On a warm, windy summer evening in July, I sat on a folding chair outside the Roundhouse in Yaletown. This is an area of Vancouver I seldom frequent, yet at that moment in time, it felt like the heart of the city, of my city. I was surrounded by cement and brick, skyscrapers looming above me and above the makeshift stage. The sun was setting, Alvin danced.
Alvin Erasga Tolentino. Photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.
This "Bard on the Beach":http://www2.bardonthebeach.org/index.html production of *The Comedy of Errors* is polished, breezy, and shamelessly anachronistic – in fact it is larded with unauthorized gags designed to provoke the audience to easy laughter.
Ryan Beil and Shawn Macdonald, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh
One of Shakespeare's earliest (and shortest) works, The Comedy of Errors as performed by "Bard on the Beach":http://bardonthebeach.org/ is just a lot of fun. The carnival atmosphere of the Bard Village and the buzz of opening night set the tone perfectly for this comedy directed by David MacKay.
Putting ideas ahead of aesthetics when making art can be an interesting exercise. This kind of conceptual art tends to provoke questions about the nature of art, about what makes for good art, and about the boundaries of form and genre. But, if the resulting artwork doesn’t come up with many good answers to the questions it asks, then one has to ask what the point of the exercise is. If an artist isn’t in it for the aesthetics, and doesn’t do a great job of addressing the big questions either, then what is the value of such art? This...
There's a surprising theme that links this year’s mainstage shows at "Bard on the Beach":http://www.bardonthebeach.org/: twins. They feature in The Comedy of Errors, which opens next week. They also, perhaps unexpectedly, make an appearance in their sleek production of *Othello* directed by Dean Paul Gibson.
Twin Set: Michael Blake and Bob Frazer from Othello, photo by David Blue
The play title makes reference to 36 Views of Mount Fuji, a series of 46 large, color woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. This wasn’t clear until well into the 2-hour play presented by "Tempus Theatre":http://tempustheatre.com/ so I spent a good part of the production trying to figure out the title and the significance of the number 36. Perhaps 36 was the number of previously viewed performances of this newly formed theatre company presenting its second production? Could 36 have been the number of different art projections viewed on the black curtains during the show?...
I wanted to rave about *John and Beatrice*. I wanted to stand on the rooftop patio of the slick Coal Harbour highrise that houses the PAL Vancouver Theatre and shout the production’s praise to the urban folks going about their daily lives below. Just as the title character Beatrice sought a man to love, I wanted to love this piece, completely and in its entirety. But seldom do things work out as we desire.
I've dived into the dating pool again and I am very distracted by this one very smart and sexy but complicated guy. Why can’t people come with instructions - or even drawings?
What makes a show like *live** work is the fact that it not only plays with our perceptions of reality and illusion, but that it plays with the very idea of performance itself, stretching the concept of performativity to the far end of the spectrum and asking questions about who is audience and who is performer, and what constitutes spectacle in the first place. The great thing about this show, however, is that it asks all these questions without slacking off into the mentality that if one is asking questions, then anything goes in the way of aesthetics. All of...
Living in Calgary at the turn of the millennium brought me few artistic pleasures: the "Calgary Folk Festival":http://www.calgaryfolkfest.com/users/folder.asp, "One Yellow Rabbit":http://www.oyr.org/, and the "Old Trout Puppet Workshop":http://www.theoldtrouts.org/. As a globe-trotting arts lover, I felt wretchedly misplaced amongst the stripmall shopping, suburban-dwelling oil profiteers in the Texas of Canada. I clung dearly to the few cultural niches I discovered, and the Old Trouts were one of those nuggets that kept me going until I finished my degree and fled to Vancouver.
