The Georgia Straight - Spring Arts - Feb 28, 2019

FEBRUARY 28 - MARCH 7 / 2019 | FREE

Volume 53 | Number 2667

REPRIEVE FOR PUNKY Judge grants dog owner’s appeal

WOMEN IN FILM

Red Power on fest’s agenda

TASTING ROOM

Wineries show their stuff

Spring Arts Maestro Otto Tausk puts his signature on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming Spring Festival; plus, our guide to the cultural season

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2 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

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1 604 662 4441 FOLLOW US

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FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 3

CONTENTS

INFO

February 28- March 7 / 2019

13 COVER

Midway through the VSO’s 100th season, Otto Tausk talks opera, Mahler, and the conductor’s role.

By Alexander Varty Cover photo by Karolina Turek

9

NEWS

A dog named Punky has been given a reprieve from being euthanized even though the owner concedes it’s vicious.

By Carlito Pablo

11

BOOKS

Growing Room festival returns with high-profile speakers including trans author Lorimer Shenher.

By Kate Wilson

29 MOVIES

A Lakota warrior gets her due at the opening of the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival.

Skilled workers are in high demand in British Columbia.

Explore ways to get skilled and get ahead in a new career.

Program

Location

By Adrian Mack

35 MUSIC

After fleeing sunny Australia for Berlin, the members of Parcels met a couple of French legends and began writing their own beautifully complex story.

By Mike Usinger

Music Thursday, Feb. 28 & March 14, 4:15 p.m. – meet at Blenz coffee, building B

Broadway

Access to careers and education Monday, March 4, 12:30 p.m. – room 516

Downtown

Legal administrative assistant Monday, March 4, 4 p.m. – room 622

Downtown

Accelerated gemmology Monday, March 4, 5:30 p.m. – room 164

Downtown

Fashion Monday, March 4, 5:30 p.m. – room 921

Downtown

Automotive trades Tuesday, March 5, 11 a.m. – lobby, 4th floor

Broadway

Practical nursing & Access to practical nursing Wednesday, March 6, 4 p.m. – room 1208

Broadway

CAD and BIM (drafting) Wednesday, March 6, 4 p.m. – room 718

Downtown

Early childhood care and education certificate Thursday, March 7, 4:30 p.m. – room 240

Downtown

Check out more free info sessions at vcc.ca/info Downtown campus 200-block Dunsmuir at Hamilton two blocks west of Stadium SkyTrain station.

e Start Here 34 THE BOTTLE 36 CONFESSIONS 26 DANCE 33 FOOD 10 HOROSCOPES 32 I SAW YOU 29 MOVIE REVIEWS 7 REAL ESTATE 39 SAVAGE LOVE 25 THEATRE 27 VISUAL ARTS

e Online TOP 5

Here’s what people are reading this week on Straight.com.

1 2 3 4 5

e Listings 28 ARTS 37 MUSIC

Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly Volume 53 | Number 2667 1635 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 1W9 T: 604.730.7000 F: 604.730.7010 E: gs.info@straight.com straight.com DISPLAY ADVERTISING: T: 604.730.7020 F: 604.730.7012 E: sales@straight.com

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Beach Bay Café and Patio closes at English Bay. Jody Wilson-Raybould learns what happens to whistle blowers.

WWE’s John Cena raves about restaurant in decent Mandarin.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh elected in Burnaby South.

Filmmakers reveal jaw-dropping empathy in Us and Them.

GeorgiaStraight @GeorgiaStraight

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FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 5

Things to consider when you’re buying a new home (This story is sponsored by Brody Development Group.)

W

hat makes a house a home? It’s one of the biggest financial investments you’ll ever make, but there’s more to buying a new home than money. After all, it’s within your domestic surroundings that you enjoy life’s most precious moments. Your home is a private refuge where you can escape the outside world and be your true self.

When it comes to real estate, many Vancouverites are choosing to move outside of the city core to have closer proximity to nature’s playground and benefit from more space. Brody Development Group has been building superior homes on the North Shore for 40 years. Its latest project, Continuum (856 Orwell Street), is a collection of 23 beautiful townhouses located in Lynnmour. This is their third development in the area, which is quickly becoming a vibrant community for young professionals, families, and outdoor enthusiasts alike.

Brianne Brody, real-estate development manager at Brody Development, recognizes that building properties is so much more than bricks and mortar—it’s about creating a lifestyle. Below, she shares some of the most important things to consider when you’re buying a new home.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

It’s the mantra of real estate agents everywhere, and with good reason. The location of your property has a huge impact on your lifestyle, so it’s key to know what matters most to you. Research the surrounding amenities. If you have a family, look into the local schools. Time the commute to your office and weigh that against having easier access to the outdoors and a neighbourhood that matches your lifestyle.

Continuum provides homeowners with a limitless backyard. It is conveniently situated on a quiet cul-de-sac linked to Digger & Interriver Parks, Lynn Canyon, bike trails, and off-leash dog walks. Yet it is a short walk to the newly designed Lynn Creek Town Centre, where homeowners will enjoy a new community centre, coffee shops, local artisan stores, and a true community feel. Those who work in downtown

Homeowners at Continuum can expect superior workmanship, value, and sustainability in its townhomes.

Vancouver have easy access to Highway 1 and can be in the city centre in 15 minutes.

“The entire community is flourishing with young families,” says Brody. “It will be really nice for owners to have the convenience of the new, vibrant town centre yet be removed from the hub so you’re not among the traffic and noise. It’s that life balance—very much the best of both worlds.”

Being able to enjoy the great outdoors is likely a priority, but that means a lot of gear.

Big gear. While skis, bikes, tents, and paddleboards are all wonderful when you’re outside, they are far less fun when you are trying to incorporate them into your interior design.

So having a place to store them when they are not in use is crucial. Space is a premium in a townhome and making the most of outdoor space is a key design feature of Continuum.

USABLE LIVING SPACE Private rooftop terraces provide a quiet and The concept might seem out of this world to safe area to play or entertain and a refuge to city dwellers, but one of the perks of moving escape, star gaze, and enjoy the fresh air. outside the city is having access to more space, both inside and out. Having the room to live THE VALUE IS IN THE DETAILS your life more comfortably and a home that can There’s a security in buying a new build beaccommodate a growing family over the years cause you know that it incorporates the most current building standards and the most upis a real asset.

While many newly built properties offer to-date sustainability features. You also have open-plan living, storage space is often over- less hidden costs like renovations, maintenlooked, but that’s a mistake. It’s amazing how ance, and repair fees that come with buying quickly a home can start to look cluttered and an older home. And it’s the seemingly small small when you start bringing in your stuff. details that can actually make a significant difThat’s why at Continuum select floorplans of- ference to your everyday life.

“We, as a company, want to make sure we fer dedicated storage closets on each floor in are building a home with comfort, energy efaddition to custom shelving in all closets.

Each townhouse also comes with an over- ficiency, and health in mind,” says Brody.

One of Continuum’s best features is prosized two-car garage. And EV outlets for chargrammable interior climate control providing ging electric cars come standard in each one.

continuous comfort. An air source heat pump both heats and cools the home meaning you have air conditioning in the summer months.

And since this energy-efficient system works by transferring heat instead of converting fuel like a traditional system, homeowners can benefit from energy and cost savings.

Homes have hot water on demand units, which heats only what you use and means you never run out of hot water. Each townhouse also comes with a heat-recovery ventilator (HRV) that purifies air and improves the air quality of the home by pulling fresh air from the outside and extracting pollutants and toxins from inside the home.

At Continuum, every detail has been considered. The use of drawers as opposed to cupboards wherever possible allows for easy access to your things. The spacious kitchen has a wall oven, natural gas cooking and built-in microwave to really make the most out of the space.

ARE YOU IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL?

It’s sensible to consider how long you plan to live in a property. Ask yourself if the house has room for you and your family to grow. People spend years in a home, so having a timeless style, smart use of space and offering the best in sustainability features is becoming more crucial—factors that Brody Development recognizes in every build.

“We are always aiming to be as green as possible in our building, use clean energy and design homes for comfort,” says Brody.

Today’s real estate market is forcing buyers to redefine the family home and question the need for space. Townhomes are the new single family home.

“These are not basic homes,” adds Brody.

“They have space, they have storage, they have outdoor living, they have sustainable design features they have limitless features of convenience. Continuum is the forever townhome. It will fit you for whatever phase of life you’re in.” g The estimated completion date for Continuum is winter 2019–20, and there are only eight homes remaining. To learn more, visit the website at continuumliving.ca/ project/. Go to straight.com/contest and enter to win one of two North Vancouver prize packs valued at $250.

778.729.1202 continuumliving.ca

Artist’s renderings are representations only and may not be accurate.

A collection of 23 townhomes in beautiful North Vancouver, featuring private roof top terraces, attached garages, air conditioning, hot water on demand, natural gas cooking, contemporary feature replaces and ample storage. Conveniently situated on a quiet cul-de-sac, Continuum is a short walk to the newly designed Lynn Creek Town Centre and all of its amenities. Homeowners have easy access to HWY 1 and downtown Vancouver while enjoying trails, parks, rivers and the North Shore Mountains at the doorstep.

856 ORWELL STREET · NORTH VANCOUVER 6 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

HOUSING

Prof says taxes miss the mark

There’s no place like

E

The best new condo prices

Andrey Pavlov believes that adding supply is the only long-term solution

by Charlie Smith

ven though Metro Vancouver’s housing market has slowed dramatically over the past year, an SFU professor of finance says that doesn’t necessarily mean that homes are becoming more affordable.

“If incomes are going down, who cares if prices are lower?” Andrey Pavlov of the Beedie School of Business told the Straight by phone. “You still can’t afford to get into the market.”

It’s why he’s skeptical about the approach of the City of Vancouver and the B.C. government. According to him, they’ve “done everything in their power to suppress demand”.

In the case of the city, it’s through measures like the empty-homes tax and zoning restrictions that drive up prices. To cite an example, he pointed to the massive number of low-rise warehouses in the area around Terminal Avenue and Main Street, as well as in other areas of Vancouver.

“That, in my view, is a very inefficient use of space,” Pavlov said. “If you need the warehouses, you put them underground. Or you build on top of it—more residential or office.

People do that all the time. It’s not rocket science.”

Because this land is being set aside exclusively for industrial purposes, it leaves fewer sites for housing. And more housing, in his view, could lead to lower prices.

He also accused the province of suppressing demand with a range of new real-estate taxes. They include a surtax on expensive properties (called a school tax), a vacancy tax (also known as a speculation tax), and an increase in the property-transfer tax.

NORTH VANCOUVER

“Sure, they may reduce prices,” Pavlov acknowledged. “But you have a higher tax bill. So your monthly payment doesn’t change all that much. And even if it does, that’s a terrible way to provide affordability, and it will not work because you’re slowing down the economy.”

So what’s Pavlov’s prescription?

Over the long term, he argues that adding housing supply is really the only solution. That’s because adding supply doesn’t making housing more unaffordable because that’s

alk TOF THE WEEK A WAR is being fought for people’s attention like never before. With their powerful algorithms, digital platforms have become essential weapons in this battle.

Whether it’s for marketing or politics, it’s a contest of tweaking the message to suit the target audience. In some cases, people’s will can be subverted through disinformation.

U.K. technology researcher Carl Miller dives into this topic in a Vancouver lecture titled Digital Democracy 101: The Attention Economy. The event happens Monday (March 4) at SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street), from 6 to 7:30 p.m. g

RICHMOND

tied to the price-to-income ratio.

“You need a situation where incomes are rising and prices are stable,” he said. “That’s going to help people get into the market.”

He contrasted that with “taxing everyone to death”. Furthermore, he said that over the long term, curbing the housing supply reduces population growth.

“How many more people are we going to squeeze into the existing square footage?” he asked.

Pavlov thinks it was necessary for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to subject mortgage borrowers to new stress-testing rules in late 2017. But he’s concerned about the timing because this came after a big run-up in housing prices.

“This is the worst time to introduce restrictions on how much people can borrow,” Pavlov said. “Mortgage lending should be tightened when realestate markets are rising, not when they’re flat or falling.”

He worries about the effects of all of these policies on the domestic economy, particularly if there’s a slowdown internationally.

“All these measures take a year or two to take effect,” he stated. “You raise this tax, you raise that tax, and people aren’t going to stop what they’re doing on the same day. But they’re sure going to scale back their investments going forward. It takes a year for those things to take effect.

“Unless we reverse course right now,” Pavlov added, “I do predict we’re going to have a substantial economic slowdown relative to the rest of the world because of those tax policies and the resulting slowdown in the real-estate market.” g

RICHMOND

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8 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

NEWS

There’s no place like this

Dog who attacked woman at a park gets a reprieve

anywhere else in Vancouver,

by Carlito Pablo

P

unky gets to live another day.

The owner of the Australian cattle dog has secured a new reprieve from death row for her beloved pet. Punky had been designated by provincial court as a dangerous dog and ordered destroyed after he attacked a woman at a Vancouver park in 2017.

The B.C. Court of Appeal has granted Punky’s owner, Susan Leah Santics, permission to appeal the euthanization order.

In oral reasons posted online Monday (February 25), Justice John Hunter said that it is “in the interests of justice that this Court provide guidance on the interpretation of the statutory provision that authorizes destruction of dangerous dogs”.

“At a minimum, there must be a judicial determination that the dog meets the definition of dangerous dog as defined under the legislation,” the judge noted.

According to judicial records, a woman identified as Ms. AP was sitting by the edge of a forested area at Locarno Park Extension when Punky, who was off-leash, charged and bit her. She suffered deep puncture wounds to her right leg and right hand, as well as other injuries. The wounds took months to heal.

where the waterfront trails lead you to parks, outdoor movies, Save-On-Foods, restaurants and shops that are only steps from your home.

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There must be a judicial determination that the dog meets the definition of dangerous dog.

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Prices are subject to change without notice. This is not an offering for sale. E&OE.

– Justice John Hunter

Upon application by the city’s animal-control officer, a provincial court judge determined that Punky was a dangerous dog and ordered the animal put down under Section 324.1 of the Vancouver Charter.

Santics appealed the provincial judge’s decision. In reasons for judgment dated January 10, 2019, a B.C. Supreme Court judge dismissed Santics’s appeal and ordered a stay of Punky’s destruction order for 31 days to allow his owner an opportunity to make a further appeal.

Santics does not question that Punky is a dangerous dog. Her principal question in the B.C. Court of Appeal case is whether or not that designation is enough to have a dog put down.

“Is it sufficient that the court determine the dog is a dangerous dog to order that it be destroyed?”

Hunter noted.

According to the judge, this issue “leads to the question of onus of proof”.

“Is there an onus on the animal rights officer to prove that the dog is so dangerous that destroying it is the only way of protecting the public?” the judge wrote. “Is there an onus on the owner of the dog to establish that there are steps that can be, or have been taken to protect the public without destroying the dog?

“Or is the question of onus irrelevant,” the judge continued, “on the basis that the trial judge must simply assess the evidence presented and exercise a discretion implicit in s. 324.1 [of the Vancouver Charter], balancing protection of the public with the property rights of the owner and perhaps, the welfare of the animal?”

Punky’s owner has until March 14 this year to file materials for the appeal. g

Help Shape the Future of Broadway We’re launching a two-year planning process to create a comprehensive plan for the Broadway area that will integrate new housing, jobs and amenities around the future Broadway Subway.

Join us at our open houses to learn more about the planning process and how you can get involved.

City staff will be on hand to answer questions and receive your input.

BROADWAY PLAN OPEN HOUSES: Thursday, March 7, 2019, 3 – 7 pm CityLab, 511 West Broadway Friday, March 8, 2019, 3 – 7 pm CityLab, 511 West Broadway Saturday, March 9, 2019, 12 – 4 pm CityLab, 511 West Broadway Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 3 – 7 pm Kitsilano Neighbourhood House 2305 West 7th Avenue Thursday, March 14, 2019, 3 – 7 pm Kingsgate Mall, 370 East Broadway FOR MORE INFORMATION: vancouver.ca/broadway-plan broadwayplan@vancouver.ca Visit: vancouver.ca Phone: 3-1-1 TTY: 7-1-1 FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 9

HAVE YOU BEEN TO...

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JIM GREEN MEMORIAL LECTURE 2019: NATHAN EDELSON

The Future of Inner City Planning

March 13, 2019 at 7:00pm SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St. Register: jimgreenmemorial.eventbrite.ca Find more details at www.sfuwoodwards.ca

HOROSCOPE

E

LEO

F

VIRGO

G

LIBRA

H

SCORPIO

I

SAGITTARIUS

J

CAPRICORN

May 21–June 21

K

AQUARIUS

CANCER

L

PISCES

I

by Rose Marcus

FEBRUARY 28 TO MARCH 6, 2019

t’s that time again. Yep, Mercury retrograde is on the way. Before getting to that, Venus is on the move.

March opens with Venus turning a corner with Uranus before beginning a several-week stint in Aquarius. Enough attention and effort have been spent; it’s time to switch gears.

Friday can produce a sense of earning and deserving it and/or gaining new ground. A new angle, spontaneous choice, or fresh conversation can make the day.

The Aquarius moon keeps it on the upbeat through Monday. As of Tuesday, the moon enters Pisces and Mercury begins retrograde (10:19 a.m.) at the very last degree of this same sign.

By now, you know the drill: make no assumptions; play it safe with health and money; lock up; keep tabs on your things, passwords, words, and actions; allow extra time, et cetera.

Just as we think it’s all been said and done, there’s more to go. Mercury retrograde in Pisces is an exposing archetype, targeting the immune system, innocence, beliefs, vulnerability, and vulnerable ones. The Pisces archetype also stimulates imagination, dream cycles, romance, emotional responsiveness, and creative process. Escapism, chasing the elusive, or searching for the ultimate also falls under the Pisces banner.

The start of Mercury retrograde is accompanied by a Pisces new moon conjunct Neptune in its home sign. Wednesday also launches Uranus into Taurus, a shatter-thesound(bite)-barrier transit of great significance for all. This planetary cluster can reveal what was previously hidden from view and, in so doing, clear up confusion and uncertainty.

The lost can be found. Mining from buried treasure, there is also an opportunity to reclaim a part of yourself that has gone missing.

A

ARIES

March 20–April 20

A great idea, an intuitive flash, or something unexpected could kick-start your Friday. One way or another, you’ll stay well on the go this weekend. Fresh-start Monday keeps you on the gain, but come Tuesday, Mercury retrograde can see you lose focus or steam. Wednesday’s new moon is laden with hidden potential. Stay open/receptive; be creative; go by feel; trust intuition.

B

TAURUS

April 20–May 21

Pay close attention to what you are feeling. Do not ignore or overlook a thing. Potentials are gathering substantial steam. Mercury retrograde, starting Tuesday, is an exposing transit. Uranus in Taurus, starting Wednesday, can set you up for a personal breakthrough and/or a radical change. In combination with the Pisces new moon, know that even a subtle shift can trigger monumental growth and progress.

C

GEMINI

Friday brings a liberating feel. Venus keeps you on a fresh topup through Monday. Tuesday/Wednesday, don’t force it. Mercury retrograde, the Pisces new moon, and Uranus into Taurus call for you to suspend preconceived ideas and expectations, to accept what is, to have more faith. If you run out of steam or find yourself at a loss, it will not be for long.

D

June 21–July 22

Venus into Aquarius, starting Friday, and next Wednesday’s new moon aligned with Uranus into Taurus can trigger something lucrative and/or unexpected. You could break through your own sound barrier. While Mercury is retrograde, let the world spin without you for a while. Time is best spent on spiritual replenishment, creative projects, and getting back in touch—with another or with yourself.

10 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

July 22–August 23

Venus in Aquarius, starting Friday, is good for a social boost. Someone or something new could light a fresh spark. Money, time, interest, and/ or resolve can evaporate once Mercury in Pisces turns retrograde. Know you can be easily sold, consume more, or talk yourself into more than is wise.

Uranus in Taurus is well timed for considering a new career or lifestyle track.

August 23–September 23

By Friday, you should feel like you are making good headway regarding something in particular or on the bigger-picture front. Venus into Aquarius, starting Friday, and Uranus into Taurus, starting on Wednesday’s new moon, set you up for a significant personal breakthrough.

Mercury retrograde puts you back in touch with a missing piece of yourself.

September 23–October 23

Venus in Aquarius, starting Friday, dishes up a great cut-yourselfloose feel. You’ll continue to enjoy a fresh wind through Monday. Tuesday/ Wednesday, keep plans simple and open-ended. Motivation, focus, or time can be lost once Mercury turns retrograde. Uranus into Taurus can dish up unexpected opportunity or expense. To the plus, the transits enhance creativity, romance, and intuition.

October 23–November 22

Friday through Monday sets up never-a-dull-moment times.

Tuesday/Wednesday can steer you into something unplanned or uncharted. It’s a deeper dive, a totalimmersion program, a floodgate of emotions. Despite the start of Mercury retrograde, intuition, creativity, romance, luck, and opportunity are at peak.

November 22–December 21

Friday through Monday can get you going on a fresh idea, activity, or conversation. Venus in Aquarius also stimulates your social life and professional prospects. Tuesday/ Wednesday, it is easy to lose track, time, or focus. On the other hand, what’s lost can be found. Indulge yourself or one you love, but also keep health and safety in mind.

December 21–January 20

It might be the end of the week, but things are on a wind-up, not a wind-down, as Venus exits Capricorn for Aquarius on Friday.

The fresh-air feel continues through Monday. Tuesday/Wednesday, stay open-ended; go by feel. Mercury retrograde and Uranus into Taurus can diffuse, unlock, unblock, reveal or remove it, and/or ease up on you.

January 20–February 18

Venus in Aquarius, starting Friday, has you freshly refuelled and good to go. The Aquarius moon also keeps you well on point through Monday. Make the most of it while the getting is so good. Tuesday/Wednesday, chill out. Watch for Mercury retrograde and Uranus in Taurus to unwrap it for you. Simple and easy are the best options.

February 18–March 20

Tuesday/Wednesday can set you up for a disappearing act or a lostin-space, watershed, or waterworks experience. On the total-immersion program, Mercury turns retrograde in Pisces and the new moon in Pisces draws extra turbo from Neptune in Pisces. Uranus into Taurus can spark an exceptionally emotional, creative, lucrative, expensive, opportune, or life-changing couple of days. g

Book a reading or sign up for Rose’s free monthly newsletter at rosemarcus.com/.

BOOKS

Growing Room festival makes space

by Kate Wilson

D

iscussions of gender identity have become increasingly nuanced over the past few years. Social-media platforms display countless images celebrating those whose gender differs from their biological sex. Trans and genderqueer characters are the focus of film and TV shows, and even the Canadian government has taken steps toward recognizing alternative gender identities, permitting trans or nonbinary individuals to change their gender marker on official documents.

That open-mindedness, though, wasn’t the case for most of writer Lorimer Shenher’s life. Born in 1960s Alberta as Lorraine Shenher, he spent much of his time trying to suppress his gender dysphoria by channelling his energy into career pursuits, including his work as a Vancouver Police Department detective and lead investigator for the harrowing case of serial killer Robert Pickton (described in his acclaimed debut book, That Lonely Section of Hell). It wasn’t until 2015 that Shenher began his physical transition to male—a process that he documents, along with his life from childhood to the present, in his upcoming memoir This One Looks Like a Boy. More than most, he appreciates why gender is such a slippery concept, and why society carries the expectation that gender and sex should correlate. “I think there are a million historical, underpinning reasons for it,�

Shenher tells the Georgia Straight on the line from his Vancouver home. “But I have an English degree and a communications degree, so I often look at things through the lens of language. And I think sometimes it’s as simple as human beings need[ing] to be able to label things. The first thing we say when we’re talking about someone we met that day is ‘I met this woman,’ or ‘I met this guy’‌I think it’s a need to...make [things] more understandable.â€?

Shenher’s nuanced approach to gender is mirrored by the long-running literary journal Room, which values the ability to express marginalization through language. Unapologetically feminist, its pages have featured work from women, trans, and two-spirit and nonbinary writers over its 44-year history, and offers a platform to wordsmiths often excluded from the canon. At the journal’s 10-day-long festival, Growing Room—now in its third year of entertaining Vancouver audiences with panels, readings, and workshops— Shenher will be discussing writing and surviving in a cis-sexist society. “For me, everything comes down to intersectionality,� Shenher says. “I think within this feminist space, you can have women of colour, you can have people who identify as women, you can have trans men—you can bring a lot of voices, and everyone can

Shenher celebrates the Growing Room festival for its ability to create thoughtful dialogue. In a world where opinions are becoming increasingly polarized, the events, he says, are able to give space—or, quite literally, room—to different perspectives. “I think festivals like this are so important,� he continues. “Again, when I talk about my people, my people are ‘others’, really. So to have a festival like this where people can come together Lorimer Shenher will discuss writing and share that experience of marginand surviving in a cis-sexist world. ality, I think it’s always so positive, relate to the experience of not being and it’s really reaffirming for people of the dominant culture. I think for to walk away and feel a little less anyone who identifies as female, right bruised.� g away you’re in the nondominant 50 percent of the world. All those other Lorimer Shenher speaks at Growing Room: identities can share that experience, A Feminist Literary Festival on March 12 and March 16. The festival takes place at various so we find a lot of commonality.�

More than anything, however, venues from March 8 to 17.

Books TIP SHEET The third annual Growing Room festival is ready to run at venues all over town from March 8 to 17. (See related story on this page.) Rooted in the mission of the groundbreaking feminist literary journal Room, the program celebrates writing and art by cisgender and transgender women, transgender men, and Two-Spirit and nonbinary people. Here are just a few highlights from the complete lineup, available at festival.roommagazine.com/.

c INDIGENOUS BRILLIANCE (March 9 at the Red Gate Revue Stage) The local quarterly reading series of the same name, normally housed

by Chinatown store Massy Books, marks its first anniversary with a full day of readings, music,

art, and more, from morning to evening at the Red Gate.

c FUNNY FEMINISTS (March 10 at the Red Gate Revue Stage) Humour still has its own powers against oppression, as this gathering will show through the witty work of such writers as Ivan Coyote, Eden Robinson, and Lindsay Wong. c WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH (March 16 at Native Education College) Hosted by Vancouver author Jen Sookfong-Lee, this reading revolves around a soon-to-be-published collection in which 12 writers delve into the aftermath of sexual assault, exploring trauma and survival in ways often neglected by mainstream discussion.

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spring arts Otto Tausk settles into VSO centenary Expect Mahler and more as the Dutch conductor shapes the Spring Festival and the season to come

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by Alexander Varty

e could, I suppose, call this story “Tracking Otto Tausk”. Our task takes us into the bowels of an Amsterdam theatre, through the thorns of a malfunctioning voice recorder, and across two different dodgy Skype hookups, until finally we arrive, digitally, at his home—where he’s a perfectly genial host.

And in our conversation, once we finally have him, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s new music director delivers more than a handful of clues about where he’s been and what he’ll be up to next. It’s not necessarily significant that he’s in his hometown: unlike his predecessor Bramwell Tovey, Tausk is opting to fly in for his VSO appearances rather than invest in expensive Vancouver real estate.

But it’s telling that he’s presently rehearsing the Dutch National Opera for this week’s world premiere of Micha Hamel’s Caruso a Cuba—a sign that he has both an ear for new music and an eclectic musical background.

“What I’ve learned from opera is that you need to have incredibly clear and eloquent technique, because there are so many things happening at the same time,” Tausk explains, noting that the lessons he’s acquired in the pit are applicable to the concert stage.

“There’s always a limited amount of rehearsal time, so you need to be fast when you do opera. And always something happens. There’s always a singer that comes in a bar late, or somebody that speeds up suddenly or is really slow.…So it has to be incredibly clear what you want and what’s going on.”

In his first season with the VSO, which also happens to be the orchestra’s centenary year, Tausk has already shown himself to be a precise, detail-oriented conductor, attuned to a work’s inner voices as well as its overall shape. That he’s also a good leader is evident in the way that he eagerly offers to share the credit.

“What I found is an orchestra that has a history,” he says. “Especially now, in the 100th-anniversary season, you sense that history.…There are all the stories about who came to the orchestra in the past—Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff and Glenn Gould

Maestro Otto Tausk says he has found an orchestra that “has a history”, with both versatility and a high level of training.

and Bernstein—and all these great artists, they left a certain mark on the orchestra. And Bramwell’s tenure was of course a really long one, and that means he has done something really well with the orchestra—and it shows, because the orchestra is in very good shape. The level of training is very high. They are capable of playing a very diverse repertoire, and they are very quick with getting a piece together in a very limited amount of rehearsal time, which is great.”

As for what comes next, Tausk displays a winning combination of modesty and ambition. “I also like that the orchestra is, in a very large way, independent of the conductor,” he notes.

“I feel that an orchestra gives much more energy to the audience when it

works as if it were a chamber-music group—an ensemble playing together, listening to each other, not depending on a conductor as much. As a conductor, I try to get out of the way.

“Of course, the conductor is necessary,” he continues. “You need somebody to steer the ship, and you need to find a direction that everybody has to go for. In rehearsing with 80 people, if everybody wants to say something, then you need 100 rehearsals—which would probably be really interesting, but it’s not that practical. So somebody needs to make decisions of what to rehearse, and how, and when. I love to make the artistic side of the planning: the programs, the guest artists… I really like thinking about those things, and

shaping the season of the orchestra.”

THE VSO’S 2019-20 season will see a carefully balanced blend of the old and the new—and a number of programs that suggest future developments. Opening in the fall with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, for instance, hints at Tausk’s respect for the great works of the orchestral repertoire, Mahler himself, and his own Dutch lineage. “Mahler had a very close connection to my hometown, to Amsterdam, and did a lot of his works there; he conducted a lot with the orchestras,” he says. “I’ve seen the scores of Mengelberg and van Beinum and all these old conductors that did the Mahler symphonies, and I hope to bring something of that to Vancouver.”

Translation: there’ll probably be even more Mahler in our near future. Another of Tausk’s ideas worth expanding on is that of having living composers comment on the historical figures that shaped their work. He’ll begin by bringing in Australian composer-conductor Brett Dean to lead a program of Ludwig van Beethoven and original works. “I think that’s very interesting,” Tausk says, “because I always feel I can learn a great deal from the way that composers look at other composers.”

Before the fall, however, we’ll also get a chance to enjoy the VSO’s Spring Festival, which under Tausk has become more conceptual and less composer-centric than past incarnations. Music and Power is this year’s theme, but rather than go all didactic, the focus is on stimulating a necessary discussion of orchestral music’s role in society. After programs that pair the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn, banned under the Nazis, with fascist darling Richard Wagner, and that consider the mix of propaganda and protest that characterized Russian music under Stalin, Tausk will end Spring Festival with the audacious combination of Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor.

What links Ives’s proto-existentialist meditation and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”? Tausk answers this question in a typically Dutch and democratic way.

“What is this question that we can’t answer?” he says. “For me, it has always been a question about how do we survive in this society. How do we survive with ourselves? How do we survive with each other? How do we commit to our inner self? How do we commit to other people? That’s the big question, and the answer, for me, has always been music. So Beethoven, in a way—the idea of music making brotherhood—is the answer to the question. But that’s something that everybody can decide for themselves.” g The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Festival takes place at the Orpheum from April 5 to 13.

Local visionaries lead vivid music roster

I

by Alexander Varty

’m writing this with chain saws ripping into 100-year-old cedars in the lot next door, just a stone’s throw away from the heronry, and some Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon is about to give a press conference containing the 8,000th lie of his presidential tenure, but in the world of art… In the world of art, all is pretty good. The capsule report?

Well, our city’s major cultural institution, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, celebrated its centenary by handing the reins to music director Otto Tausk (see story above), who’s a very different conductor than his predecessor Bramwell Tovey, but equally skilled. And Vancouver keeps turning out visionary musicians and composers, many of whom are represented in the concerts listed below. It’s a good time to be alive… until a tree falls on your nest.

WORDS & MUSIC (At the Orpheum Annex on March 9 and 10) The birds and the bees, the fish and the frogs. Although human expression is the focus of this Turning Point Ensemble production, which features the premiere of the Ernest Hemingway–inspired The Old Man and the Sea, by composer Rita Ueda and librettist Rod Robertson, the natural world gets a look in too. The Draw: The rarely heard but highly touted music of Mexican modernist Silvestre Revueltas, in the

of us who can appreciate a smartly executed succession plan.

SONIC BOOM (At Pyatt Hall and the Orpheum Annex from March 21 to 24) Vancouver Pro Musica’s annual festival allows inquisitive listeners to discover the rising stars of the local composition scene, which has never been healthier, alongside new pieces from established artists. The Draw: This year’s Sonic Boom house band is the allstar Turning Point Ensemble, ensuring that both emerging composers and veterans will be handled with elegant assurance. Target Audience: Anyone who can tell a treble clef from an ampersand.

Violinist Jennifer Koh hits Music on Main’s A Month of Tuesdays on April 9. Photo by Juergen Frank

form of his Duet for Duck and Canary and Frogs. vel of consistent excellence since 1946. The Target Audience: Species-inclusive listeners.

Draw: For some of us the chief joy of this Friends of Chamber Music event will be the JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET (At the Van- fabulously astringent tones of Béla Bartók’s couver Playhouse on March 19) Now boasting String Quartet No. 3; others will find joy in the a powerful new first violinist, Areta Zhulla, mellifluous works of Ludwig van Beethoven the Juilliard String Quartet has been a mar- and Joseph Haydn. Target Audience: Those

TAUSK CONDUCTS MOZART (At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on March 22 and 23) I am not a devotee of the Salzburg wunderkind, and I’m not alone; Glenn Gould once famously described Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concertos as having all the charm of “inter-office memos”. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. The Draw: New Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director Otto Tausk is a fan, and applies his interpretive genius to Mozart’s last three symphonic offerings. Target Audience: Me, I guess—and everyone who disagrees with me.

see next page

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 13

Rising cello star Jonathan Roozeman, who’s been hailed as a distinctive voice on the scene, hits the Vancouver Recital Society with his brother Jan-Paul on March 31.

from previous page

ANDREW DOWNING’S NOSFERATU (At the Orpheum on March 23) The Vancouver Bach Choir teams up with an all-star cast of local improvisers—including clarinetist François Houle and trumpeter Brad Turner—to provide a postmodern score for the famous 1922 silent movie. The Draw: Bassist-composer Andrew Downing’s Technicolor sound meets filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s indelible black-and-white images. Target Audience: Definitely not the tonedand-tanned crowd.

CHOR LEONI

ERICK LICHTE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

JONATHAN AND JAN-PAUL ROOZEMAN (At the Vancouver Playhouse on March 31) No matter their genre, it seems that musical siblings always have unequalled musical chemistry, and this Vancouver Recital Society concert offers a chance to test that theory. The Draw: Only 20, Jonathan Roozeman is already being hailed as a distinctive voice on the cello, and his pianist brother Jan-Paul seems similarly blessed. Target Audience: Talent scouts with an ear for classic but underexposed repertoire.

A MONTH OF TUESDAYS (At the Fox Cabaret from April 2 to 30) Lucky us: this year, April has not four but five Tuesdays, giving us an extra opportunity to enjoy Music on Main’s annual spring showcase of emerging artists and established innovators. The Draw: Just buy a series pass. But if you have to pick two of the five, we’ll suggest violinist Jennifer Koh, who’ll present an exceptional survey of short works for the modern virtuoso on April 9, and Emerge on Main on April 23, featuring uncategorizable artists-to-watch Matthew Ariaratnam, Julia Chien, and Alex Mah. Target Audience: Open ears.

CAPELLA An explosion of choral, jazz, and pop music with Jodi Proznick and her band.

March 1,2,3 | 8pm March 2 | 4pm VANCOUVER PLAYHOUSE

chorleoni.org | 1.877.840.0457 14 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

VSO SPRING FESTIVAL (At the Orpheum on April 5, 6, 12, and 13) The VSO’s annual Spring Festival gets a makeover, as it shifts focus from surveying great classical-music individuals to considering how music and society work together in concert—or sometimes at cross-purposes. The Draw: Smart programming, especially the Revolutionaries show on April 12, which looks at three sly, subversive, and once bannedin-the-U.S.S.R works from Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sergei Prokofiev. Target Audience: Progressive conservatives, but not the now-extinct political kind.

CANTUS & CHOR LEONI (At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on April 12) The opening concert in the 2019 VanMan Male Choral Summit pairs the local lions with their American counterparts in Cantus—a group originally convened by Chor Leoni artistic director Erick Lichte during his student days. The Draw: What’s the opposite of toxic masculinity? Target Audience: Healthy, harmonious men.

MUSIC FOR A VERY GOOD FRIDAY (At the Orpheum on April 19) Jon Washburn ends his 48-year tenure with the Vancouver Chamber Choir in a program that features a few of his favourite things—including Johann Sebastian Bach’s Missa Brevis in G Minor and two of his own folk-song arrangements. The Draw: A chance to say thanks to one of the giants of choral music in Canada.

Target Audience: A large and appreciative crowd.

PANTAYO (At the Orpheum Annex on April 27) We haven’t yet heard this “all-women lo-fi R&B gong punk collective”, but since we like all of those adjectives, we’re definitely going to check out the Toronto group’s local debut.

The Draw: This Vancouver New Music–sponsored event features a radical take on Filipino percussion music, bolstered by deep electronic grooves. Target Audience: Those of us ready to go somewhere we’ve never been before.

FAUST (At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on April 27, May 2, and May 5) Naked ambition and desire lead an amoral schemer to sell his soul to the devil, only to find out that his gains mean nothing. Charles Gounod premiered his Mephistophelian masterpiece in 1859, but his plot hasn’t aged a day. The Draw: Marianne Fiset, who delighted in 2017’s Turandot, returns, with David Pomeroy in the title role. There’s a good chance their Faust will be the highlight of the 2019 Vancouver Opera Festival, which also includes nine performances of Gioacchino Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Target Audience: Those who know that the devil has the best tunes.

VENICE IN THE EAST (At Christ Church Cathedral on May 10) Frankly, I’d like to head to Crete right now, but I suppose we’ll have to wait until May 10, when Early Music Vancouver presents Cappella Romana in a program of medieval Byzantine chant from the Mediterranean island and its Ionian neighbours. The Draw: Although this music will speak more of shady cloisters than sunlit beaches, it will still buoy the heart. Target Audience: Dreamers and the devout, who are not necessarily the same.

EVENING WITH ELEKTRA (At the Sutton Place Hotel on April 7) It’s a spendy affair, with tickets going for $250, but for that you get dinner, choral brilliance from Elektra Women’s Choir, and an intimate audience with star soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. The Draw: Bayrakdarian, who has a larger-than-life voice and stage presence to match.

Target Audience: Patrons of the arts. SCANDINAVIAN TREASURES (At the Scandinavian Community CRISTINA PATO QUARTET (At Centre on May 25) Although this the Chan Centre for the Performing Burnaby venue is better known for Arts on April 11) We happen to baking classes than vocal beauty, love the bagpipes, but we were born we’ve got to give kudos to Vancouin Aberdeen and so have no choice ver Cantata Singers for finding an in the matter. You, on the other appropriate venue for their survey hand, have options, but it wouldn’t of the Nordic choral scene. The hurt to check out one of the lead- Draw: If we’re lucky, there’ll be ing practitioners of their Galician pulla and coffee. If not, we’ll still cousin, the gaita. The Draw: A get to hear extraordinary compossubtler, warmer, and jazzier take itions, beautifully sung. Target on the famous Celtic skirl. Target Audience: Vikings, and those who Audience: Curious crossover fans. love them. g

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 15

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16 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

SPRING ARTS

Dance steps from paradise to tech nightmares

by Janet Smith

Y

ou want bold dance? This spring is full of fearless offerings—some funny, some elaborately visual, and some unabashedly strange. One Montreal icon has the guts to try to turn the historic painting The Garden of Earthly Delights into a wild dance tableau. A Japanese legend, meanwhile, brings on a nightmare world of technologically enhanced beings.

And an Austrian innovator puts an ironic new spin on his homeland’s folk dance. There’s circus, there are club beats, and more. Hang on for a wild ride.

VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL (At the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, the Vancouver Playhouse, and KW Production Studio from March 8 to 30) Kokoro Dance’s allembracing fest draws companies from across the city, the country, and the world. Local bright lights include Vision Impure’s Noam Gagnon and Inverso Productions’ Lesley Telford, while Tedd Robinson’s Ottawa company 10 Gates Dancing presents the mysterious Trust, complete with a gong. Japan’s butoh-driven Dairakudakan makes a long-awaited return with the cautionary AI tale Pseudo human/Super human. The Draw: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if you haven’t seen Dairakudakan’s legendary Akaji Maro stalk the stage in a fright wig and ghoulish white face paint, you haven’t lived; his new work will be an inspired spectacle. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Taiwan’s Tjimur Dance Theatre will be hauntingly hypnotic. Target Audience: The adventurous, the curious, and the eclectic.

VIVA MOMIX (At the Vancouver Playhouse on April 12 and 13) At DanceHouse, Momix artistic director Moses Pendleton blends ballet and acrobatics with dazzling lighting to create what can only be described as kaleidoscopic tricks of the eye.

Human forms contort into blooming flowers, flying bats, and shifting abstract art. The Draw: The sheer invention and the chance to experience wonder again. Target Audience: Those who think they’ve seen it all, especially when it comes to “new circus”.

NO MORE FANTASIES (At the Annex on April 25) The city’s newest contemporary-dance company, Future Leisure, puts its own, innovative twist on the pas de deux—in this case, for two females. The Draw: Expect the unexpected from emerging choreographer Julianne Chapple, who has At DanceHouse, Compagnie Marie Chouinard brings to life Hieronymus Bosch’s an ability to put surreal signatures on 15th-century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Photo by Sylvie-Ann Paré even the most stripped-down pairing. Target Audience: Dance junkies COMPAGNIE MARIE CHOUINARD Target Audience: Art historians, looking for a fresh new voice.

(At the Vancouver Playhouse on utopia seekers, and anyone who’s March 15 and 16) With Hierony- ever squinted in amused puzzle- PROGRAM 3 (At the Queen Elizamus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly ment at Bosch’s bird monsters and beth Theatre from May 9 to 11) After Delights, the Montreal visionary swollen strawberries. wowing crowds with 2016’s technopays inspired, three-act homage driven Bill, collaborators Sharon to the 15th-century artist’s erotic- SONS OF SISSY (At the Scotia- Eyal (a former dancer with Batsheva ally deranged triptych. In a piece bank Dance Centre from April 4 to 6) Dance Company) and Gai Behar created to mark the hallucina- Viennese artist Simon Mayer cele- return with the North American tory artwork’s 500th anniversary, brates and subverts the folk-dance premiere of Bedroom Folk, a bold Marie Chouinard sends her dan- and -music traditions of upper Aus- mashup of music, dance, and light cers—white-powdered and half tria. At the same time, he’s sending first staged at cutting-edge Nedernaked—cavorting across the stage, up old-fashioned notions of mascu- lands Dans Theater. The program capturing all the sexual charge and linity. Think accordions and knee- also boasts a world premiere by surreal touches in Bosch’s visions of slapping. The Draw: Mayer, who was Vancouver dance veteran Serge Benparadise and hell. It’s a DanceHouse also a heavy-metal bass player and nathan, rounded out by the return presentation. The Draw: Translat- singer, is an art star in his home- of Batsheva legend Ohad Naharin’s ing the elaborate painting through land, and his work is funny yet razor raucous Minus 16—another strong dance is something only the ever- sharp. Target Audience: Österreich- presence this season from the poweraudacious Chouinard could pull off. er and Schuhplattler fans. house Israeli company. (See story

on Program 2, page 24.) The Draw: Eyal and Behar’s work is the coolest thing happening on the Ballet BC calendar; with rave beats, pummelling technique, and sharp humour, it’s hip without even trying. Target Audience: Club kids and those in the know.

ASHES FOR BEAUTY (At the Scotiabank Dance Centre from May 23 to 25) Here’s a rare West Coast overview of the work of prolific Calgarybased dance icon Davida Monk. She presents Ashes for Beauty, specially remounted for seven Vancouver dancers; she dances in a new solo by Alberta choreographer Helen Husak; and she joins a duet with local talent Arash Khakpour, in a Paras Terezakis work based on the Greek tragedy Antigone. The Draw: The chance to see a long-time force on the Canadian dance scene, who’s collaborated with everyone from musicians to poets and visual artists. Target Audience: Devotees of the mythical, the literary, and the natural world— some of her favourite themes.

UNDIVIDED COLOURS (At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on June 6 and 7) Asian-Canadian artists Peter Chin (Toronto), Hari Krishnan (Toronto), William Lau (Ottawa), and Alvin Erasga Tolentino (Vancouver) showcase everything from Peking opera to Indian classical dance as part of a Canadian tour. The Draw: An overview of the influence of eastern dance forms on the contemporary scene here, featuring some exciting artists who are pushing traditional forms.

Target Audience: World travellers and dance enthusiasts who like to look outside of western borders. g

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Following sold out performances in London and Tel Aviv FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 17

SPRING ARTS

On stage, naughty fun and unlikely love

by Kathleen Oliver

A

h, spring! The snow will pass, the blossoms will bud, and exciting shows will proliferate on Vancouver stages. My picks include premieres and proven successes; as usual, I don’t have room for all the shows I’d like to mention.

So, in addition to those highlighted below, there are formally innovative shows: Reverberations at Presentation House, Ce qu’on attend de moi from Théâtre la Seizième, and Nassim at the Cultch all promise to shake up the usual relationships between audience, performer, and script.

Women writers are getting plenty of stage time this spring, and the coming months will see the return of some excellent feminist shows from the recent past: my 2018 Fringe favourite Poly Queer Love Ballad at the SUM Gallery, Hot Brown Honey at the York Theatre, and the latest Mom’s the Word: Nest ½ Empty at the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage in June. If you missed any of these the first time around, go see them!

Shows for younger audiences include Carousel Theatre’s Salmon Girl and Iron Peggy at the Vancouver International Children’s Festival, both written by Indigenous women.

And watch for more strong women in Glory, Tracey Power’s play about a 1930s female hockey team at the Gateway, and in Lois Anderson’s production of The Taming of the Shrew at Bard on the Beach. Anderson directed last year’s Lysistrata, one of the most unhinged shows I’ve ever seen at Bard; if anyone can make the problematic sexual politics of Shrew both meaningful and entertaining in 2019, it’s her.

It follows an artist’s model down a figurative rabbit hole that’s at once familiar and deliriously trippy. The Draw: Breathtaking originality— and naughty fun! You will never look at a toothbrush the same way again.

Target Audience: The fearlessly adventurous. Adults only!

THE ORCHARD (AFTER CHEKHOV) (At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage from March 27 to April 2) Playwright Sarena Parmar transplants Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to the 1970s Okanagan Valley, where a Punjabi Sikh family faces financial pressure to sell its beloved orchard. The play’s premiere at the Shaw Festival last year earned strong reviews. The Draw: The creative team is loaded with talent.

Jovanni Sy directs a 12-person cast Ruby Slippers stages Marine Life, with Alen Dominguez, Christine Quintana, and Sebastien Archibald. Photo by Tim Matheson that includes Laara Sadiq, Nadeem Phillip, and Adele Noronha. Target COME FROM AWAY (At the Queen 23) Vancouver actor and playwright Ruby Slippers Theatre gives us the Audience: Locavores who appreciate Elizabeth Theatre from March 5 to Meghan Gardiner’s new script Vancouver premiere of Rosa Labordé’s a new twist on the classics.

10) Vancouver finally gets a chance explores revenge and redemption much-praised story of the unlikely to see one of the most successful in a twisting story of two prisoners. romance between an environmental REVOLVER FESTIVAL (At the Canadian musicals of the past decade, The press materials promise #MeToo activist and a corporate lawyer. The Cultch and various venues from May set in Gander, Newfoundland, the relevance. The Draw: Provocation. Draw: If environmentalism and 22 to June 2) As the weather warms community that welcomed thousands Producing company SpeakEasy corporatism can find a harmonious up and many local stages grow quieter, of passengers whose flights were Theatre last got our attention with relationship—even if it takes magic the rEvolver Festival explodes in and redirected after the 9/11 terrorist The Shipment, a formally daring and realism to make it happen—then around the Cultch like a fizzy summer attacks. The Draw: Major, sustained socially relevant production. The maybe there’s hope for us. Target drink, showcasing unconventional, buzz. Irene Sankoff and David talent assembled for this show looks Audience: The hopeful. experimental work from mostly Hein created this show at Toronto’s impressive as well. Target Audience: emerging artists, local and national.

Sheridan College; it has gone on to Fans of Gardiner’s acting who want MULTIPLE ORGANISM (At the This year’s lineup includes two dazzle audiences on Broadway and to see what else she has up her sleeve. Vancity Culture Lab from March 19 terrific shows from last year’s Fringe to 30) My hands-down favourite Festival—Fake Ghost Tours and earn seven Tony nominations, among a host of other honours. Target MARINE LIFE (At the Firehall Arts show at the 2017 Fringe Festival Surveil. The Draw: Variety. The festival Audience: Proud Cancon supporters Centre from March 14 to 23) Globe was this wildly inventive adults- promises storytelling, dance, sketch and Mail critic J. Kelly Nestruck only puppet show from Mind of a comedy, clown, puppetry, absurdism, who got their tickets early. calls this play “a nice, light romantic Snail, which won both the Georgia and more. Bonus: there’s a barbecue.

(At comedy about the inevitability Straight Critics’ Choice Award and Target Audience: Want a hot dog and GROSS MISCONDUCT Gateway Theatre from March 14 to of environmental destruction”. the Cultchivating the Fringe Award. a beer with your existentialism? g

“A pianist of uncommon sensitivity and refinement” — The Independent

NOT TO BE MISSED!

YEVGENY SUDBIN Morna Edmundson, M Ed d Artistic A i i Di Director Ø Stephen S h Smith, S i h Pianist Pi i March 9, 2019 Ø 7:30 pm

Pre-concert talk with featured composer, Marie-Claire Saindon Ø 6:45 pm Shaughnessy Heights United Church, 1550 West 33rd Avenue, Vancouver Adult: $35 Ø Seniors (65 +): $30 Ø Students with valid ID: $18 Ticket prices include all service charges

ticketstonight.ca Ø 1.877.840.0457

PIANO

SUN MAR 24 at 3pm

CHAN CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS Described as “potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st Century” (The Telegraph), this renowned Russian is hailed for his insightful and powerfully expressive performances.

SCARLATTI | BEETHOVEN | CHOPIN SCRIABIN | SAINT-SAËNS TICKETS: 604 602 0363 I VANRECITAL.COM SEASON SPONSOR:

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

CONCERT SPONSOR:

The John C. Kerr Family Foundation

18 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

YORK THEATRE

T ICKET

This tour has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Hot Brown Honey has been supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Brisbane City Council and Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts.

FOR AGES 16+

IMAGE BY DYLAN EVANS

BRIEFS FACTORY (AUSTRALIA)

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FROM

$24

Mar 15– Mar 30, 2019

TICKETS AVAILABLE AT

604-251-1363 THECULTCH.COM MEDIA SPONSOR:

CORPORATE PARTNER:

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 19

THROUGH MAY 20, 2019 This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum Major Sponsor:

Major Community Partner:

Major support provided by:

Cathy Zuo

Visionary Partners for Historical Exhibitions:

Huaijun Chen and Family

Berthe Morisot, Madame Boursier and Her Daughter, c. 1873, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 29.30, Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

20 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

SPRING ARTS

Photo-based works reign, from Pawtucket to Harlem

by Robin Laurence

M

Rodney Graham’s City Self/Country Self shows a French connection in VAG’s Affinities.

any of the season’s best shows are photobased—not surprising given that the annual Capture Photography Festival (April 3 to 30) has so successfully come to signify springtime in Metro Vancouver’s visual-art world. Personal stories are reconstructed, cultural histories are illuminated, and changing viewpoints are processed through the lenses of local, national, and international artists.

NICOLAS SASSOON: LIQUID LANDSCAPES (At the Surrey UrbanScreen to April 28) Nighttime passengers on the SkyTrain between Gateway and Surrey Central stations are graced with views of Nicolas Sassoon’s digital-animation ode to the natural landscapes of Surrey, playing across the façade of the Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre. Drawing on photographs found online, Sassoon translates natural colours and forms into pulsing and morphing abstractions— a different work for each night of the week. Each references a different site, such as Crescent Beach, Serpentine Fen, and the Nikomekl River, while also alluding to early computer graphics. The Draw: Sassoon asks us to reconsider the ways our understanding of the natural world is mediated by photographic and digital technologies. At the same time, Liquid Landscapes is visually mesmerizing—more than worth the SkyTrain fare. Ride back and forth as often as you dare, or, hey, get out and stand gawking in the rec-centre parking lot.

AFFINITIES: CANADIAN ARTISTS AND FRANCE (At the Vancouver Art Gallery from March 2 to May 20) While the main event at the VAG this spring is definitely French Moderns, touring from the Brooklyn Museum and featuring the likes of Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, and Henri Matisse, Affinities promises to tie this show to Canadian art from the gallery’s collection. Probing the influences of French modernist movements on Canadian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Affinities gives us works by Emily Carr, Maurice Cullen, and J.W. Morrice.

More recently, French cultural and feminist theory is reflected in the postmodernism of Rodney Graham, Lucy Hogg, and Mary Scott. The Draw: It’s fascinating to consider the ways in which French art and theory have spun outward, throwing long lines of inventiveness into our own backyard.

JIM BREUKELMAN: ALTERED STATES (At the West Vancouver Museum from March 20 to May 11) This solo exhibition spotlights both early and recent work by one of our leading photographic artists. We are introduced to a body of images Breukelman shot in a diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, while he was a student at the famous Rhode Island School of Design. These works reflect on opposing views held by the

Deanna Bowen’s Theatre Under the Stars’ cast photo from Finian’s Rainbow.

counterculture of the artist’s generation and the older factory workers and truckers who patronized the diner.

Also on view are selections from more recent photographic series, including unsettling images shot in a taxidermy shop and a mesocosm.

The Draw: A major retrospective of Breukelman’s work is long overdue. In the meantime, the West Van Museum show gives us a gratifying glimpse into his career.

DEANNA BOWEN: A HARLEM NOCTURNE (At the Contemporary Art Gallery from April 5 to June 16) Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen researches and retells African-Canadian histories, including those involving her own family, who immigrated to this country from the United States in the early 20th century. In the second of two related exhibitions (the first was at Toronto’s Mercer Union in 2017), the culmination of a multiyear research project, she uses film, photography, and other media to examine race relations in Vancouver.

Focusing particularly on our city’s black entertainment community, she illuminates the story of Eleanor Collins, a jazz singer and variety-show host of the 1950s and ’60s—the first black host on TV in North America. The Draw: An internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist, Bowen unearths overlooked black histories, reminding the mainstream that it is not as squeaky clean and tolerant as it likes to believe.

KAREN TAM: WITH WINGS LIKE CLOUDS HUNG FROM THE SKY (At the Richmond Art Gallery from May 4 to June 30) Montreal artist Karen Tam characteristically works with mixed-media installations that re-create spaces claimed and shaped

by Chinese immigrants. Her RAG work, originally created for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, “reimagines” the painting studio of Lee Nam, an artist who migrated to British Columbia more than a century ago and settled in Victoria’s Chinatown. Tam’s installation includes flowers, goldfish, and photographs, as well as traditional brush paintings by contemporary Chinese-Canadian artists. The Draw: Building on her extensive historical research, including that into the friendship between Lee and Emily Carr (who showed his work in her studio), Tam opens our eyes to the life and times of an artist who might otherwise have slipped into obscurity. g FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 21

2019VANCOUVER I N T E R N AT I O N A L DANCEFESTIVAL M A R CH 4 -3 0 TAIWAN’S

TJIMUR DANCE THEATRE 8pm, March 29 & 30 Vancouver Playhouse $60-$70

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8pm, March 8-9 Vancouver Playhouse

2pm, March 10 & 17 and 2pm & 3pm, March 24 Woodwards Atrium

3pm, March 10 & 17 Woodwards Atrium

5pm, March 13-16 KW Production Studio

Free

$15-$20

$60-$70

Free

VANCOUVER’S

MONTREAL’S

VANCOUVER’S

OLIVIA C. DAVIES / O.DELA ARTS

MANUEL ROQUE

KELLY MCINNES

JEANETTE KOTOWICH

7pm, March 14-16 Roundhouse Exhibition Hall

8pm, March 13-16 Roundhouse Performance Centre

5pm, March 20-23 KW Production Studio

7pm, March 20-23 Roundhouse Exhibition Hall

Free with VIDF Membership

$30-$35

$15-$20

Free with VIDF Membership

VANCOUVER’S

MONTREAL’S

VISION IMPURE

DAINA ASHBEE

8pm, March 20-23 Roundhouse Performance Centre

5pm, March 27-30 KW Production Studio

$30-$35

$15-$20

VANCOUVER’S

LESLEY TELFORD / INVERSO PRODUCTIONS 7pm, March 27-30 Roundhouse Exhibition Hall Free with VIDF Membership

INFO & BOX OFFICE: 604.662.4966 · VIDF.CA

22 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

VANCOUVER’S

OTTAWA’S

10 GATES DANCING 8pm, March 27-30 Roundhouse Performance Centre $30-$35

Tjimur Dance Theatre photo by Maria Falconer

JAPAN’S

SPRING ARTS

Big names bolster comedy calendar

T

by Guy MacPherson

he JFL NorthWest comedy fest is all done for another year. Get over it. As you recover from all your laughrelated injuries, start getting out to more shows, a little at a time.

KENNY ROBINSON (At Lafflines on March 1 and 2) He’s a Canadian legend who doesn’t get out West all that often. The Draw: Such is Canadian show business that you maybe haven’t heard of this legend, but that’s no knock on him. Perhaps it’s his potty mouth that has kept him out of wider circulation. Target Audience: True patriots who love freedom of speech.

WHOSE LIVE ANYWAY? (At the Molson Canadian Theatre on March 1; at the River Rock Show Theatre on March 2 and 3) How about a little improv from some of the world’s best and funniest? There’s more to comedy than standup. The Draw: Ryan Stiles (who started his career in Vancouver), Greg Proops, Jeff B. Davis, Joel Murray, and Bob Derkach provide the spontaneous laughs based on your suggestions. Target Audience: TV’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? has been on the air in some form or another since you were a baby. The live version is just as funny.

IAN BAGG (At the Comedy MIX from March 7 to 9) The B.C.–born Bagg has been living south of the border for virtually all of his long career, but he loves coming home to where it all started. The Draw: Silly, quick as a whip, and inclusive, Bagg offers one of the best live shows in the business, with unparalleled crowd work. Target Audience: His act stands up to multiple viewings due to the largely interactive nature of it. But don’t worry; he won’t harass you unless you harass him first.

GARY GULMAN (At Yuk Yuk’s on April 12 and 13) Finally! Or should we say “Finally?” Gulman has been scheduled to play Yuk Yuk’s twice in the past two years and has cancelled both times. Here’s hoping third time’s a charm. The Draw: He’s been one of

British comedy legend John Cleese—of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus fame—brings his funny walks to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on May 25.

JOHN CLEESE (At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on May 25) Funny walks, funny talks with funnyman John Cleese, best known for… pretty much anything he’s ever done, not least of all Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. The Draw: It’s John Cleese!

Say no more! Target Audience: Maybe you’ve got to be of a certain vintage to rush out to hear an old man talking, but he’s worth it.

the best and smartest comics working for over a decade, but it’s only in the last few years that his name has become better known among the masses. If you’re one among the masses who has yet to learn of him, get out there to the club to see what all the fuss is about. Target Audience: Gulman has been giving, essentially, a master class on Twitter lately with tips aplenty for comedians. His students will want to watch the master in action, notebooks in hand.

TREVOR NOAH (At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on June 14 and 15) How does this guy, head of the World’s Fakest News Team, find the time to tour? It seems Noah visits us at least once a year. Not complaining, mind you, just wondering. The Draw: The South African expat has slowly ingratiated himself into America’s heart after the breakup with Jon Stewart. He’s proving his mettle every night. Target Audience: With Trump still trumping all news, we desperately need a good laugh at his expense. g

TERRY FATOR (At the Molson Canadian Theatre in Coquitlam on May 4) He won Season 2 of America’s Got Talent and hasn’t looked back since. The ventriloquist’s milliondollar prize is peanuts compared to the five-year, $100-million contract he received from the Mirage in Las Vegas the following year. The Draw: With the Hard Rock Casino next door, it’ll be like going to Vegas without leaving home. Target Audience: Who doesn’t love talking puppets? C’mon, you know you do.

“Unlike any bagpipe playing you’ve heard…a virtuosic burst of energy” - The New York Times

THU APR 11 2019 / 8PM

Cristina Pato Quartet C H A N C E N T R E AT U B C

Tickets and info at chancentre.com

8pm Friday, March 15, 2019 Shaughnessy Heights United Church 1550 West 33rd Avenue at Connaught Drive

Vancouver Chamber Choir Jon Washburn, conductor The Farewell Tour will be performed across Canada and features our all-time Top Ten List (by number of performances over the last 48 years) including Bach’s Lobet den Herrn, Debussy’s Trois chansons, and Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia.

There’s also music by Kodály, Raminsh, Schafer, Foster, and McKennitt. This concert marks Jon Washburn’s 92nd domestic or foreign tour with the Vancouver Chamber Choir!

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FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 23

ARTS

Batsheva alumna builds work at Ballet BC

by Janet Smith

A 8pm Friday, April 19, 2019 The Orpheum Vancouver Chamber Choir & Orchestra Pacifica Singers Vancouver Youth Choir Jon Washburn, conductor Jon Washburn draws all his soloists, choirs, alumni and orchestra together for a wonderful evening of music to celebrate the passage of his 48 years as leader of the Vancouver Chamber Choir. The music is resplendent J.S. Bach’s marvellous Missa brevis in G minor, Tarik O'Regan’s mystic and evocative Solitude Trilogy, a premiere performance of Jon Washburn’s Two Canadian Folksongs and a celebratory massed performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ glorious Five Mystical Songs.

1.855.985.ARTS (2787) vancouverchamberchoir.com

“Above all, Bezuidenhout knows how to make a fortepiano sing.”

— The Guardian

single audition changed the trajectory of Adi Salant’s life, securing her a place in Israel’s Batsheva Dance— one of the most influential companies of the past 20 years.

Trained at the demanding BatDor Dance School, she tried out and made it into Batsheva’s junior company after high school. After two years, she joined the main company as a dancer, then in 2001 started working as an assistant to its legendary artistic director, Ohad Naharin, helping to teach and stage his work around the world. Then she returned home to Tel Aviv to codirect Batsheva with him from 2009 to 2017.

“It felt right to my body. And we connected; I felt the chemistry with Ohad. It made sense to work like that,” the warm dance artist tells the Straight with a shrug, sitting in an empty rehearsal hall at the Dance Centre in the week before her new work premieres at Ballet BC. “He gave me the trust to stage his works at other companies. You go away and you’re by yourself. I was a good babysitter, I guess, to his creations.”

At the same time, Salant had a front seat for the creation of gaga— the sensation-based movement language that Naharin invented, which has since swept the dance world.

“When I started there was no ‘gaga’,” Salant recalls with a smile.

“We had those classes, but we called it ‘the movement language of Ohad’.

I was there for the development of that. It was all the time refining itself, and making itself more coherent. I taught it to other companies, but I didn’t try to be Ohad—I was Adi, and I found out who Adi was doing that.”

Salant is all too aware that an audition set the course for her role in the seminal company. And down the hall in the rehearsal studio, she explores the idea. Cheesy music from an iconic dancer-tryout scene, the opening number from A Chorus Line, is blasting out of the speakers. But the Ballet BC dancers—all 17 of them—are not performing the Broadway-style high kicks and star jumps of the famous musical. Instead, to the sounds of the driving beats and rhythmic horns, the dancers are opening their mouths in silent screams, flapping their hands by their ears, flailing on the floor,

Adi Salant explores the audition as a metaphor for life. Photo by Michael Slobodian

and tiptoeing around each other like spinning tops. At one point, Kirsten Wicklund wraps her arms around Kiera Hill, bends her backward, and shakes her like a rag doll.

In her new work WHICH/ONE, Salant reveals, human beings are in the struggle of their lives.

Watching video of A Chorus Line’s opening number last year, Salant was struck by the larger metaphor of all the dancers vying for a spot in the show. “It’s how we’re always in the situation of auditions and have the need to prove ourselves,” Salant says.

“It’s someone else’s decision; it’s in someone else’s hands. It can change the course of your life. And it’s about how much someone else can control your life, not just in dance, but a friend or a boss. So I was really playing with that—the image of the movie really fit for me with the story of life.”

Salant is also clearly having fun with the razzmatazz of the score. “I wanted this iconic piece of music,” she admits. “It’s show biz, but you realize that the dancers are really just fighting and struggling and fragile, with this need to keep it going.”

You can see Salant’s creation of a work here in Vancouver as a kind of audition in itself—in the best possible way. This is the first time the artist has ever choreographed for a North American company. She choreographed for years when she was based in Denmark, but having three children and helping

to run Batsheva required a hiatus. But then she connected with Ballet BC’s Emily Molnar, who’s known for finding fresh, exciting voices from around the globe—and who has shown a taste for the work of other Batsheva alumni, including Naharin himself and Sharon Eyal (whose Bill is part of the company’s repertoire now, and whose Bedroom Folk is up next in Program 3).

“Emily was very generous to me, coming out again as a choreographer,” Salant says. “Emily was following her instincts.”

Ballet BC’s dancers have in turn shown a willingness to dive into Salant’s brutally honest and unleashed style. “They have so much on their plate; they’re a company that has to continue to fulfill so many different fantasies of different choreographers,” marvels Salant, whose work shares the roster of Program 2 with Jorma Elo’s flickering 1st Flash and Crystal Pite’s ethereal Solo Echo.

“I’m telling the dancers ‘I want you to act more like yourself.’ They really need to find the person that they are true to. And they are doing it with such openness.” The best part? It’s a full-company work; life may be one big audition, but she likes this crew so much, she hasn’t cut a single one from the roster. g Ballet BC presents Program 2 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from Thursday to Saturday (February 28 to March 2).

JFL NorthWest ends with a bang Comedians from Metzger to Rannazzisi impressed in smaller club venues

by Guy MacPherson

COMEDY

JFL NORTHWEST COMEDY FEST

At the Comedy MIX, Yuk Yuk’s, and the Vancity Theatre from February 20 to 23. No remaining performances

Tickets start at

CHIAROSCURO QUARTET KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT

$25

FORTEPIANO SUN MAR 10 at 3pm I VANCOUVER PLAYHOUSE SCHUBERT & MOZART The celebrated fortepianist joins forces with one of the world’s preeminent period ensembles to perform a program featuring an iconic Schubert masterpiece and an arrangement of a Mozart concerto.

Not to be missed!

TICKETS: 604 602 0363 I VANRECITAL.COM SEASON SPONSOR:

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24 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

d OKAY, BREATHE. Even if you didn’t go to every show in the just completed JFL NorthWest comedy fest, chances are you saw more comedy in the past fortnight than in most twoweek periods during the year.

There were shows at theatres big and small throughout the festival, but clubs usually provided the best experience. You were closer to the performer, sipping beverages, sharing a laugh with friends at a table. Vancouver is fortunate to have two world-class comedy clubs, so I stuck to the Comedy MIX and Yuk Yuk’s and still managed to see many of the big names who headlined the theatres, doing shorter drop-in sets.

The MIX on February 22 was a solid show from top to bottom, with the suave MC Patrick Maliha getting the crowd perfectly pumped with confident yet self-deprecating crowd work. The standup veteran can do an hour with seemingly no act and still kill. It’s harder than it sounds. On this night, he was kept to a tight 10 off the top and a few minutes in between acts, keeping the show moving and on track. Middler Levi McCachen was smart and super funny, talking about not your usual subjects.

Granted, his love of the craziest conspiracy theories isn’t smart, but his take on it is, managing to make fun of them while also claiming support for them.

Headliner Kurt Metzger said he could only muster “just-got-off-a-flight energy”, but still was hilarious. Like McCachen, he was able to think way outside the box,

giving his take on “classic news”, dolphin dicks, Hollywood morality (it’s easier to get on the Supreme Court than it is to host the Oscars), religion vis-à-vis Jeffrey Dahmer, Jared Fogle’s prison justice, and a retrospective on Saddam Hussein (“Looking back, weren’t we a little rough on him?”).

Over at Yuk Yuk’s on February 23, I missed Chris Griffin’s opening set, but headliner Steve Rannazzisi’s act was strong. He’s a self-assured New Yorker—confident but never cocky—whose wife-and-kids material was for everyone, not just fellow parents. Too often when a comic veers into family material, dread overtakes me, but not with Rannazzisi. He also talked about his father’s latelife obsession with online porn without getting gross.

For three late nights, Andy Kindler’s Alternative Show hosted drop-ins from the festival. Highlights over the run of nights were Liza Treyger, such an open book and so naturally funny, Rory Scovel surprising Todd Glass with some positive heckling, Scovel’s own “contractually obligated” appearance, Victoria-based Chelsea Lou’s stories of teaching and coming into her own in her 30s, the Jewish Sophie Buddle talking about stumbling into being a Christian camp counsellor, Simon King’s speed-round impressions, and Natasha Leggero’s Marie Antoinette shtick as an oblivious rich snob and uninvolved mother.

I also managed to get to the Just For Laughs Film Festival portion to see Roy Tighe’s riveting new documentary Never Be Done: The Richard Glen Lett Story at the Vancity Theatre on February 20. Filmed over a nine-year period, the movie shows Lett at his worst, best, and most cringe-inducingly funny. Hopefully, it will be streaming somewhere soon, just like the various standup specials by many of the names listed above.

And for those above who don’t have online specials yet, it’s just a matter of time. In the meantime, look for them at a club near you. It’s the best way to see them anyway. g

New PuSh head helmed Toronto theatre hub

by Janet Smith

WHEN JUSTICE AND MORALS COLLIDE, WHERE IS THE LINE?

A FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE ALLEY THEATRE PRODUCTION

GOOD BRIDE

THE

ARTS

BY ROSEMARY ROWE

The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni takes over the PuSh festival starting in June.

“Overflowing with humour, humanity, insights and empathy ... should not be missed.”

PROVOCATIVE DRAMA

– Calgary Sun

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GROSS MISCONDUCT

By Meghan Gardiner

Mar. 14–23, 2019 ੏ Studio B Tickets only $29!

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VETTA CHAMBER MUSIC 2018 - 19 33rd Season

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Joan Blackman Artistic Director

HORN OF PLENTY JANE COOP piano JOAN BLACKMAN OTO CARRILLO horn

A Feminist Literary Festival // March 8 - 17 // Vancouver 100+ Authors • 41 Panels/Readings • 14 Workshops • Events Include:

violin

Eden Robinson

Whitney French

Hana Shafi

Indigenous Brilliance Black Voices Raised Cut to the Feeling: A Night March 9, 11:00am - 8:30pm March 10, 7:30pm - 9:30pm of Queerotica @ Red Gate Revue Stage @ Red Gate Revue Stage March 11, 7:30pm - 9:30pm (split into four readings) @ Red Gate Revue Stage

HARBISON

Twilight Music for Violin, Horn and Piano

BEETHOVEN

Violin Sonata in A major, Opus 12, No.2

BRAHMS

Horn Trio in E flat major, Opus 40 Serena Lukas Bhandar

THU MAR 7 at 2pm

Valeen Jules

Elizabeth Renzetti

Dream Me a Dream: So You Think You Can The Might of the Pen: Literary Futurisms Slam?

Writing as a Political Act March 13, 7:30pm - 9:30pm March 13, 7:30pm - 9:30pm March 16, 1:30pm - 3:30pm @ Annex Theatre @ Red Gate Revue Stage @ Native Education College

West Point Grey United Church

FRI MAR 8 at 7:30pm

West Point Grey United Church

eventbrite.ca

Events are pay-what-you-can unless otherwise specified. To see the full line-up and schedule, and to register for events, visit festival.roommagazine.com. Walk-ups are welcome.

Registration guarantees you a seat but is not necessary to attend events, except workshops.

Thu $20 / Fri $25 / Student $10

vettamusic.com MARTHA LOU HENLEY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION season media sponsor

JANE COOP

T

he PuSh International Performing Arts Festival has named Toronto-based Franco Boni as its new artistic and executive director.

Since 2003, Boni has been artistic director of the Theatre Centre in Toronto, helping turn the historic Carnegie Library at 1115 Queen Street West into a live arts hub. The centre has worked on several shows that came to PuSh, including premiering 2014’s Sea Sick and 2019’s This Is the Point.

Meeting with the Straight at PuSh’s downtown headquarters in the Post at 750, Boni said the PuSh fest has been a favourite destination for him. “I’ve been coming for quite a long time, and for me, what I love and what I continue to admire is what Norman [Armour] has created—placing local work in an international context,” he said. “That’s taken Vancouver companies to a level where they’re being presented internationally, and that’s really good. It’s built conversations we as artists need to be having.”

Former PuSh artistic director Norman Armour (who cofounded the interdisciplinary event with Katrina Dunn in 2003) left the fest last year to become a consultant for the Australia Council for the Arts. PuSh has since been guided by interim executive director Roxanne Duncan (who also worked at the Theatre Centre, and is leaving PuSh in March) and interim artistic director Joyce Rosario.

“I’m mostly going to be doing a lot of question-asking,” said Boni of starting his role formally in June.

“I want to talk to people in the city: what are the concerns and questions that are running through the city?

And then I want to try to respond to them through art, but also through programs and projects that will allow them to engage.”

He’s keen to encourage more community engagement, but also to look at ways of expanding the fest: “Push is already established as an extremely important stop for artists—and it would be great to give it enough support of infrastructure and funding to grow it.”

At the Theatre Centre, Boni led a $6-million fundraising capital campaign that saw the total redevelopment of the heritage space. “That took us 10 years because we didn’t have any money,” he says. “I didn’t know the impact it would have.

I couldn’t have even imagined. It’s really transformed the city and the community.”

Among its many facets was the integration of a café that opens at 8 a.m. and runs until well after shows are done at the venue. “That consistency of us being open allows the audience to engage with us in a different way,” he explains. The centre also provides a home for other arts organizations such as Why Not Theatre, and has started outreach to surrounding condo residents.

Elsewhere in his long arts career in Toronto, Boni served as festival director of the Rhubarb Festival from 1998 to 2000 and as artistic producer of the SummerWorks Festival from 1999 to 2004. g

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 25

ARTS

GOLDRAUSCH

Revisor lives up to electric expectations

by Janet Smith

DANCE REVISOR

Created by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young. A Kidd Pivot production, presented by DanceHouse. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Wednesday, February 20. No remaining performances

by Guillermo Calderón Directed by MFA Directing Candidate Jenny Larson

March 14—30, 7:30pm Frederic Wood Theatre Tickets: theatrefilm.ubc.ca

GLOBAL DANCE CONNECTIONS SERIES

SIMON MAYER (Austria)

SONS OF SISSY April 4-6

DAVIDA MONK (Canada)

ASHES FOR BEAUTY Credit: Simon Mayer/Arne Hauge

May 23-25

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d AT ITS WORLD premiere in Vancouver, Kidd Pivot’s Revisor had enough electricity to blow out the substation at nearby Cathedral Square.

It helped that Crystal Pite and cocreator Jonathon Young had drawn a hugely supportive hometown crowd. Adding to the excitement was a small army of presenters, in town for the first Vancouver International Dance Showcase.

With all the attention came high expectations. Revisor is the first big, full-length follow-up to the hit Betroffenheit, created by Pite and theatre artist Young. Were those expectations met? Yes—and better yet, the hyperstylized creation was uncompromising in challenging those expectations, earning a loud, extended standing O. First, to be clear, Revisor is not Betroffenheit—nor could it ever be, the latter being such a personal exploration of trauma and grief. But the new work continues Young and Pite’s play with language, and takes it to wildly complex new levels.

The show opens with a sort of warped pantomime of Nikolai Gogol’s classic 1836 satire The Inspector General (also known as The Government Inspector). Actors read Young’s adapted script over the sound system, while the dancers mouth the words and turn the physical language of farce into grotesquely exaggerated movement that falls somewhere close to Jim Carrey channelling Looney Tunes and Tim Burton–brand stop-motion. A pratfall becomes an extended, three-person tumble across the floor; a postmaster who regrets something he’s just said tries maniacally to stuff his words back down his throat.

The set has all the requisite pieces for a farce—a door, a settee, a desk, a chandelier—but something is off, the action arch and unhinged.

Pite and Young have a ball playing with the archetypes of the form: the title character is a woman with a mustache, the mayor’s redheaded wife is a crazed cartoon of a ’30s-film sexpot.

The plot is basically about a lowlevel clerk (in this case, one whose job it is to revise legal texts) whom town officials mistake for a highranking inspector general. Soon the entire community is wining, dining, and bribing him with wads of cash.

But the plot becomes less and less important, as Pite and Young start warping what we’re watching, looping and repeating key words and moments to create something else entirely. The dancers switch their historical

In Kidd Pivot’s Revisor, dancers enact a warped pantomime of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, then abstract it into something else. Photo by Michael Slobodian

costumes for contemporary street clothes; flashes of light fork and melt across the back screen; a strobe catches dancer David Raymond under a bed, stuck in some kind of glitching limbo.

By stretching time, bending it, and abstracting the story, Pite and Young take us into a kind of alternate dimension—one so feverishly removed from reality, in fact, that not all the creatures are even human anymore.

So what on earth does it all mean?

First and foremost, Pite and Young are taking the idea of revision to the nth degree. Much of Pite’s early work was about the role of the artist as creator, destroyer, and even detail-oriented revisor, and it’s hard not to read the same ideas into what goes on here. Repeatedly in the abstract second half of Revisor, a narrator obsessively stops and changes her directions for what the figures onstage are enacting. Sometimes performer Matthew Peacock adjusts the dancers’ heads and positions, puppetlike.

But there are deeper existential questions posed by the looping script, as well—lines like “I am within this even as I contain this” recur with relentless rhythmic force. And the themes of corruption and deception ring true in the era of fake news.

It’s all driven by a soundscape of text and haunting music that’s a marvel as complex as it comes, by Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani, and Meg Roe. For all the heavy intellect on display here, Revisor can be enjoyed purely on a visual and aural level. You can submit yourself to Jay Gower Taylor’s atmospheric sets, to the performers’ hallucinatory physical comedy, and to the hypnotic effect of Pite’s torso-swirling, flickering movement.

It’s a strange, fascinating trip no matter how you approach it.

YING YUN

A Wen Wei Dance production. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Tuesday, February 19. No remaining performances

d WEN WEI WANG HAS always had a keen eye for dancers, and with his gorgeous new work Ying Yun, he’s recruited a stunning quintet of

young female talent.

Stéphanie Cyr, Sarah Formosa, Eden Solomon, Eowynn Enquist, and Daria Mikhaylyuk are able to handle his demanding mixture of strength and grace. In this meditative ode to women and his own mother, Wang shifts between beautiful, deep back arches and warriorlike squats, and punctuates balletic turns with high, powerful kicks.

The soundtrack, by Sammy Chien with Wang and the dancers, helps cast the spell, mixing everything from women’s whispers to crashing waves, and ticking clocks to haunting electroacoustic strains. There’s a spellbinding moment when Chinese singing echoes with piano and the sound of children playing in the street. So much of this sequence and other parts of Ying Yun feel like abstracted memories, fading in and out—fragments from Wang’s childhood in Xi’an.

The work begins subtly, the dancers moving in unison, bathed in pure white and breathing together in the quiet, evoking the rhythmic release of qi gong. The women seem aligned in some strange ritual, tapping a collective energy. The movement builds, and so does the soundscape, climaxing in a stylized lunar eclipse projected on the back screen.

Through it all, the women come across as quietly forceful, but somewhat mysterious and unknowable creatures.

Wang crafts striking phrases, full of flickering surprise. At times, you feel like you’re in a strange new dimension, where arms bend at odd angles, bodies lean and turn perilously off-axis, and heads glitch back and forth.

By the end, with Ying Yun taking on red light and a hospital-monitorlike red bar working its way up the back screen, it adopts a more unsettling tone. Wang seems to be confronting death—his mother died from ovarian cancer four years ago.

Striking a hypnotic tone, Ying Yun has an appeal that goes beyond the fact that it is just beautiful to watch. It is that nothing is ever literal—memories, imagery, and movement meld into an abstract vision that exists in a place beyond words. And, fortunately, Wang has the talent on hand to take us there. g

THE

ORCHARD

taxes included

(AFTER CHEKHOV)

By Raes Calvert and Sean Harris Oliver

Starts Mar 7! stanley industrial alliance stage

In partnership with Citadel Theatre and Hardline Productions

COMMUNITY PARTNER | 2018–19 SEASON

26 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

By Sarena Parmar

Starts Mar 21!

granville island stage

goldcorp stage at the bmo theatre centre

ARTS

Drawing dread out of the dust Polygon Gallery show haunts with images from Hiroshima to desert wars

by Robin Laurence

VISUAL ARTS A HANDFUL OF DUST

At the Polygon Gallery until April 28

d ENTER THE FIRST of three galleries in which A Handful of Dust is mounted and you will hear eerie, atonal music. It’s a snippet of the soundtrack, composed by Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue, to the 1959 Alain Resnais film Hiroshima Mon Amour. Playing on a video monitor mounted halfway along the room’s north wall, a short excerpt from the film depicts the smooth skin of embracing lovers transforming into glittering and hideous matter. Burn-blistered flesh, it seems, sprinkled with radioactive dust.

The soundtrack conditions our initial encounter with this insightful and engaging exhibition, which is predicated on another cultural artifact altogether. That is Man Ray’s 1920 black-and-white photograph of a Marcel Duchamp work in progress, a dust-covered sheet of glass that would become the protoconceptual work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass). First published as a “view from an aeroplaneâ€? in the October 1922 issue of the French avant-garde journal LittĂŠrature and subsequently incorporated into other artists’ designs, it was, decades later, titled Dust Breeding and signed by both Man Ray and Duchamp. In his introductory panel, independent curator David Campany writes that the exhibition is about that photograph’s “life and afterlifeâ€?. “It is a document,â€? he continues. “It is an artwork. It is a document of

HAVE YOU BEEN TO...

Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts picachef.com

An image from Depression-era Kansas captures the effects of a dust storm.

an artwork. It is realist and abstract.

It is a still life and a landscape, a forensic image and a performance.� It has “haunted� contemporary culture and is linked, in this show, to a raft of possible narratives. Writer, artist, and lecturer as well as curator, the London, England–based Campany has pulled together a diverse array of photographs from the past hundred years. Old and new, famous and anonymous, moving and still, they spin lines of connection with the Man Ray–Duchamp photo and pose the idea of dust as a defining subject of the modern age. At the same time, they alert us to the ways photographic histories may be constructed.

Artists here include BrassaĂŻ, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Bruce Nauman, Sophie Ristelhueber, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington. Ostensible subjects range from desert wars to the dust-covered

car in which Benito Mussolini took his last ride, and from peeling paint, rock surfaces, and Depression-era dust storms to the 2007 implosion of a Kodak film factory.

Campany weaves a number of fascinating connections out of his “speculative history�. Still, the pervasive tone of the show, he said at the opening-night reception, is one of “dread�. Certainly, there is the recurring suggestion here of death and destruction, and beneath many of the images persists the funereal intonation “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust�. Photos of the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Resnais film clip, images by Shomei Tomatsu of objects found at the Nagasaki blast site, all speak of people and buildings blasted to dust. Reverberations of this theme are felt in Jeff Mermelstein’s photo of papers and debris surrounding a statue of a seated businessman following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Giorgio Sommer’s 1873 Plaster Cast of a Victim of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius seems to foretell later images of war and terrorism, even though that disaster was not of human making.

Another soundtrack underscores our reading of the works in the second and third galleries: that of Kirk Palmer’s video installation Murmur. His long, silvery, horizonless shots of a Hiroshima-haunted Japanese landscape are backgrounded by the sounds of birdcalls and a gradually building windstorm.

Pliant, supple, almost human, bamboo trees are whipped into intense animation by the roaring wind and then, suddenly, there’s silence.

Deathly silence. g

Rogues West actors studio

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Bharata natyam by

Kiruthika Rathanaswami

Amer Scene Work

Revol. of Character

Audition Amer Dialect Voice & Text Audit for Free!

Choreography:

Evolving Type to enter text the Artist

NOSFERATU

Rogues West

www.rogueswest.ca rogueswest@gmail.com

Jai Govinda & Bragha Bessell Visual Design:

Sridar Elumalai

Roundhouse Community Centre

Thursday, March 7, 2019 Friday, March 8, 2019 7:30pm

By

MARIE CLEMENTS Director

SHERRY J. YOON WORLD PREMIERE

MAY 28–31, 2019 WATERFRONT THEATRE childrensfestival.ca/peggy Tickets go on sale - March 7th PRODUCED BY

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

SUPPORTED BY

www.kiruthika.net | www.manadalarts.ca | www.roundhouse.ca

tickets available at: www.sridar.com/kiruthika Students / Seniors $15 Adults $18

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 27

2019

GUEST SPEAKERS

ARTS LISTINGS ONGOING

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28

CHILDREN OF GOD Musical about the children of an Oji-Cree family who are sent to a residential school in northern Ontario. To Mar 10, 8 pm, York Theatre. Tix $10-51.

THE 39 STEPS A cheeky Hitchcock parody.

Feb 28–Mar 10, Norman Rothstein Theatre.

From $29.

THE SHOPLIFTERS The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Morris Panych’s play about a career shoplifter whose life of petty crime is halted by an overzealous security guard and his affable mentor. To Mar 9, Granville Island Stage. Tix from $29.

MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT UBC aIN A DIFFERENT LIGHT: REFLECTING ON NORTHWEST COAST ART to spring 2019 aMARKING THE INFINITE: CONTEMPORARY WOMEN ARTISTS FROM ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA to Mar 31 aSHAKEUP: PRESERVING WHAT WE VALUE to Sep 1

MUSEUM OF VANCOUVER aWILD THINGS: THE POWER OF NATURE IN OUR LIVES to Sep 30 aHAIDA NOW: A VISUAL FEAST OF INNOVATION AND TRADITION to Dec 1, 2019

TERMS AND CONDITIONS: ART AND ENGAGEMENT IN PUBLIC Justin Langlois will present a range of approaches to making art with, though, and in the public. He will propose new ways in which artists can create public encounters through working with a range of communities. This talk will be preceded by a short performance

by Khac Chi Bamboo Music.

FREE. RESERVE SEATS AT

RICHMOND.CA/LULUSERIES

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY aA CURATOR’S VIEW: IAN THOM SELECTS to Mar 17 aTHE METAMORPHOSIS to Mar 7 aFRENCH MODERNS: MONET TO MATISSE, 1850–1950 to May 20 aAFFINITIES: CANADIAN ARTISTS AND FRANCE Mar 1–May 20

THE POLYGON aKEVIN SCHMIDT: RECKLESS to Mar 10 a10,000 SHIPS to Mar 17 aA HANDFUL OF DUST to Apr 28

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27 THE GOOD BRIDE Rosemary Rowe’s onewoman comedy about Christian faith and feminism. Feb 27–Mar 9, Firehall Arts Centre.

From $17.

LE SOULIER Théâtre la Seizième presents David Paquet’s dark comedy. Feb 27–Mar 9, Studio 16. From $26.

MEET THE AUTHOR: TRAVIS LUPICK Meet Vancouver journalist and author Travis Lupick and discuss his book Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle With Addiction. Feb 28, 7-10 pm, Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art. $22.

Arts

HOT TICKET

BRYAN O’GORMAN Comedian performs three nights of standup. Feb 28–Mar 2, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club. $10/20.

FRIDAY, MARCH 1 METAMORPHOSIS Puppetry for grownups. Mar 1-2, Presentation House Theatre. $28/$23/$15.

WHITE NOISE A curious comedy by Taran Kootenhayoo. When the Mannings notice that new neighbours moved in next to their Point Grey home, they invite them over.

Drama and comedy ensue as a Denesuline & Nakoda Sioux family try to find common ground with the Mannings. Tensions rise as internalized racism surfaces. Mar 1, 1-2:30 pm, Anvil Centre. Free.

OPEN REHEARSAL: OLIVIA C. DAVIES Dancer Olivia C. Davies shares excerpts from her upcoming new work Gidaashi. Mar 1, 3-3:30 pm, Scotiabank Dance Centre. Free.

CHOR LEONI POPCAPELLA Hits by Joni Mitchell, Sting, David Bowie, and Billy Joel performed a cappella. Mar 1-3, 8-9:30 pm; Mar 2, 4 pm, Vancouver Playhouse. Adults $45/30/10.

SATURDAY, MARCH 2 THE COMIC STRIP Standup comedy by Efthimios Nasiopoulos, Gavin Clarkson, and

THE 39 STEPS (March 1 to 10 at the Norman Rothstein Theatre) New Vancouver theatre company Circle Bright Productions has a lot going on in its stylish parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller.

For one thing, four actors play over 100 comical characters. For another, the troupe will provide Mandarin surtitles for the quickwitted dialogue. Sarah Rodgers directs the play, which won a 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy and a 2008 Tony nomination for best play.

CHOR LEONI POPCAPELLA

(March 1, 2, and 3 at the Vancouver Playhouse) Vocal acrobatics have never been this much fun: the Vancouver men’s choir has a ball applying its members’ virtuoso a cappella to the likes of Irving Berlin, Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, and more. Jazz artist Jodi Proznick and her band provide backup.

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO (March 2 at the

Chan Centre for the Performing Arts) The South African a cappella ensemble from Paul Simon’s Graceland returns to town with Malian stars Bassekou Kouyate and Habib Koité for a concert that should warm up any remnants of winter weather we’re having.

ELEPHANT AND PIGGIE’S “WE ARE IN A PLAY!”

(March 2 to 31 at the Waterfront Theatre) If you have a toddler in your life, chances are you have seen Mo Willems’s adorable Elephant & Piggie books. Now Carousel Theatre is bringing the stories’ simple yet inspired adventures to the stage, complete with music by Deborah Wicks La Puma. The show is recommended for kids three to eight years old. g headliner Aaron Charles Read. Mar 2, 9 pm, Tyrant Studios. $18.

MONDAY, MARCH 4

TURN IT UP AND DISRUPT. a festival celebrating gender equity + creative mobilization + the art of positive change + Trans Scripts and Dissolve theatre + Virago Nation all-Indigenous burlesque + panels and workshops + booths, crafts and much much more!

MARCH 9, 2019 AT UBC

$10-25 all-access pass: arts.ubc.ca/turnitup 28 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019

VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL Highlights of the monthlong festival include Japan’s Dairakudakan and Taiwan’s Tjimur Dance Theatre. Mar 4-30, various Vancouver venues.

TUESDAY, MARCH 5 EMERSON QUARTET The consistently exciting quartet is with us for the 31st time. A burnished program of mature works of Mozart (K 464, one of the Haydn quartets), a late Bartok No. 5, and one of Beethoven’s “Rasumovsky” quartets, Opus 59 No.1. Mar 5, 8 pm, Vancouver Playhouse. $60/55.

SATURDAY, MARCH 9 VIVALDI CHAMBER CHOIR: WATERCOLOURS—FROM SKY TO SEA IN SONG The music of Canadian composers & arrangers, including the premier of the beautiful Vancouver Lullaby, composed

by Nicholas Kelly, with artistic direction

by Edette Gagne. Doors and silent auction at 7 pm. Tix at watercolourshelens. brownpapertickets.com and at the door.

Mar 9, 7:30 pm, St. Helen’s Anglican Church. $25/20.

SUNDAY, MARCH 10 6TH ANNUAL CHOCOLATE AND BEER TASTING Annual fundraiser to benefit Parkinson Society British Columbia promising a unique approach to enjoying chocolate and beer! Six Moody Ales beers paired with six local handcrafted chocolates from Take A Fancy Chocolate specifically designed for the pairings. Meet BJCP master beer judge Julian Zelazny and chocolate maker Becks D’Angelo. Mar 10, 4 pm, Moody Ale. $50/60.

ARTS LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit events online using the event-submission form at straight.com/AddEvent. Events that don’t make it into the paper due to space constraints will appear on the website.

movies

Warriors of the Women in Film festival

I

by Adrian Mack

n 1975, a BBC reporter visited South Dakota’s We Will Remember Survival School, created by the American Indian Movement (AIM) to reacquaint Indigenous youths with a culture that was erased in the state education system.

Interviewing founder Madonna Thunder Hawk about the Survival School curriculum of “natural resources, legal rights, and spirituality”, the skeptical Brit journalist protested: “But aren’t you making these children more Indian? Aren’t you making them less able to fit in?”

With a withering glance, Thunder Hawk snapped back: “Yeah, you bet!”

Coming about six minutes into Warrior Women, this tattered old film clip offers an uproarious introduction to a figure who is little known yet central to the rousing account of Indigenous radicalism that follows.

“Every once in a while, you get to see what I like to call the ‘face-melting Madonna’,” says codirector Elizabeth A. Castle, calling the Georgia Straight from Ohio. “It just reminds you that, you know, she has a presence.”

That presence will certainly linger with anyone who catches Warrior Women when it opens the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival at the Vancity Theatre on Tuesday (March 5)—even if the Lakota activist was, initially, a somewhat reluctant participant in the project. “She has little tolerance for agenda seekers or career builders when so much is on the line,” Castle says. “There’s a reason we don’t call it Thunder Hawk.”

Marcella Gilbert and Madonna Thunder Hawk stand their ground in Warrior Women.

Still, her utility to the filmmaker is obvious. As Castle says: “Someone once called her the Forrest Gump of Red Power. You name it, she was there.”

Directed with Christina D. King, Warrior Women marries archival footage with contemporary interviews to explore the role of women in some of Red Power’s most historic actions, from AIM’s 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island to the Women of All Red Nations’ successful expulsion of uranium-mining operations from the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1980.

As noted on-camera, it was “the first cowboys-and-Indians alliance in the history of South Dakota”—a particularly poignant statement given the tales we hear of gang rape at the hands of white ranchers decades earlier in the same state and the vigilante ambush a young Thunder Hawk organized to

decisively end an epidemic of sexual violence that the police ignored.

Even amid these tales of abuse, government attack, and cultural genocide, Warrior Women imparts an irresistible sense of joy. Thunder Hawk’s endeavours consumed her entire adult life—the film catches her still swinging away at Standing Rock in 2016—and it impacted her relationship with daughter, Marcy. But the film finds Thunder Hawk and her relatives cracking up over their frequently dangerous exploits.

“Of course, these women have very serious trauma that they carry with them,” Castle says. “But they think of that period in their lives as the most shimmering, empowered period, where they thought anything was possible. It’s scary, but what human being doesn’t want to have a purpose?

And one that’s super in-your-face?”

There is, in fact, a lot of subtext that Warrior Women necessarily elides, partly to maintain the film’s focus.

In her other life, Castle is a historian whose initial student work, under the supervision of political activist Angela Davis, was a comparative study of women inside the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.

(A subject that was met with “laughter” when she took it to Cambridge.

“They said, ‘That’s not history; that’s five angry women in a room.’ ”) If it was depressingly common for the radical groups of the ’60s and ’70s to adopt patriarchal power structures, Castle also allows that “people were actively trying to change both policy

but also social attitudes, and quite often their rhetoric about women and equality was way ahead of their actual daily behaviour.”

In any case, if Warrior Women is designed to redress a lopsided view of history, spiked with what the filmmakers call “the swagger of unapologetic Indianness”, then it can be considered a conclusive success. As we hear from one of the film’s rare male voices: “If you want good words, invite the men. But if you want something done, bring the women.” g The Vancouver International Women in Film Festival runs from Tuesday (March 5) to next Sunday (March 10) at the Vancity Theatre.

Festival TIP SHEET WITH ARTIST TALKS, pitch ses-

sions, and a VR program, the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival has much to offer when it arrives at the Vancity Theatre on March 5. Here are some of the highlights of the sixday fest. More information is at www.womeninfilm.ca/.

SHORTS

PROGRAMS

The shorts program A Fighting Chance builds on the Indigenous themes of opening-night film Warrior Women with titles that include Petie Chalifoux’s “Nisowak” and Tristin Greyeyes’ “Statistics” (March 6).

GENDER AND INCLUSION— SEEKING SOLUTIONS Amanda

Coles is among the guests at a halfday forum focused on the barriers women face in one of the busiest filmmaking cities in the world (March 9).

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

Following the Gender and Inclusion forum, the Directors Guild of Canada looks at the Hollywood gender gap with a free screening of the doc This Changes Everything, featuring Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, and Rosario Dawson. (March 9)

by Adrian Mack

Picasso trumps Pixar in Ruben Brandt REVIEWS

RUBEN BRANDT, COLLECTOR

Featuring the voice of Iván Kamarás. In English and Hungarian, with English subtitles. Rated PG

d COLLECTING ART can be as tempestuously driven as its creation.

Or so asserts this strangely dreamlike, altogether captivating debut feature from Slovenian-born, Budapest-based animator Milorad Krstic.

As one character puts it, “Art is the key to troubles of the mind.” It definitely turns the brain lock of the titular Ruben Brandt, a sleek psychotherapist who confirms the cliché about shrinks being nuttier than their patients. Voiced in English by Iván Kamarás, who played hunky villains in Hungary-shot items like Hellboy II and A Good Day to Die Hard, Brandt has assembled a rogues’ gallery of disturbed people at his Swiss-lake retreat. Oddly, most of their issues have to do with stealing things—something that matters when they learn that Brandt (whose name carries the oil-based whiff of old masters like Rubens and Rembrandt) wants them to purloin 13 of the most famous paintings in the world.

This compulsive collector has decided that owning original icons from the likes of Diego Velázquez, Vincent van Gogh, and Sandro Botticelli will somehow end the violent nightmares and hallucinations that find these paintings’ subjects trying to kill him in novel ways. In an oblique nod to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and with surprising connections to Never Look Away (about German artist Gerhard Richter), it turns out that Brandt’s father was an intelligence agent who used his own son in psychological experiments involving film about art.

VIFF‘18

The old masters collide with the modernists, the avant garde, Alfred Hitchcock, film noir, and a whole lot of other things in the captivating Ruben Brandt, Collector.

This wildly animated venture combines a multitude of drawing styles, although characters mostly reflect Picasso’s African-mask period. Pixar it ain’t. But Hollywood still looms large, with high-speed car chases, cat-burglar sequences, and myriad

Movies

TIP SHEET

c AUDITION Hard to believe Takashi Miike’s J-horror masterpiece is 20 years old. See the restored edition (through your fingers) at the Rio Theatre on Friday (March 1). c SEDER-MASOCHISM A big fave from VIFF 2018, Nina Paley’s wild animated take on Judaism makes a return visit to the Vancity Theatre on Monday (March 4). c THE GENERAL Prior to the opening of the Keaton doc The Great Buster the Cinematheque welcomes back Buster’s greatest, starting Wednesday (March 6).

film-noir references dominating a story that isn’t always easy to follow.

One subplot involves a 1940s-style private eye (Csaba Márton) chasing slippery femme fatale Mimi (Gabriella Hámori) around the great museums of Europe and North America.

Given all the Hitchcockian goings-on here, it’s unfortunate that the mostly Hungarian voice cast, while adequate, fails to pull off the accentless genre-speak that would make this Collector one for the vaults. Perhaps some fresh buzz will help raise money for a new pass at the soundtrack—even if it can never raise Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame from their everlasting graves.

VIFF‘18

Not your ordinary run of the mill animated movie, this Hungarian caper is a delirious, crazy riff on art and art history. At its centre is Ruben, a psychotherapist tormented by hallucinations relating to some of the most famous paintings in art history. Bent on collecting these paintings, Ruben turns to some of his criminally-savvy patients to help... Inspired, inventive and jam-packed with action, Milrad Krstić’s movie is a surere crowd-pleaser.

“Fizzes with originality.” Screen International VIFF‘18

by Ken Eisner

GRETA

Starring Isabelle Huppert. Rated 14A

d CHLOË GRACE MORETZ plays Frances, a listless New Yorker fresh from Boston and living in a Tribeca loft so big she can ride her bicycle through it. The place belongs to sassy Erica (Maika Monroe), her rich bud

VIFF‘18

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MOVIES from previous page

from Smith College. The latter appears to have majored in yoga, but there’s no mention of our protagonist’s specialty. It wasn’t cinema, because if she had seen Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, she’d have known to stay away from Isabelle Huppert— especially when classical music and broken glass are involved.

Huppert has been playing pretty twisted characters of late, as in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Haneke’s Happy End. This wasn’t lost on Irish writer-director Neil Jordan, far from

his premillennial run of Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and The End of the Affair. He and coscripter Ray Wright came up with a seemingly apt vehicle for the eerily ageless French star, as the titular Greta Hideg, a Parisian widow full of grace, charm, and something else.

When Frances finds the older woman’s handbag on a subway from Manhattan, and returns it, she discovers a homey, if somewhat strange, corner of Brooklyn (a nifty effect heightened by shooting some scenes in Ireland, and the urban stuff in

Toronto—thereby necessitating the presence of Colm Feore in a small role). This enigmatic lady is impossibly cultured, and Frances has recently lost her mother. Consequently, she’s deaf to Erica’s warnings and doesn’t run back to the A train when Greta hits the ol’ upright. Liszt’s Liebestraum supplies a morbid motif, and the hint that the stylish Frenchwoman may not be what she seems. (Another hint: Hideg means “cold” in Hungarian.) Seriously, don’t go into her basement!

I wouldn’t give too much away, but the filmmakers and the trailer

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Burgoo

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Starring Sofia Boutella. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

MAR 3

VIMFF.ORG O G

RIO THEATRE

CLIMAX

d BOY, EVERYTHING’S coming up Suspiria these days. First, we get the retina-scorching 4K restoration of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic—with colours so wild it feels like your eyes are on acid—then Luca Guadagnino’s high-test remake, and now this. We can conby Ken Eisner sider Climax a cousin, given that an old VHS copy of Suspiria is conspicuously present in the 1996-set film’s opening scene, along with Andrzej Żuławski’s equally bonkers Possession and a few other culty titles used to curry the approval of writer-director Gaspar Noé’s intended audience.

In another callback to Argento’s film, Climax is about a group of dancers who find their way to hell not because they’ve landed in a nest of witches, but because somebody spiked a bowl of sangria with LSD. But let’s back up a bit: after a pre-credit sequence introducing us to a cast of uniformly detestable characters, all of them signalling the neurotic vulnerabilities the film will subsequently turn against them, Climax explodes into an enthralling five-minute dance sequence, captured in an uninterrupted take that bleeds into a postrehearsal party and the arrival of that fatal bowl of sangria.

Viewed from a distance, what we then see is another 90 minutes of spectacular choreography, or the viscerally physical staging of all the film’s ensuing worst-trip-ever psychodramas, acts of violence, and deaths. Noé’s camera swoops through the studio and around these contorted, self-punishing bodies with equivalent muscularity and delirium, often upside down, locked in a sick pas de deux with a nauseatingly overamped EDM soundtrack. Sound fun? I liked it, but then, as the great Chuck Barris once said, “I like morgues.”

As if it matters, among the ciphers employed here to flesh out Noé’s theatre of cruelty are a pregnant depressive, a soulless lesbian couple, two super horny and totally not gay black guys—and a child, also dosed, whose fate naturally inspires the most from Noé’s evil genius. But it doesn’t matter. Garbled message about the sanctity of life aside, I think (who knows?), this is the Irréversible filmmaker in his native territory, where unmatched technical daring is put to the service of a sensation-addicted 14-year-old boy’s gleefully X-rated imagination.

Two thumbs up (your ass).

PHOTO: BILL HAWLEY

VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL MOUNTAIN FILM FESTIVAL

do that for themselves. In fact, the movie’s biggest problem is that it pulls its switcheroo too soon, revealing Greta’s ill intentions just as the new relationship begins. Jordan gestures toward kinkier, or at least campier, fare. At one point, Greta says she’s caught in a “well of loneliness”, referring to the 1928 novel that set the tone for countless tragic lesbian tales to follow. Alas, an intriguing art-house start yields to tired horror-thriller tropes before psychology even sets in.

THE CINEMATHEQUE FEB 28 JOURNEY TO EVEREST MAR 1 TAO CANYON More shows at Kay Meek Arts Centre, Frederic Wood Theatre and Richmond Olympic Oval.

WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE OF THE PROVINCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

by Adrian Mack

THE IMAGE BOOK

Starring Jean-Luc Godard. In English, French, Italian, Arabic, and German, with English subtitles.

Rating unavailable

d THERE ARE now only two survivors of the nouvelle vague movement of the late 1950s, and at 90, Agnès Varda has seniority. Jean-Luc Godard, two years younger, probably reached his upstart peak with 1960’s Breathless—still a film-school staple and a reference point even for people who’ve never seen it. His disruptive jump cuts and other dissociating tricks became so common, those early films probably don’t look revolutionary anymore, while the more humanistic films of junior partner François Truffaut have continued to attract new fans.

Godard’s “approachable” period ended with his 1968 dalliance with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil.

The Swiss-French director subsequently created an idiosyncratic vocabulary that dropped standard narrative approaches—and bankable stars—in favour of bold-faced sloganeering subverted by playful nose-tweaking. His convoluted polemics have since spoken to a steadily narrowing

see page 32

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 7 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 31

from page 30 > Go on-line to read hundreds of I Saw You posts or to respond to a message < “TROU-DE-LUKE”

s

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

r

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 23, 2019 WHERE: Vancouver Ferry Swartz Bay Bound I think that’s what you said. I regretted not introducing myself, but I also wasn’t sure if you just checked me out because I startled you. You’re tru-de-cute (I’m terrible too).

SATURDAY NIGHT FERRY

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 25, 2019 WHERE: M n B Red hair, beautiful chef, after you and your buddy ordered a couple of sandwiches you said "I understand, I used to be a chef". By the way, today is my birthday. I wish I could give you that chocolate with my phone number. I hope to see you again bonita.

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 23, 2019 WHERE: Victoria Ferry Tsawwassen Bound

BETH & ALEX - YOU WERE GOING TO ROWAN’S PARTY

I bumped into you and shared the most awkward quick chat.

You kept walking by me after with the cutest smile. You had a green jacket and a baseball cap.

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 21, 2019 WHERE: Walking Up a Hill

LOOKING FOR THE MAN IN SEAT 24D ON WESTJET FLIGHT FROM PUERTO VALLARTA FEB. 21ST

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 21, 2019 WHERE: Westjet Flight WS2153 Puerto Vallarta to Vancouver I am the blonde woman that was sitting in front of you on our flight home from Puerto Vallarta to Vancouver. We were both visiting out mothers who winter in Lo De Marcos for you and Guayabitos for me. We had a brief chat, and I was sorry I didn’t see you at the baggage carousel or get a chance to give you my number!

BACK ALLY SLOW COOKER

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 22, 2019 WHERE: See-em-ia Lane West End Bridget. You were donating an unwanted kitchen appliance just out side your door in the West End. We chatted for a minute about housing. You had nice energy and a kind smile. I wanted to ask for your number and see if you wanted to get a coffee some time, but I didn't. Thanks again for the slow cooker.

r

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We chatted briefly on the walk up the hill; you were going to a party, and I jokingly asked to come along. You asked if I was cool or a douche, and I said I was a bit of both. We chatted very briefly and you said I looked familiar - sorry I couldn’t come with - I was dead on my feet from a longass shift. Tell me the nearest SkyTrain, or what I do for work; I’d love to tag along and meet you two properly when it’s not freezing cold outside.

YOU SAVED ME $20

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 23, 2019 WHERE: Dollar Days at You Know Where There was a long, long line at the check-out. When I went to pay, you told me I could use my points for $20. But, you already had me when you asked if I needed any bags and smiled. :^)

BEL CAFE STYLISH FEDORA

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 19, 2019 WHERE: Bel Cafe You: gorgeous suit, coffee with 2 friends/colleagues discussing travelling. No wedding ring.

Me: gray dress, leather jacket, with a coffee and croissant. I should have said great hat when you put on your fedora.

SMILEY CALGARIAN ON BUS 84

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 12, 2019 WHERE: West 2nd I couldn't stop smiling. You said I looked happy (something to that effect, I was so taken that I got flustered and wasn't listening properly). I said I was happy because the buses were running in the snow. I should have said that you were the brightest light in my day. Would be pretty awesome to see you again!

RED HEEL PUMPS

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 20, 2019 WHERE: Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal I first noticed your friend as she exited her Lexus after parking in lane 45 and was struck by how lovely she looked; that was, until you appeared from around the other side... I am smitten! Your look, your red heel pumps and all I could do was smile inside, thank you for making my day.

THE ACORN - SPARKLY SILVER SHIRT

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 16, 2019 WHERE: The Acorn - Main Street You were part of the birthday party gathering Saturday night at the Acorn around closing time.

Latina beauty in a sparkly silver shirt! As I was getting ready to leave I couldn’t take my eyes off you and we locked gazes a few times. Respond with something about me, hope you see this.

ERNEST ICE CREAM AND BUDDHIST MONKS

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: FEBRUARY 18, 2019 WHERE: Ernest Ice Cream on Fraser You were sitting on the bench at Ernest Ice Cream. You were with two male Buddhist monks in orange, and two other women. I sat down next to you and you gave me a hello and a smile that warmed my heart. I think you must know who I am.

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audience, but he certainly never lost interest in the act of viewing.

As suggested by its title, The Image Book is a YouTube-like compendium of moments stolen from movies that have affected him personally while influencing the course of cinema and—he would argue—perceptions of society itself. Snippets of L’Atalante and Vertigo are butted up against Buster Keaton, the apocalyptic noir of Kiss Me Deadly, and Pasolini’s porntastic Salò. Godard, who also narrates, blends in newsreel footage of Algerian War torture and ISIS executions, plus a lengthy excerpt of an Egyptian movie, all held together, sort of, by bits of Bach, Prokofiev, and other unrelated music, as well as purposely nonsynchronized sound.

Ultimately, it’s not exactly clear whether he means to assert the movies’ power to mitigate human cruelty or that they abet it. Further complicating things in this challenging 84 minutes are his seemingly random format changes and manipulation of iconic images toward their harshest, primary-coloured elements—as if he just got new software and just had to push it to the max. Indeed, a long disquisition on hands suggests the primacy (and privacy) of the editing booth over the camera.

By the way, Varda also has a clip show in the works: a narrated retrospective of her long career. She’s been very hands-on as well, and is currently waving, not drowning.

by Ken Eisner

EVERYBODY KNOWS

Starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Rated PG

d IRANIAN DIRECTOR ASGHAR Farhadi is known for making films that look and feel like whodunits, but are in disguise. Instead, they end up investigating family and class relationships more than the mystery itself. The appeal of movies like the Tehran-set A Separation and The Salesman was that he refused to solve the central puzzle

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in the too conventional Everybody Knows.

with a tidy ending, subverting the thriller genre. Until now.

With Everybody Knows, the visionary filmmaker moves the action to an atmospheric old town north of Madrid, Spain. And what strikes you first is the way he creates an intimate sense of space as comfortably as he does in his home country. Just as you got to know every corner of a family’s rented apartment in The Salesman, you will become intimately familiar with the dilapidated belltower, the small, old inn, and the main cobblestone plaza here.

Spaces are hugely important to Farhadi; like secrets, they can separate people and bring them together.

Laura (Penélope Cruz) has come back to her hometown from Argentina with her two children; her younger sister is planning a big, loud wedding in the village square. Staying in her sibling’s cozy hotel, Laura reunites with her colourful extended clan, as well as with a former lover, Paco (her real-life husband, Javier Bardem), who runs a local winery.

Cue endless cheek-kissing.

The night of the wedding starts out blissfully, but after a thunderstorm one of Laura’s children goes missing, setting off a frantic scramble to find her—and pitting friends and family members against each other. As usual in Farhadi’s films, the central trauma exposes all the rifts between people, mostly

to do with wealth and status.

In this territory, Farhadi excels, carefully excavating the characters and their complex pasts: the estate owner who may have paid too little to Laura’s father for the land; the brother labouring to make a living from his hotel business; the family members who resent Laura for escaping to greener pastures in Argentina.

Amid all this, Cruz and Bardem are at their energetic best, the latter portraying a free spirit who, at one point, breaks into dance in a pelting rainstorm.

The director’s helped by José Luis Alcaine’s voluptuous cinematography, which celebrates every cracked plastered wall, every vineentwined gold-brick courtyard. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to get online and book the next flight to Spain.

But as Farhadi heeds the urge to wrap up the plot he’s so intricately laid out, the film turns trite—even soap-opera melodramatic. Cruz spends a lot of time crying, and a retired police officer begins to put together the pieces of the disappearance. Instead of upending conventions, Farhadi succumbs to them. It’s a testament to his skill that Everybody Knows still manages to be absorbing—and would be even more so without a tight resolution.

by Janet Smith

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FOOD

Tayybeh is a celebration of Syrian fare

I

THE 18

Celebrating

2015

50 years!

by Gail Johnson

t’s difficult to comprehend the pain and grief Syrian refugee Kawthar Barho is experiencing after losing all seven of her children in a house fire in their adopted community, Spryfield, a Halifax suburb, on February 19. Her husband, Ebraheim, remains in hospital with extensive burns, the family having fled the embattled nation just 18 months ago.

The Barho children ranged in age from four months to 15 years. The devastating story hit the families of Tayybeh: A Celebration of Syrian Cuisine especially hard. The Vancouver social enterprise employs women who similarly escaped war and violence to build new lives in the safe haven of Canada. These women are now supporting their families by cooking their deeply flavourful traditional foods for Tayybeh’s pop-up dinners, catered events, seasonal food truck, and stands at local markets.

One of the chefs, Inaas, is a mom who lost one of her five children in Syria. Her beloved 14-year-old son was murdered by ISIS for having the same first name as President Bashar al-Assad.

“The news [of the fire] left me completely speechless,” Inaas tells the Georgia Straight. “Having lost my dear son Bashar, I know how heartbreaking it is to live with the pain. These tragic stories are so painful because they are so close to home for us.”

Although the group’s pop-up dinners have been extraordinarily successful, selling out in minutes, Tayybeh launched its catering service a year and a half after starting up due to so much demand and to help establish

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The Vancouver social enterprise Tayybeh employs women who escaped war.

a more secure source of income for the women.

Tayybeh’s catering division now has multiple menus, such as à la carte, office lunches, receptions (cocktails and finger foods), seasonal, and, soon, weddings. Many options are vegan.

In addition to local favourites— like mutabbal, a creamy smoked-eggplant dip; a red-pepper spread called mhammara; and makloubeh, aromatic rice with aubergine, seasoned ground beef, almonds, and parsley— new menu items include lentil soup, olive-and-red-pepper pie, yogurt-cucumber dip, pea-and-meatball stew, vegan okra stew, fasolia bil zeit (vegan

slow-cooked green beans), and a dessert called madlouka, a light angelhair pastry topped with ashta—a type of Arabic cream—and pistachios.

So far, Tayybeh has 99 reviews on Facebook, with a score of 4.9 out of 5.

“Every time our chefs prepare food, they do so as if they are feeding their families,” says Tayybeh founder Nihal Elwan. “The main ingredient is lots of love.” g Filmmaker Eva Bronstein's short documentary "Tayybeh" screens at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival on March 9, preceding Soudade Kaadan's The Day I Lost My Shadow.

Dachi likes to keep its menu fresh

P

by Tammy Kwan

lenty of restaurants serve up local and seasonal fare in Vancouver, but few work with farmers and producers in ways that enable them to print out new menus every other day. Enter Dachi (2297 East Hastings), East Van’s latest neighbourhood hot spot.

The simple yet cozy 40-seat dining establishment, run

by Aburi Restaurant Canada veterans and business partners Miki Ellis and Stephen Whiteside, offers a Pacific Northwest menu that rotates consistently.

“We’re a small restaurant, but all of us are coming from larger-restaurant backgrounds,” Ellis told the Georgia Straight in an interview at the new eatery.

“The ability and freedom to be able to play around with it [the menu] a bit and change it whenever we like keeps it really fun for us.”

It’s exactly what the restaurant co-owners wanted for Dachi (the name is Japanese for “pal”): a short-butsweet list of food and drink offerings that are seasonal and sustainable.

“We buy all of our produce in small quantities. Our shellfish comes at 4:30 p.m. and service starts at 5 p.m.,” Whiteside explained. “Some people ask what the specials are, but the menu shows everything. If we have the item, then we will print it. It all depends on what we have.”

Dachi opened in December 2018 in the 1,200-squarefoot space formerly occupied by Campagnolo Roma. The

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tight-knit team, with the help of some very good friends, included wooden elements, lush greenery, and a do-ityourself upholstered booth banquette in the warm and welcoming interior.

“If you came to each of us a few years back, we’d be on the same page and have the same vision for a restaurant,” Whiteside said. “We’ve always wanted plants and books in the restaurant.”

Its latest menu, created by executive chef Tyson Viteychuk, features three-year-aged cheddar and buttermilk biscuits, roasted-winter-squash stew with cashew butter, country-fried steelhead trout with salted beets, and 24-hour-roasted beef chuck f lat with red miso. Desserts include poached Granny Smith apple with ginger mascarpone, and 72-percent-cocoa chocolate ganache with hazelnut streusel.

Alongside an ever-changing culinary roster, Dachi’s beverage offerings also rotate.

The owners value building relationships with those who frequent their dining spot.

“At the end of the day, we’re both servers at heart, and it’s nice to have that one-to-one conversation with others,” Whiteside added. “Regulars have helped us build this as much as our friends have. I think that really helps us set ourselves apart in creating an atmosphere where people feel like they’re part of it.” g

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DRINK Tasting room offers a world of wines

T

by Kurtis Kolt

Authentic Greek Food

Extensive Wine & Bar List 1830 Fir St. Vancouver | 604.736.9559

www.apolloniagreekrestaurant.com C L O S E D M O N D AY S L U N C H â&#x20AC;˘ W E D N E S D AY to F R I D AY 11:30A M Íł 2:30 P M D I N N E R â&#x20AC;˘ T U E S D AY to S U N D AY 4:30 Íł 9:30 P M

he 41st annual Vancouver International Wine Festival is in full swing this week.

Local and visiting wine enthusiasts are primed to sip the juice from 160 international wineries during Thursday, Friday, and Saturday sessions in the festival tasting room at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a daunting room, and it is virtually impossible to taste all 700-plus wines being poured. The best thing to do is have a plan before hitting the floor. A plan should always include eating a hearty meal beforehand, not wearing cologne, perfume, or any strong scents, and perhaps practising your spitting technique with water over the bathroom sink. The big part of the plan, however, should always be your sipping strategy. Do visit the festivalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website (vanwinefest.ca/) and make a list of the wineries you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to miss.

No time for that? Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an abridged version of my list; at one point or another, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be hitting up these personal favourites.

BENZIGER FAMILY WINERY

(California) Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll start with California, since itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theme region. Family proprietor Chris Benziger will be on hand, pouring his wineryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biodynamically farmed, site-specific Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Sauvignons from Sonoma. The sheep, cattle, birds, and gardens on the family ranch provide a diverse ecosystem, ensuring healthy vineyards and the foundation for brilliant wine.

GRGICH HILLS ESTATE

types enjoy some of the best surf on the planet. Swirl and sniff those stunning Chardonnays and revel in that fresh, salty sea air. Meanwhile, halfway across the country, Yalumbaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Barossa Valley home is a hub for incredible Grenache wines that give quality Pinot Noir a run for its money.

BENCH 1775 (British Columbia)

The Vancouver Wine Festival has tons of selections at the convention centre.

practices coupled with natural-yeast fermentation make for single-vineyard wines that are the real deal, with no additives in the process. There are 60 additives permitted in making American wine (Does â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mega Purpleâ&#x20AC;? sound like something you want to consume?); Ridge keeps things nice and clear by listing ingredients on their back labels.

Oh, sure, this Naramata winery makes some lovely aromatic whites and a particularly kick-ass Cabernet Sauvignonâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Syrah blend, but it is face time with legendary Okanagan winemaker and viticulturist Valeria Tait that will be the highlight of this stop.

LIGHTFOOT & WOLFVILLE VINEYARDS

(Nova Scotia) The Chardonnays coming out of this East Coast winery are some of the best in the country, full stop.

MINUTY

(France) An excellent opportunity to chat with François Matton and splash ROBERT MONDAVI WINERY into some of his fresh Provençal (California) rosĂŠ. Springâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just around the corThis pioneering wineryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resident ner, right?

Master of Wine, Mark de Vere, will be pouring some of their best stuff. MARCHESI DI BAROLO Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a charismatic storyteller who (Italy) has an encyclopedic knowledge of Sixth-generation family proprietor the Napa Valley and its coveted Valentina Abbona is one of the To Kalon Vineyard, which has nicest people in the biz. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a some of the most premium fruit on great ambassador for this lauded Barolo property, and for the entire the continent. region as well. Her enthusiasm for FAMILIA ZUCCARDI her familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wines is contagious, (Argentina) and it wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take more than a sip or The Zuccardi familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wines will two to see why. make many rethink the assumption that all Argentine Malbecs are fruit ASTROLABE bombs without any sense of place. (New Zealand) Precision planting and farming on Winemaker and proprietor Simon their side of the Andes sees various Waghornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wines are fresh as can be. vineyard blocks with unique soil Sure, the Sauvignon Blanc is delitypes harvested and vinified separ- cious, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ignore his Chardonately in order to ensure the best ex- nays, Pinot Gris, and anything else pression of the land. The wines are he has on the table. precise and quite charming.

(California) The Judgment of Paris was a historic 1976 blind tasting of California and French wines where California shocked the world by taking top honours. The winning white was 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, made by Mike Grgich, who went on to found Grgich Hills Estate the following year. It probably goes without saying that the bar for quality is set high. Their Napa Valley FumĂŠ Blanc is the stuff of legend, floral and citrusy, framed by pitchVASSE FELIX AND YALUMBA perfect French oak.

(Australia) RIDGE VINEYARDS This one-two punch of excellent (California) Aussie wineries will be at the same The team at Ridge refer to their wine- table, so make sure a proper amount making as â&#x20AC;&#x153;pre-industrialâ&#x20AC;?, which of time is allotted here. Vasse Felix is means they are authentic wines of situated in Margaret River on Ausplace made with minimal intervention traliaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s west coast, where eucalyptus in the winery. Sustainable farming trees grow in abundance and sporty

AQUILINI RED MOUNTAIN

(Washington state) Yes, Vancouverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own Aquilini family has a Washington-state wine project, and its Red Mountain appellation is one of the most soughtafter in the state. The wines are quite bold yet sophisticated, limited in production, and destined to become modern classics. g

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music

Parcels aims for a timeless sound

by Mike Usinger

C

ulture shock isn’t something entirely new to the five Aussie expats who make up Parcels, but that’s not stopping keyboardist Louie Swain from feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment.

Reached in frigid Montreal, where the quintet’s playing the 600-capacity Fairmount Theatre, the Byron Bay–raised musician says he’s okay with the subzero weather. Living in Berlin for the past few years has prepared Swain and his bandmates— Patrick Hetherington, Noah Hill, Anatole “Toto” Serret, and Jules Crommelin—for the kind of winters Australians are lucky enough to avoid at home.

The German city also taught Parcels the value of patience, and not just with overcoming language barriers.

“We spent two years just practising in Berlin before we played any serious shows,” Swain says, speaking on his cell. “That was really because we didn’t know how, or what to do, to get shows.”

What’s taking some adjusting to at the moment is the fact Parcels hasn’t quite become a major draw on this side of the Atlantic—as opposed to Europe, where it now pops up at high-wattage festivals like Glastonbury.

“We’re about five shows into this tour and it’s started off pretty rocky,” Swain admits candidly. “It’s all felt really overwhelming being in America. For one, we’re sort of playing smaller venues than we’re used to in Europe, which kind of feels like we’re stepping backward a year, in a weird way. It’s not that it’s bad—it’s just more that we have to readjust our mindsets a bit.”

Those who love being able to say “I saw them when” can thank the electro-analogue, disco-prog, futuristic–MOR gods that Parcels is currently playing small club shows in North America. But look for that to change in the coming 12 months, as the band plans to tour relentlessly in

The five members of the Berlin-based band Parcels challenged themselves by moving to Germany after playing only a handful of shows in their native Australia.

support of its wildly accomplished eponymous debut full-length, released last October.

Pulling off the impressive trick of sounding both forward-looking and obsessed with the past, the album casts Parcels as a band as enamoured with Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, and Chic as it is with Justice’s daring Audio, Video, Disco. With its metronome-steady percussion, wavering flutes, and sumptuously analogue synths, “Tape” plants one foot in magic-years FM radio and the other in the Korova Milk Bar. The cokehazed “Iknowhowifeel”, meanwhile, sounds like 2040 funk as we imagine it might have sounded in 1978.

The reference points run deep on Parcels. Consider the eight-minutelong “Everyroad”, which is built around spoken-word ruminations on the quest for mental peace and settings that convey a physical tranquillity. Starting out like a mellowgold self-help meditation, the track slowly builds to something more menacing, with 3 a.m.–nightmare synth waves eventually giving way to gorgeously regal strings. Swain is happy to explain the inspiration.

“I love interviewing people, so I walked around Berlin talking to people who’d been in the city for a long time,” he says. “We had themes we wanted to explore in the song, so

I’d give them palm cards to read and answer. That’s something that we read Pink Floyd did for Dark Side of the Moon.”

Parcels is more than mentally equipped for the challenges of cracking North America. After years playing everything from modern folk to speed-jacked metal in different groups, Swain and his bandmates came together with a blueprint.

“When we started Parcels, we wanted to cherry-pick the best bits of the projects that we’d been in previously and then combine it into one thing,” Swain says. “Like, one of the things we’d done was a folk band where we sang a lot of harmonies, so we took that and brought it to Parcels. But we didn’t really have fun live shows with the folk band. Because we love to see people dance, we started Parcels with the idea of having a really high-energy live show.”

Taking their name from an old post-office sign found in Swain’s home, the quintet released a debut 2015 EP called Clockscared, played a handful of Australian shows, and then decided they’d challenge themselves by moving to Berlin.

That geographic decision was made partly because England and France were too expensive, and partly because—judging by a Whitest Boy Alive video shot in a shop window in the neighbourhood of Mitte—they thought Berlin looked Euro-cooler than David Bowie in ’77.

Swain spoke no German, but he knew how to clean an apartment, something he did as a job as he and his bandmates got settled. Being strangers in a strange land gave the chance to focus on making music with almost no outside distractions.

Early live shows in London and Paris led to the group being discovered by the members of Daft Punk, who took Parcels into the studio and oversaw the 2017 single “Overnight”.

Parcels absorbed every bit of

advice handed down by the French techno legends, especially on the importance of making a record that can’t be pegged to one particular pop-music decade. That would prove huge when they got to work on the self-produced Parcels.

“Daft Punk told us that their only goal in making music was to make music that could exist in any era,” Swain says. “So, yeah, that’s definitely something that we talked about. Like, to get that warm analogue sound we did all the vocals through an oldschool tape machine. And we’d get a recording sounding great on a deck and then run big chunks of it through the tape machine. We were working in a beautiful studio with all kinds of great gear, and we had an engineer— who we actually owe a lot to—who was a wizard really up for showing us all kinds of crazy trickery.”

One thing he didn’t have to teach the members of Parcels to do was to get along. Normally, having five band members share the producer’s chair during 14-hour hauls in the studio is a recipe for fireworks and misery.

Luckily, Swain says, everyone in Parcels has benefited from their laid-back upbringing in Australia.

Adapting—whether to living in Berlin or to relearning how to play clubs—is easy when you’ve got the right mindset.

“The entire process really taught us even more of a mutual respect for one another,” Swain says. “It’s important to let someone play their ideas out instead of instantly shutting them down. We knew when to jump in and when to jump out, and that rhythm really worked out. We’re all supremely chill. It’s a product of where we grew up. So when we’re in the studio, we’re all producers, but we also know our places.” g Parcels plays Fortune Sound Club on Tuesday (March 5).

NOW plays a timely tribute to a jazz giant d FOR BOTH cultural and sonic diversity, it’s going to be hard to top the 11-piece version of the NOW Orchestra that artistic director Lisa Cay Miller has assembled for the long-running ensemble’s next concert. Joining Miller on piano will be Taiwanese-Canadian erhu virtuoso Lan Tung, ChineseCanadian zheng player Geling Jiang, Portuguese-born cellist Marina Hasselberg, recent Montreal transplant Joshua Zubot on violin, electronic musician Roxanne Nesbitt, and five pillars of the local improv scene in the form of trumpeter Bill Clark, bassist James Meger, guitarist Ron Samworth, saxophonist Graham Ord, and drummer Skye Brooks. If that’s not enough, they’ll be working with four guest artists: singer and composer Russell Wallace, of the Lil’wat Nation; saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, from Germany by way of Brooklyn; Seattle-based clarinetist James Falzone; and Indo-American singer and accordionist Kamala Sankaram.

Fittingly, they’re all convening at the Orpheum Annex this Friday to honour one of the most eclectic and accomplished musicians of the past century: Anthony Braxton, who turns 75 next year. Although best known as a free-jazz saxophonist, Braxton has also produced symphonic works, operas, and a large body of theoretical writings expanding on his Tri-Centric System, a modular method of music construction that incorporates notated material, improvisa-

tion, and graphic scores.

“I know of no other contemporary composer who has created written music of such depth, diversity, and exceptional quality,” says Braxton’s frequent collaborator Taylor Ho Bynum, and Laubrock, who’s recently returned to North America after playing with Braxton in Stockholm and Paris, would undoubtedly agree with the great cornetist.

“Working with Anthony is always really mind-blowing, and it’s been incredibly eye-opening,” she says, on the line from her home. “There’s a certain sort of feeling of, like, openness to his music, and the way the music can be here in the moment. Even if it’s very composed, it’s really in the moment.

And the sheer immensity of his output is inspiring—the way that he has so many musical systems that all fit into one.”

In Vancouver, Laubrock will be helping realize two of Braxton’s older scores for large ensemble, Composition No. 56 and No. 151, as well as presenting a work of her own. “We’re adjusting them to fit the ensemble,” she says of the Braxton compositions, adding that it shouldn’t be difficult to find room for Chinese strings or Lil’wat singing in the music. “The two pieces that we picked are actually pretty traditionally notated. So in terms of what there is to read, in terms of musical information, there’s nothing that adventurous. It’s more in the way the improvisation is sort of woven into the more classical kind of

writing. That’s what we’ll work on.”

As for her own “Chance 2”, Laubrock says that it will reflect Braxton’s influence—but not necessarily in an audible way. “He’s just inspired me to think bigger, to think broader,” she explains. “And also to really think about your composition, think about what you are trying to do with it, in a way.”

by Alexander Varty

The NOW Society presents Braxton 75 at the Orpheum Annex on Friday (March 1). Ingrid Laubrock and Kamala Sankaram will also join Lisa Cay Miller and other Vancouver improvisers at 8EAST (8 East Pender Street) tonight (February 27).

COATHANGERS’ KUGEL SEES THE POSITIVE IN EVERYTHING d ASSUMING SHE’S not already practising, one gets the feeling that Coathangers singer-guitarist Julia Kugel would make a pretty good Buddhist.

Advancing this notion is the frontwoman herself. As angry as the Coathangers sound on their sixth and perhaps best full-length to date—the upcoming The Devil You Know—Kugel is anything but on edge in conversation.

That’s not by accident. Christ knows that it’s easy to be outraged these days—all you have to do is punch in “MAGA” on Twitter. The challenge is to work toward something better.

“Everything is a reflection of

yourself,” Kugel says philosophically, reached at an L.A. tour stop.

“Everything that you see around you that you like, or that you don’t like, is yourself looking back at you. You are the universe. So it’s easy to get into a negative space right now because there’s so much negativity around.

“But you have to notice the positive and the good,” she continues. “I have a policy for this point in time: for 2019 it’s good news, and good news only, and fuck everything else. If you think about past history, things have been difficult—more difficult than now. If you expect to just be cruising all your life, you’re in for disappointment. Buddhists say that life is suffering. As soon as you make peace with that, you can start finding the beauty in things.”

The Coathangers have given every indication in the past that they have little interest in hitting cruise control as a creative unit. Past records like Nosebleed Weekend and Suck My Shirt saw the band branching out from its scrappy lofi punk beginnings to tackle everything from towering posthardcore to authentic Emerald City grunge. From the artstar no wave “Farms” to the drug-sick dirge “Crimson Telephone”, The Devil You Know sees the trio once again expanding its musical boundaries.

Kugel, bassist Meredith Franco, and drummer Stephanie Luke are at their angriest on “F the NRA”, which channels the uncompromising spirit of early-’80s hardcore. Setting the distortion pedals for megafuzz,

and bringing all hands on deck for the gang-chant chorus of “Fuck the NRA”, the Coathangers take no prisoners, lyrically or musically.

“Everyone has a voice thanks to social media, and some of them are out there to stifle the voices of people they don’t like speaking,” she says. “I didn’t really think about negative associations when we were writing and recording the song, but then we got people going ‘This is going to attract a lot of trolls, with a lot of people hating on you’. I’m from a country [Belarus] where people disappear. As crazy as we all think America is, there are lots of places that are worse.”

That reality might be behind her belief that there’s always reason to hope for a better world. If Buddhists believe in anything, it’s that change is not only always possible, but something to strive for. No matter what religion—if any—the Coathangers subscribe to, they’re determined to move.

“With the Trump thing, everyone is super angry,” Kugel acknowledges.

“But you also have to consider that there’s been so much social progress and so much conversation because of that. There are probably 8 billion people in the world. For every one of them that did something shitty today, the other seven billion probably did something good.”

by Mike Usinger

The Coathangers play the Imperial on Saturday (March 2).

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FESTIVAL DU BOIS Festival du Bois CONCERTS JUST ANNOUNCED celebrates its 30th anniversary with francophone music from across DAVID GRAFF & BAND Album release Canada. Program includes traditionshow for “Supposed to Fly”. “Indeed, it is based Québécois music from Les Tireux David Graff’s singing, full of character and d’Roches, Innu singer Shauit, an eclectic experience – a distinctive storyteller’s sampling of Acadian sounds from voice, that is the most notable aspect of Seconde Nation. Vishtèn, and Comté de this new release. His vocal style is gritty Clare, BC’s Alpha Yaya Diallo and Jou Tou, and emotional, with a good range and an shows for kids, great food and more! Mar ear for a catchy, sometimes unexpected 22-24, Mackin Park. $20/13/8. melody.” ~ Americana UK Mar 8, 8 pm, TOM WALKER Scottish indie-folk singerBuckerfield’s. $25. songwriter. Mar 28, 9 pm, Imperial Vancouver.

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Vancouver. Tix on sale Mar 1, 10 am, $18.

THE DREADNOUGHTS Punk band plays BEA MILLER American pop singer-songwrita St. Patrick’s Day weekend show, with er. May 18, 7 pm, Venue. Tix on sale Mar 1, 10 guests BRASS, ATD, the Gung Hos, Campfire am, $20.

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Indie-rock band from Australia. Jun 7, 9 pm, CELTICFEST VANCOUVER CEILIDH MOR Rickshaw Theatre. Tix on sale Mar 1, 10 am, The Beating Heart of Celtic Fest Vancouver! $17.50.

Join Blackthorn and friends for a full night THE CULT British hard-rock band from the of music and dance. Fun, participatory, called-dances will be taught throughout the ‘80s, featuring vocalist Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy. Jun 9, 8 pm, Vogue Theatre. Tix night or you can just leap about and boogie on sale Mar 1, 10 am, $49.50-127.50. to yer own beat! Featuring: BCR Irish Pipes & Drums, Eire Born Irish Dance Company, HOWARD JONES British synth-pop legend, Shot of Scotch Vancouver Company. Mar 16, with guests All Hail the Silence. Jun 28, 8 7 pm, Scottish Cultural Centre. $25/$20. pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $39.50/$204.50 (VIP).

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SATURDAY

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NEUTERHEAD Local bands raise funds for nonprofit animal rescues. Mar 1, 7 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $10.

LONG RANGE HUSTLE Toronto-based indierock quintet. Mar 1, 7 pm, Biltmore Cabaret. $13.

BAILEN Melodic pop band featuring siblings Daniel, David, and Julia Bailen. Mar 1, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. $12.

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MUSIC LISTINGSare a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit events online at straight.com/AddEvent.

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VHS COLLECTION Electro-rock trio from New York City. Mar 5, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. $12.50-75.

PARCELS Australian electropop quintet.

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MANDOLIN ORANGE Americana-folk duo from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mar 7, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Imperial Vancouver. $27.50.

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JULIA HOLTER American art-pop singersongwriter. Mar 4, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Imperial Vancouver. $18.

YOUNG THE GIANT Indie-rock band from Irvine, California, with guests Sure Sure. Mar 4, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre. $49.50/39.50/29.50.

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THE COATHANGERS Punk rock/garage band from Atlanta. Mar 2, Imperial Vancouver. $17.50.

HORIZON SCHOOL OF MUSIC LAUNCH PARTY Featuring performances by guitarists Don Alder, Kelly Brown with Uno Mas, and Kris Schulz. Mar 2, 4-7 pm, Bluedog Guitars.

MAR

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WALTER LURE’S L.A.M.F. Ex-Heartbreakers cofounder tours with guitarist Mick Rossi, with guests Fashionism. Mar 3, 8 pm, Pat’s Pub & Brewhouse. $16.50.

BILLY IDOL Rocker from the ‘80s performs with guitarist Steve Stevens. Mar 3, 8 pm, Vogue Theatre. $114.50/99.50/64.50.

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LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO Ninemember choral group shares the bill with Malian guitarist Habib Koité and lutist Bassekou Kouyate. Mar 2, 8-10 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

ANTIBALAS Brooklyn-based Afrobeat band.

Mar 2, 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $25.

COEUR DE PIRATE Indie-pop singer-songwriter and pianist from Quebec. Mar 2, 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $32.50.

Mangan, the War and Treaty, William Prince, and Southern Avenue. Aug 10, 1 pm, Deer Lake Park. Tix on sale Mar 1, 10 am, $50/60/70.

PRETTYMUCH American-Canadian boy band from L.A. Aug 16, 7 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Tix on sale Mar 1, 10 am, $49.95/32.50/29.95.

SAID THE WHALE Local indie-rock band, with guests the Beaches. Sep 6, 7 pm, Malkin Bowl. Tix on sale Feb 28, 10 am, $34.50.

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Brother-in-law needs to tell the truth

by Dan Savage

b I’M A GAY guy in my late 40s with a straight sister in her early 50s. She’s been married for a bit over two decades to a guy who always registered as a “possible” on my average-to-good gaydar. But I put “BIL”, a.k.a. my brother-in-law, in the “improbable” bucket because he actively wooed my sister, was clearly in love with her, and fathered four boys with her, all in their late teens now. I’m sure you already saw this plot development coming: it turns out BIL has been far more “probable” than I thought. He has a boyfriend but is still very much closeted and denies he is gay. My sister has apparently known about this arrangement for four years but has kept it a secret for the kids’ sake. But she recently filed for divorce and told our parents and me what’s been going on.

Their kids have been informed about the divorce but not about their father’s boyfriend. BIL needs to gay-man up and admit the truth to himself and the rest of his family and start the healing process. That’s obvious. Unfortunately, there’s no way I can talk him into it (we’re not close), and my sister is left holding this terrible secret while her bewildered kids watch their parents’ marriage crumble with no clue why.

I think the kids deserve the truth and that neither my sister nor the kids can start to heal until that happens. If BIL won’t do the right thing, my sister is going to have to tell them the truth.

What can I do to help her with this?

She’s awfully fragile right now and I don’t want to pressure her, and I can’t tell the kids without causing a big stink. But dammit, Dan, someone

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needs to start speaking some truth in or wanted all those kids—he’s unlikely to ever come out. So you can’t fault BIL that house.

- Dishonest Gay Brother-In-Law for not being out, DGBIL, when it’s attitudes like yours that keep bi guys Secret second families —and a secret closeted in the first place. boyfriend of four years counts— I shall now say something that will aren’t secrets that keep. So your piss off my bisexual readers: a familynephews are gonna find out about minded bi guy can have almost dad’s boyfriend sooner or later, DG- everything he wants—spouse, house, BIL, and sooner is definitely better. kids—without ever having to come Because in the absence of the actual out so long as that bi guy winds up reason why their parents are splitting with an opposite-sex partner. Comup—in the absence of the truth— ing out is a difficult conversation and they’re likely to come up with alter- it’s one that many bi people choose nate explanations that are far worse. to avoid. And who can blame them?

And when they inevitably discover I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of telling the real reason, your nephews’ anger my mom I put dicks in my mouth, but at having been lied to or left in the it was a conversation I couldn’t avoid. dark will reopen the wounds.

Faced with the choice between telling Backing way the hell up: seeing as my mother the truth and possibly beBIL actively wooed and “was clearly ing rejected by her and thereby losing in love with” your sister, and see- her or cutting her out of my life in ing as he successfully scrambled his order to keep my secret and definitely DNA together with hers four times losing her, I chose to tell her the truth. and remained married to her for two If I’d been, say, your average heterodecades, DGBIL, I don’t think BIL is romantic bisexual man instead of a a closeted gay man. My money’s on huge homo—if I enjoyed sex with men closeted bisexual man. and women but only fell in love with I shall now say something that will women—I could’ve avoided coming delight my bisexual readers: I’m sure out to her and very well might have. you’d like to live in a world where Back to your nephews, DGBIL: everyone is out, DGBIL, or, even bet- they should be told the truth but you ter, a world where no one ever had to be shouldn’t be the one to tell them. in. But in the world we live in now, bi- Their parents should. Sit down with sexuals are far less likely to be out than your sister and make the argument gays and lesbians, DGBIL, and the be- I did above: yes, your kids are upset lief that a guy is either gay or straight about the divorce and it will add to keeps many bisexual guys closeted. their upset to learn their father is in a Because if a bisexual guy who’s mar- relationship with a man. But they’re ried to a woman knows he’s going to be going to be angry about being lied to seen as gay if he tells the truth—if no when they inevitably fi nd out. And one will ever believe he loved his wife if she’s keeping this secret solely at

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Two thoughts…

1. Your girlfriend is keeping a secret from her family and friends, BASHED, and she has to hide you to protect that secret. You’re keeping a secret from your girlfriend: being hidden, being treated like her dirtiest secret, is making you miserable. Tell her how you feel about being hidden—because she needs to know being hidden is making you miserable.

2. “Don’t date closet cases” is one of my rules for out folks, BASHED, but there are exceptions to every rule.

If an out person meets someone on their way out or someone who, for good reasons, can’t come out this minute (they’re dependent on bigoted parents) or possibly ever (they live in a part of the world where it’s too dangerous to be out), an out person can date a closeted person. But dating someone who can be out and isn’t and has no plans to come out? They’re not dating you; they’re dragging you back into the closet. Just say no. g On the Lovecast, Dan chats with Johann Hari about the depression epidemic: savagelovecast.com. Email: mail@savagelove. net. Follow Dan on Twitter @FakeDanSavage.

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BIL’s request, well, he can’t ask that of her if doing so will damage her relationship with her kids. I don’t think she should immediately out BIL, but she can and should let him know that she will have to tell the children if he doesn’t. You should have a conversation with BIL. Open it by telling him that life is long, marriages are complicated, and that you know he loved your sister. But to stick the dismount here—to end his marriage without destroying his relationship with his kids—he can’t hide from them. If he doesn’t want to tell his boys about his boyfriend because he fears he might lose them, DGBIL, then he’ll have to cut his kids out of his life—and that means losing them for sure. And then butt the fuck out.

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