Putting the Multi in Disciplinary
When I interviewed choreographer Andrea Nann last week following a rehearsal of Tumbling into Light (left), the multidisciplinary show was still coming together, far from nascent but not yet fully formed. With music by artistic director David Buchbinder and Dave Wall, the show features a live band, video and dance from a diverse cast of local pros working with emerging artists and non-professional members of the Thorncliffe Park community.
Playing at Harbourfront Centre’s Enwave Theatre December 1 – 4, Tumbling into Light is the latest creative offering from Diasporic Genius, whose first show, last January, was a critical and creative hit.
This year’s effort explores “a journey through the darkness of our times to arrive at a new illumination . . . Tumbling into Light questions some of our basic assumptions about who we are and how we got here,” according to the press materials.
“The idea,” explains Nann, “is to work in an interdisciplinary manner so that no one form really stands out, there’s always a movement of the audiences’ attention from one area to another as opposed to, oh, there’s a dance number, and oh, there’s a vocal number. We’re trying to blend and blur those lines.” READ MORE
‘Tis the Season to Buy Art
Two of Toronto’s leading visual arts establishments are having fundraising sales this week, 401 Richmond’s Open Studio (above) and Gallery TPW, which celebrates its 25th annual Photorama affordable art fundraiser beginning December 2.
Open Studio’s annual artist proof sale is Thursday (December 1) from 6 – 9 pm featuring excellent local print art in the $50 – $300 range. The sale continues until December 17 but for best selection, shop early. Thursday’s print preview begins at 6 pm with the sale starting at 6:30; print making demos will be part of the action.
Photorama features works by renowned local photographers including Ed Burtynsky, Suzy Lake, Robyn Cumming and many other talented photo artists. Your best hope of snagging one of the highest profile works is to buy yourself a gallery membership ($75), which allows you to attend the exclusive members preview (”collectors” get first dibs), December 1 (6 – 9 pm).
Toronto’s Kastner Wins Int’l Emmy
Congratulations to Toronto’s John Kastner on winning the 2011 International Emmy Award for best documentary for his film, Life with Murder. Produced by JS Kastner Productions in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada, in association with CTV, Life with Murder is a gripping portrait of an Ontario couple’s painful struggle to accept their son back into the family after he is convicted of murdering his sister. The doc was the only Canadian program nominated for the 39th International Emmy Awards, which were presented by the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in New York City on November 21. This is the fourth Emmy win for Kastner, more than any other individual in the history of Canadian television.
Melanie McNeill’s Life in the Wings
Climbing the theatre ladder has never been easy or especially rewarding. Devotees, particularly those backstage and in the wings, practice their craft for love not money with a few lucky souls able to scrape their way to long and fruitful careers.
Melanie McNeill, above, has been paying her dues for a decade and is finally on a rung somewhere in the middle of that ladder. She says that when she was in a student in Ryerson’s Theatre Production program (class of 2002) she had two dreams: to win a Dora and to be flown somewhere to work. Both of those dreams came true for her in 2011.
I met McNeill backstage at the Cameron House on Sunday to talk about her work on the stupendous Life and Times of Mackenzie King, an instalment of writer/director Michael Hollingsworth’s The History of the Village of the Small Huts, 1918 – 39. Performed black box-style by the wonderfully innovative VideoCabaret, the shows are unlike anything else on the Toronto theatre scene, a sort of pantomime of Canadian history played broadly and colourfully with a wink and a nudge. READ MORE
Pop Art Poetry
No one is more surprised to see Jeff Campagna doing his first gallery show than Jeff Campagna. He’s a writer primarily – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, movies, a blog – but he refuses to restrict his creative output.
By his own admission he can’t draw or paint “worth a damn” but he knows his way around Adobe Photoshop and decided to apply himself to creating visual treatments for a handful of his poems. The resulting work is on show now at gallerywest with an opening reception slated for Thursday (November 24, 7 – 10 pm).
The works are digital prints on canvas, each one dressed up in a different, ornate gilt frame. For the artist, the frames represent a bridge between the digital present and a romantic, poetic past. The poems themselves are naïve, rhyming affairs, like lyrics for a pop song. Pop poetry meets pop art.
“I’ve gone from filmmaking, specifically screen writing, to fiction to poetry and now to visual art,” says Campagna. “It may not sound consistent but I see continuity running through it all. I don’t see this work as a departure, I see it as an extension.”
