Various dates until Nov. 21, Victoria: The Rake’s Progress is your typical boy-meets-girls, boy-dumps-girl, boy-hangs-out-in-big-city-with-the-devil, boy-ends-up-in-the-nuthouse, boy-dies kind of story. Igor Stravinsky based his opera most famous opera on a series of 18th-century paintings by William Hogarth, and so the tale is appropriately sordid. W.H. Auden co-wrote the libretto, so it’s both sordid and poetic.
Pacific Opera Victoria is mounting a production of Stravinsky’s opera in five performances, with the first happening last night, Nov. 12. Four more chances left to catch it! (Check out the stage and costume design.)
November 5-14, Toronto: Here’s the challenge I am giving myself: to write about the Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival, which examines how issues of mental illness and addiction are represented onscreen, without using the words crazy, nuts, daft, demented, sick, cuckoo, barmy, tetched, mental, psycho, berserk, bonkers, cracked, delirious, schizo, out to lunch, or wig out.
The festival, now in its 17th year and is put together by Workman Arts, a not-for-profit arts organization that works out of Toronto’s Centre of Mental Health and Addiction, presents more than a dozen screenings over its nine days, along with panel discussions, and even an evening of comedy. The full schedule is here. Last night’s opening night gala was sold out, but there are still tickets left for other events.
Missing it would be… ah, disappointing.
Oct 24-29, Toronto–Whether your love of martial arts stretches back to the era of Bruce Lee, or is of the more recent, Kill Bill variety, there is probably no better place to be this coming week than Toronto’s Ricoh Coliseum for the 10th World Wushu Championships, which is held every two years. The grand opening ceremony is on Saturday, and will feature a performance by members of Official China Performance Troupe. (Snappy name, that.)
The promo materials promise “Full Motion, Full Contact, Full Combative”, which sounds promising, if ungrammatical. So pack up the nunchucks and do that cool “running across the treetops” thing down to the Ricoh.
Here’s something to warm you up – a little Wu-style Wushu – after the jump (probably NSFW).
(Photo by Jeremy Barwick, used under Creative Commons License 2.0)
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Montreal, until October 31 - I am a complete philistine when it comes to oysters, being one of those people who feels that 90% of the half-shell experience is the butter, the slightly exotic nature of the dish, and the booze drunk while tipping back and chugging the little things down, and only 10% about the actual taste, which, let’s face it, isn’t much.
But if you are already convinced about oysters, and love them to death, then there are few better places to be this month than in Old Montreal for the Festival l’eau à la bouche (”mouth-watering”). It’s slightly misleading to call it a festival, since the participating restaurants are all owned by the same hotel consortium –- it’s a little like the kind of “Rib-fest!” a more downscale eatery might put on –- but all the same, the slippery little fellows will be cheap and plentiful at the six participating restaurants.
Plus, Montreal’s Old Port is beautiful right now, oysters or no oysters.
Halifax, Sept. 29-Oct. 4 – There are few moments more groan-inducing as when, at a concert, the extinguishing of all spotlights – but one – heralds the beginning of a dreaded drum solo. (Seriously, Buddy Rich v. Animal is one thing, but does everyone have to do it?)
Still, in the right context, there are few things more viscerally exciting than live drumming, which may be the secret behind the success of Drum!, a percussion-centred show that its web site calls “a spectacular musical production featuring 20 musicians, dancers, drummers, and singers from four principal cultures – Aboriginal, Black, Celtic and Acadian – brought together in a heart-pumping fusion of music, dance, poetry, video, rhythm, and song.”
Starting life as a Halifax tourist attraction ten years ago, the show has travelled all over North America. It returns to it home city for a six-day, eight-show run at Dalhousie University’s Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.
Ending Sept. 26, Ottawa – This weekend is your last chance to take in the SAW Gallery’s special exhibition “Works of Art Made by Animals.” If the title of the exhibit is not sufficiently self-explanatory, this is a show consisting of dozens of works of art created by both pets and zoo animals. It may sound bizarre, but they are dead serious about it.
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Sept. 20 - 27 — Perhaps because literary types like things a bit autumnal, fall is a big season for book/author/reading festivals. Though Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, which takes place at the end of October, is the big kid on the block — especially this year, its 30th (more on that here, BTW) — there are a number of festival’s in smaller cities that bring in both big-name authors and word-hungry crowds.
Winnpeg’s week-long “Thin Air” festival, now in its 12th year, takes place mostly at the CanWest Global Performing Arts Centre, and this year features such authors as Guy Maddin, Robert Charles Wilson, Bonnie Burnard, Laureen Kirshner, Robert J. Sawyer, and Jake MacDonald. There will also be a business breakfast on the 25th featuring “culture commentator” and Peep Diaries author Hal Niedzviecki yakking about “The New Rules of Social Media: Why the Customer Doesn’t Care about Privacy—and What You Should Do About It.”
(Image by Isaac Leedom)
Sept. 12, Quebec City — Unless they mark the appearance of a big-name author, or are part of one of Canada’s many big-time book festivals, public readings tend to fly under the mainstream radar. In fact, the majority of readings are fairly dour, unremarkable, and under-attended affairs.
The upcoming Moulin a paroles (or “chatterbox”) event being held in Quebec City this coming weekend to mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham will be anything but. Put together after Quebec nationalists scotched the idea of a full-on reenactment of the battle in which British forces defeated the French and thus became rulers of what would eventually be Canada, the event is a 24-hour reading of a few hundred texts, all of which purport to say something about Quebec, past and present.
The one text that has a lot of people up in arms, though, is the manifesto of the radical separatist group the Front de libération du Québec, or the FLQ, the grouped that sparked the October Crisis of 1970.
Even if readings aren’t your thing, this one promises to be a helluva show.
(And if you can’t make it, here’s the manifesto in question.)
Ongoing to August 15, Toronto – DRIVEN contributor Murray Foster will be appearing in the stage adaption of Toronto Noir, a collection of short stories about Hogtown. Foster, who plays bass for Great Big Sea, will be playing a man who plays bass, but not for Great Big Sea. The master of the bottom end has received at least one rave-ish review.
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If nothing else, I take away from my weekend at Montreal’s Osheaga Music Festival one undeniable fact: Colplay frontman Chris Martin can speak French better than I can. This year — the fourth in the festival’s history — Coldplay and Yeah Yeah Yeahs served as headliners, though the cancelled performance by the Beastie Boys (due to Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis) was sorely missed. Other big-name acts included The Roots, Artic Monkeys (who were surprisingly dull on stage), Rufus Wainwright, The Decemberists, Jason Mraz, and Girl Talk.
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