Untitled @susanewalk48 - Tumblr Blog

"Good Luck to You All" Channels AI anxiety

“. . . the most complex piece of highly organized active matter in the known universe that gives rise to consciousness.” That’s Dr. Christof Koch, describing the human brain and human thinking. A little girl, voiced by grade 1 pupil Daisy Wolch, plays on the floor with a robot-like doll that she’s pulling apart. “Thinking,” she says, “is cool…” as she pulls off the head of her doll. “It shoots…

An exciting final flight into aviation history

Anyone who was living in Canada from the 1960s to the 1980s, especially those of us on Vancouver Island, will have seen a Mars water bomber. A lucky few will have witnessed one of these flying behemoths skimming over a lake or the sea, scooping up thousands of gallons of water to disgorge over a forest fire. “Before the Mars, nobody had seen four acres of water at one time come out of an…

View On WordPress

Dancing like your life depended on it

“It’s not a spectacle,” says Noam Gagnon. “It’s an encounter . . . Intense. Unflinchingly human.” He is speaking of being, the nearly hour-long piece that he and violinist Stefan Smulovitz will perform at Vancouver’s KW Production Studios, from March 11 to 14. Anyone who witnessed the birth of being, the opener for last June’s Dancing on the Edge festival, will know that Gagnon is not…

The National Ballet offers a dream of dance heaven and a descent into hell with Suite en Blanc and Flight Pattern

From the sublime symmetry and purity of Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc to the palpable despair and Stygian gloom representing the plight of refugees in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, the superb dancers of the National Ballet of Canada leave an audience — stunned into silence — with plenty to ponder. Serge Lifar (19051986), a native of Ukraine, served as ballet master of the Paris Opera Ballet…

View On WordPress

#National Ballet of Canada

Rogers v. Rogers: a Canadian satire

Even without the stellar creative team behind Rogers v. Rogers, Crow’s Theatre might have guessed they had a hit on their hands, for one simple fact. There is nary a Canadian who uses a telephone or cellphone, logs onto the internet or watches TV who isn’t mad at the way we are served, more like screwed, by our telecommunications corporations. In adapting Alexandra Posadski’s book, Rogers v.…

Vera Frenkel brings us a sparkling, thought-provoking video installation

It would be a mistake to try to sum up As If by Chance, Vera Frenkel’s newly completed two-channel video and print installation. But an entry point to this multivalent, moving – in both senses – picture could be in the notion that there are many ways of telling a story. In most traditions a story is linear. We speak of a story arc, a climax, a resolution, a beginning, a middle and an end. Indeed…

25 years . . . and counting

Older and Reckless? At its inception, the name of the show for dancers and choreographers (initially over 40) had a whimsical air, implying “nothing left to lose.” Over time, the showcase for senior dance artists, established in 2000 by Claudia Moore when she led Moonhorse Dance Theatre, has become an occasion for artists more than 45 years of age to advance their craft, take new risks and mentor…

Procession is a triumph

Just blocks away from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were playing in top form in the final game of the World Series on Saturday night, the National Ballet of Canada offered up an equally thrilling performance with the world premiere of Procession. Created on the company by choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Procession brings 32 dancers, a cellist and a soprano to the stage…

#National Ballet of Canada

Pat Ferns: trailblazing Canadian television producer

Pat Ferns’ The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada is a revealing, five-decade account of Ferns’ significant contribution to film, television and documentary production. Among the revelations: if you want to make it in television production in Canada, you’d best be able to think on your feet and improvise. And even then, the odds are against any…

Victoria dancer Patricia Sparks and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet at 85

Patricia Sparks’ long career in ballet culminated with her recruitment into the Winnipeg Ballet and a command performance for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in October 1951. She was 20, and no neophyte. The Victoria native, now Pat Taylor, began dance lessons at age six. At 94, she still resides in Oak Bay, near the beach, keeps fit with tai chi and has total recall of her ballet training…

View On WordPress

Dancing on the Edge keeps it fresh

Arguably, Noam Gagnon has been dancing on the edge ever since he started classes at Concordia University, where he had thought he might major in psychology. The Quebec-born dancer, choreographer and pilates instructor has no fear of risk: safe is not in his vocabulary except as a synonym for boring. Gagnon will be the opening show at the 37th Dancing on the Edge festival, June 12 to 21 at the…

View On WordPress

The National Ballet of Canada is on a roll with Hope Muir

When the National Ballet of Canada opens its mixed program on May 30, a farewell to Guillaume Côté entitled Adieu, the company can expect record-breaking box office numbers. Such has been the effect of a rebrand that coincided with the 2022 appointment of Hope Muir as the Joan and Jerry Lozinski artistic director of the company. A lot of development has occurred under her tenure, both for the…

#National Ballet of Canada

Citadel Dance Exchange offers a fair trade in exuberance

We all could use some exuberance in these troubled and angst-ridden times. A good place to find it is at the Citadel Dance Exchange, a Montreal-Toronto collaboration, now in its second week at the Citadel on Parliament Street in Toronto. A joint initiative with The National Ballet of Canada’s Creative Action program, the exchange of dancers and choreographers from both cities has resulted in a…

A Swan Lake for the ages

Karen Kain, then the outgoing artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, set herself a tall order when she determined to re-stage the Erik Bruhn 1966 production of Swan Lake. Premiering in 2022, this new edition of the Tchaikovsky classic, directed by Kain, with new choreographic invention from her, Christopher Stowell and Robert Binet, brings the 1895 story ballet by Marius Petipa and…

#National Ballet of Canada

The National Ballet's perfect mix

In all the years of enjoying the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed program I have never seen a program so well attended and so loudly appreciated. You might, without too much exaggeration, call this artistic director Hope Muir’s perfect mix. This two-hour program, with one last performance today, Sunday, March 2, opens with something old, Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading, marking 50 years…

Josiah escapes to freedom in Ontario

Contemporary interpretations of slave narratives have kept the focus on the relentless cruelty of slave owners. Whipping and more whipping, repeated, horrific rape, humans reduced to beasts of burden and tools of their slave masters: it amounts to torture porn. Male creators crafted Twelve Years a Slave, The Book of Negroes and Django Unchained – slave women’s stories are depicted in a way so…

View On WordPress

Other Desert Cities; Catch it before they burn up

It says a lot about the dysfunctional Wyeth family, portrayed in John Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities,that the only truthful and nuanced character is a barely recovering alcoholic: Aunt Silda. Silda (a similarly nuanced Deena Baltman), despite her struggles to resist alcohol, is the one family member who can look herself in the mirror and not profess to be something she isn’t. But she’s not…

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Untitled