In Quebec, public works are complicated: everyone knows that the roads and bridges are falling apart, but the public tendering process has lost much of its credibility through repeated and unresolved allegations of widespread corruption and the involvement of organized crime. In 2007, five people died and another six were injured when structural flaws caused the Concorde overpass in Laval, Quebec to collapse. Sexy beton II takes on this public tragedy in search of public accountability and justice.
After the collapse, a public inquiry found that no none was to blame. The government classified the event as a “car accident”, which although bizarre allowed the government to pay out small sums to the injured and the families of those who died through the province’s no fault auto insurance. Soon after, the public lost interest and the story slowly faded from public consciousness.
Enter the Porte Parole documentary theater company. Porte Parole is a Montreal based group dedicated to retelling current events with humanity, humour and humility through theater and online platforms. Sexy beton II is the second installment of their exploration/presentation of the story of the Concorde overpass. The play retells the story not only of the collapse and public inquiry, but how the playright’s own efforts to understand what happened became part of the story through the victims’ search for answers and justice.
This is theater like it used to be: relevant, critical, important, necessary.
The play is billed as bilingual, but – in case you are linguistically challenged like myself – the last half of the play is mostly in French.
On until December 1 at the Segal Center.
One of Canada’s preeminent video and sound art festivals Signal & Noise is calling for submissions.
Signal & Noise will showcase a spectrum of single and multi-channel audio & video works, live performances and immersive installations. Signal & Noise is an intimate forum for creative exchange between local, national and international artists. The event will take place in Vancouver May 27-29, 2010.
Submission deadline January 15, 2010. For more info go to the Signal and Noise website.
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La Sala Rossa in Montreal was packed last week for the eleventh Artists Against Apartheid concert, a cultural event series bringing diverse musicians to the stage in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Artists Against Apartheid is occurring within the growing international campaign to enforce boycott, divestment and sanctions on the Israeli government in response to Israeli apartheid policies against the Palestinian people living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This global movement gained prominence and support after the internationally condemned Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip last winter.
At the eleventh Artists Against Apartheid hundreds gathered to listen to unique performances, including a trio featuring Sam Shalabi on oud, Omar Dewachi on oud and Pierre-Guy Blanchard on percussion who opened the evening. Sam Shalabi’s performance at the concert builds on a growing excitement in Montreal and globally towards Shalabi’s innovative sound that incorporates tones from the Middle East and experimental musical styles from North America. Shalabi recently released an album, Land of Kush, on the celebrated independent record label Constellation Records. In recent years Shalabi has visited and performed in Cairo, Egypt developing styles on the oud and linking with groundbreaking musicians in Cairo, a cultural center in the Middle East.
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“After Auschwitz, it is barbaric to write poetry” wrote German thinker Theodore Adorno. Adorno is addressing the difficulty if not impossibility of creating beauty from the experience of human suffering without insulting or trivializing the horror. Martin Sherman’s “Bent” (on until Nov. 15 at Espace Theater in Montreal, produced by the Altera Vitae theater company) takes up this challenge by focusing on the plight of queer men in Germany under the rise of National Socialism. It is a difficult play that raises questions about memory, suffering, representation and the power of love.
In a nutshell, Bent tells the story of a gay man who endures the rise of Nazism first in flight from the SS with his lover, then, after capture, as an inmate at the Dachau concentration camp. In both contexts, it is the power of love – in this story, queer love – that provides a humanizing force in the face of relentless and murderous brutality and an urgent need for survival.
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Every country has its dirty stories. In Canada, we could point to the continuing theft of land and resources from First Nations; the environmental devastation and human cost of the Alberta tar sands; or the Highway of Tears (to name a few).
In the case of Turkey, a particularly dirty story from their recent past is the 1980 coup that saw hundreds of thousands of detentions, and widespread human rights abuses including torture, lengthy jail terms, and executions for political dissidents and civilians. It is not a popular memory.
This month, the exhibition “Dirty Stories” opened at the BM SUMA Art Center in Istanbul’s Karaköy district. The show presents 30 artists working in a range of media to excavate and transform the memory of Turkey’s dirty war into some kind of new and contemporary understanding. As we’re fond of saying on our war memorials in Canada – “Lest We Forget”, indeed.
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Just when you thought it was safe to visit your local drive-thru, political troubadour Geoff Berner sets the record straight. There are some really Angry Chickens in Europe, and he’s speculating it just might have something to do with the recent crackdown on refugees across the continent.
The following account is an except from Berner’s newsletter.
In parts of Europe, you may remember that I told you that Burger King, in its wisdom, was selling a product called the Angry Whopper. I am pleased, as your Cultural Correspondent, to report to you that they have added new items to their Angry line of food products. Not only can you get an Angry Whopper, you can also buy an Angry Chicken. Yes, it is frightening. And no, I can tell you definitively, the staff still don’t know why the food is angry, leaving us to continue with our speculation…
Perhaps this is to make people feel better about eating meat? I mean, perhaps all the Angry Chickens were killed in self-defense, when they were on the Angry attack? No jury would convict you.
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King in Toronto at FANEXPO 2007
Depending on who you ask, Donovan King is either a creative genius who consistently pushes the boundaries of “acceptable” art in his quest to live out Brecht’s dictum that “art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”, or an insufferable pain in the ass.
He is a celebrated author, playwright and director (artistic facilitator, in his parlance) and a relentless creator who never stops innovating, or challenging the boundaries of conventional theatre. King is the creator of the award winning Car Stories experimental theatre project, and co-founder of the critical-arts based Infringement Festival, which has now spread to cities across North America, Germany and France.
When writing and presenting scenes that are performed in cars, alleys, streets or corporate chain stores (in the case of his work culture jamming), King always injects hefty doses of the political. He is an unfailing critic of the corporate monoculture which he believes threatens creativity and artistic expression, and a thorn in the side of commercial interests and the powers that be, from city hall to corporate theatre fests. King and Sinking Neptune, his recent work challenging Canada’s history of colonialism, were profiled in a book on the most influential currents in Canadian theatre.
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