This weekend marks the 5th annual Honk festival in Somerville, MA, a celebration and gathering of activist street bands from across North America. These are the musicians who protest with instruments, costumes and rowdy improvised dance beats – the marching bands who put festivity into political resistance and a little bit of order into boisterous crowds. It is an often overlooked and yet vital aspect of protest gatherings around the world.
Performance
Is resistance the secret of joy?
Activist marching bands and the sounds of protest
Theatrical passion for politics
People Power explores the personal and political dimensions of the 1986 Filipino revolution
People Power is a play that packs a lot of politics, passion and prose into its tiny frame. And by tiny I’m not referring to the stature of the actors, nor the scope of this historical narrative – but rather the apparatus of the play, including the set, costumes, props, sound, lighting, etc. Teesri Duniya Theatre is used to doing a lot with a little, though, and as an independent social political arts group mainly showcasing English-language productions in the heart of Montreal, it is impressive what they manage to accomplish, all toward their goal of “changing the world, one play at a time.”
Soulful renaissance
Naomi Shelton sings of hope and struggle
Soulful music of struggle took the stage at La Sala Rossa with Naomi Shelton and The Gospel Queens performing for this year’s Pop Montreal festival. Authentic music to the core, Shelton’s ruff but beautiful vocals speak to an American musical history intimately bound to a century of struggle for civil rights and equality in the US, a story woven into many of America’s most profound cultural voices of the past century.
In the present context Shelton’s sound speaks to a well-crafted indie revival of soul music that contrasts recent decades of corporate-programmed digital sound. Flickers of the 21st century soul music resurgence are immediately apparent in the striking success of Daptone Records, Shelton’s record label based in Brooklyn, New York.
When I was still a student at Simon Fraser University the city and working at The Peak I managed to get my hands on a copy of plans for the Woodward’s development a full year before the official announcement that the SFU School for Contemporary Arts would make a home there.
I’ll admit, I snuck it from the student union offices because I’m nosey and have to know everything. But what I saw made me excited. Excited that the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU would FINALLY have a home that wasn’t a set of trailers placed helter skelter behind campus. Excited that they’d be getting a real home after 40 years of promises. Excited even though I wasn’t a contemporary arts student.
Education is a backbone to any society. Across the world social movements are struggling for accessible public education in the face of economic ‘austerity’ measures administered by neoliberal budgetary knifes. Budgets for public educational institutions are being too often sacrificed for corporate tax cuts, driving both the access to and quality of education down for the people.
In Canada, as the cost of quality post secondary education rises, the Conservative government is moving to cut the corporate tax rates to 15 per cent by 2012. Canada will then have the lowest tax rate for corporations in G7 major economies, reducing annual government revenues by $14-billion, as our schools, universities and society generally is forced to walk a financial tightrope in times of economic crisis.
Serious questions on our collective future must be raised as education is under the gun across the world. Beyond the hollowing out of public education through budgetary attacks, access to education is also becoming eroded by war.
It has begun! In late August, a group – or project – calling itself the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) reclaimed 41 advertising posts and about 25 larger billboards in the city of Toronto.
The “interventions” included painting over, pasting over and replacing advertising kiosk images with artwork and anti-consumer and anti-advertising graphic images from more than 60 international artists. Approximately 90 individual ads were “reclaimed”.
The takeover was orchestrated by 15 local artists lead by Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist, well-known for his similar 2009 reclamation project in New York. The group was briefed on how to gain access to the kiosks and then issued a make-believe letter of permission from an advertising company stating that the company had “graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other fictional things. The kiosks were targeted in a 2-hour period on a Sunday afternoon; billboards were reclaimed later that night.
Stephen Harper said last week that he was “concerned” about Homegrown, a play running at this year’s Summerworks theatre festival in Toronto. Homegrown apparently takes a sympathetic view on one of the ‘Toronto 18’ would-be terrorists who were foiled by Canadian authorities in 2006.
Summerworks, like many artistic endeavors across Canada, receives federal funding. This year, Ottawa gave the festival $35,000. There are over 40 performances at this year’s festival, which means that Homegrown probably received somewhere in the range of $875 from the federal government.
Granted, the concern is probably not just about the money; it’s a principles thing, I guess. Why, one might ask, would Canadian taxpayers support a play that asks us to sympathize with a man who was apparently going to try to blow up federal buildings and kill Canadians?
