WinterCity Feast on Flickr
Life conspired to derail my WinterCity plans last weekend — fortunately there were lots of local photographers who did make it out to capture the spectacular and spectacularly cold first weekend. I found a superb cache of photos on Flickr and have taken the liberty of pulling a few of my favorite shots to share with you here. Artist/photographer Alfred Ng shot the Flaming Lotus Girls‘ Angel of the Apocalypse, above, just as daylight faded into darkness. Jugolic captured the installation on video.
First New George F. Walker Play in a Decade
Tonight’s world premiere of And So It Goes is writer/director George F. Walker’s 23rd production at Toronto’s Factory Theatre (including three revivals), which celebrates its 40th anniversary season in 2010.
“Walker has been a huge part of Factory’s history, and his plays have resonated in a big way with audiences,” says the theatre’s artistic director Ken Gass, “So when George called to say he’d written a new play, I pretty much leapt at the opportunity. This is very much a play for our times.”
In And So It Goes, Ned and Gwen are middle-class victims of the recession grappling with the fallout of their daughter’s schizophrenia and Ned’s downsizing. Pushed to the edge during their downwardly mobile spiral, they seek the help of a literary legend whose unorthodox therapy may prevent them from going all the way over.
Home Is Where the Art Is
The Gardiner Museum’s first major exhibition of 2010 was unveiled to the media this morning in advance of its official launch tomorrow: From the Melting Pot into the Fire, Contemporary Ceramics in Israel is a complex show, much more conceptual art than pretty pots and vessels.
Ceramic artist Yael Novak, left, whose installation Between the Pots is featured, joined the museum’s Chief Curator Charles Mason in leading the tour. “The show is about identity and sense of place in a multicultural, immigrant society,” said Novak, whose work takes advantage of the negative space “between the pots” to depict the multifarious building forms prevalent throughout the nation. “You have the iconic architectural shapes of Israel,” says the artist, “the influence of the kibbutz but also the domed and minaret shapes of the Arabic villages. The installation combines my two loves, architecture and pottery but I created my landscape out of air; architecture is about volume, my architecture is air, it’s an illusion.’
Black History Unfolds at Mackenzie House
Black History Month begins today and one of Toronto’s most inspiring true stories – that of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first woman in North America to publish a newspaper — is being told at Mackenzie House Museum (82 Bond Street), former home of Toronto’s first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie.
The “rebel mayor” responsible for starting the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837, was also a newspaper publisher and he used his broadsheets to condemn slavery and to encourage the equal treatment of Upper Canada’s Black population. In 1837, he wrote: “as a public journalist we have never failed to espouse, and delight in advocating the heaven-born principle of abolition of slavery, of every race of which it may be the curse.”
Mac House, as we affectionately call the museum, boasts a recreated 1800s printshop, the perfect place to explore Shadd Cary’s role as publisher of the Provincial Freeman, founded in 1853.
WinterCity Turns Up the Heat
The City of Toronto’s annual WinterCity festival kicks off tonight in Nathan Phillips Square with the first of many spectacular performances. The City’s Special Events programming team scoured the globe to select talent from near and far; France’s Compagnie Les Passagers and San Francisco’s Flaming Lotus Girls (see above) headline tonight beginning at 6 pm, plus there’ll be skating parties, ice sculptures and a host of tandem indoor events dubbed the Warm Up Series taking place around town through Februrary 7. Pictured left is Ottawa’s Jesse Stewart who’s inventive Ice Orchestra makes its world premiere Sunday (5 pm, 6 pm and 7:40 pm) in Nathan Phillips Square. A professor of music composition at Carlton University, Stewart also has a background in fine art, which helped enormously when it came time to create his ice instruments. Stewart will also play the waterphone: “I’m very interested in elemental things,” he says, “water, fire, metal, ice. And if you want to make music using those things, you pretty much have to make the instruments yourself.”
Toronto’s own Peter Jarvis, above, will also be on the square Saturday and Sunday offering a series of performance pieces including The Cube, the Subtonic Monks (”Dr. Suess meets Stomp”), the Three Legged Man, and the world premier of something called the Tubafish. Best known as his alter ego, Silver Elvis, Jarvis trained with renowned Canadian clown Richard Pochinko. “I’m a performance artist,” says Jarvis. “What interests me is the interactive and emotional elements of clown and mime. I’m also fascinated by the surreal.”
Dress warm and don’t forget your sense of wonder — see you at WinterCity.
