FREE | MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
Volume 56 | Number 2823
PINOY FLAVOURS
Smokehouse Sandwich Co. owner Rico Verzosa will present his home country’s cuisine in a playful way during Filipino Restaurant Month
AIRBORNE COVID
Premier accepts scientific reality
AFRICAN GROOVE
Alpha Yaya Diallo’s musical journey
JONATHON YOUNG • REAL ESTATE TRASH • MADDY KELLY • GINALINA
NEWS
Foot soldier against COVID measures blows the whistle
F
CONTENTS 6
By Carlito Pablo
or nearly two years, Brian Paul has been deeply involved in the movement opposing mask mandates, vaccine passports, and other measures intended to reduce the spread of COVID-19. He’s worked closely with highprofi le leaders on events, including a rally last year at Vanier Park in Vancouver. But in a livestreamed March 18 commentary on Facebook, Paul turned his sights on some of those very same organizers. In particular, he questioned what’s happened to donations from the movement’s supporters. “I’m guessing over a million dollars have probably been raised in the freedom movement [in B.C.] in the last couple of years,” Paul said. “That’s a number that I’m throwing at the dartboard.” He urged anyone watching the livestream to send polite emails to groups such as Action4Canada, Police on Guard for Thee, and Freedom Rally World to ask where their donations went. On Facebook, Paul alleged that some donations went missing but he provided no
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COVER
Smokehouse Sandwich Co. owner Rico Verzosa is eagerly looking forward to the first Filipino Food Month in Canada.
by Charlie Smith
2
March 24-31 / 2022
Cover photo by Jeff Toledo
5
HEALTH
After the B.C. government dropped all provincial mask mandates, Premier John Horgan described COVID-19 as an airborne disease. By Charlie Smith
13
MUSIC
Burnaby’s Alpha Yaya Diallo is bringing his upbeat West African music to Coquitlam’s Mackin Park for his third Festival du Bois appearance. Brian Paul has made unproven allegations of financial wrongdoing. Photo by Facebook.
evidence in the video to back up this claim. He also made an unproven allegation about a cryptocurrency scam associated with the movement, disclosing that he’s “a few days away from calling the Mounties”. Paul’s 40-minute commentary came on the eve of another so-called freedom rally at Jack Poole Plaza on March 19. Organizers of the rally issued a news release earlier this month declaring that antivaccine activist Chris Sky has not been invited to speak. Meanwhile, Police on Guard for Thee has distanced itself from one of its members, retired B.C. sheriff Bert Mayo, for allegedly agreeing to speak at a March event hosted by antivaxxer Chris Sky, who’s been charged with uttering threats. This elicited a critical response from Paul, who praised Mayo as a good “Biblical Christian” and “one of the most integral, hardworking freedom fighters”. “Bert is actually not standing with Chris,” Paul said. In particular, Paul singled out his former colleagues Alicia Johnson, Danielle Kinchella-Pistilli, and Marco Pietro for becoming “gatekeepers of the freedom movement and protectors of the microphone”. He described Action4Canada organizer Tanya Gaw as “a warrior with misguided objectives, good intentions, novel intentions, and a failed approach”. Paul also claimed that after volunteering his time and donating money to the movement, he was “literally ousted from the inner elitist freedom circle dinners and events, even Christmas”. “They’re fulfi lling their long-life aspirations of being famous on stage right, with all the lights shining forever upon them,” he said. Last May, Paul told a Freedom Rally World event at the Vancouver Art Gallery that COVID-19 health orders were “not a Canadian problem”. “This is a global elitist parasite problem, and they are the ones that need to be exterminated,” Paul said. g
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
By Steve Newton
e Start Here 10 ARTS 14 CLASSIFIED ADS 7 COMEDY 9 DANCE 11 MUSIC 2 NEWS 4 REAL ESTATE 13 SAVAGE LOVE 8 VISUAL ARTS
Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly Volume 56 | Number 2823 #300 - 1375 West 6th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6H 0B1 T: 604.730.7000 E: gs.info@straight.com straight.com DISPLAY ADVERTISING: T: 604.730.7020 E: sales@straight.com
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EDITOR Charlie Smith GENERAL MANAGER Sandra Oswald SECTION EDITORS Mike Usinger (ESports/Liquor/Music) Steve Newton SENIOR EDITOR Martin Dunphy STAFF WRITERS Carlito Pablo (Real Estate) SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT Jeff Li ART DEPARTMENT MANAGER Janet McDonald
e Online TOP 5
Here’s what people are reading this week on Straight.com.
1 2 3 4 5
Fairmont Hot Springs Resort CEO placed on leave after sexist remarks. East Van house sold for below 2022 assessment “needs a lot of TLC”. 40 things to do in Vancouver this week, March 21 to 25. Antivaxxer Chris Sky justifies Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. Vancouver police arrest suspect in videotaped assault at Granville Station. @GeorgiaStraight
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3
REAL ESTATE
Condo resident outed as a litterbug loses CRT case
G
by Carlito Pablo
oing through someone else’s trash sometimes pays off. Police and private investigators do it. The sleuthing technique also worked in a case involving a Burnaby condo tower. The 37-storey highrise in Metrotown was encountering problems with rubbish on common property. As a Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) heard, the strata caretaker found a bag of garbage on the landscaping of the property. The caretaker, identified only as BS, decided to open the bag to “identify who had littered”. One item found was a shredded bank document from TD Canada Trust. BS pieced the shredded paper together and came up with a name. “A photograph of the TD document shows ‘Mr. Gandong Xu’ as the recipient, with his address that matches the address he used in this dispute,” tribunal member Micah Carmody wrote in his reasons for decision. Moreover, the bag was found on the “common property greenspace under the balconies of the units ending in ‘01’, which included Mr. Xu’s unit 901”. After a hearing that Xu requested,
Xu wanted his $200 back. Carmody dismissed Xu’s claim. – Carlito Pablo
A condo caretaker pieced together a rippedup bank document to identify a litterbug.
the strata determined that Xu tossed the bag of household trash off his balcony. It slapped the resident with a fine of $200. Xu filed a claim before the CRT, saying the strata had no evidence that the garbage was his. Moreover, the man asserted
that he did not get a fair hearing. Xu wanted his $200 back. Carmody dismissed Xu’s claim. In his reasons for decision, the tribunal member noted that caretaker BS provided a written statement providing context about the garbage. “Given that the garbage bag was found in a landscaped common property area where BS says there was a history of littered garbage, I find opening the garbage was a reasonable investigative step for BS to take,” Carmody wrote. Hence, the tribunal member accepted
BS’s evidence that the garbage belonged to Xu by virtue of the shredded TD document that the caretaker pieced together. Carmody dismissed Xu’s argument that BS framed him with the TD document. “He says BS had access to the ‘mailroom’ and could steal his mail any time,” Carmody wrote. However, Xu had “not provided any explanation as to why BS would do this, such as personal animosity between them”. Xu also argued that the TD document could not be used as evidence based on the Privacy Act. But Carmody noted that the Privacy Act does “not address the admissibility of evidence”. The tribunal member recalled that in a different case, the Supreme Court of Canada held in its 2009 ruling in R. v. Patrick that a “person abandoned their privacy interest when they placed garbage for collection on their property in a way that was accessible to the public”. “I find the privacy interest in garbage tossed onto a common property landscaped area is even more clearly abandoned,” Carmody wrote. Overall, Carmody found the strata’s evidence more persuasive than Xu’s denial. g
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HEALTH
Premier acknowledges that COVID-19 is airborne
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by Charlie Smith
here’s been a great deal of frustration among some healthcare workers and educators over the B.C. government’s approach to COVID-19. At the centre of this has been the reluctance of health authorities to accept that COVID-19 is mainly transmitted by the airborne route. “Reducing airborne transmission of virus requires measures to avoid inhalation of infectious aerosols, including ventilation, air filtration, reducing crowding and time spent indoors, use of masks whenever indoors, attention to mask quality and fit, and higher-grade protection for health-care staff and front-line workers,” six researchers wrote in a paper published in the peerreviewed medical journal Lancet last year. Four of the authors of that paper have publicly criticized the B.C. government and/or the health authorities for refusing to take actions to prevent the spread of a virus primarily transmitted through the air. So it came as a surprise to a teacher who has read the science, Jennifer Heighton, to hear Premier John Horgan finally describe COVID-19 as an airborne disease. Horgan made this comment during an interview with Global B.C.’s Richard Zussman on Focus B.C. “Teachers have been right in the centre of it because when you put a whole bunch of people in one room for a whole day when you’re talking about a disease—an airborne disease—this is a challenge,” Horgan said. “It’s created stresses in the lives of teachers and their families. It’s created stresses in the lives of parents and their kids. “And so is there a need to compensate that?” the premier continued. “Or is there a need to better understand where we can make investments in HVAC systems within our old and our new schools?” Heighton, a cofounder of Safe Schools Coalition B.C., responded to Horgan’s comments by tweeting that educators are looking forward to him reinstating mandatory masks and supporting HEPA filters in classrooms. Horgan’s comments came after health
After provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced the end to mask mandates in B.C., Premier John Horgan questioned whether there’s a need for better ventilation in classrooms.
journalist Adriana Barton accused him of hypocrisy for imposing a mask mandate at a news conference the day after his government had scrapped provincewide mask mandates. Dating back to the early months of the pandemic, papers have been published explaining why COVID-19 is primarily transmitted through the air. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control eventually accepted this as a scientific fact. Yet as recently as last month, Vancouver Coastal Health’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Patricia Daly, insisted that there remains a great debate over airborne COVID-19. And this month, the Vancouver Island Health Authority claimed that COVID-19 is a “droplet spread organism” (while acknowledging that there are procedures that may cause droplets to disperse as fine aerosols). This VIHA comment flew in the face of the Lancet paper cited above. It also contradicted what one of the Lancet article authors, University of Colorado Boulder atmospheric chemist Jose-Luis Jimenez, told a group called Protect Our Province B.C. last month. Last year, Jimenez also coauthored a paper in Science describing mechanisms of airborne transmission. He and the other
authors challenged the view that several respiratory pathogens primarily spread between people through large droplets produced in coughs. Yet six months after publication of that paper, the health authorities appear to remain intransigent, clinging to droplet dogma in connection with COVID-19 and discouraging HEPA filters in classrooms. Meanwhile, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian
Dix have steadfastly refused to say that COVID-19 is primarily spread through airborne transmission in the manner outlined by atmospheric chemists such as Jimenez and Kimberly Prather. (Prather is director of the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Evironment at the University of California San Diego.) It was on March 10 that Henry and Dix announced the end of provincial mask mandates. UBC chose to retain its indoor mask mandate, but virtually every other public body—including TransLink, B.C. Transit, B.C. Ferries, and other colleges and universities—no longer require noses and mouths to be covered indoors. Horgan’s recent comments to Zussman didn’t address another concern articulated by the government’s well-educated critics. And that’s the fact that COVID-19 is routinely described as a respiratory infection by Henry when it’s actually been associated with a wide range of medical conditions. In some cases, it leads to neurological problems, including strokes. It’s also been linked to blood-vessel damage, organ failure, and heart attacks, according to the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. g
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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT
5
FOOD
Pinoy flavour served in playful way at Smokehouse
T
by Carlito Pablo
his pork dish typically makes quite an entrance. It comes sizzling and hissing on a hot cast-iron plate greased with butter or margarine, turning heads as it leaves a trail of smoky flavours on its way to the table. Called sisig (pronounced “see-sig”), the pork hash is topped with a freshly cracked egg that is quickly mixed onto the meat. Filipinos in and outside of their home country enjoy this minced-pork recipe two ways. One is ulam, a dish eaten with rice, and the other is pulutan, a snack that goes with beer and other alcoholic drinks. For the first Filipino Restaurant Month in Canada, which starts April 1, sisig arrives minus the hiss but without missing out on the stuff that makes it delish. It will come on a bun, courtesy of Smokehouse Sandwich Co., a Richmond restaurant participating in the month-long food event. The sisig sandwich is a good example of the innovative approach by business owner Rico Verzosa in introducing Filipino culinary influences to the mainstream Canadian food scene. “I want to present Filipino f lavours in a playful way,” Verzosa told the Straight
in a phone interview. Filipinos dishes are typically paired with rice, which is what most Filipino Canadian restaurants do. “A sandwich is more accessible and friendly to diners who are not used to eating Filipino style,” Verzosa explained. Smokehouse Sandwich Co. opened at 108–5188 Westminster Highway in November 2013 as a brunch spot with a menu that would appeal to a broad clientele. Its bestseller is the Samson, a coffee-crusted and strawberry-glazed beef brisket sandwich. One can also have the Billie, a salt-cured pork-belly sandwich with salsa. Then there’s the Sarah, pulled tamarind chicken with sesame slaw and aioli. Unless one is familiar with Filipino cuisine, it would be easy to miss hints of Verzosa’s Filipino culinary heritage in a number of offerings. For example, he has reconstructed the Mexican burrito in an homage to one of his favourite ways of having breakfast. Like many Filipinos, Verzosa is a fan of the silog trifecta, which is a combination of any kind of protein, fried rice (sinangag), and egg (itlog). The most famous of this holy trinity is tapsilog (tapa beef
Smokehouse Sandwich Co. owner Rico Verzosa looks forward to presenting his home country’s cuisine to the broader public during Canada’s first Filipino Restaurant Month. Photo by Jeff Toledo.
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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
jerky, sinangag, and itlog). At Smokehouse Sandwich Co., one can also order a tocino burrito. Tocino is sweetcured pork. It’s the main star of this burrito offering with hash browns instead of fried rice, scrambled eggs, cheese, and aioli, with pickled daikon and carrots as sides. Another option is the salpicao burrito, which features Filipino stir-fried tender beef cubes. Verzosa was born and raised in the Philippines. His grandmothers on both sides of the family liked entertaining guests, and he was their assistant during meal preparations. “I grew up in the kitchen, chopping, mixing, tasting, and so I feel at home in the kitchen,” Verzosa related. When he was a young adult, he worked as a filmmaker in his native country. “It’s a stressful job, and cooking was my way of relaxing,” Verzosa said. In Canada, he worked in restaurants without having gone to culinary school. One of these establishments was the former Jethro’s Fine Grub in Vancouver’s Dunbar neighbourhood. Verzosa said Jethro’s owner D’Arcy Allen knew about sisig and asked him to prepare the dish one day. Sisig traditionally uses pork jowl, which is as savoury as pork belly. The dish
can also be made with other proteins, like chicken or fish. The idea for Smokehouse Sandwich Co. was born in the Philippines, when Verzosa and his wife, CC, were preparing to settle in Canada with their first child. “My wife thought that a sandwich is easier than having a rice combination, and it’s a complete meal with carbs, meat, and veggies,” Verzosa said. The couple started selling sandwiches with smoked meat at a weekend market in Metro Manila. “[It was] mostly expatriates who kept coming back for our sandwiches, and it convinced us that it could work in Canada,” Verzosa said. He and CC thought that having such a business would be a good way of supporting their growing family (they now have two kids, both girls). The Richmond resident met someone in his church who mentored him about doing business in B.C. and eventually gave him a loan. Verzosa also got some help from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation. Canada’s first Filipino Restaurant Month is a project by the Philippine embassy in Ottawa, Philippine consulates in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto, and the Philippine government’s Department of Tourism. g
ARTS
Maddy Kelly is part of the New Wave of Standup
M
by Steve Newton
addy Kelly didn’t wait long to start her career in standup comedy. In fact, four days after she turned 19—the legal drinking age in B.C.—she did her first set in a local club. After that, she felt like she was part of the Vancouver comedy scene. “There was a really, really welcoming community at that time,” Kelly says on the phone from her Mount Pleasant home. “It felt like I was becoming a part of something which I wasn’t aware of before I started comedy. I did all the open mikes and we’d go to the clubs and watch comics who were better than me, and it was really, really fun to be 19 and 20. It felt like I was growing up, you know?” Now, at the ripe old age of 25, Kelly is enjoying the fruits of her labour of laughs. Besides being known around town for her standup work, she has made a name for herself working on podcasts (Let’s Make a Sci-Fi), a conceptual comedy show for CBC Gem (The Slowest Show), and a sitcom project (Popcorn for Dinner) that was bought by the Podcast Network. She’s also going nationwide as one of the comics featured on the second season of The New Wave of Standup, which launches March 29 on the free CBC Gem streaming service. Filmed this past winter at Gastown’s Guilt & Co., the series features 12 Canadian comics offering up their funniest work in 10-minute sets. Kelly says it was quite a challenge coming up with a tight, chuckleworthy set in time for the taping. “I did have to write it quite fast,” she recalls. “I was workin’ overtime, doing a lot of stuff at night to get the material worked out. My friends Bobby Warrener and Malik Elassal, they were like my pit team—we all worked on the set together and it was so fun. I’m really happy with how it turned out.” During her allotted time, Kelly covers topics like her Irish Catholic immigrant grandparents, being really broke for a long time, and getting a wrong order from A & W during the pandemic. She claims to know most of the comics taking part in The New Wave of Standup, which includes one of her best friends, Vancouver’s Andrea Jin. “We got to the same taping at the same time,” she says, “and that was really fun. I think I was a better comic because she was in the room with me.” Kelly says that her favourite standup comedians when she was starting out were Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Wanda Sykes, and the late Louie Anderson. She’s much younger than any of them, though, which is a bonus when you’re trying to connect with a youthful crowd. “I can relate to the same issues [as the audience],” she points out, “like talking about dating apps and social media or
I’ve got funny friends… You can’t be my friend if you’re not funny. – Maddy Kelly
Maddy Kelly is only 25 but she is fast making a name for herself on the Vancouver comedy scene and will soon go nationwide with an appearance on CBC Gem. Photo by Emily Cooper.
whatever it is. But I’m also going through similar things people in their 20s are going through, right now, and not talking about it in the past tense.” Speaking of social media, one of the factoids mentioned in Kelly’s impressive bio is that she has amassed more than 2.5 million views on Tik Tok. That exposure wasn’t brought on by any savvy socialmedia skills on her part, though. “I was just really lucky,” she says. “A comedy outfit called Comedy Here Often? posted a clip of me and it just went viral. I’m not very good at social media. And I prefer Instagram, I think.” Kelly also believes that the success she’s finding at such a young age is partially due to the help she got from certain Vancouver comedians who embraced her from the get-go. “I really do look up to a lot of the people on the local scene,” she says, “Erica Sigurdson and Graham Clark. And Ivan Decker. They’ve all really given me lots of advice and a lot of mentorship, and I’ve been really lucky for that.” As fortunate as she feels right now, Kelly admits that Vancouver’s comedy scene has faced some major hurdles, like the recent shuttering of a longtime venue near and dear to her heart. “Little Mountain Galley was a huge loss, for sure. I used to run a show there for years, and I think a lot of people got their start and found their own audiences being able to run their own shows there. It is really sad that we don’t get to have those opportunities.” Overall, Kelly remains positive about the Vancouver comedy scene, though, adding that it’s done a great job of finding new venues. It’s easy to stay positive when you’re only 25 years old. Or is it? With all that life left to live, is it hard to do com-
edy when the unfunny spectre of the Third World War looms so large? “I mean...yeah!” she replies. “I think that first week when all that [war in Ukraine] was happening, it was very weird. We were announcing Let’s Make a Sci-Fi, and it was so embarrassing to be promoting an en-
tertainment comedy podcast when a lot of other people were sharing resources. “But I also think that I relied really heavily on comedy in tough times,” she adds. “I watched so much comedy during the pandemic, and some of my worse times during that, so my dream is that I’m, hopefully, providing some sort of relief for other people.” And should the state of the world ever get sorry enough that she needs someone to make her laugh for a change, Kelly knows who to call. “I’ve got funny friends,” she says. “Yeah, that’s my whole thing. You can’t be my friend if you’re not funny.” g
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7
ARTS
Fest to present subtly subversive public art by Charlie Smith
V
The subject of Sara Cwynar’s Umi, on Burrard Street, is not trying to sell something to passersby. Photo courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.
ancouver-born and Brooklynbased contemporary artist Sara Cwynar has already hit the big time well in advance of her 40th birthday. The Yale graduate’s art is already in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and several other high-profile institutions. Beginning in April, one of the former UBC student’s photographic works will
be visible to the masses in her hometown. That’s because the Capture Photography Festival selected her for a prestigious commission. Cwynar’s Umi—a bold image of a woman lying on her back in a tomato-red outfit and matching shoes—will grace the Burrard Street façade of the Dal Grauer Substation from April until March, 2023. The curator of this public art and the executive director of the Capture Photography Festival, Emmy Lee Wall, told the Straight by phone that the installation is “subtly subversive, in a way”. “What Sara and I both really like about this image is it’s ambiguous,” Wall said. “It’s not a clear read. You can’t see this woman’s face. You don’t know if she’s happy or upset.”
work, to reveal visual assumptions and biases that we may all have when we’re looking at imagery,” Wall said. “But we aren’t even really aware of those because we’re just so inundated with imagery constantly in contemporary society.” Wall emphasized that the image on the side of the Dal Grauer Substation is not inside an art gallery. Thousands of people pass by the site every day by vehicle or on foot. Unlike visitors to a gallery, the vast majority won’t have a great deal of time to process something that’s overly complex. “I think the image she’s created for us is perfect to see quickly and at a distance,” Wall said. So why is it subtly subversive? Wall noted
It’s not a clear read. You can’t see this woman’s face. You don’t know if she’s happy or upset. – Capture Photography Festival executive director Emmy Lee Wall
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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
The pose is also unclear, she added, noting that the woman’s hand is held on her forehead. “Is she exasperated? Is she tired? Is she in ecstasy?” Wall asked. “It’s just really not clear how she is feeling and what she’s thinking.” Cwynar, a 2020 Sobey Art Award winner, has a history of creating art that takes aim at the historic objectification of women. Her well-known Tracy series of photographs challenge conceptions of beauty, featuring her friend Tracy Ma as a model. Wall said that the Tracy images are invariably overlaid with objects and images, often including makeup, in a multilayered and provocative manner, forcing viewers to think deeply about what they’re seeing. “I feel like she’s really able, through her
that most large-scale images of women in public are largely for the purposes of consumption. These women are typically smiling, meeting the viewer’s gaze directly, often in advertising intended to sell products. The woman in Umi, on the other hand, does not meet the viewer’s gaze even though she has clearly been colour-coordinated in a specific shade. The cloth laid down below her suggests that she’s participating in a photo shoot. But her pose is something unexpected in this setting. “She’s not doing what she was told to do,” Wall said. g The Capture Photography Festival’s B.C. Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project, Umi by Sara Cwynar, can be seen from April 1 to March 18, 2023.
ARTS
Dance becomes vehicle for a warning in Black Feather by Charlie Smith
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Oksana Maslechko (above) performs in Lamondance resident choreographer Davi Rodrigues’s Black Feather, which is inspired by a Brazilian president blinded by power. Photo by Miles Clark.
O
n Sunday (March 27), the controversial far-right president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is scheduled to launch his reelection campaign. More than 10,000 kilometres away from the capital of Brasilia, a former resident is putting the finishing touches on a dance show inspired by Bolsonaro’s incompetence. In a phone interview with the Straight, Lamondance artistic director and resident choreographer Davi Rodrigues talked about Black Feather, which he describes as a spinoff of Swan Lake. The full-length production will have its world premiere on April 29 at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts in North Vancouver; a 15-minute excerpt is scheduled at the Dance Centre on April 3 as part of Open Stage #2. “Black Feather is about a swan—this creature,” Rodrigues explains. “He carries a curse and he needs to pass the curse to someone to take his position.” Sadly, he chooses another swan to carry the curse—and this one is very ill-prepared to hold such authority. “The creature, this swan, gets blinded by the power and starts to destroy everything,” Rodrigues says. “He is the curse.” Bolsanaro’s curses have included utterly mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic to the point where Brazil ranks second in total deaths from the disease. His homophobia, mass deforestation of the Amazon, and love of authoritarianism and torture have made him a villain to progressives around the world. All of this prompts the Straight to ask if the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, plays any role in this production? “There is no Dilma,” Rodrigues replies with a laugh. “I got inspired by what happened to my country, but whoever is watching the piece won’t see any president or any commentary about politics.”
The lighthearted Rodrigues describes Black Feather as beautiful, poetic, and gorgeous before quipping that he’s biased because he’s the choreographer. But the 50-minute piece contains a serious message. It’s intended to convey the potential consequences of turning over power to a new face simply because people want a change. “We don’t foresee what’s going to happen from giving it to someone who’s not prepared,” Rodrigues says. Lamondance was founded in 2009 by Monica Proença and Lara Barclay to help emerging dancers make the transition to becoming professionals. Rodrigues joined the company in its first season as a dancer and guest choreographer after a distinguished career in Brazil. In 2014, he became the sole artistic director of the company, which has 12 performers and a separate training program. He is now a Canadian citizen. “My vision has always been to create a ground where emerging artists can have a platform to continue to train but also to work as professionals, because at Lamondance, we serve two different streams,” Rodrigues says. When evaluating potential dancers, he pays a great deal of attention not only to their talent but also to their energy and ability to collaborate with others. “I always think we all have dreams and goals, but when we are in a collective, my goal and my dream can be elevated because my dancer beside me is going through this journey of searching for their dreams and goals,” he adds. “Together we can help each other.” If only that spirit of collaboration existed within the office of Brazil’s president. g The Dance Centre will present Lamondance’s 15-minute excerpt from Black Feather on April 3 as part of Open Stage #2.
Hear it. Feel it. Vern Griffiths MAR
27
The Composer is Here Sun, 2pm | Orpheum
The VSO’s own Vern Griffiths leads this fun and family-friendly performance that explores what it means to be a composer. The audience will get in on the action and help compose a brand-new work to be performed live by the VSO.
Mischa Maisky APR
Fri, 8pm | Sun, 2pm | Orpheum
1/3 The great cellist Rostropovich on Maisky: “… one of the most outstanding talents. His playing combines poetry and exquisite delicacy with great temperament and brilliant technique.” Need we say more? Mischa Maisky
APR
8/9
Jane Coop Plays Mozart Fri & Sat, 8pm | Orpheum
Jane Coop plays Mozart’s earth-shattering C minor concerto, alongside Schumann and a new work from Métis composer Ian Cusson with mezzo Krisztina Szabó. Jane Coop
VancouverSymphony.ca MAR 25, 26 VSO POPS SERIES SPONSOR
BROADCAST MEDIA PARTNERS
MAR 27 KIDS CONCERTS SERIES SPONSOR
MEDIA SPONSOR
604.876.3434
APR 3 SYMPHONY SUNDAYS SERIES SPONSOR
APR 8, 9 MASTERWORKS GOLD SERIES SPONSOR
Concert programs are subject to change at any time.
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
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ARTS
Gogol farce on Russian corruption inspired Revisor
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by Charlie Smith
arly this year, playwright and actor Jonathon Young had no idea that the remounting of Kidd Pivot’s Revisor would occur in the midst of a bloody invasion of Ukraine. He wrote the dancetheatre hybrid production, which premiered to glowing reviews at the Vancouver Playhouse in 2019. It’s based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 farce The Inspector General (also known as The Government Inspector), about a man mistaken for a government inspector in a small provincial town, where everyone bends over to please him. Gogol was born in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg, which happens to be the birthplace of Russian president Vladimir
Putin. It was in this city where Gogol found fame as a playwright, novelist, and author of short stories. “I have been thinking more about Nikolai Gogol and his journey as a writer,” Young tells the Straight by phone from his home in Toronto. “He was, essentially, an outsider to St. Petersburg, which afforded him a perspective that insiders didn’t have. Also, there was a real appetite when he arrived in Russia for the folk tales of what they called ‘Little Russia’—Ukrainian folk tales.” Young points out that Gogol filtered these stories of his homeland through “his own particular and peculiar lens”. “And they became something that no one
Doug Letheren (above) played the director of the complex in the original run of Revisor, which was written by Jonathon Young and choreographed by Crystal Pite. Photo by Michael Slobodian.
RESPITE
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had ever read or seen, and ended up really shaping Russian literature,” he says. According to Young, Gogol assumed that The Inspector General would serve as a moral indictment of bureaucracy and officialdom in the way it portrayed the corruption of the state. But that didn’t happen at all. “It was instantly absorbed as a grotesque comedy—an over-the-top farce—so that even the tsar was able to sanction it and love it and laugh at it,” Young says. “It became a national institution almost instantly and survived through the chaos and upheaval of Russia.” In Soviet times, it was something that artists could radicalize. Director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 nonrealist production of Revizor [the Russian name], for example, brought a new theatrical inventiveness to the play, Young says. It was later covered in an issue of Yale University’s Theater magazine. Young had an old tattered copy of the publication, complete with Meyerhold’s production notes, on his shelf at home. So when he and Kidd Pivot founder and choreographer Crystal Pite discussed creating a farce, they decided that Gogol’s play would be ideal for this purpose. In Young and Pite’s version, actors recorded the script, which is heard in the theatre through the audio system. Dancers lip-sync these words on-stage while moving in often strange and bewildering ways. “It is quite a radical adaptation even though the inherent structure is the same,” he adds. “Very little remains of Gogol’s text—almost nothing.” He reveals that one of the characters knows what’s going on behind the scenes. And he can barely contain himself. “He has these outbursts where he cannot stop talking,” Young says. “His body is almost puppeteered by the language inside him. The pressure is so great for it to come
out.” Another character, the interrogator, is quite the opposite. She’s suffering from a condition that prevents her from speaking. “She can barely get a word out at times,” the playwright says. “And they’re contending with a ‘movement’, which is never described beyond that.” Last year, Stanford University Slavic literature expert Yuliya Ilchuk’s book Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity argued that the writer’s cultural identity was a product of “negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values”. “By examining Gogol’s ambivalent selffashioning, language performance, and textual practices,” the publisher’s blurb says, “this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance.” Moreover, Ilchuk argued that Russia’s imperial culture depended on Ukrainian intellectuals like Gogol in its development. Young is very aware of that influence. “He’s known as sort of the father of Russian modernism and even, in a weird sense, psychological realism that began to flourish at the end of the 19th century,” Young says. “And many of those writers trace their inspiration back to Gogol.” Young finds it shocking that in the space of a couple of years since Revisor was last performed, it will now resonate in “a different and more present way”. “In early 2020, before the pandemic, we gathered for the first remount and the beginnings of a tour that would have taken us to St. Petersburg and Moscow,” he says. “That was where the tour was to end. It was, of course, cancelled by April and so we never made it there—and I doubt we ever will now.” g DanceHouse presents Kidd Pivot’s Revisor at the Vancouver Playhouse from March 30 to April 2.
MUSIC
Ginalina makes music for children in three languages by Charlie Smith
Three-time Juno nominee Ginalina will be joined by her daughter Emma and the rest of the family when they perform at the upcoming Festival du Bois in Coquitlam. Photo by Carla Hedges.
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ancouver musician Ginalina likes to say that everybody is valuable and everybody has a place in this world. And she has found her place making music and singing songs in three languages for kids. Along the way, she has created four albums and collected three Juno nominations. “I love going back to the basics of what’s important and essential in life—things like appreciating the moment, love and friendship—these universal truths that never grow old,” Ginalina tells the Straight by phone. “I love those aspects about my writing. There’s a real purity to that and it keeps my spirit healthy.” One of her favourite songs, “The Best Is Apple Pie”, reflects this philosophy. It’s about enjoying the sweet things in life, including apple pie, with friends and family. “The kids get to jump, clap, and laugh,” she says. “The adults get to feel all cozy and warm.” Another of her songs, “It Takes a Village”, gets audiences swaying their bodies and humming along in a chorus that reinforces the need to help one another pursue their dreams. “Whether you’re a child or whether you’re an adult or whether you’re a senior, there’s always a big role for community throughout every stage of your life,” Ginalina emphasizes. In early April, Ginalina will perform twice at Festival du Bois. She credits executive and artistic director Joanne Dumas, communications manager Clémence Dufresne, and the rest of the team for their hard work in maintaining this annual celebration of francophone culture in Mackin Park in Coquitlam. Ginalina will sing and play guitar with her husband Joseph (accordion) and their four kids: John (bass guitar), Annalise (ukelele),
Gabriel (cajon), and Emma (accordion). “We have more accordions in the house than guitars,” Ginalina says. “That says something. Everybody in my family plays accordion except for myself.” That’s not the only francophone touch. The Toronto-born Ginalina also sings fluently in French (as well as in English and Mandarin) after studying the language in school and then immersing herself in Québécois culture at different times in her life. Many years ago, she spent five weeks on a language-exchange program in Chicoutimi, experiencing the city’s joie de vivre. She says that this stimulated a desire to improve her French. The following summer, Ginalina worked in Les Laurentides, a small town not far from Montreal, and went on to live beside Mont Royal in Montreal. But where she really gained a strong facility with the language was in China, of all places. She enrolled at Nanjing University to improve her Mandarin. Her multilingual roommate was from Slovakia and they communicated with one another in French. “We travelled together; we worked together; we lived together,” Ginalina recalls. “She was my best friend in an overseas country. My French just skyrocketed.” Her Mandarin also improved, enabling her to forge stronger connections with her Taiwanese-born parents after she returned to Canada. “Music and language have opened the door to so many interesting experiences and deeper relationships,” Ginalina says. “I’m very grateful to be a singer-songwriter and to contribute a bit more joy into the world.” g Ginalina and her family band will perform at 1 p.m. next Saturday (April 2) and Sunday (April 3) at Festival du Bois in Mackin Park in Coquitlam.
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
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CHILL.
Enjoy stress-free reading without the noise on CreatorNews.
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MUSIC / SAVAGE LOVE
Diallo brings African groove to Festival du Bois
A
by Steve Newton
s a youngster growing up in Guinea, West Africa, Alpha Yaya Diallo took in a lot of culture. His travelled around the country with his father, an in-demand doctor, and was exposed to musical influences from the Susu, Mandinka, and his own Fulani peoples. He also spent time in nearby Senegal—where mbalax dance music was all the rage—and heard the sounds emanating from Cape Verde and the Caribbean. He absorbed it all like a sponge. “There’s a lot of different types of music in Africa,” he points out on a call from his Burnaby home. “It’s a big continent. I started playing guitar at age seven and listening to everything from local music to rhumba to guitar players like young Mark Knopfler or George Benson—all those guys.” Diallo moved from Africa to Europe in 1991 and joined a band called Fatala in the Netherlands that got picked up by Peter Gabriel’s label, Real World. Bolstered by that signing, the group toured North America, and that’s when Diallo first laid eyes on his future home of Vancouver, where he landed in the summer of ‘91. “I stayed here to teach African music workshops,” he says, “then I met some people and I decided just to stay in Vancouver for good. I’ve been here for a long time now, and I’m glad I stayed, because it allowed me to know the country. I travelled every corner of Canada, from Vancouver to Newfoundland, the Yukon, Yellowknife. I know Canada more than many Canadians.” A good part of Diallo’s cross-Canada travels involved playing folk festivals in Edmonton and Ottawa and jazz fests in Toronto and Montreal. He’ll be continuing
Burnaby Afro-pop artist Alpha Yaya Diallo makes three appearances at Festival du Bois.
his festival work with two mainstage appearances and a workshop at the upcoming Festival du Bois, the family oriented francophone music festival taking place at Mackin Park in Coquitlam in early April. It’ll be his third appearance at the annual event. As well as being a fixture on Canada’s live-music scene, Diallo has made a splash in the recording world. His 1998 third album, The Message, won a Juno for best global recording, and three years later he took that category again with The Journey. In 2005 he scored a third Juno when African Guitar Summit—which saw him in the company of fellow pickers Madagascar Slim, Donné Robert, and Pa Joe—was voted best world music album. That album was followed in 2006 by African Guitar Summit II, and a highly suc-
cessful tour of the United States. So is there any chance of a third African Guitar Summit platter? “Well, we’re talking about it,” Diallo says, “but everyone has a project, and right now I’m focusing on my new album. Probably when we do that we’ll see, but we were talking about it, for sure.” The new disc Diallo hopes to have out by this summer is produced by Malian multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Fofana, who plays ngoni and kora on it. As well as singer-guitarist Diallo, the album will feature African musicians Adama Bilaro Dembele on percussion, Naby Camara on balafon, Etienne Mangala on bass, Knowledge Majonik on drums, and Madagascar Slim on guitar. Local crooner Janelle Reid performs on a couple of tracks, and rapper Ndidi Cascade does her thing on two others. “It talks about a lot of things,” Diallo says of the lyrical side of his new project, “like what’s going on right now. These…things we’re seeing—after COVID, we now have war in Ukraine, and I’m gonna talk about all the challenges we’re having right now, from disease to war to politics to climate change—we are facing a lot of challenges.” Over the years, Diallo has performed and/or recorded with the likes of David Lindley, Thomas Mapfumo, Jimmy Cliff, Third World, Burning Spear, and Vancouver’s Paperboys. When asked to name some of the local players he’s come to admire most, Diallo doesn’t lean toward world-music artists like himself. Surprisingly, he goes more for the local rockers and bluesmen. “Well, I like people who sing and play guitars,” he says, “I like artists like that. You know, I listen to Bryan Adams a lot. I
listen to—who’s that big star, a blues player, local guy. What’s his name? Oh, yeah— Colin James. And I like Bruce Cockburn, too; that’s another Canadian guy I like.” As well as winning several major awards for his music over the years, Diallo has garnered a lot of critical praise for his smooth, seemingly effortless guitar playing, some of which he performs on a Quebec-made, Godin Multiac Gypsy Jazz guitar. He’s also been known to mess around on a Fender Stratocaster, like many of the biggest guitar heroes around. But he claims that his favourite axemen are too numerous to mention. “There’s a bunch of them because my style is mixed,” he explains. “It’s from western blues, African blues, to flamenco style, because I play electric, acoustic, and nylonstyle classical guitars. So I can say [there are] millions of guitar players I like to hear.” For his mainstage performances at Festival du Bois, Diallo will be joined by his band, which includes the abovementioned rhythm section of bassist Mangala and drummer Majonik, plus keyboardist Joshua Amadine and singer-dancer N’Nato Camara. He describes the music he’s playing these days as “Afro-pop”. “It’s an African groove,” he notes, “but with a little bit of everything. There’s, you know, funk, blues, and really sometimes it’s a mix. We have some acoustic songs accompanied by traditional instruments, but sometimes we do really upbeat, very danceable music, too. There can be a lot of energy.” g Alpha Yaya Diallo performs on the Festival du Bois mainstage on April 2 at 5:30 p.m. and April 3 at 2:15 p.m., and he leads a workshop at Mackin House on April 2 at 1:30 p.m.
Sexless partner leaves you two courses of action by Dan Savage
b MY BOYFRIEND AND I have not had sex for more than two years. When I first asked him about it, he hemmed and hawed. When I pressed him, he said he doesn’t have any interest. I felt like he was not telling me the whole truth. When I suggested he tell his doctor, my boyfriend said he could not do that because his doctor is an old family friend. He won’t go to another doctor. I don’t know what to do. Staying in a long-term relationship without sex does not appeal to me. But I love him, so leaving him is not an option. On all other levels, we have a great relationship. But I miss his cock and I miss intimacy. I have tried many things, but I am sick and tired of being refused. He will remove my hand from his cock if I touch it, and he does not seem to ever get hard anymore. I used to think that it was my fault but no longer
to rule out leaving, UNHAPPILY, your options are staying and enduring a sexless existence or staying and having sex with other people. If you don’t wanna be accused of cheating, you’ll have to ask your boyfriend’s permission to seek sex elsewhere. If you don’t wanna ask his permission or you ask and don’t get it, well, then you’ll either have to endure a sexless existence or discreetly fuck other people when you have the chance. (I hesitate to describe that as cheating in a case like yours, UNHAPPILY, since you wouldn’t be cheating your boyfriend out of anything he seems to want.)
If you’re going
Dan advises a reader in a relationship without sex to get used to it or stray. Photo by Getty.
accept the blame. What can I do?
- Unhappy Not Having Any Penetration Play In Literally Years
b I’M A 65-YEAR-OLD gay man, and over the past few years, I’ve completely lost interest in having sex with other men. Coincidentally, pleasure from the prostate has gone to
a whole new level. I am now having the most intense and powerful prostate-induced orgasms one could ask for—like joining-theuniverse intense. Do I need to see a therapist? - My Orgasms Are Now Sensational
Only if you’re unhappy, MOANS, and you don’t sound unhappy to me. (And if you were, you might be better off seeing a sex worker.)
b I BROKE UP with my boyfriend about one month ago after almost a year together. I’m 22 and he’s 20, and we met at work. A month after we started dating, his mom died. He is a jealous and controlling person, whereas I’m a very friendly and outgoing person, and he didn’t like it that I had friends. He was constantly worried I
MARCH 24 – 31 / 2022
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from previous page pubescent boys by cutting away their pubic was cheating on him, and I would reassure hair? Hair is masculine and should be allowed to thrive in its natural habitat. him as best I could. I tried to be understanding because, again, - Bush Lover In Maryland his mom had just died. But nothing helped. A month ago, he starts yelling that he now Are you suggesting you can’t tell the differknows for sure I had cheated on him at least ence between a 30-year-old man who shaved three times, even if he doesn’t have any proof. his pubes and a prepubescent 11-year-old (I never cheated on him.) So,I broke it off. But boy who doesn’t have any pubes to shave? 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and lie—and that’s what “It’s not you; it’s me,” is, right? It’s a lie, TITE, and everyone knows it’s a lie: the person who says it during a breakup knows it’s a lie; the person who hears it during a breakup knows it’s a lie. But it’s a lie most of us are comfortable being told. Because when someone says, “It’s not you; it’s me,” what they’re saying to us is, “Look, I know this sucks and it hurts and I’m sorry and I don’t want to hurt you anymore than I have to, and if it takes even a little bit of the hurt away for me to blame myself when we both know I don’t blame myself and that I want out of this relationship because you’re not who or what I want… I’m willing to do that.” So, while you can’t avail yourself of the face-saving, ego-sparing, off-the-shelf “It’s not you; it’s me” lie, you can and should avail yourself of the lie you were workshopping there at the end of your question: “My partner wants to close things up for now.”
Trust your instinct
Jessica
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