Visual & Performing Arts Blog

Summer is the time for theatre festivals, and Canada has lots to offer. Here’s a roundup of some of the standouts:

Newfoundland’s Stephenville Theatre Festival was actually founded by a Montrealer, Maxim Mazumdar, in the early 1980s. It delivers new and popular work that reflects its somewhat remote east-coast setting.

The classic offering at the Charlottetown Festival in Prince Edward Island is Anne of Green Gables, the musical about the beloved orphan who changes the lives of those around her, but there are always lots of other theatrical and musical events on the program

Ontario has several important summer festivals, of which the oldest is the Stratford Festival, founded in 1954 to present Shakespeare and the work of other classic dramatists. Now the repertoire has broadened to include new commissions, modern classic and musicals. The nearby Shaw Festival was funded to present the work of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. Its mandate has also expanded to include any play set during Shaw’s remarkably long lifetime. Lesser known is the Blyth Festival, a rural company that has devoted itself to the creation of work reflecting countryside life. But don't underestimate it! Blyth was the company that premiered The Drawer Boy by MIchael Healey, which was the most-performed play in America a couple of seasons ago.

In Toronto, the annual SummerWorks Theatre Festival has evolved to become a crucible of new performance of all kinds. Then there's the Fringe of Toronto festival, which falls between July 4 and 15 this year. It's part of the worldwide Fringe theatre movement, which consists of festivals of non-curated short plays (usually an hour), all offered at the same admission (usually about $10). The idea is you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Lots of independent theatre producers have latched onto the Fringe concept to support themselves over the summer months by touring from one festival to another. The trick is that most Fringes use a lottery system to choose their lineup, so no one can plan their itinerary before they know the lottery results. To capitalize on box office, Fringe presenters often insert lots of gratuitous sex, comedy and music into their shows. Guerilla marketing techniques (buttons, flyers, stickers and so on) are common in Fringe districts. But sometimes the Fringes breed work that has a serious afterlife. (The classic example would be The Drowsy Chaperone, which went from the Fringe of Toronto to Broadway, where it cleaned up on Tony Awards last season.)

Among the earliest and biggest of the Canadian Fringes was the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, which continues to attract avid audiences and amazing performances. Other Canadian Fringe festivals include the Atlantic Fringe Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the Montreal Fringe Festival in Quebec; Ontario's London Fringe Theatre Festival and Ottawa Fringe Festival; Saskatchewan's Regina International Fringe Theatre Festival, Saskatoon International Fringe Festival and Swift Current Fringe Festival; Alberta's Athabaska Country Fringe Festival, Calgary International Fringe Theatre Festival and Edmonton International Fringe Festival, and British Columbia's Fraser Valley Fringe Theatre Festival, Vancouver Fringe Festival and Victoria Fringe Festival.

Not in Canada? Well don't miss out on summer festival fun. You can click here for a comprehensive list of worldwide Fringe festivals.

It’s not all about the giant joints; it turns out that Cheech Marin, best known as half of the ‘60s comedy duo Cheech and Chong, is also among the fiercest champions of visual art by Chicano (Mexican-American) artists. In fact, he has helped bring the idea of a "Chicano School" of painting to the attention of art scholars and collectors.

Born Richard Anthony Marin (the nickname is from "chicharron", a fried pork snack), the actor and comedian has made his fortune through an eclectic career that included early Cheech-and-Chong movies like Up in Smoke (1978) as well as roles in films like After Hours (1985), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) and this year’s Grindhouse. He has also voiced characters in animated films like Cars, Oliver & Company and The Lion King, and he has played the recurring role of "Ignacio Messina" on television’s Judging Amy. (With a bio like this, it’s clear that Marin’s pretty smart; any remaining doubters should note that he was the first-ever Celebrity Jeopardy Champion.)

But Marin is also one of the foremost collectors of Mexican and Mexican-American art. He has published writng on the subject, and curated an exhibit called Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, which features the work of 26 artists: Carlos Almaraz, David Botello, Charles "Chaz" Bojorquez, Melesio Casas, Gaspar Enriquez, Diane Gamboa, Margaret Garcia, Rupert Garcia, Carmen Lomas Garza, GRONK, Raul Guerrero, Wayne Alaniz Healy, Adan Hernandez Ester Hernandez, Leo Limón, Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, Cesar Martinez, Frank Romero, Alex Rubio, Marta Sanchez, Elloy Torres, Jesse Treviño, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Vincent Valdez and George Yepes.

Over the past five years, Chicano Visions has been touring across America to such institutions as the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago and de Young Museum in San Francisco. On the "Chicano" website, which includes further information about the show, Marin writes: "While other "schools" of painting have been defined overwhelmingly by stylistic concerns, the CHICANO School combines stylistic innovation with elements of tradition. The blending of Mexican popular and religious iconography with modern images of urban angst reflects the continually evolving role of Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, within the larger American society. This mix of sophistication and naiveté, combined with a socio-political overlay, has produced a uniquely American school of painting based on CHICANO content that is at the same time universal in its aesthetics of the human condition"

Marin recently announced that he will donate 50 sets of copies of works from his collection to top U.S. museums including the Smithsonian, UCLA, the San Antonio Museum of Art and California State University, Northridge, where Marin himself studied. They’ll take the form of high-quality digital prints of the pieces featured in Chicano Visions.

World Theatre Day falls in March; since 1982, it's had a counterpart in Dance Day (April 29), a celebration by and for the international community of dancers and dance enthusiasts. It's main purpose is focus attention on an art form that is sometimes overlooked, but which in recent years seems to have been gaining new followers.

Certainly television shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars, as well as international touring shows from River Dance to Dirty Dancing have large throngs of enthusiastic followers.

On April 29, special performances and activities will be held all over the world, and this year's Dance Day is dedicated to children. In his official message, Prof. Alkis Raftis, President of the International Dance Council of UNESCO, stated that "Dance is a basic component of personal and societal development. We recommend quality basic education in dance for all children with an emphasis on gender equality and eliminating disparities of all kinds. No child should be left without the opportunity to learn and to practice dance. Access to the art consitutes a right for every person, and children in particular. This right should be protected, in order to help meet their basic needs and reach their full potential."

Toronto celebrations include performances by 10 Gates Dancing and Fujiwara Dance Inventions, Joanna de Souza, COBA, Janak Khendry Dance Company, Company Blonde, Baila Boogaloo DanceCompany and Collective Heat, as well as BeDiscovered’s Divas of Dance Hip-Hop Workshops and a gala called Stars of the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, here at Suite 101 you can celebrate dance every day by visiting Melissa Joaquin's Ballet, Jazz and Tap Dance page, Contemporary Dance by Sarah Snowdon and our World Dance page.

Now that spring is here, are your fingers itching to get into some creative craftwork? Well, forget Martha Stewart: the Visual and Performing Arts section of Suite 101 is a great place to look for artistic inspirations and great projects.

Jennifer Hollowell (Mixed Media Arts) is always a wonderful source for creative project ideas. For example, she has suggestions on how you can integrate the bits and pieces of old board games and their boxes into your next paper craft project. She explains how to transform a castoff serving tray using little more than an old book, some paint and some gel medium. And you'd hardly guess what you can do with an old cardboard tea box!

Alina Sandor (Painting and Drawing) is another fertile source of project ideas and tips for the beginner or the professional artist. She explores painting with coffee, how to get started drawing in soft pastel, how to paint with household objects like sponges, toothpicks, rags and even plastic wrap, and how to embellish your favourote photos with collage and overpainting.

Is clay more your thing? You don't have to be an expert to create something useful and nice to look at. Jennifer Yap's Sculpture and Ceramics page offers great project tips; you might like to start with a simple pinch pot, for instance. Having mastered that, then you could move on up to a pinch pot piggy bank (particularly appropriate in this Year of the Pig!) Of you can experiment with improvized press moulds for making standardized bowls, jars and even sushi trays.

Apart from this section, there are some other great Suite spots for creative types, like Mary Welling-Bonney's Crafts page, Janice Benoit's page about Entertaining (centrepieces galore!) and Belinda Mooney's very popular Kids Crafts page. Have fun exploring these pages, and don't be shy to let your favourite writers know what kinds of projects you'd like them to write about next!

Every year, the International Theatre Institute and theatre people aruond the world celebrate World Theatre Day on March 27 with events and ceremonies; also, the ITI always publishes a message on the day from an important world theatre figure – most often a playwright or director. Last year's message was from Mexican playwright Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda; this year, its from H.H. Sheik Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates, Ruler of Sharjah, and also an author in his own right. Here is an exerpt from his message:

Theatre is life. There has never been a time as now when it is incumbent on all of us to denounce futile wars and doctrinal differences which often raise their ugly heads undeterred by the conscience that is vibrant with responsibility.

We need to put an end to scenes of violence and random killings. These scenes have become common occurrences in today’s world, only to be aggravated by abysmal differences between wicked affluence and abject poverty, and by diseases like AIDS which have bedevilled many parts of the globe and defeated the best of efforts to eradicate them. These ills are alongside other forms of suffering from desertification and drought, calamities fanned by the absence of any genuine dialogue which is the sure way of turning our world into a better and happier place. (...)

We are mere mortals, but the theatre is as eternal as life itself.

The Winter's Tale is one of my very favourite Shakespeare plays, and I had the pleasure of seeing a fine student production recently at Toronto's George Brown College, where I teach. In case you don't know the story, it's about a husband and father (he's also a king) who accuses his innocent, pregnant wife of infidelity. In fact, he behaves very, very badly, and in the course of his jealous tantrums he manages to lose his wife, his five-year-old son and his infant daughter.

Thanks to the swift passage of 16 years, and with the intervention of some shepherds who are far better supplied with kindness than with brains, the king is able to get back together with two of his three missing family members, and forgiveness reigns on all sides. As the lights came on again, the woman I was sitting next to spontaneously turned to me – and I to her. "Well at least I'm not the only one," we both laughed, dabbing at our red eyes with hankies.

Fast forward to this past weekend and me by myself in a movie theatre as part of my plan to catch up with a few of the more highly recommended Oscar nominees before the awards. The film in question is Little Miss Sunshine, and once again I'm teary-eyed and sniffling. Why? Same story, essentially. Any time you set up a plot where people can behave really badly to each other, then find themselves softened and ultimately redeemed through the power of love, you're going to hit me square in the tear ducts.

At heart, I think that's the reason for the lasting appeal of The Simpsons, too. How many of the best Simpsons plots turn on one or more members of the family realizing that the love of the rest of their family is the most important thing in their animated universe? Whether it's Bart and Lisa competing at hockey, or Lisa literally redeeming Bart's soul, or Homer dedicating his terrible job to Maggie, or – well, just about everything that Marge does, the Simpsons are another fictional family that exists to give us lessons about the redeeming power of love.

Pardon me while I run and grab a hankie.

Our local Toronto Star recently informed me about a book called I've Got a Home in Glory Land by local historian Karolyn Smardz Frost. It's a fascinating and detailed account of the life of an early Toronto family of the mid-19th century.

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1831 and traveled north to Canada, where Thornton started the city's first cab company – horse-drawn, of course. This was something I had known about before. But the newspaper excerpt from the book informed me about another aspect of the Blackburns' lives that I had never yet heard about. It turns out that when the Blackburns settled here, they built their own home on Eastern Avenue, which was then on the eastern outskirts of town and is now part of the eastern downtown. Since the Blackburns had been raised in the southern U.S., they naturally built a home along a plan familiar to people of that area: the "shotgun house", with rooms arranged one after another along a straight line. This is a style of domestic architecture typical of southern African-American culture, but a real oddity here.

It was demolished in 1892, but in 1985, an archeological dig on the site turned up lots of historical artifacts. In the piece excerpted by the Toronto Star, Karolyn Smardz Frost writes: "By the end of the summer of 1985, the dig had exposed the fragile foundations of an old horse barn and a little frame cottage facing south toward the lake. It was built on wooden sills set right on the ground. Only a single room wide and with its gable end facing South Park St., the modern Eastern Ave., the building comprised only three small rooms set in a row. The parlor was the front room (...) Behind was their tiny bedroom, and then came the kitchen, with its fireplace and back door to the garden..."

One of the reasons this interested me so much was that Suite 101 was the first place I ever heard of shotgun houses. You can read more about them in Kay Grigar's article about the rebuilding of historical New Orleans.

Okay, I haven't seen all the Oscar-nominated pictures. In fact, the ones I've only seen only account for about a third of the 100 or so nominations – and that's not even counting animations and documentaries! But I can predict what the Academy likes as well as the next movie buff, so here are my acting predictions for next Sunday's big event:

Best Supporting Actress: Nominated are Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi in Babel, Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal, Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine and Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls. I loved Breslin, but I think kids don't win unless their films are harrowing. Hudson can be counted on to give one of those hiccuping, hysterical, god-thankingly emotional acceptance speeches, so I think she'll get it.

Best Supporting Actor: The nominees are Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine, Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children, Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond, Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls and Mark Wahlberg in The Departed. Gosh, I wish Arkin would win, but I'm sure he won't. I saw Departed and even so I can't recall Wahlberg's performance. I think he might get it, but Murphy'll give him a run for the money.

Best Actress: Noms went to Penélope Cruz in Volver, Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, Helen Mirren in The Queen, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and Kate Winslet in Little Children. I think there's little chance the one Yankee on the bill is going to keep the little gold man on home turf in this category. The meltingly lovely Ms Cruz would be my pick, but I think she'll have to wait for another English-language movie for her chance. Everybody is calling for Helen Mirren to get it, and I personally adore the cheeky Ms M, but in this case the acting award should go to her wig, reading glasses and galoshes.

Best Actor: Up for top honours are Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, Peter O’Toole in Venus, Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness and Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. I have a sneaky suspicion that the blue-eyed Mr. O'Toole might whisk Oscar back to the U.K. out from under the nose of Forest Whittaker, but who knows? And did anyone actually see Half Nelson? Anyone...?

I've somewhat recently become part of a small board that's been assembled by the City of Toronto to think about a project called Humanitas. This still-slightly-amorphous project has already held a summer cultural festival in Toronto. However, its real purpose is to build up excitement among Torontonians about our shared past and to create a locus for that excitement, which might (or might not) manifest itself as a museum of the City of Toronto.

Now the City already administers several museums and galleries, mostly in buildings of historic interest (homes of famous past citizens, the War of 1812-vintage Fort York, and so on). But these are pretty small and only capable of housing a minute proportion of the municipality's 100,000-artifact collection of historical objects. We also have several big, important museum-type institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Toronto, but these aren't run by the city. And there are any number of other privately-run archives, historical buildings and mini-museums (ranging from Moses Znaimer's MZTV Museum of Television on the downtown property of Citytv to the Toronto Islands archives, located in a private home).

But when it comes to Toronto history, there's no there, there. There's no central focus, and no obvious starting point. Which has got me to thinking about the role of a city museum. Whose stories get told, and how do you tell them? Do you show objects, or do you literally tell stories? Do you have a place for dances and songs? (I somehow feel that food ought to be part of it.) In short, what does a city museum do, and how does it do it? I'd love some suggestions.

Last April I wrote about worldwide celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the death of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and I mentioned the production of A Doll's House by the innovative New York company Mabou Mines that's literally set in a doll's house, and stars men under 52 inches tall alongside women who range from five to six feet. It's finally coming to Toronto, as part of a sensational series called NeWorld International Performance that runs at Harbourfront Centre from now until June. Consequently, I had a chance to talk to Lee Breuer, who directed the show.

He called me from Uruguay, where he's working on what sounds like a fascinating new piece in collaboration with composer Bob Telson. The pair's most famous previous work was The Gospel at Colonus (1988), which was a Gospel rendering of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that originally starred Morgan Freeman and the Blind Boys of Alabama. It premiered at The Brooklyn Academy of Music and subsequently moved to Broadway, where it was nominated for a Tony Award (you may have seen it on PBS’ Great Performances).

The new work takes the form of a cantata, which is a musical piece that's set to a (usually) religious text and sung by solists and a chorus with orchestral accompaniment, like Handel's Messiah. I was interested that, unlike many cutting-edge contemporary artists, Breuer is not at all embarrassed to use words like "regligion" when he talks about his work. In fact, he told me: "When you look at the journey of the artist, it's as much a religious one as an artistic one."

Just thought I'd toss that thought out there. Breuer and Telson's new work premieres later this year at BAM.