The evening begins with an “audio house tour” - which turns out to be an engaging lecture by choreographer / dancer Peggy Baker explaining how the art of Canadian artist Sylvia Safdie inspired and influenced the creation for her trio coalesce. Safdie provided not only paintings but also a series of short films where she utilized a combination of slow motion, reverse and looping techniques to depict the motion of a beetle. "This beetle was lying on its back, and it was basically in its death throes," Baker is quoted in a recent interview with the North Shore News. "It was going through...
Here’s what is going to happen. For 80 or so minutes Bruce Horak is going to stand on stage and paint a portrait of you; by you I mean the whole audience, but it will feel like it is just you. While he is painting your portrait, he’s going to tell you a long beautiful story that interweaves his life story, information on visual impairment and blindness, some Canadian art history, some instruction on art making, facts about the Group of Seven, philosophies and many theories on what happened to Tom Thomson on July 8, 1917.
The creative...
An Original Painting circa Opening Night (photo by Kristina Lemieux)
You should go out and see You Should Have Stayed Home. There are some things we, as Canadians, assume will never be obstructed; our freedom of speech, our freedoms of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, our freedom from arbitrary detention or imprisonment and the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.
I was working at a summer stock theatre in Ontario when the G20 took place. I vividly recall being in a production meeting on Skype with a designer in Toronto. The meeting ended abruptly when the noise of the violence on the street became...
