ArtwordBlog

Just in case anybody missed Jim Chambers’ excellent article in the Spectator entitled “Who Are Artists and Why Should We Care?”, here is the link: http://www.thespec.com/article/563049

Here’s a quote:

Toronto artists ask me weekly, “Is Hamilton a good place to set up business?” I give a qualified “yes” but after witnessing the recent roadblocks the city’s bureaucrats have thrown in the path of enterprises such as the Pearl Company with its arcane and punitive zoning laws I really wonder if Hamilton has the “political will” necessary to reinvent itself in a time of downscaled heavy industry.

That’s really the point, isn’t it? Artists are only one group within a larger sector of self-motivated, entrepreneurial people who do things because they’re worth doing. Together, we could transform this city. We don’t need a whole lot of help, just not so many barriers. We have a city management this is primarily in the business of collecting fees. The fees are onerous. The paperwork is excessive. The pace of administration is glacial. These are strong disincentives. If people want something to happen, they make it easy.

On April 15, two members of the audience for the first preview of Tobacco Troubadour turned out to be undercover by-law enforcement officers, out to bust Gary Santucci and Barbara Milne for running a theatre and an art gallery!

This nefarious enterprise, by the way, is located in a neighbourhood notorious throughout Hamilton for crack houses and prostitution.Well, I guess you have to start somewhere!

I must say that I feel rather sick to my stomach, thinking of how Judith welcomed them to our play, performed by local actors, based on songs written and played by Hamilton musicians, telling the story of farmers in Ontario’s tobacco belt.

For some information on what The Pearl is doing for Hamilton, check out the video Hamilton Arts and Heritage, made for the Hamilton Economic Summit held last week. More »

As we waited in the lineup for tickets to the Hammer City Roller Girls Mother’s Day Massacre yesterday (May 9), we were approached by a Cable 14 videographer. “What are you expecting to see?”, he asked me. “I have no idea”, I said, this being my first time. I blathered on for a while, trying to sound intelligent about something I knew nothing about. Afterwards, Judith said “He should have asked me. I would have said ‘bad girls kicking ass’.” He should have asked her.

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Summer in the city, and James Street North is the place to be. Loose Canon was showing surprisingly sophisticated work by high school students from Highland and Westdale Collegiate art programs. Hats off to their instructors, who must be doing something right. The technical skill was impressive and the ideas were clever, but unselfconcious.

Three new places opening up. A new studio/gallery called Socalled, with the owner exhibiting paintings and playing the flute.

A custom tailoring establishment, celebrating with a huge cake.

And our favorite printing house, just relocating that very night from darkest Westdale to the bright lights of James Street North: Copydog! www.copydog.ca.

After the stunning matinee production of Warhorse, Judith and I went for dinner to Studio 6 at Gabriel’s Wharf, a ten-minute stroll from the Southbank complex. We usually have dinner here at least once every visit. Prices are modest and the fare is excellent. It’s tucked in at the back of the cluster of shops.

Then back to the Lyttleton to see Steppenwolf’s widely-acclaimed August: Osage County. (For a sample of the acclaim, and a lot more detail than I’m going to supply, see the review in the NY Times.)  Steppenwolf is an ensemble company based in Chicago, and this has the feel of a work that has a great deal of collective energy, with some of its attendent limitations. More »

I went early to the National Theatre to line up for tickets. This being Wednesday, we could catch two plays: Warhorse in the Olivier (matinee) and August: Osage County in the Lyttelton.

In both cases, I didn’t have any real idea what I was going to see. I like surprises.  And I wanted to discover the plays as they revealed themselves.

Warhorse, based on a book for young people by Michael Morpurgo,  is a remarkable piece of theatre. More »

The Oval House Theatre in South London, just by the cricket ground, is an arts complex with two theatres and a cafeteria/gallery, specializing in Caribbean/African work. The atmosphere is casual and friendly. It’s the kind of theatre you should go to an hour ahead of time so you can have a glass of wine and a spicy plate of  jerked chicken, look round at the art, and maybe join in a stimulating  conversation with the people at the next table. There are two theatre spaces. The play we came to see was in the tiny upstairs space - 56 seats on three levels, arranged on three sides of the playing area. Intimate.

The play was a version of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (aka Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe), performed by two actors, Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu, from Zimbabwe. In English. More »

Eugene Martynec

We linked up with our friends Eugene and Vida. Eugene Martynec is a new music composer and performer whose instrument is a laptop-based midi controller. He uses sampled sounds to improvise in real time with other musicians. For four years at our second Artword Theatre, he organized regular Sunday new music improvisation concerts, featuring most of the leading new music practitioners in Toronto. Now he’s in London, playing gigs in the London music scene. He reported with delight that in London there’s a lot of older musicians making his kind of music, not just youngsters.

Thursday night, December 12, we joined him up at the back (cheap seats) of the Queen Elizabeth Hall for a concert celebrating the 100th(!) birthday of Elliot Carter, one of the iconic figures of avant-garde music for most of the previous century. The concert began with filmed greetings from the composer, who looks nothing like 100 and reports that he is still as busy composing as ever. More »

Kleztory is one of the two or three top Klezmer Ensembles in Canada. Based in Montreal, they have an international reputation — well deserved. There music is polished and tightly arranged, and very respectful of the tradition. They forgo the undisciplined crazyness that is sometimes thought to characterize the Klezmer revival. Perhaps that’s why they get asked to play and record with symphony orchestras and classical ensembles, such as I Musici de Montreal. More »

Wacky and elegant: two qualities that are not generally associated. And yet, Friday’s art crawl saw the two hand-in-hand more than once.

Brian Kelly’s sculptures, at the You Me gallery on James Street North, are free-standing assemblages of cast-off objects. They are high-spirited, witty, whimsical — all of that. And yet, something more. Let your eye draw away from the detail, and each melange of random objects resolves into a structure that’s graceful and pleasing to the eye. More »