of the back of the theatre and...
The joy of hearing music like that of Yemen Blues, who performed as part of the Chutzpah Festival at Venue Club on February 24, is the thrilling feeling of being transported to somewhere far from the chilly night of Vancouver. Even better is the fact that Yemen Blues has the power to take its audience to not one, but many far away locales through its eclectic musical style that is drawn from any number of Middle Eastern, as well as North and West African traditions.
I have spent a week struggling with my reaction to the current production of Edward Albee's seminal American play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an Arts Club/Blackbird Theatre co-production running on the Granville Island Stage until March 12th.
