Enjoy a varied Sunday cabaret series, starting February 23. Admission is by donation, for PAL Vancouver.
Sunday Showcase Cabaret @ PAL Studio Theatre SUNDAY FEBRUARY 23, 7:30PM Tickets: By donation at the door PAL Studio Theatre 581 Cardero Street @ West Georgia
APPLAUSE! is partnering with three other organizations to present a monthly “Sunday Showcase” cabaret at PAL Studio Theatre – the gorgeous rooftop theatre in the PAL Vancouver building in downtown Vancouver. This wonderful intimate venue is the perfect cabaret setting, and we are thrilled to return and participate in this exciting venture. Times: Doors open @ 6.30. Performances begin at 7.30 (running time: 2 hours max)
Sunday February 23, musical theatre performances with APPLAUSE! Musicals Society Sunday March 9, Behind the Curtain – Storytelling with Sara Bynoe Sunday April 6, Dances for a Small Stage Sunday May 4, Behind the Curtain – Storytelling with Sara Bynoe Sunday June 15, musical theatre performances with APPLAUSE! Musicals Society
Location: PAL Studio Theatre, 581 Cardero Street
PAL Theatre is associated with PAL Vancouver, and the PAL Theatre is located in the same building:
PAL Vancouver provides a safe, affordable home for a vibrant community of creative professionals who work, or have worked, in the performing arts. Our doors are open to all disciplines—film, television, radio, theatre, dance, music—and just about any occupation within them that you can think of. Priority is given to seniors (55+), persons with disabilities, and those with the greatest housing need.
We are all familiar with the chain experience. A uniform cup of coffee or the same burger, in a place that looks like every other incarnation. There can be comfort in sameness, and if you want Starbucks in Vancouver, you have plenty of opportunities for it. But Vancouver has lots of other options too. I have at least a dozen coffee shops that I really like, some of which I visit only occasionally for logistical reasons (like lack of Sunday opening hours or being too far away). And there are plenty of other interesting shops too.
Like every Early Music Vancouver concert I have attended, this concert provided a thoughtful selection of music performed beautifully. This ensemble, described as “Marc Destrubé and Friends”, was comprised of Canadian, German, Swedish, and American musicians who gathered for this performance. Clearly, Marc Destrubé, artistic director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra and an accomplished and versatile violinist (who has described his philosophy as “we play the music of the past as if it was written yesterday”), has similarly talented friends. Continue reading →
I enjoyed seeing TJ Dawe in Medicine last year at the Firehall Arts Centre, so I decided to check out “The Fugue Fugue”, one of a series of short “micro performance” productions that are the hallmark of Boca del Lupo. The play is 20 minutes of intense multimedia monologue, performed in a cramped space on Granville Island, with skillful use of surround-screen projection and sound.
One inspiration for this play was TJ’s discovery of Stephen Malinowski’s animation that delineates the voices in Bach’s Little Fugure in G Minor, and lays bare the fugue form, where the various voices are all playing together on variations of the same theme.
TJ Dawe then noticed how the fugue form is, in fact, incredibly pervasive in literature and film, even in comics and TV series. Most of the ideas that TJ Dawe presents in are found in an essay he wrote a couple years ago: The Fugue Fugue. Aldous Huxley draws on this concept with the title of his novel “Point, Counterpoint”, which follows the lives of several, apparently unconnected characters in London (the concept of “counterpoint” is closely related to the fugue). TJ realized that his own writing often used the form of interwoven separate monologues, essentially a fugue in prose.
I related to what TJ was saying, as last fall, I heard Tomson Highway describe how he conceived of his play “Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing” as being a fugue in eight voices. I also thought about turntablism (in the Q&A, TJ mentioned the documentary “Scratch”).
Part of the joy of this production is observing TJ Dawe’s enthusiastic, almost naive discovery of how so many forms of art that he loves (including Watchmen comics) all use a similar underlying form. The production itself becomes a multi-threaded piece, as it is impossible to watch every wall at once, and listen to every sound. You have to make a choice, and so the work will be different for every attendee. The production is selling out for many performances, so buy your ticket quickly (and it ends February 16).
TJ Dawe is currently working on an expansion of this piece with a collaborator, and I look forward to that incarnation as well. This version will focus more on the idea of the fugue as an inevitable multi-tasking component of modern-day life. TJ touched on this concept in this performance, but with a 20-minute production, there was not sufficient time to explore it.
In all world cultures, the one common musical element between them is a beat; a rhythm; a drum. From the djembe of Africa to the heavy bass of techno music, we are all familiar with percussion and its effect on our groovy well-being. How many of us non-drummers have looked on during a solo with admiration, envy, and awe at the utter release of creative energy before us, wondering how we, too, could look so graceful while having all of our limbs flail in various directions at various times?
In The Drummer Girl, Lauri Lyster, a percussionist whose interests have ranged from classical to New Age music, takes the stage to give us an insight into her world. While we don’t get the chops of Dave Grohl overnight, we learn about Lauri’s personal experiences, from the professional sphere of the drummer-for-hire and the many gigs she has done, to being a mother and woman who brings that same passion for music into the rest of her life. Combining her incredible musical talent with an innate storytelling ability, Lauri takes us on a journey through her childhood to the present, weaving a trail of humorous mischief throughout.
Through the course of two and a half hours, we learn many different things about Lauri: how her father predicted she was destined to be a drummer, how music has shaped her life and found her love, how she finds a meaningful rhythm even in traffic jams and perhaps most importantly, how a self-proclaimed obsessive-compulsive keeper of the beat does Zumba. Lauri never fails to interact with the audience, keeping the atmosphere light, relaxed and festive. Indeed, it is a celebration of Lauri’s life, and she brings us along for the party, making the theatre feel like a casual club, or even a gathering in her backyard.
With the aid of her band (including her husband and gleeful co-conspirator in many of her exploits, Simon Stribling), Lauri incorporates a number of songs through the show, ranging from self-composed Celtic rock to soulful jazz standards to an incredibly entertaining one-man performance of baby toys strewn about the floor. The whole band is incredibly talented – it seemed like everyone in the ensemble plays at least four different instruments – but what was palpable was the sense of camaraderie everyone shared. It gave the show a very special kind of feeling, like we were not only seeing a performance of professionals but a gathering of good friends.
Being a music nerd, I appreciated the amount of musical detail Lauri brought to the show. Talking about how rhythm and melody have governed her life resonate with me, as did her comedic recap of a night’s work for a triangle player at the opera. However, Lauri makes sure to make those jokes accessible to even those who believe themselves tone deaf, and the whole audience was kept somewhere between smiling lightly and in stitches.
The Drummer Girl is part monologue, part concert, part random impromptu gig. Indeed, it feels like you get a brief sampler of Lauri’s personal philosophy, from her passion for women’s and girl’s rights, to her personal feeling for various types of music, to various vignettes about why one should not date male drummers. With these little bites, you are swept up in her chaotic fun, and what shines through is Lauri’s cheer for her calling in life. You can feel the smile in her playing, just as readily and as clearly as when she winds up her next anecdote. As she winds up to play the next drum roll, you’re right there with her, cheering her through her next crazy endeavor.
And, hopefully, hearing about it in the next show she does.
Hardline Productions lives up to its name. Among others, I particularly remember how compelling and harrowing “Cautivos” (about a torturer who has the tables turned on him, or does he?) and “Medea” (a play by Neil LaBute, about parents who kill their children) were. “BUG” looks like it will be similarly compelling.
Love. Drugs. Bugs.
Hardline Productions follows their 2013 hit Of Mice and Men with a biting psychological thriller by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts.
Directed by Sean Harris Oliver (500 Days to Mars), Bug is an unconventional love story between Agnes, a lonely cocktail waitress living day-to-day in a rundown motel, and Peter, an AWOL solider with conspiracy theories so crazy they might just be true . . . Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County, Bug will have you buzzing from start to incredible finish.
Featuring Bob Frazer, Genevieve Fleming, Jay Clift, Melissa Oei, and Raphael Kepinski
Avant-garde is itself not a very avant-garde term nowadays. So, perhaps, I should say instead experimental or contemporary or new or noise music. But in the end, any nomenclature is limiting. However, you define it, most would probably say that Canadian composers Barry Truax (of SFU) and R. Murray Schaefer are pioneers in that category. Vancouver’s early punk scene is a topic for another day. If you want to know more, you should get Dave Thorvald Olson to tell you. I was lucky enough to hear him give a short talk on the subject a few months ago. On to the present.
“Absurd Machinery”, composed by Remy Siu, performed by Turning Point Ensemble:
Dan Mangan, at the Vancouver Folk Festival in 2012, started his set by saying that Vancouver has the best experimental music scene anywhere, and he feels like a kid in a candy store when it comes to choosing musicians to play with. Although I hardly feel qualified to judge, I can attest there is a diverse scene, technologically, culturally, and historically.
Western Front, now 41 years old, has musicians, speakers, and art exhibitions and performances that may leave you agape, thrilled, bored, or stimulated, depending. Music is a large component of the Front’s offerings, but literature and other art forms are important too. A recent performance: Dissonant Disco, “Copious Flow”:
Vancouver New Music organizes concerts. It has some community overlap with Western Front. Vancouver New Music and Western Front tend to have compositions and audiences with an academic bent.
For something more youth-oriented and outside the academy, check out events like the Music Waste Festival. More Fun City lists low-cost events that span a variety of genres.
Keep an eye out for Art for Impact events. This organization hosts events which raise money for very good causes, while providing an incredible combination of visual, theatre, and sound artists.
(Thanks to VancouverScape.com, the Chutzpah Festival, and Firehall Arts Centre, I will be seeing several Chutzpah Festival productions. I’m looking forward to reviewing them!)
The Chutzpah Festival, going strong after 14 years, brings a thrilling program of dance, comedy, music, and theatre to Vancouver from February 22 to March 9. I am particularly excited by the musical offerings, which you can see here. A really diverse array of countries and styles are represented. Although groups like Dudu Tassa & The Kuwaitis and Yemen Blues call on their Iraqi and Yemeni roots, respectively, their styles are strikingly contemporary and unbound by tradition.
I am particularly looking forward to Tiny Music, which I saw in a staged reading format last year. The musical side has been intensively developed since then, based on the description, and I am looking forward to this “sound design musical”.
Hirsch has been a Fringe Festival hit across the ocean, and I have high expectations for this biopic of the Hungarian-Canadian Holocaust survivor who became one of Canada’s foremost theatre artists.
The dance and comedy offerings look superlative too, but I will leave those for another day.
Vancouver always seems to have some film festival or another running. Whether it is the Vancouver International Film Festival (a 3-week extravaganza in the fall), the Serbian film festival, the Venezuelan film festival, the EU film festival, DOXA (a documentary film festival), and so on, some film festival is bound to interest you sooner or later.
Next up is New Spanish Cinema Week 2014, from February 21-27 at VanCity Theatre.
Gala screening Feb 21 includes a performance by Flamenco Rosario & special guests, a glass of wine and FREE ADMISSION to 9.30 show Serrat y Sabina: Two for the Road. Tickets only $20
Note that these films are from Spain. You can see plenty of Latin American films at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, which I highly recommend, and which occurs in the fall with occasional events throughout the year.
I volunteered in 2013 to write reviews for the Vancouver Fringe Festival. One of the shows I was assigned was Hockey Night at Puck & Pickle Pub (read my review). As volunteers, we have little choice, but I was worried that my complete lack of interest in hockey (which admittedly is still more than the negative-value interest I have in American football) would make me an unfit reviewer. I need not have worried. The show was among the funniest that I have seen, period, excepting just about any play that features Jacques Lalonde.
So I recommend seeing this play if you can. I suspect it may sell out as it did during the Fringe.
Culture, Travel, Food, Music - Vancouver and Beyond 