The Georgia Straight - Doxa Fest - April 27, 2017

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THE HIDDEN BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS It has been said that mathematics is the poetry of science. Professor Cédric Villani will discuss the interface between mathematics and art, showing how both these disciplines seek to illuminate hidden beauty in the world. Tickets are FREE I Reserve tickets at pwias.ubc.ca

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50th Anniversary Issue | MAY 4, 2017

1967-2017

It all originated over beers in the old Cecil Hotel in 1967. Over the last five decades, the Georgia Straight has thrilled, enraged, educated, and enlightened Vancouverites.

4 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

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CONTENTS

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VOTED VANCOUVER’S BEST

MAY 7, 2017 Cardero Street. Sean Laidlaw photo.

11

START HERE

GREEN LIVING

Ditch the chemical-ridden skin- and body-care products prevalent at beauty salons and drugstores for these all-natural DIY solutions suggested by local maker Beata Kacy. > BY LUCY L AU

13

FOOD

Mushrooms, anyone? The spring and summer farmers markets will soon be upon us, along with these local specialty vendors. > BY GAIL JOHNSON

14 36 30 10 14 8 39 12 7 29

The Bottle Confessions Dance Health I Saw You Real Estate Savage Love Straight Stars Straight Talk Theatre

TIME OUT

17

COVER

Protesters, rockers, and a very busy Cate Blanchett bring a welcome dose of trouble to the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.. > BY ADRIAN MACK

23

32 Arts 36 Music

RUNNERS NOT REQUIRED Free Health & Sports Expo May 4-6 at the Vancouver Convention Centre West You can win prizes including Whitecaps tickets from BMO, Seahawks Training Camp VIP Passes, Saucony Shoes,

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SERVICES 37 Careers 8 Real Estate

ARTS

As a new locally created revue shows, Joni Mitchell’s songs are as timely today as when they were written decades ago. > BY ALEXANDER VARTY

33

MUSIC

Local band Said the Whale’s new status as a trio led to some experimentation with their sound for their latest album. > BY JOHN LUCAS

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straight talk

B.C. Greens’ Jonina Cambpell argues for more access to prescription heroin. “People have been calling for this for quite some time now,” Campbell said. “Even at supervisedinjection sites people are still at risk of injecting heroin that is laced with fentanyl. It is time to treat this as the public-health-care crisis that it is.” Last year, 931 people died of an illicit-drug overdose death in B.C. That compares with an average of 212 deaths annually from 2001 to 2010. The B.C. Liberal Party did not respond to a request for an interview on the subject of the overdose epidemic. The Green party’s clear and specific support for prescription heroin separates it from the two leading political parties, neither of which refer directly to that type of treatment in their election platforms. Selina Robinson is the NDP candidate for Coquitlam-Maillardville. In a telephone interview, she criticized the Green party for its leader’s past support for provincial budgets tabled by the Liberal government. Robinson argued that this indicates the Greens agree with how the Liberal government has responded to the fentanyl crisis. Meanwhile, she described the Liberals’ record as “negligent”. In a previous interview with the Straight, Robinson described an expansion of prescription heroin as worthy of consideration. “We need to explore everything because people are dying,” she said. “And so we need to be prepared to look at all of those options.” > TRAVIS LUPICK

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The provincial election isn’t the only voting opportunity taking place in Vancouver in the next two weeks. On Thursday (April 27), the City of Vancouver will announce four candidates in a competition to determine which avian species will become its feathered representative for the next year. The “city bird” will be elected online in advance of Vancouver Bird Week, which takes place from May 6 to 13. Last year’s winner, the peregrine falcon, topped the polls with 115,164 votes. “It’s to get awareness about birds around the city,” Vancouver bird advisory committee chair and SFU ornithologist Rob Butler told the Straight by phone. “We run Vancouver Bird Week.” He pointed out that birding (birdwatching) has become big business, which creates opportunities for the city to attract more tourism as it becomes better known as a haven for birds. A 2011 study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that bird aficionados spent $41 billion per year on trips and equipment in pursuit of their passion. “You start identifying birds in your back yard,” Butler explained. “You go down to the park. You get hooked on this and you start looking elsewhere.” To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation this year, Butler is on a mission to identify 150 different species in Vancouver by Canada Day (July 1). As of April 25, he was already up to 122 different types of birds. He said that the last week of April and first week of May is when most of the songbirds and shorebirds travel through Metro Vancouver. “Today there were about 70,000 sandpipers down on Roberts Bank,” Butler stated. “That will probably reach 100,000 or more.” Butler said the best locations to see birds in Vancouver are Queen Elizabeth Park, Stanley Park, Everett Crowley Park, Jericho Beach, and Trout Lake. “There is a big number of birds plus a large number of species coming through,” Butler said. “If you’re in the right place at the right time, the trees are literally dripping with birds.” > CHARLIE SMITH

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The Green party has released the health portion of its platform for the 2017 provincial election. Compared with that of the Liberals and the NDP, it includes a more detailed plan for how B.C. should respond to the fentanyl crisis. “Drugs contaminated with unknown quantities of fentanyl are killing people,” the platform reads. “Providing a clean alternative will save lives. “Substitution drugs can be therapeutically administered and monitored in supportive housing units, pharmacies, overdose response centres and clinics.” In a telephone interview, Jonina Campbell, the party’s candidate for New Westminster, confirmed those points mean the B.C. Greens would expand access to diacetylmorphine, the medical term for prescription heroin. “What we are doing is not working,” she told the Straight. “So it is time to look at what the evidence says.” One clinic in the Downtown Eastside has provided a small and select group of patients with prescription heroin since November 2014. An in-depth report the Straight published last month describes how patients who receive a regulated supply of heroin no longer have to risk injecting themselves with fentanyl, like those addicts forced to buy drugs on the street. On Friday (April 21), Health Canada proposed revising federal regulations to make it significantly easier for doctors to supply patients with prescription heroin. The changes would eliminate many import restrictions, something that Vancouver care providers have complained about in the past. Campbell said it is now time to expand access to this class of opioidsubstitution therapy in B.C. “The provincial health officer and chief coroner are asking government to look at allowing health authorities to offer clean, medical-grade heroin to addicts for whom drug treatment has failed repeatedly or who are at risk of dying from contaminated street opioids,” she said. Campbell added the federal health minister to that list. Vancouver’s mayor and B.C.’s health minister have also said they support wider access to prescription heroin.

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The Georgia Straight | Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly | Volume 51 Number 2573 1635 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 1W9 www.straight.com Phone: 604-730-7000 / Fax: 604-730-7010 / e-mail: gs.info@straight.com Display Advertising: 604-730-7020 / Fax: 604-730-7012 / e-mail: sales@straight.com Classifieds: 604-730-7060 / e-mail: classads@straight.com Subscriptions: 604-730-7000 Distribution: 604-730-7087 EDITOR + PUBLISHER Dan McLeod ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Yolanda Stepien GENERAL MANAGER Matt McLeod EDITOR Charlie Smith SECTION EDITORS

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Tammy Kwan, Lucy Lau, Travis Lupick, Carlito Pablo, Amanda Siebert, Craig Takeuchi, Kate Wilson SENIOR EDITOR Martin Dunphy EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jennie Ramstad PROOFREADER Pat Ryffranck CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Gregory Adams, Nathan Caddell, David Chau, Jack Christie, Jennifer Croll, Ken Eisner (Movies), George Fetherling, Tara Henley, Michael Hingston, Ng Weng Hoong, Alex Hudson, Kurtis Kolt,

Robin Laurence (Visual Arts), Mark Leiren-Young, John Lekich, Amy Lu, Bob Mackin, Michael Mann, Rose Marcus, Beth McArthur, Verne McDonald, Allan MacInnis, Guy MacPherson, Tony Montague, Kathleen Oliver, Ben Parfitt, Vivian Pencz, Bill Richardson, Gurpreet Singh, Jacqueline Turner, Andrea Warner, Jessica Werb, Stephen Wong, Alan Woo ART DEPARTMENT MANAGER

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The Georgia Straight is published every Thursday by the Vancouver Free Press Publishing SUBMISSIONS The Straight accepts no responsibility for, and will not Corp. Copies are distributed free every week throughout Vancouver, Burnaby, North necessarily respond to, any submitted materials. All submissions should be and West Vancouver, New Westminster, and Richmond. International Standard Serial addressed to contact@straight.com. Number ISSN 0709-8995. Subscription rates in Canada $182.00/52 issues (includes GST), $92.00/26 issues (includes GST); United States $379.00/52 issues, $205.00/ 26 issues; foreign $715.00/52 issues, $365.00/26 issues. Contact 604-730-7087 if you wish to distribute free copies of the Georgia Straight at your place of business. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Vancouver Free Press, Best Of Vancouver, BOV And Golden Plates Are Trade-Marks Of Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp.

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 7

HOUSING

Home search: Parental push focuses the mind

M

illennials are sometimes dubbed “Generation Screwed”. It is said that young people nowadays face difficult prospects in life and that it applies to homeownership as well. A typical narrative says that it is tougher for people born from 1980 to 2000 to buy a house compared to their elders. However, a report by the TorontoDominion Bank has noted that millennials are “faring better economically than is commonly portrayed”. According to the TD Economics report, more than 50 percent of millennials in Canada owned a home as of the first half of 2015. Moreover, they are buying at a “younger age than their parents—or any other cohort that has come before them, for that matter”. Hailey Curtis, 22, is a new addition to the ranks of millennial homeowners. In January this year, she moved into her condo. “I just wanted to get a head start while I have the opportunity,” Curtis told the Georgia Straight in a phone Hailey Curtis is only 22, but she still interview. saved enough for a down payment. According to her, she has a wellpaying job as a manager in a financial- Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in March this year. technology company in Vancouver. Curtis related that her parents According to the Paris-based think steered her in the right direction: “They tank, Canada’s economy will grow by said, like, ‘You need to be saving up,’ 2.4 percent and 2.2 percent in 2017 because I never went to postsecondary and 2018, respectively, surpassing the school. I landed…a job that I really like, 1.4-percent growth figure for 2016. and it was full-time. And I was really, However, the OECD in the same really, unsure about report expressed what I wanted concern about to do after high the pricey housschool anyway.” ing market in Carlito Pablo She continued: this country. “So I just said, ‘Let’s forget it for now.’ “In advanced economies, some And they said, ‘Well, that’s fine. If you countries have experienced rapid don’t want to go to school, you don’t house price increases in recent have to. But you need to save your years, including Australia, Canada, money and your goal needs to be realis- Sweden and the United Kingdom,” tic, because you need to get in [the real- the OECD stated. “As past experiestate market] as early as possible so ence has shown, a rapid rise of that you can pay everything off as early house prices can be a precursor of as possible and not, you know, have a an economic downturn.” mortgage when you’re 60, like us.’ ” Curtis got her Port Coquitlam It was more than just encouragement condo for less than $230,000, and that she received from her parents. she recalled that the 700-square“They let me stay with them with foot-plus unit wasn’t even the cheapno charge. So all the money I would est at the time. have been spending on rent or payCiting her experience, she said that ing my parents, I was able to save the Tri-Cities, which includes Coit,” Curtis said. quitlam and Port Moody, is a “good After four years of saving, she had place to start” for first-time home enough for a down payment. “It was buyers because prices in the area are just the right time, like I was finan- relatively affordable. cially ready,” she said. “Anything past that, like BurCurtis also said that it helped that naby…Vancouver, I don’t think I’ll her realtor, Garth Sylte, is also a mil- be able to afford that in a long time lennial. She met him at an open house until I’ve paid off a lot more of my and, a homeowner himself, he was able apartment and have some equity,” to make a good connection with her. Curtis said. According to Curtis, her biggest From her new place, she said that concern about owning a property is it’s now easier for her to get to work if the economy slumps and she loses via public transit. her job. Being in Port Coquitlam also For now, prospects look good, gives her more comfort: “It’s close based on the interim global economic enough to my parents. I don’t get too outlook released by Organisation for homesick or lonely.” -

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be professional politicians to run for office. As for Le Pen, Villani accused her of advancing an “inward notion of France and detaching it from the rest of the world”. And he claimed that Le Pen’s fiscal policies would multiply France’s debt by five times. “It is a program that is out of this world, given the amount of things that she promised,” Villani said. “It would mean chaos [and] confusion for five years.” When asked why he is so infatuated with mathematics, the philosophical Villani replied that it’s not possible to explain love. He said that a person can just appreciate the quest and take delight in unravelling mysteries. “Mathematics is about finding the deep rules of the universe and explaining them to the whole world,” he said. Then he quipped: “And who does this except the French?” In fact, some of the greatest mathematicians in history—including René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre de Fermat—were French. According to Villani, there are more mathematicians in Paris than in any other city in the world. “I don’t believe it is an issue of language but it is an issue of culture,” he said. “The French culture likes the abstraction and the rational thinking.” Some like to think of mathematics as a language because it can convey a great deal of information in easily digestible ways. Villani, however, noted that although languages are learned innately, with no need for training, this isn’t the case with mathematics. “Neuroscience has shown that it uses different brain areas,” he said. “But you can use mathematics to represent and re-create bits of the world and phenomena around us.” -

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Cédric Villani has won the prestigious Fields Medal. Marie Lan Nguyen photo.

MA

édric Villani is at the pinnacle of the math world. Winner of the Fields Medal—widely seen as his discipline’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize— the French scholar is an acknowledged giant in solving partial differential equations. But unlike other star mathematicians, he has also become an international celebrity for his storytelling and his unique fashion sensibility. Villani’s TED talk last year in Vancouver, entitled “What’s so sexy about math?”, has generated more than 1.4 million page views. He has been featured on BBC broadcaster Brady Haran’s YouTube Numberphile program. And in Paris, where he is the director of the Institut Henri Poincaré, he is often stopped in the street by people who instantly recognize the man who looks like he walked right out of an 18th-century period piece. Every day, Villani wears a threepiece suit, colourful velvet cravat, pocket watch, centre-parted shoulder-length hair, and large spider brooch on his left lapel. He refuses to reveal why he wears the brooches, maintaining an aura of mystery as he travels the world promoting the benefits of mathematics. When the Georgia Straight contacted Villani by phone in advance of his May 2 lecture for the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, he was ready to discuss why he believes math can be as pleasurable as sex. He was also prepared to talk about why there is big money in mathematics and how mathematicians can help the public understand and address climate change. But he was also keen to talk about the French presidential election. That’s because Villani has been a high-profile supporter of centrist Emmanuel Macron, who came out on top in the first round of voting on April 23. Macron is heavily favoured to defeat hard-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff election on May 7. “I know the election is not won yet, but this first one was extremely uncertain, while the second round is much less uncertain, in my view and in the view of most people,” Villani said. He also revealed that he’s considering running for parliament with Macron’s fledgling party, En Marche. That’s because Macron has said that he loves Europe rather than being suspicious of it, and Macron dispenses with the left-right dichotomy of politics, preferring policies oriented toward the country’s future. This includes an aggressively proenvironmental stance that includes doubling France’s solar-power and wind-power capacity by 2022. “Many, many people who thought that politics was not for them were very excited to see the appearance of this new kind of movement with Macron,” Villani said. He also appreciated Macron’s message that people don’t have to

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SHOWINGS BY APPT ONLY APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 9

FOLK FEST

Folk fest lineup unveiled > BY M IKE U SI NGE R

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he Vancouver Folk Music Festival will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a lineup that pays tribute to the event’s rich past while embracing today’s reality that genres are blurring in ways that once seemed unimaginable. Headliners for the event, which runs July 13 to 16 at Jericho Beach Park, include Billy Bragg with Joe Henry, Kathleen Edwards, Shawn Colvin, Barenaked Ladies, and Rhiannon Giddens. Bragg and Henry—who will perform songs from their collaboration Shine a Light: Field Recordings From the Great American Railroad—will be the sentimental favourite of long-time folk-festival attendees. The 59-year-old Bragg first rose to prominence at a time when the western world was ruled by right-wing likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. With Donald Trump now in the White House, songs like “Help Save the Youth of America” and “To Have and to Have Not” seem even more relevant today. Over a career that’s spanned four decades, the Grammywinning Henry has proven himself to be one of the most idiosyncratic and daring figures in Americana, working with everyone from Daniel Lanois and T Bone Burnett to Ornette Coleman and Helmet’s Paige Hamilton. On the Canadian-bred front, alt-country fans should be thrilled by the return to action of Kathleen Edwards, who just four years ago retreated from the music business to start an Ottawa coffee shop called Quitters. Accurately dubbed a with-a-bullet breakout artist by Rolling Stone after the release of her essential 2003 debut Failer, the Ontarioborn Edwards subsequently proved just that, with her last release, 2012’s Voyageur, going top-two in Canada. Speaking of Canuck chart-toppers, the Barenaked Ladies’ biggest challenge will be deciding which hits to leave out of their set. Whether the long-running Scarberians are dipping into their wacky-folk early years for “If I Had $1000000” or going down the stupidly infectious pop road with “One Week”, there’s guaranteed to be no shortage of audience sing-along participation. South Dakota–born Shawn Colvin might be best recognized for her Grammy-winning 1997 hit “Sunny Came Home”, but she’s been straddling the line between folk and thinking-person’s country for over three decades. Guaranteed to be the show-stopping surprise as far as the headliners are considered, Rhiannon Giddens has rocketed from a member of old-timey cult faves the Carolina Chocolate Drops to collaborating with Elvis Costello and Marcus Mumford. Expect a set that will swing from rawhidecountry blues to Muscle Shoals soul. As always, the Vancouver Folk Festival won’t be focusing only on music from the western world. Sixty acts from

Documentary takes a new view of death

No longer operating a cappuccino machine at an Ottawa coffee shop, Kathleen Edwards is headed here for folk fest.

18 countries will descend on Jericho Beach Park, from as far away as Greenland (the winsome Nive Nielsen & the Deer Children), Egypt (folk agitator Ramy Essam, who’s been profiled on 60 Minutes), and Haiti (the rhythmic Chouk Bwa Libète, a band that comes from the voodoo-steeped area of Gonaïves). Also making the trek to the West Coast will be France’s Blick Bassy, Spain’s Korrontzi, Australia’s Archie Roach, and Columbia’s Sidestepper. One of the Vancouver Folk Festival’s big strengths has been its support of talent in its own back yard. Multiple Juno Award–winner Alpha Yaya Diallo, much-respected veteran Roy Forbes, and indie-pop up-and-comers the Belle Game will all make appearances. Those for whom folk will always be first and foremost protest music, meanwhile, will want to catch Lotusland activist Luke Wallace. VFMF 2017 is smartly peppered with undercard acts that continue to move folk forward in interesting ways. Can’tmiss artists include doom-folk genre-masher Cold Specks from Toronto, cabaret-pop alchemist Leif Vollebekk from Montreal, and the critically adored John K. Samson & the Winter Wheat from Winnipeg. Diversity is also the buzzword when looking at the international undercard. Australia’s Mae Trio specializes in honey-dipped harmonies straight from old-timey Appalachia. And England’s Will Varley makes throwback folk at its most clever; if you want a damning commentary on our Internet-obsessed times, check out his “Talking Cat Blues”. Those who argue that the Congotronics series is the most deliriously mesmerizing thing to ever come out of world music, meanwhile, should be elated that the Congo’s Mbongwana Star is headed to VFMF 2017. Get ready to lose yourself in the music in a way you never thought possible. Early-bird passes for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival are on sale now. For tickets and a full run-down of the event, go to thefestival.bc.ca/. -

hen he knew that his time was up, James Pollard made some unusual choices about the legacy he wanted to leave. “I really do believe that the whole point of the film is to start having more frank conversations around death and see it as part of our living experience and as a social process rather than just a medical event,” says Carmen Pollard, James Pollard’s final days are a local film-industry vet who intimatechronicled in For Dear Life. ly chronicled her cousin’s final years in the documentary For Dear Life. the oncologists and palliative-care Carmen’s film couldn’t be more blunt specialists that composed his close in its depiction of the process of dying. community toward the end. “It’s so messy and it’s not pretty and we And then there’s the whole R & D don’t want to look at it, and, cultur- team: friends and family, that is, busy ally, we just love control and youth and experimenting with dead rats, clay, beauty,” she says. and little caskets as “This is the antiththey try to honour esis of all that.” James’s wish to be In the wake of preserved like “a Adrian Mack his prostate-cancer bog man”. diagnosis, Carmen was initially struck “James always had what he would by “how much James wanted to talk call hare-brained ideas about almost about the fact that he was dying.” Two everything,” Carmen says with a years later, she floated the idea of ex- laugh. “So nothing was a simple propanding the conversation into what ject. But I immediately knew he could she initially saw as an art installation. pull it off, because I know him.” “He was a very public guy and he grew Rather serendipitously, For Dear up in the theatre,” she says, “so he Life will premiere at the DOXA Docureally saw the world through the lens mentary Film Festival almost a year of theatre, and for him life was a per- to the day of James’s passing. Carmen formance. I think with realizing this notes that “it’s still pretty raw.” was the end for him, he saw it as an op“James wasn’t afraid of dying or portunity to take that even further and the pain leading up to it, but he was try to create a lasting project.” so, so terrified of the actual moment So Carmen started to document of blinking out of existence,” she says. James’s last days, beginning with “Because he really, firmly believed that her iPhone and then graduating to a it was the end. For me, that’s the real real camera by the time the Know- tragedy of his story, and so—maybe ledge Network came aboard. Besides just as a coping mechanism—I like to observing her subject’s shocking think that it’s not.” physical decline, Pollard’s four-anda-half-year diary frequently checks in For Dear Life screens at the Vancity with those closest to James, including Theatre on May 7 and the Cinemahis kids, his new romantic partner— theque on May 14. More information that’s a whole story unto itself—plus is at www.doxafestival.ca/.

Health

Bronze Age Records presents

Madou Diarra Vocalist and n'goni player from Mali performing his new album

Djandjon Hunter songs from the precolonial Mandinka Empire

Friday, April 28 at 9:00 (doors open at 8:00)

The Western Front - 303 East 8th Avenue Free concert; LP's and CD's available at the show 10 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

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APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 11

straight stars > B Y R O SE MARCUS

April 27 to May 3, 2017

T

here are just six more days of Mercury retrograde. While the end of the cycle is usually less of an issue, don’t expect the Quick One to wrap this one up without fanfare. He’s saved the best for last. Before giving you the scoop on Mercury, let me give you the scoop on Venus. Her retrograde cycle ended last weekend, and, as of Friday morning, she’ll again pick up the pace in hot-stuff Aries. Venus started the retrograde cycle getting stoked in this go-for-it sign, but she swam back into the Pisces ocean for most of April. She hasn’t been idly treading water, though. She’s kept us totally immersed. What’s real; what’s not? Is it really worth it? Should I; can I; will I? Will it/they, and when? It’s been a month of feeling our way along. Shortly after Venus treks into Aries, Mercury retrograde links up with Uranus in Aries. This hot-flash duo is a cut-to-the chase, flash-of-genius, and breakthrough pairing. When they are working at their best, synchronicity, spontaneity, and opportunity are too. They can awaken, enlighten, inspire, liberate, or gift you with something out of the blue. It must be said, they are also a high-stress, volatile, radical, lighting-strikes combination. Things can break or tempers can suddenly go snap. See the clearing away as a plus or not, Mercury/Uranus well aligned with Saturn makes the timing right to take your best shot and to get the job done. Mercury ends retrograde on Wednesday morning. The day runs well; the evening does too. Start to finish, it’s all systems go.

news. Don’t take an unnecessary risk but ride the good wave when you see it/ feel it. The spontaneous and new could be great. Innovate; follow instinct and intuition. Friday through Tuesday keeps you clipping right along. Next Wednesday’s stars are yours to own. Seize the day; enjoy the reward!

VIRGO

LIBRA

SCORPIO

August 23–September 23

Mercury/Uranus can kickstart your Friday with an unexpected reason to hit it earlier than usual. They’ll continue to keep you well stoked and in hot pursuit for the next couple of weeks. Venus, freshly into Aries, could fire up a new financial prospect, passion, or love interest. Wednesday is a great day to dream, say, and do. Spontaneity and creativity are a winning combination. September 23–October 23

You can now get back to it or you can get pulled into it. Either way, you’ll hit rapid fast-forward regarding a key relationship, a contract revisit (karmic or actual), or a money matter. Additionally, Venus into Aries boosts social opportunity. On another note, your inner rebel wants a say; your inner genius wants to play. Wednesday, go for it. October 23–November 22

Disruption can kick-start your Friday. Mercury/Uranus can dish up something that requires fast thinking and/or immediate attention. On another note, a break in the routine or something new tossed into the mix hits it just right. Venus into Aries suggests there’s money to be made or money to be ARIES spent. An improvement or an upMarch 20–April 20 grade is your net gain. Wednesday She’s been dallying else- is a smooth sail. where for this past month, but as of SAGITTARIUS Friday, Venus fires up in again in November 22–December 21 Aries. Along with Mercury/Uranus, Game for anything goes/ watch for a sudden hit to front-load your day. They don’t call you hot spur of the moment are your best stuff for nothing! Whether inspired, plays Friday. Whether you are on provoked, or surprised, expect to hit first or second go ’round, know you the ground running and to keep go- are at the start of a good run. Mering strong through mid–next week. cury/Uranus will continue to keep that fresh spark lit for the next Wednesday is your best day. couple of weeks. Watch for your TAURUS best choices, options, and avenues to April 20–May 21 become more obvious and straightDon’t expect a slow start forward. Wednesday is your best. Friday; expect to hit it full tilt right CAPRICORN from the get-go. Mercury/Uranus December 21–January 20 can start the day with a jolt. AcciRenovating, moving, adddents and mishaps can happen when you go too fast. Feeling restless? In ing, subtracting, or making some want or need? For the next month, other major change? Whether by Venus in Aries keeps you preoccu- choice or necessity, it’s action time! pied with an internal dialogue. Control or emotions can be hard Through Tuesday, Mercury retro- to maintain once Friday puts pedal to metal on matters to do with the grade keeps it all on edge. home front, family, or personal GEMINI reinvention. Mercury retrograde May 21–June 21 ends next Wednesday, but you are Mars in Gemini isn’t the wise to get a head start now. only reason for the speed track. AQUARIUS Friday’s Mercury/Uranus nixes the January 20–February 18 need for your morning caffeine. This Venus into Aries dishes jump-start duo will spring you into action before you can think twice. up something fresh and new for you An early head start is the wise one’s to try on for size. Stimulation and way. Venus into Aries gives you conversation are easy to come by. something new to consider, say, or A brainstorm, conversation, surdo. One thing leads to another. Wed- prise news, or unexpected moment could stir up the excitement on Frinesday, reward yourself. day. A repeat or revisit could deliver CANCER even better than the first time. WedJune 21–July 22 nesday delivers the goods. Off with the old; on with PISCES the new. Whether you are actively February 18–March 20 working on it or Mercury/Uranus You are especially quick on springs it on you, now through mid– next week jettisons you through the uptake Friday. Let intuition or the bust-up-the-concrete time. A whole moment dictate the play. A fresh innew reality is in the works. The un- sight could give you a whole new take charted can be stressful, but Venus, on something or someone. Venus freshly into Aries, adds benefits and into Aries enhances financial proshelps you to make better inroads pects but it can also see you spend! Keep it simple Saturday/Sunday. where you need it the most. Monday through Wednesday, good/ LEO positive strides can be made. -

July 22–August 23

Friday, Mercury/Uranus B o o k a re a d i n g o r s i g n u p f o r makes for the exciting, the unexpect- Rose’s free monthly newsletter at ed, and the eventful. You could hear www.rosemarcus.com/astrolink/. 12 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

FOOD

Markets to bring farm fare to city

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ancouverites are no doubt overjoyed to be saying sayonara to the nastiest, bleakest winter in recent memory. Besides having some mood-boosting sunshine to look forward to, the end of that season brings the reboot of summer farmers markets. Although the Nat Bailey Winter Market wrapped up over Earth Day weekend and Hastings Park has its last go this Sunday (April 30), Vancouver Farmers Markets’ sunny season kicks off on May 6 at Trout Lake and May 7 in Kitsilano. Downtown, Mount Pleasant, the West End, Riley Park, and Main Street Station follow. Visit www.eatlocal.org/ for details; here are a few local vendors that will be making the rounds.

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BATARD BAKERY Chris Brown, Vancouver Farmers Markets’ vendors will range from Glen Valley Artichoke Farms to Howling Moon Craft Cider. former owner of Rise Artisan Bakery and Ecco il Pane Bakery (the city’s wild, sustainable seafood. Look for apricot chanterelles, and lobster heritage, heirloom, and dessert apples, this cider comes from the first artisan bakery) joined forces sablefish, lingcod, halibut, albacore mushrooms, among others. Okanagan Valley. The label’s sigwith the Born family of Finest at Sea tuna, and wild Pacific salmon: chifor this proudly old-fashioned bou- nook, sockeye, coho, pink, and chum. GLEN VALLEY ARTICHOKE FARMS nature product is the Revival, a langerie and café. They make rustic Bring your insulated bag, stock up, Sure, you love them in spinach dip, but medium-bodied cider that starts artichokes have much more going for out crisp and has a fruity finish and loaves (such as spelt, levain noir, and and get ready to fire up the barbie. them than that costarring role. Said pairs well with soft cheeses, spicy seeded rye) as well as exquisite pastries like espresso-praline biscotti, goat- OYSTER AND KING If they’re to help lower cholesterol and improve foods, and barbecued chicken. Its cheese-and-apple scone, cinnamon- good enough for local chefs, the cardiovascular health, the vegetables Revolution cider is light, dry, and mushrooms from contain vitamin C, fibre, folate, phyto- subtly smoky, terrific with wild B.C. orange morning Oyster and King nutrients, and antioxidants. Try them salmon. Look, too, for the Sidre bun, chocolateare good enough in frittata, soup, or pasta dishes, or Blanco (sparkling apple wine), made raspberry-almond for you. Coast simply drizzle with olive oil and lemon with an equal blend of Swiss sharp torte, tarte au citGail Johnson M u s h r o o m t e c h juice and roast them. cider apples and late-harvest oldron, and kouignEvery year, this small family farm growth Pinot Blanc grapes. It has amman: sugary laminated dough Ltd., an organic production facilrolled into layers and baked until cara- ity in Cloverdale that grows several near Fort Langley grows 20,000 arti- hints of melon and apricot and pairs melized. You’ll smell the stall before hundred tons of specialty organic chokes, the flowering plants tradition- nicely with shellfish and salads. mushrooms per year, started out ally from the Mediterranean and Cali- , you see it. as a research hut at UBC in 1995. fornia. It also harvests summer and YELLOW BASKET BAKING Who BLUE COMET SEAFOODS The The company cultivates certified- winter squash, beans, peppers, cab- says there’s no such thing as vegan family-run business and Ocean Wise organic lion’s mane (or monkey’s bage, kale, tomatoes, and cardoons, treats? The following nut-free goodies partner got its start at Steveston Fish- head), baby king oyster, king oys- thistlelike plants related to artichokes are made with organic local flour, orerman’s Wharf before it began sell- ter, blue oyster, and shiitake mush- that can be fried, tossed in stews, or ganic coconut oil, and local produce: ing at Vancouver farmers markets in rooms that it distributes directly eaten raw (after peeling away the outer snickerdoodles, chocolate–orange zest 2005. Its three vessels—The Sleepless to many of this area’s restaurants. layer) with dip or hummus. cones, chocolate-chip tea cake, forage Nights, Eldorado 1, and Pacific Shad- It also works with local foragers cookies, cinnamon buns, roastedow—ply the B.C. coast from Haida for wild mushrooms such as mat- HOWLING MOON CRAFT CIDER tomato-and-herb scones, rhubarb Gwaii to Johnstone Strait, harvesting sutake, white chanterelles, yellow Made with a mix of freshly pressed thumbprint cookies, and more. -

www.boblikesthaifood.com

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1967-2017

MAY 4, 2017 The Georgia Straight is celebrating its 50th birthday with a blockbuster issue celebrating how Vancouver has grown into one of the world’s most admired cities. In our May 4th anniversary issue, we will examine how the Straight chronicled and participated in Vancouver’s evolution from a sleepy backwater into a global centre for environmental innovation and awareness. We’ll look at the rise of international cuisine, progressive ideas, and LGBT rights, all of which have been advanced in the Straight for five decades. The 50th anniversary issue will take you down memory lane with local musicians, artists, and others who’ve made our creative economy the envy of the world.

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 13

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 22, 2017 WHERE: The Yale

Sam, I saw you at the Yale! I’m fairly certain you don’t know who I am but I embarrassingly recognized you from Tinder a while back. Almost as shameful as me posting on this. We made some eye contact but that’s all. I’ve got long blonde hair, no idea if you noticed me. You don’t strike me as the type of person to read these but you’re fine as hell and I hate myself for not coming up and talking to you.

HARPOONIST & THE AXE MURDERER

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 23, 2017 WHERE: Commodore Ballroom

E XC E P T I O N A L I TA L I A N C U I S I N E

You were with a group of friends towards the back of the Commodore Ballroom. Wearing red t-shirt , reddish beard and great smile. We danced a bit and shared a few sips of beer. You ended up in a conversation with a friend and I didn’t want to interrupt even though I wanted to ask your name and dance some more. Then the show ended and I lost you in the crowd...

YOU PRETENDED TO HAVE NO BEARD

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 20, 2017 WHERE: Hoy’s Wonton House on Kingsway

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AMANDA ON YOUR WAY TO JOHN MAYER

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 19, 2017 WHERE: International Village Starbucks Hi Amanda... couldn’t think of another way to reach you other than here or Craigslist. Super hot I know lol. I would love to buy you another candy from Starbucks at International Village and see you again. -A

DRIVE-BY SMILE AND WAVE

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 14, 2017 WHERE: Kingsway and Victoria Drive Last week I drove past you in my white van and smiled, you smiled back and we waved. I wish I’d stopped! Seemed mutual? You’re blonde, I think you had a red toque on. Corner of Victoria and Kingsway... I think. Something like that. The day is fuzzy, but your smile is not.

MYSTERY BIKE MAN ALL AROUND VANCOUVER

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 14, 2017 WHERE: Everywhere Downtown Vancouver You: tall, dark hair, handsome, outgoing, Adam Driver doppelgänger. Me: significantly but not quite as tall as you, half Asian, light brown hair. I’ve seen you all around the classic Vancouver spots: Yyoga (possibly), Whole Foods on Cambie and most recently the sea wall near Science World. Last I saw you, you were on your bike with female company. I recognized you and I think you did too so you said hi. I got too nervous to respond. Who are you mystery bike man?!

MIXED WITH DREADS ON HASTINGS AT WOODWARDS

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 19, 2017 WHERE: East Hastings

Saw you walking in Hastings between Cambie and Abbott this afternoon on my way home from working out. We made eye contact briefly and you had this vibe... When I looked back you had turned around and were walking behind me but must have ducked in somewhere cause you were gone when I looked again. If you recall and are down, tell me what I was wearing? I’d love to grab a coffee and hear all about you.

BEAUTIFUL LADY ON FLIGHT FROM MONTREAL TO VANCOUVER

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 18, 2017 WHERE: AC195 flight from Montreal to Vancouver We were sitting on the same row but on opposite sides of the aisle. You were watching Big Bang Theory episodes during the flight. We glanced and smiled at each other several times. You had long, red hair, blue jeans, and a small bag. I let you pass in front of me as we were disembarking and it appeared you had a connecting flight to catch. Maybe sometime you’ll be in Vancouver and free for a coffee or drink?

130 BUS HEADING TO METROTOWN

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 14, 2017 WHERE: Willingdon and Hastings

You; Filipino sitting at the back talking on the phone in a red sweater. Me black jacket, several smiles exchanged and would like to see that smile again :)

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 3, 2017 WHERE: Studio Marine

You blonde middle aged and smoking hot. Hard worker with a smile that never quits... I get butterflies every time you walk into my stage or by my bench. I’m a little younger but believe me I’m not inexperienced. A series of... Say hi sometime. Let’s go for drinks.

KARAOKE DREAM MAN

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 13, 2017 WHERE: British Ex-Servicemens Club I didn’t sing, and neither did you, before I left. You were wearing plaid and had a delicious ginger composition. I like your beard. We made eye contact once or twice. I would like to again!

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ith the sun starting to make regular appearances, we’re likely in the mood for some fresh and lively wines to suit the season, right? There’s a great opportunity to dive into a whole flurry of wines perfect for this time of year when the Great New Zealand Wine Tiki Tour hits our shores next Thursday (May 4). It’s all going down at the fancypants Terminal City Club (837 West Hastings Street) starting at 7 p.m. That’s when your $65 ticket opens the door to sampling wines from 29 wineries pouring some of their best stuff. Even if you’re not a fan of Sauvignon Blanc, the country’s flagship wine

The Bottle Kurtis Kolt variety, there’ll be plenty of other wine styles on offer. Some stellar Rieslings, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noirs, and Syrahs are coming out of the country as well. With almost 30 wineries in the room, there is going to be a little something for everyone. Here are a few wineries I would be making a beeline toward: ASTROLABE WINES Founded in 1996, Astrolabe’s wines are all about purity of fruit sourced from a trio of subregions in Marlborough: Awatere Valley, Wairau Valley, and the Kekerengu coast. I’ve always found winemaker Simon Waghorn’s bottlings pristine and elegant. You can get a sneak preview of his fare by picking up a bottle of Astrolabe Sauvignon Blanc 2015 for $22.49 at B.C. Liquor Stores. BRANCOTT ESTATE These folks were the original producers of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc back in 1975, and Patrick Materman has been at the winemaking helm since 1990. It probably goes without saying that they’re getting the hang of it. While enjoying an encounter with these historical players, make sure to ask them about Sauvignon Gris—an almost-lost white Bordeaux variety they’ve been reviving, offering the citrusy aromatics of Sauvignon Blanc amid the weight and stone-fruit character that Pinot Gris is known to carry. CROWDED HOUSE All cards on the

table: I’ve never tried a wine from this winery, but I have been a long-time fan of Crowded House, the Australian band led by New Zealander Neil Finn. There’s no actual connection here (the name is in reference to Marlborough being chock-a-block with vineyard see page 16

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 15

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properties), nor is there any connection of winemaker Peter Jackson to the dude who directed the Lord of the Rings movies. Their terroir-driven wines are made from various Marlborough sites and their aim is to pick all of their fruit at optimal ripeness and then not get in its way too much in the winery. I’m looking forward to giving ’em a whirl. VINTNERS Loveblock comes to us from Erica and Kim Crawford (yes, that Kim Crawford), and my first opportunity to try its wines was when Erica visited Vancouver a few years back. There were a few media and trade in attendance at a dinner she was hosting at Cactus Club in Coal Harbour, and she’s one of those people who is just so amiable and charming the moment you meet her: quick to laugh and generous with her industry knowledge. You can even glean elements of her personality on www.loveblockwine.com, where she eschews corporatespeak and overly technical terms, preferring to write in the first person, almost as if she’s having a chat with pals. Although Erica and Kim grew the Kim Crawford brand into the powerhouse it is today, after its sale they went back to their roots of small-batch winemaking, creating wines with brilliant concentration from high-alititude vineyards in Marlborough’s Awatere Valley, and down in Central Otago as well. Their Sauvignon Blanc offers waves of muddled lemon, peaches, and quince, while their Pinot Noir explodes with darkberry fruit, finishing off with a nice, earthy landing. They also get bonus points for having some of the prettiest wine labels out there.

SPY VALLEY WINES Jan and Bryan Johnson’s Waihopai Valley winery has 130 hectares of plantings, and although they include New Zealand mainstays like Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, and Pinot Gris, they also produce varieties we don’t see as often from the country, such as Gewßrztraminer, Merlot, Malbec, and even a little olive oil, too. Plenty of single vineyard wines offer a good drilling down into various components of their terroir.

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DOXA FEST

In 2017, you could say that DOXA is star-

ing back at itself. For a documentary-film festival that has hardly ever been shy about agit-prop, disruption, or general rabble-rousing, giving this year’s spotlight series to “Troublemakers” merely feels like an idea whose time has finally come, and then only because it hasn’t already. Here, we find 10 films of “deep dissent and defiance”, as the DOXA program puts it, “about people righting wrongs and reimagining the future”. For a filmmaker like Vancouver’s David Goldberg, the wager is that troublemaking can be infectious. His debut film, “The Caretakers”, joins the protesters who put themselves between Kinder Morgan and the territory being eyeballed for a transmountain pipeline on Burnaby Mountain in 2014. Goldberg captures the sometimes brutal clash with police that followed a successful injunction by the Texan company in November of that year. Such images are depressingly familiar. But “The Caretakers” puts its major focus on the relationship between indigenous land and water protectors and their settler allies, while taking a brief but critical time-out to speak with former B.C. Hydro

BY ADR IAN M ACK

The trouble with DOXA

Indigenous land and water protectors join settler activists to protect Burnaby Mountain from a pipeline in the inspiring locally made doc, “The Caretakers”.

evidence that anyone can have their mind changed, even in areas as intractably polarized as energy policy and environmental protection, and even if they’re a former board memMischief makers, rabble-rousers, and one major Hollywood star lead the charge at this year’s documentary film festival ber at Suncor. DOXA includes movies in CEO Marc Eliesen. His blunt estimation of the its Spotlight on Troublemakers series that aren’t protest, remarkably, is that it’s completely neces- so overtly political—you’ll find music, art, and sary. Canada’s regulatory bodies have abandoned some of the more arcane realms of social theory the public interest in favour of facilitating multi- among its subjects, plus at least one major Hollynational oil companies, he says, deeming the ac- wood star setting a few conceptual fires—but each one is a challenge to prevailing modes of thought. tions of the National Energy Board “a farce”. “He was literally fizzing,” says Goldberg, in a call And behind all that is the insistence that a movie to the Straight. “He was agitated about the stance that can actually make a difference. Kinder Morgan and the NEB had taken, and was “I think storytelling is what’s at the root of it, and very proactive toward the direct action taken by the storytelling has been part of humanity since forprotesters. And that was awesome.” It’s also stirring ever,” says Goldberg. “When you say that history is

2

No way to delay that trouble comin’ every day

You wanna rumble? Here

2 are four Straight-approved

picks from DOXA’s Spotlight on Troublemakers series.

ADA FOR MAYOR (Spain) Elected in an upset in 2015, Ada Colau went from housing-rights activist to mayor of Barcelona in three incredible years. During her campaign, captured here in its entirety, she is ridiculed by media, attacked for her “Venezuelan” politics, and—rather hilariously, really—excluded from all the off-camera chumminess between the pompous mainstream charlatans she’s running against. Her party, a new leftist coalition called Guanyem, even thwarts a clumsy sabotage attempt traced back to the interior ministry. That’s how sad and impotent the establishment starts to look in the face of Colau’s simple integrity. Meanwhile, in an amazing series of private video diaries, she wrestles with her profound distaste for every single aspect of the whole toxic charade. We couldn’t relate more. An essential film. Cinematheque, May 9 (7 p.m.) DONNA HARAWAY: STORY TELLING FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL (Belgium) A blast from

that distinctly Californian academic milieu sitting

somewhere between the human potential movement and Silicon Valley futurism, here we have the influential author of “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” holding forth (some might say rambling circuitously) on topics including science fiction and her life inside a sexually fluid extended family of friends and lovers. Much of it is captivatingly dotty, including director Fabrizio Terranova’s inelegant if disquieting video effects, like the enormous jellyfish that placidly floats in and out of Haraway’s study. Some of it is exquisite brain food. It all comes together (probably) in the wonderful sci-fi short story Haraway recites at the film’s end. The Annex, May 5 (7 p.m.) MANIFESTO (Germany) Closing DOXA with a

high-concept bang, German artist Julian Rosefeldt unleashes Cate Blanchett to recite from a collage of (mostly) 20th-century art manifestos while taking on 13 different ironically pitched personas. The effect can be hilarious, as in the whey-faced widow who bellows “From now on we want to shit in different colours!” at a funeral procession (from a Tristan Tzara Dadaist tract), or the rather brilliantly executed segment in which an anchor and a reporter (both Blanchett) debate minimalism in the frigid tones of the television news industry. As a conservative southern mom, an imperious Russian choreographer, or

written by the winners, documentary gets to be a critical voice of the story as it’s happening. And with education systems broadening into nothing but multiple-choice questions, critical thought or storytelling in any form is needed, in documentary or narrative film.” But can it actually lead to any kind of advance? Goldberg thinks so, and he can back up his belief with some pretty compelling anecdotal evidence. “Well, my dad voted for Harper,” he says, with a laugh. “But I showed him this film and he really liked it, so—what kind of dialogue has that started in his mind?” Yeah, fair enough, but on the other hand kids are always trouble. The DOXA Documentary Film Festival runs at various venues from next Thursday (May 4) to May 14. More information is at www.doxafestival.ca/.

a wild-eyed homeless Glaswegian, Blanchett is clearly having a blast. Who wouldn’t, given how ecstatically alive and provocative so many of these words still sound? SFU-GCA, May 13 (8 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, May 14 (6:30 p.m.) RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD (Canada) Charley Patton and Jimi

Hendrix are among the godhead musicians whose veins coursed with aboriginal blood, although the real spirit animal here is Link Wray, whose incredibly influential 1958 instrumental gives this celebratory and deeply satisfying doc its name. “Here comes this sound that makes you levitate out of bed about four feet,” is how Taj Mahal remembers first hearing Wray’s menacing (and much banned) hit. Mahal’s own outfit would feature Comanche-Kiowa guitar genius Jesse Ed Davis, also lovingly profiled here alongside jazz pioneer Mildred Bailey and a remarkable succession of artists leading all the way to Black Eyed Peas’ Taboo. In the end, with help from the likes of Wayne Kramer and Iggy Pop, Rumble makes it abundantly clear that the time has come to rewrite the book on American music, or as the ever-pithy Robbie Robertson puts it, “Yeah, you wouldn’t let me talk about it before, well now I’m gonna talk real loud.” Vancity Theatre, May 5 (9 p.m.)

> ADRIAN MACK

ACROSS THE DOXA UNIVERSE

A

long with its Spotlight on Troublemakers, the DOXA Documentary Film Festival returns this year with regular programs including French French, Rated Y for Youth, and the Justice Forum, while a special series called Trumped! Now What? takes a well-needed look at where we might want to go next down here on Planet Crazy. We’ll be offering our take on films from all these programs in the coming weeks, starting right here and now. 78/52 (USA) The shower scene in

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho still has the power to shock. That’s a strange thing when you consider how old the film is, how black-and-white it is, how long we’ve lived with all of the sideshow butchers and demented Texan chainsaw owners that filled movies in its wake. This fact says a lot about the virtuosity that

Hitchcock brought to the 52-second stretch of celluloid, every whitetiled facet of which is, uh, dissected in this fascinating documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe. Hitchcock himself dismissed the scene as a nasty joke, but everyone from Danny Elfman and Walter Murch to Guillermo Del Toro and Illeana Douglas appears here to explain how it changed nearly everything about cinematic storytelling and mechanics. There may, in fact, be slightly too much film-school-style close reading in 78/52, at the expense of questions about certain explosive social implications, hinted at when Karen Kusama remarks that the scene represents “the first modern expression of the female body under assault”, and when Peter Bogdanovich contends that in it Hitchcock was “killing off” the idea of the top-billed woman that had dominated Hollywood only a couple of decades before. Still, as

with the original, you can’t look away. SFU-GCA, May 11 (8:30 p.m.) > BRIAN LYNCH

COMPLICIT (USA/China) Consumers of outsourced goods—that is to say, the majority of First-World peeps—are likely aware of the poor working conditions prevalent in manufacturing plants overseas. But Heather White and Lynn Zhang’s heartbreaking doc will elicit serious pause the next time viewers pick up a Chinese-made smartphone. Following the lives of manufacturing employees—many of them teens—and the tireless efforts of labour activists such as Yi Yeting, who began advocating for the rights of workers after developing occupational leukemia at age 24, Complicit reveals the inhumane ways in which hopeful, hardworking citizens are exposed to toxic chemicals on the job and the shady attempts by multibillion-dollar corporations to shed

all responsibility. The result is equal parts devastating, gut-wrenching, and infuriating—a necessary call for westerners to re-evaluate their relationship with capitalism and its astronomical cost. Vancity Theatre, May 6 (2 p.m.); Cinematheque, May 14 (6 p.m.) > LUCY LAU ELSEWHERE (Canada) Wander-

lust, the travel bug, or the call of the road—however you identify it, the intricacies of that desire are laid bare in this francophone work that bridges the traditional documentary form with experimental film. Accompanied by black-andwhite cinematography capturing the hypnotic visual rhythm of train tracks and telephone wires, various off-camera interviewees offer contemplations on the nature of travel, from the liberation of one’s self to loneliness and getting lost. While the logical flow of commentaries provides structure,

when the discussion delves into physiology and biology, the film loses emotional potency. Overall, though, it’s a thoughtful work that offers an opportunity to reflect upon the irresistible urge to explore the world that lies beyond. Cinematheque, May 11 (7:30 p.m.) > CRAIG TAKEUCHI

While disFATTITUDE (USA) crimination related to race and gender have long spawned art, protests, and social-justice crusades, less mainstream thought has been dedicated to the struggles of fat people. And if you recoiled at this flippant use of “fat”, that’s the point: we’ve been socialized to see the Fword as inherently bad—as gross, villainous, and undesirable—and Fattitude has the receipts to prove it. Through interviews with various body activists, authors, and public figures, filmmakers Lindsey Averill see next page

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 17

TOKYO IDOLS (U.K./Canada)

At the outset, the worship of female teen idols by salarymen in Japan’s otaku culture seems like organized pedophilia. While the ickiness never goes away, filmmaker Kyoko Miyake delves into the multilayered psychology and sociology behind this phenomenon. Among the middle-aged men who find empowerment from their idols to rebel against the system, Miyake peels back the layers to reveal complex roots in Japan’s economic depression, technological developments, loneliness and failure, gender dynamics, and escapism from stifling cultural pressures. An uncomfortable yet gawk-inducing watch. Vancity, May 11 (9:15 p.m.) > CT

DOXA reviews

from previous page

and Viridiana Lieberman strive to reclaim the term while presenting a contemporary, no-holds-barred breakdown of why no one—regardless of weight—should be ashamed of his or her body. As one interviewee puts it, “You can be a fat person and be fucking phenomenal.” The Annex, May 9 (12:30 p.m.) > LL LITTLE GO GIRLS (France) There is

probably no more depressing place on Earth: brothels, set in crumbling buildings, surrounded by mountains of garbage. But photographerdirector Eliane de Latour finds beauty, humanity, and dignity amid the “go girls” in the dumpside slums of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. De Latour gains their trust, earning intimate access to their off-hours, spent struggling to sleep on mats in the daylight, nursing their babies, and braiding each other’s hair. Every shot is framed with the artistic care of de Latour’s photographs, a carnival of multicoloured batik wraps, neon jewellery, dark skin, and the Ivory Coast’s pastelhued walls. Throughout, de Latour is a fly on the wall, nonjudgmental, just letting the women exist or share their deepest thoughts; a running worry is the shame they’ve brought to their families in this Muslim/Catholic country. De Latour follows the “gos” as they use her profits from a Parisian photo exhibit to set up a communal house—proving there can be hope even in hell. SFU-GCA, May 6 (4:30 p.m.) > JANET SMITH

PORNOCRACY: THE NEW SEX MULTINATIONALS (France) Back

in its so-called golden era of the ’70s and ’80s, you could at least trace the money flowing in and out of the porn industry to some sort of recognizable mob. Since the advent of tube sites like YouPorn in the mid-2000s, profits have skyrocketed to incomprehensible levels concentrated mainly in some nameless, formless entity dubbed “the Octopus” in this deeply

WAKING THE SLEEPING GIANT

Clockwise from left to right: scenes from the documentaries Fattitude, Tokyo Idols, and Waking the Sleeping Giant.

depressing investigation. Based in taxshelter countries with no copyright or ownership laws, this tentacled beast is actually in the business of selling traffic—millions of users a day—with content that’s largely stolen or unlicensed. The deeper director-host Ovidie goes in search of the Octopus, with stops in Luxembourg, Germany, and Montreal, the murkier and scarier it gets. “Yay, capitalism,” is XXX star Stoya’s deadpan assessment. She’s right—as Pornocracy makes abundantly clear, this is neoliberal global economics functioning precisely as it’s meant to, with only the pretense of any regulation, and a few billionaire predators at the top profiting grotesquely from a vast, abused slave class at the bottom, as we see when the film visits a “porn

house” in Romania. The critique here is largely economic, but a precredit sequence leaves no room for ambivalence about the cost to humanity’s soul. Vancity Theatre, May 11 (7 p.m.)

> ADRIAN MACK

THE ROAD MOVIE (Belarus/Rus-

sia/Serbia/Bosnia-Herzegovina/Croatia) If the Russian tourism board is working on a campaign to convince foreigners to drop by, rent a car, and see the countryside, it should probably move on to another idea. The Road Movie, by director Dmitrii Kalashnikov, splices together raw footage from the dashboard cameras of Russian cars as they narrowly avoid—and, in some cases, fail to avoid—total chaos sliding toward the

windshield at high speed. The freeway pileups create a kind of steady beat, augmented by all sorts of obstacles to happy motoring: cows, horses, ducks, bears, hatchet-wielding psychos, deranged bridesmaids… You brace for possible impact and then brace and brace again, relieved only by the incomparably dry Russian sense of humour. (“Fuck, we’ve arrived,” one unseen passenger quips after plunging through a guardrail and into a river.) While the film’s stoicism is specific to a place and culture—note how serenely the well-dressed young woman strolls past the capsizing dumptruck—its rubbernecking is a universal part of 21st-century life, wholly anonymous and without end. Vancity Theatre, May 6 (8:15 p.m.) > BL

(USA) Young Turk Cenk Uygur offers one of the more acute comments in this U.S. election postmortem when he says the Democrats handed the presidency to Trump “with their arrogance”. An examination of the fractured state of American resistance, Giant seriously rouses when it looks at Black Lives Matter or the story of West Virginian Sabrina Shrader, moved to run for state representative from the losing side of the class divide by the Bernie Sanders campaign, also documented here from its earliest days. And it frustrates with the indication that America’s mainstream left (such as it is) still doesn’t perceive itself inside a political superstructure that needs to be much more honestly eviscerated before it’s overhauled. A Democracy Spring activist mentions voter suppression, more plainly called fraud, in the moments prior to Sanders’s defeat in the primaries. If only Sanders or any of the more well-known progressive talking heads here had done the same. SFUGCA, May 11 (6:30 p.m); The Annex, May 12 (12:30 p.m.) > AM The DOXA Documentary Film Festival runs at various venues from next Thursday (May 4) to May 14. More information is at www.doxafestival.ca/.

NEW FROM CINEPLEX EVENTS

I AM HEATH LEDGER May 4-11

IN THE GALLERY RAPHAEL May 24 (3D) 28 (2D)

VANCOUVER The Park Theatre - 3440 Cambie St.

18 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

May 10 & 25

May 15-21 | Narrated by: Matt Damson

May 14-17

For tickets and participating theatres visit Cineplex.com/Events

LIOR ASHKENAZI MICHAEL SHEEN

RICHARD GERE CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG

HANK AZARIA DAN STEVENS

STEVE BUSCEMI JOSH CHARLES

FALL IN LOVE WITH MAUDIE “THIS YEAR’S FIRST OSCAR® -WORTHY PERFORMANCES FROM SALLY HAWKINS AND ETHAN HAWKE.

ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST FILMS.” SCENE CREEK

“THE TRUE STORY OF CANADIAN FOLK ARTIST MAUD LEWIS, BOASTS A POWERFUL, OSCAR®-WORTHY PERFORMANCE BY SALLY HAWKINS.” THEWRAP.COM

“ETHAN HAWKE GIVES ONE OF THE FINEST PERFORMANCES OF HIS CAREER.” INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

“THIS IS A PAINTER WHOSE CANVAS WAS HER LIFE, AND WHOSE LIFE HER CANVAS. MAUDIE IS A MAGNIFICENT CELEBRATION OF BOTH.” NATIONAL POST

“MAUDIE IS IS STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL AND DEEPLY MOVING.” LOCALEXPRESS.CA

++++ “MOVING, HEARTWARMING! SALLY HAWKINS AND ETHAN HAWKE ARE BRILLIANT!” THE VANCOUVER OBSERVER

++++

AMAZING, INSPIRING. ONE OF THE YEARS BEST! ” MOVIESMOVESME

Academy Award® Nominee

SALLY HAWKINS Academy Award® Nominee

ETHAN HAWKE

92% *AS OF APRIL 24

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The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a Ne w York Fixer

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APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 19

OPENING NIGHT FILM

THU MAY 4

SEXUALIT Y

7 PM VOGUE FRI MAY 5 THU MAY 11

ENVIRONMENT

9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

T H E C I N E M AT H E Q U E 1131 Howe St (@ Helmcken St) THE ORPHEUM ANNEX 823 Seymour St, 2nd fl (@ Robson St) SFU’S GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS 149 W Hastings St (@ Abbott St)

The Road Forward

RACE & POWER

6:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 12:30 PM ANNEX

ART & PERFORMANCE

SAT MAY 6

4:30 PM SFU

Être-Cheval (Horse-Being)

The Caretakers

Little Go Girls

When a transgender ex-schoolteacher named Karen travels to the US to work with an old cowboy in an extended series of “Pony Play” sessions, the rituals of domination and submission between trainer and trainee must be strictly observed.

In 2014, activists, ranging from new Canadians to First Nations people, ascended Burnaby Mountain to make a camp on the future route of the proposed pipeline. David Goldberg captures the intense conviction of the Burnaby Mountain protest.

The women and girls who work the sex trade in Abidjan, initially regard director Eliane de Latour’s camera with benign indifference. But gradually the relationship between the women and the filmmaker grows more trusting.

FRI MAY 12

SAT MAY 6 MON MAY 8

WED MAY 10

Jérôme Clément-Wilz, France

V I F F ’ S VA N C I T Y T H E AT R E 1181 Seymour St (@ Davie St)

SUN MAY 7 MON MAY 8

9 PM VANCITY

David Goldberg, Canada

Eliane de Latour, France

12 PM VANCITY 4:45 PM ANNEX

7 PM VANCITY

FRI MAY 5 SUN MAY 14

9 PM ANNEX 4:15 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Everything is Performative: Shorts Program Various, Various

Dance, that most protean form of human communication, is given three wildly innovative outlets in this trio of short films.

THU MAY 11

7:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Marie Clements, Canada

Marie Clements’ musical documentary is simultaneously a piece of BC First Nations history, a call for revolution and resolve, and a portrait of a people who have retained their power and identity through community and activism. With bold blues and rock musical breakdowns led by a cast of Indigenous musicians and performers, the film charts a path of resurgence, honouring the work of ancestors, and passing on the burden of struggle, creating a way towards genuine self-determined reconciliation.

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

SAT MAY 13

8 PM SFU

The Beekeeper and His Son

Quest

Elsewhere

As a veritable open book, American writer Armistead Maupin virtually created the idea of an out gay writer. There are a few chapters of Armistead’s life that remain little known. Until now!

Despite the ongoing environmental damage and pollution that have depleted his bee colonies, Lao Yu, a stalwart beekeeper in Northern China, is determined to keep his family traditions alive. Diedie Weng brilliantly captures a changing China.

This powerful documentary follows Christopher and Christine’a Rainey and their kids over a tumultuous number of years in their North Philadelphia neighbourhood. Winner: Grand Jury Award & Human Rights Award, Full Frame Film Festival.

From a generic Montreal subway platform to the most far-flung parts of the planet, Elsewhere explores the human passion for movement and the undeniable siren song of travel through trippy animation and a propulsive soundtrack.

SAT MAY 6 SAT MAY 13

TUE MAY 9 SAT MAY 13

SAT MAY 13

FRI MAY 12

The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin Jennifer M. Kroot, US

V O G U E T H E AT R E 918 Granville St (@ Smithe St) M U S E U M O F VA N C O U V E R 1100 Chestnut St

2 PM SFU 9:15 PM VANCITY

Julian Rosefeldt, Germany

This century’s great cultural and political manifestos are given voice by actress Cate Blanchett in the guise of a baker’s dozen of characters. A frizzy-haired school teacher leading her class in a recitation of Dogme 95, or a turbaned East German choreographer directing a dance project that resembles a musical version of Ridley Scott’s film Alien whilst reciting Fluxus aphorisms. Manifesto captures the pure power of ideas, given wild flight in language that soars and screams.

3 PM ANNEX 6:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Jonathan Olshefski, US

Ouananiche, Canada

2:45 PM VANCITY

Mermaids

Let There Be Light

You Are on Indian Land

The myth of the mermaid spans the globe from the Amazon to the fjords of Scandinavia. Throughout history, the figure of the half-fish, half-human has surfaced with regularity. Modern mermaids are just as diverse, as Ali Weinstein’s new film illustrates.

Many physicists and scientists believe the only hope for future life on Earth is fusion. This is the story of the most complex machine ever invented, the hydrogen fusion energy facility, currently being built out of a million pieces in southern France.

On December 18, 1968, members of the Akwesasne Mohawk community blockaded the international bridge near Cornwall, Ontario. The intent was to bring public attention to treaty violations by the Canadian government.

SUN MAY 7 WED MAY 10

FRI MAY 12

SUN MAY 7

Ali Weinstein, Canada

Manifesto

Diedie Weng, Switzerland/Canada

Mila Aung-Thwin, Van Royko, Canada

5 PM CINEMATHEQUE 9:15 PM VANCITY

Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, Canada

7 PM VANCITY

4:15 PM ANNEX

7 PM ANNEX

Katyusha: Rocket Launchers, Folk Songs and Ethnographic Refrains Kandis Friesen, Canada

A video installation and performance work, that blends with a live-mixed video with personal and public myth-making. WED MAY 10

9 PM CINEMATHEQUE

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS THU MAY 11 FRI MAY 12

7 PM SFU 12:30 PM ANNEX

WED MAY 10 THU MAY 11

6:30 PM SFU 12:30 PM ANNEX

Sacred Water

Island Earth

Miss Kiet’s Children

Transference: Shorts Program

In Rwanda, there is a tradition of female pleasure that undoes all the standards of Hollywood and most of the Western world combined. It is kunyaza, a practice that centres on that mythic holy grail of human sexuality: female ejaculation.

Like the beautiful Hawaiian archipelago where the film is set, Cyrus Sutton’s Island Earth is a complex mix; at once hopeful and celebratory. The film examines how former plantation fields are now used for open air field-testing of restricted-use pesticides.

Haya, Leanne, and Jorj are three Syrian refugees, living in a small town in the Netherlands. Miss Kiet is their teacher. This fly on the wall documentary cuts to the heart of the question: what does it mean to educate children?

From Qatar to Quebec, Serbia to Ohio, this collection of films exposes sites of personal and emotional history. A variety of film and video techniques push the formal and narrative boundaries of cinema.

SAT MAY 6 TUE MAY 9

MON MAY 8 THU MAY 11

FRI MAY 5

THU MAY 11

Olivier Jourdain, Belgium

Waking the Sleeping Giant

Swagger

The struggle for racial justice, economic equality, and women’s rights was hard enough in the US, but then the American election came to its final shocking conclusion. An intersectional coalition of folk offers a glimmer of hope in these dark days.

The Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois garnered international attention after the violence and rioting of 2005. Director Olivier Babinet spent more than three years working with a dozen residents, posing questions about family and relationships, hopes and dreams.

Jacob Smith, Jon D. Erickson and Kathryn Goldman, US

TICKETS

General Admission: $13 • Weekday evenings, weekends Weekday Matinee Tickets: $11 • Weekday films starting at 5:00pm or earlier

Students (with valid ID) / Seniors (65+) • $2 discount P R EMIER E MED IA PAR TN ER

from regular prices for any film screening.

Opening Night: $22 • film and party Closing Night and Special Presentations: $15 • All screenings at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts and Museum of Vancouver MERMAIDS. PHOTO: CAITLIN DURLAK.

20 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

Membership: $2

Olivier Babinet, France

Cyrus Sutton, US

9:30 PM SFU 9 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster, The Netherlands

9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 3 PM ANNEX

Various, Various

9 PM VANCITY

9:15 PM VANCITY

FESTIVAL PASS

$195 • Includes membership; valid for all film screenings including opening and closing night film and party.

FESTIVAL TICKET PACKS

5 Ticket Pack: $60; 10 Ticket Pack: $110 Festival 5 and 10 Ticket Packs are only available online and are valid for one ticket each for 5 or 10 films. All films must be chosen at time of purchase. NOTE: Ticket Packs are NOT valid for opening, closing, special presentations, Museum of Vancouver, and do not include the $2 membership.

Vers la tendresse

Stuff: Shorts Program

Along the sidewalks and cafés of Seine-SaintDenis, groups of young men, dressed in hoodies and streetwear, talk with remarkable bluntness and honesty about love, desire, sex, and race. Alice Diop’s film is a piercing statement on disenfranchisement.

Whether it’s basket making in Northern Quebec, or selling plastic toys in urban China, this collection of short films calls attention to our increasingly complex and contradictory relationship with our stuff.

Alice Diop, France

Various, Various

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World

Tokyo Idols

Kyoko Miyake, UK/Canada

Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, Canada

A veritable who’s who in the music business, from Tony Bennett to Steven Tyler, attest to the power and influence of First Nations people on American music traditions.

With its saccharine vocal tracks and armies of young women in whacky outfits, it is easy to think of J-Pop idols as just another weird subculture. But idols are big business in Japan, reportedly worth more than a billion dollars per year.

— NO REFUNDS —

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 21

OPENING NIGHT FILM

THU MAY 4

SEXUALIT Y

7 PM VOGUE FRI MAY 5 THU MAY 11

ENVIRONMENT

9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

T H E C I N E M AT H E Q U E 1131 Howe St (@ Helmcken St) THE ORPHEUM ANNEX 823 Seymour St, 2nd fl (@ Robson St) SFU’S GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS 149 W Hastings St (@ Abbott St)

The Road Forward

RACE & POWER

6:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 12:30 PM ANNEX

ART & PERFORMANCE

SAT MAY 6

4:30 PM SFU

Être-Cheval (Horse-Being)

The Caretakers

Little Go Girls

When a transgender ex-schoolteacher named Karen travels to the US to work with an old cowboy in an extended series of “Pony Play” sessions, the rituals of domination and submission between trainer and trainee must be strictly observed.

In 2014, activists, ranging from new Canadians to First Nations people, ascended Burnaby Mountain to make a camp on the future route of the proposed pipeline. David Goldberg captures the intense conviction of the Burnaby Mountain protest.

The women and girls who work the sex trade in Abidjan, initially regard director Eliane de Latour’s camera with benign indifference. But gradually the relationship between the women and the filmmaker grows more trusting.

FRI MAY 12

SAT MAY 6 MON MAY 8

WED MAY 10

Jérôme Clément-Wilz, France

V I F F ’ S VA N C I T Y T H E AT R E 1181 Seymour St (@ Davie St)

SUN MAY 7 MON MAY 8

9 PM VANCITY

David Goldberg, Canada

Eliane de Latour, France

12 PM VANCITY 4:45 PM ANNEX

7 PM VANCITY

FRI MAY 5 SUN MAY 14

9 PM ANNEX 4:15 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Everything is Performative: Shorts Program Various, Various

Dance, that most protean form of human communication, is given three wildly innovative outlets in this trio of short films.

THU MAY 11

7:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Marie Clements, Canada

Marie Clements’ musical documentary is simultaneously a piece of BC First Nations history, a call for revolution and resolve, and a portrait of a people who have retained their power and identity through community and activism. With bold blues and rock musical breakdowns led by a cast of Indigenous musicians and performers, the film charts a path of resurgence, honouring the work of ancestors, and passing on the burden of struggle, creating a way towards genuine self-determined reconciliation.

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

SAT MAY 13

8 PM SFU

The Beekeeper and His Son

Quest

Elsewhere

As a veritable open book, American writer Armistead Maupin virtually created the idea of an out gay writer. There are a few chapters of Armistead’s life that remain little known. Until now!

Despite the ongoing environmental damage and pollution that have depleted his bee colonies, Lao Yu, a stalwart beekeeper in Northern China, is determined to keep his family traditions alive. Diedie Weng brilliantly captures a changing China.

This powerful documentary follows Christopher and Christine’a Rainey and their kids over a tumultuous number of years in their North Philadelphia neighbourhood. Winner: Grand Jury Award & Human Rights Award, Full Frame Film Festival.

From a generic Montreal subway platform to the most far-flung parts of the planet, Elsewhere explores the human passion for movement and the undeniable siren song of travel through trippy animation and a propulsive soundtrack.

SAT MAY 6 SAT MAY 13

TUE MAY 9 SAT MAY 13

SAT MAY 13

FRI MAY 12

The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin Jennifer M. Kroot, US

V O G U E T H E AT R E 918 Granville St (@ Smithe St) M U S E U M O F VA N C O U V E R 1100 Chestnut St

2 PM SFU 9:15 PM VANCITY

Julian Rosefeldt, Germany

This century’s great cultural and political manifestos are given voice by actress Cate Blanchett in the guise of a baker’s dozen of characters. A frizzy-haired school teacher leading her class in a recitation of Dogme 95, or a turbaned East German choreographer directing a dance project that resembles a musical version of Ridley Scott’s film Alien whilst reciting Fluxus aphorisms. Manifesto captures the pure power of ideas, given wild flight in language that soars and screams.

3 PM ANNEX 6:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Jonathan Olshefski, US

Ouananiche, Canada

2:45 PM VANCITY

Mermaids

Let There Be Light

You Are on Indian Land

The myth of the mermaid spans the globe from the Amazon to the fjords of Scandinavia. Throughout history, the figure of the half-fish, half-human has surfaced with regularity. Modern mermaids are just as diverse, as Ali Weinstein’s new film illustrates.

Many physicists and scientists believe the only hope for future life on Earth is fusion. This is the story of the most complex machine ever invented, the hydrogen fusion energy facility, currently being built out of a million pieces in southern France.

On December 18, 1968, members of the Akwesasne Mohawk community blockaded the international bridge near Cornwall, Ontario. The intent was to bring public attention to treaty violations by the Canadian government.

SUN MAY 7 WED MAY 10

FRI MAY 12

SUN MAY 7

Ali Weinstein, Canada

Manifesto

Diedie Weng, Switzerland/Canada

Mila Aung-Thwin, Van Royko, Canada

5 PM CINEMATHEQUE 9:15 PM VANCITY

Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, Canada

7 PM VANCITY

4:15 PM ANNEX

7 PM ANNEX

Katyusha: Rocket Launchers, Folk Songs and Ethnographic Refrains Kandis Friesen, Canada

A video installation and performance work, that blends with a live-mixed video with personal and public myth-making. WED MAY 10

9 PM CINEMATHEQUE

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS THU MAY 11 FRI MAY 12

7 PM SFU 12:30 PM ANNEX

WED MAY 10 THU MAY 11

6:30 PM SFU 12:30 PM ANNEX

Sacred Water

Island Earth

Miss Kiet’s Children

Transference: Shorts Program

In Rwanda, there is a tradition of female pleasure that undoes all the standards of Hollywood and most of the Western world combined. It is kunyaza, a practice that centres on that mythic holy grail of human sexuality: female ejaculation.

Like the beautiful Hawaiian archipelago where the film is set, Cyrus Sutton’s Island Earth is a complex mix; at once hopeful and celebratory. The film examines how former plantation fields are now used for open air field-testing of restricted-use pesticides.

Haya, Leanne, and Jorj are three Syrian refugees, living in a small town in the Netherlands. Miss Kiet is their teacher. This fly on the wall documentary cuts to the heart of the question: what does it mean to educate children?

From Qatar to Quebec, Serbia to Ohio, this collection of films exposes sites of personal and emotional history. A variety of film and video techniques push the formal and narrative boundaries of cinema.

SAT MAY 6 TUE MAY 9

MON MAY 8 THU MAY 11

FRI MAY 5

THU MAY 11

Olivier Jourdain, Belgium

Waking the Sleeping Giant

Swagger

The struggle for racial justice, economic equality, and women’s rights was hard enough in the US, but then the American election came to its final shocking conclusion. An intersectional coalition of folk offers a glimmer of hope in these dark days.

The Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois garnered international attention after the violence and rioting of 2005. Director Olivier Babinet spent more than three years working with a dozen residents, posing questions about family and relationships, hopes and dreams.

Jacob Smith, Jon D. Erickson and Kathryn Goldman, US

TICKETS

General Admission: $13 • Weekday evenings, weekends Weekday Matinee Tickets: $11 • Weekday films starting at 5:00pm or earlier

Students (with valid ID) / Seniors (65+) • $2 discount P R EMIER E MED IA PAR TN ER

from regular prices for any film screening.

Opening Night: $22 • film and party Closing Night and Special Presentations: $15 • All

screenings at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts and Museum of Vancouver MERMAIDS. PHOTO: CAITLIN DURLAK.

20 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

Membership: $2

Olivier Babinet, France

Cyrus Sutton, US

9:30 PM SFU 9 PM CINEMATHEQUE

Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster, The Netherlands

9:30 PM CINEMATHEQUE 3 PM ANNEX

Various, Various

9 PM VANCITY

9:15 PM VANCITY

FESTIVAL PASS

$195 • Includes membership; valid for all film screenings including opening and closing night film and party.

FESTIVAL TICKET PACKS

5 Ticket Pack: $60; 10 Ticket Pack: $110 Festival 5 and 10 Ticket Packs are only available online and are valid for one ticket each for 5 or 10 films. All films must be chosen at time of purchase. NOTE: Ticket Packs are NOT valid for opening, closing, special presentations, Museum of Vancouver, and do not include the $2 membership.

Vers la tendresse

Stuff: Shorts Program

Along the sidewalks and cafés of Seine-SaintDenis, groups of young men, dressed in hoodies and streetwear, talk with remarkable bluntness and honesty about love, desire, sex, and race. Alice Diop’s film is a piercing statement on disenfranchisement.

Whether it’s basket making in Northern Quebec, or selling plastic toys in urban China, this collection of short films calls attention to our increasingly complex and contradictory relationship with our stuff.

Alice Diop, France

Various, Various

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World

Tokyo Idols

Kyoko Miyake, UK/Canada

Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, Canada

A veritable who’s who in the music business, from Tony Bennett to Steven Tyler, attest to the power and influence of First Nations people on American music traditions.

With its saccharine vocal tracks and armies of young women in whacky outfits, it is easy to think of J-Pop idols as just another weird subculture. But idols are big business in Japan, reportedly worth more than a billion dollars per year.

— NO REFUNDS —

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 21

MOVIES

Richard Gere becomes a graceful Norman RE VIEW S NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER Starring Richard Gere. Rated PG

Generally speaking, a fixer is who puts things or people together quietly behind the scenes. In this case, the fixer is in every scene, because Richard Gere is the prime mover as Norman Oppenheimer, a free-range opportunist—one might say schnorrer, in Yiddish—who just wants to make everyone happy. Norman is the English-language debut for Joseph Cedar, a New York– born Israeli writer-director responsible for 2011’s excellent Footnote, about battling father-and-son scholars. The son there was played by Lior Ashkenazi, a handsomer Steve Carrell who here is the much slicker Micha Eshel, an Israeli politician whom Norman befriends on his way to rounding up potential contacts for—well, who knows what, exactly. One act of unusually expensive generosity carries Norman skyward on the business ladder when Eshel climbs higher. “And once you’re up,” Eshel tells his new friend early on, “you can never settle for anything less.” An American-Israeli coproduction, the movie packs a lot of intrigue into two hours, as well as an army of incidental Manhattanites. Among others, there’s Norman’s timid banker nephew (Michael Sheen), a big-shot financier (Josh Charles) and his gatekeeper (Dan Stevens), and a local rabbi who looks to Norman for help. Charles aside, that’s a whole lotta goys going Jewish all of a sudden. There’s also Charlotte Gainsbourg as a Swiss-Israeli lawyer to whom Norman rather inexplicably spills a number of beans, setting off chain reactions most viewers will see coming far in advance.

2 someone

Cedar is good at throwing a lot of balls in the air, although he complicates the juggling with montages that last too long, suffocating close-ups, and production tricks intended to make the images more exciting. They don’t. The filmmaker already had a big advantage. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Gere isn’t afraid to look and act his age. He turns in a commanding performance, even if he seems to be channelling Woody Allen at times. The too-neat ending doesn’t quite work, either, but you are left with a memorable portrait of a scrounge who finally finds his place in the world. > KEN EISNER

AFTERIMAGE Starring Bogusław Linda. In Polish with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Polish master Andrzej Wajda

2 was 90 when he made this, capping off a 65-year career as stylistic master and agent provocateur. It’s fair to imagine that he identified more than a little with his film’s subject, Władysław Strzemiński, an early hero among Polish and Soviet artists who was nonetheless hounded to death for sticking to his painterly principles. Similarly venerable Polish star Bogusław Linda is more than convincing as Strzemiński, who lost an arm and leg in the First World War and then went to Moscow to do foundational work with avantgardists like Kazimir Malevich. This landed him a privileged place in postwar Łódź, where he helped found an art school but came to be at odds with the increasingly dogmatic commissars Stalin put in charge of Poland’s culture in the late 1940s. When a new apparatchik hectors Strzemiński’s students about the resee page 24

World stocks power to record high! A dancing London banker climbs the pillars in Clara von Gool’s “Voices of Finance”.

DOXA gets into avant dance mountain, where it had just rained,” he says of the shows at the Bergen International Festival. The added benefit of “Ovis Aries” is that it reveals to local audiences just how global our Canadian dance artists’ reach is these days—and with work that’s thrillingly inviting to nondance crowds. One of Cepka’s biggest kicks has been watching audiences’ varied reactions to the bizarre but mindblowingly naturalistic sheep show on view. The Norwegian children in the audience buzz with melodious pleasure throughout his film. And the adults? “It’s either, ‘Wow, this is amazing’ or they’re questioning what I’ve been doing with my time,” Cepka says with a laugh. “It’s one of those things: you either get it or your don’t.” His deadpan outdoor show could not run in bigger contrast to the other two works on the program—in form or content. Dutch director Clara von Gool’s “Voices of Finance” speaks to the inhuman pressure cooker of world banking, drawing from a real newspaper blog and using intertitles to announce dancers’ “occupations”—from a “broker” getting dressed in the morning (between grand jêtés in his ultramodern condo) to an “investment banker” banging and spiralling around a rising glass elevator. In another cool local connection, the latter dancer is Medhi Walerski, a Nederlands Dans Theater artist who’s a favourite guest choreographer at Ballet BC and who has also created a couple of other vignettes for the film. Its spoken text, zippy editing, and urban sheen feel a world away from the dreamy, experimental Ghost Opera, set in Paris’s Palais Garnier and Opera Bastille and mixing dance, historical intertitles, drawings, and “rehearsal” scenes. Together, the three stylistically different works show the untapped potential of celluloid to capture dance in new ways. “I think dance and film are complementary forms and I think the film can, if not elevate the art, give it a new perspective,” Cepka says. “Because dance is live and it disappears, it’s great to have a record for it—and it would be great for more choreographers to get into it.” -

> B Y JA NET S M ITH

A

s a new DOXA program of shorts demonstrates, dance filmmakers have moved a long way from just shooting a performer moving on-stage. Their movies have become a separate art form, contrasting and complementing the original work and taking it to a new level. The trio of shorts Everything Is Performative acts like a kind of mini showcase of just how different a dance film can look these days. One, called “Voices of Finance”, uses a Guardian business blog for text and sets its dancers spinning and jumping amid London’s corporate highrises. “Sarah Winchester, Ghost Opera” imagines an opera-ballet that never happened—cutting between a historical tale, a tutu’d dancer in tormented solo, and a director working with a choir. And “Ovis Aries”? Well, at first it might not even look like a dance film. Close your eyes, and just listen to Canadian director Harry Cepka’s new documentary and you might think you’re hearing the soothing bleating of lambs, their neck bells echoing over a field. Open them and you’ll realize you’re watching Montreal’s Corpus dance company, a troupe known in Vancouver from Dancing on the Edge’s Dusk Dances. In Sylvie Bouchard and David Danzon’s surreal, carefully studied Les Moutons, the performers become sheep, intricately mimicking their every move—even believably re-creating milking and shearing—in front of an outdoor crowd. Cepka shoots them not in the long takes and wide shots of traditional dance movies but often in fascinating closeup. “Unlike a lot of theatre and dance shows, it was so detailed,” he tells the Straight from New York City, where he is finishing up an MFA. “It was the face and the effort that goes into every minute moment. You have to be up close to see the rigour of the performance. And with film you can zoom in and see them blink or masticate their food.” For Cepka, his film also crosses into other genres. “I thought it was very funny, too, because there’s a bit of a nature documentary to it as well. And then there is the deadpan comedy. I cut out as much of the laughter [from Everything Is Performative screens at the Annex on May 5 the audience] as possible to get that.” The lush, verdant Norwegian setting was just a bonus, and at the Cinematheque on May 14. More informaton is Cepka admits. “I didn’t know it would be at the top of a at www.doxafestival.ca/.

Wanna Yuk?

MOURIR À TUE-TÊTE (A SCREAM FROM SILENCE) + THE HAT (LE CHAPEAU) THURSDAY MAY 4 - 7pm

TOP TALENT SHOWCASE EVERY TUES AT 8:00

PRO-AM NIGHT

EVERY WEDS AT 8:00

FEATURED HEADLINERS THURS & FRI AT 8:00 SAT AT 7:00 & 9:30 THIS WEEKEND FEATURING (APRIL 27 - 29) “A brave undertaking that tells a story almost never examined on film.” - Amanda Siebert, Georgia Striaght

“One of the most celebrated and least understood auteurs of the contemporary European film scene.”

BEFORE THE STREETS

L’HUMANITÉ・ P'TIT QUINQUIN

APRIL 29-30

APRIL 27 - MAY 1

- Damon Smith, Filmmaker Magazine

EDDIE DELLA SIEPE www.yukyuks.com 2837 Cambie (at 12th)

22 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

ARTS

It’s a long way from P!nk to Joni Mitchell— B Y ALEX ANDER VAR T Y

and if you’re Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman, the journey is not only long, but decidedly circuitous. Cohen began re-imagining popular music with a wildly popular and absurdly ambitious lip dub video of the acrobatic singer’s “Raise Your Glass”, which he made in 2011, during his final semester in UBC’s theatre program. Two-and-a-half-million YouTube views later, after having met Kuman and worked with her on the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, he’s returning to the small stage with the revue Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell. This time around, the director and his choreographer partner have a cast of six, rather than thousands, and their budget is in keeping with what it takes to get a show up at the Firehall Arts Centre rather than at a purpose-built stadium. Still, their goal remains the same. “The question is ‘What can we make to surprise and delight the audience with six people?’,” Kuman says in a speaker-phone conversation from the couple’s East Van home. “We’re coming at it from a different perspective, but the aim is to create something magical and exciting.” The two have an intense but happy creative relationship: they finish each other’s sentences comfortably, and laugh a lot during the course of our conversation. They’re also both laser-focused when it comes to their work, considering not only the logistics of how to build their Circle Game production, but also where it fits in the bigger picture of a society split by environmental, economic, and political issues. And, perhaps surprisingly, their view is that the generation gap might not be as wide as it can sometimes seem. “We both kind of came to know Joni Mitchell primarily through the lens of our parents playing her music,” Kuman explains. “But for us this journey really started in 2013. It was the year of Joni’s 70th birthday, and we started hearing her

Bringing Joni to a new generation The new music of

Rather than aim for faithful cover versions, Circle Game spreads Jodi Mitchell’s songs between six singers and 18 different instruments. Tyler Branston photo.

choreographed concert, “Between governments, and other societies, starring six singers who and religions,” Cohen chimes in, before Kuman “choreographed concert”, Circle Game, shows how the also, between them, completes her thought: “And I feel that our genplay 18 different instru- eration has taken that torch. There definitely is a ’60s songstress speaks urgently to today’s activists ments. There’s no Joni a renaissance in that way.” Some things, both note, haven’t changed: the remusic everywhere we went. It was kind of an ear- figure or biographical intent, and this, they say, lets worm that we both acknowledged, so we started Mitchell’s message come through without the dis- cent marches against the Trump administration share the spirit of the women’s liberation and antiwar researching her music and her lyrics more—and traction of her well-publicized personal life. what we found was that they really spoke to us “We wanted to make it a little bit more accessible protests of the 1960s. Other factors, however, combine to give Kuman and Cohen a little more and what we were going through in our lives at for our generation,” Kuman says. optimism than their artistic forebears. the time and also generationally.” Many of Mitchell’s songs are char“We feel that we are able to search “Considering that they had been written four acterized by a kind of restlessness: Check out… for what it is that truly brings us and five decades ago, it was a little bit baffling to she began her artistic life in a forSTRAIGHT.COM happiness nowadays,” Kuman says. us just how modern they seemed,” Cohen adds. eign country and in an unhappy Visit our website “Not to say that people weren’t able “So we did this experiment and tried to figure out marriage, exiled from her family for morning-after to do that in previous generations, what these messages would sound like if they were thanks to fallout from an unplanned reviews and local arts news but I feel that millennials really value coming out today.” pregnancy and underappreciated by that as a priority—and Joni defi nitely One of the reasons why Mitchell hasn’t quite her peers due to music-industry sexspeaks to that in her lyrics.” won the iconic status accorded her peers Bob ism. An unstable sense of home and the “And maybe we can see a better future because Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young is that her impermanence of love are two constants in her music is not easily performed by bedroom guitar- work—and while Cohen and Kuman are commit- we’ve seen this cycle before,” Cohen adds. “Just ists. Working with a bank of altered tunings and ted enough as a couple that they’ve just bought a based on the fact that we’re here now, we know that a jazz-inflected harmonic sensibility, she devised house in Strathcona, they note that millennials we didn’t implode the world and kill everybody. So there is this glimmer of hope. Even though it a style that’s so deeply personal that her songs— also struggle with that need to belong. especially those that came after folk hits like the “The generation that Joni was part of was might be rusty and tarnished, it’s still there.” titular “Circle Game”—are inseparable from her really politically active,” Kuman says. “They performance of them. Rather than aim for faith- were really searching for community. They Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchful cover versions, Cohen and Kuman have wisely were searching for connection between the ell runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Saturday (April 29) to May 20. opted to recast Mitchell’s observations as a kind of Earth, between each other…”

THINGS TO DO

ARTS High five

Editor’s choice FEARS OF A CLOWN We’ve raved about them many times in the past. Many of you have listened. For those of you who haven’t: really? There is simply nothing out there like Mump and Smoot, the “clowns of horror” who carve out their own niche of violence, slapstick, existentialism, and vaudeville. In their latest twisted show, our two horned antiheroes, a.k.a. Michael Kennard and John Turner, find themselves trapped in a bare, light-bulb-lit room, and have to perform a series of ever-more-warped trials to escape. No, this isn’t a clown show for children, but adults will thoroughly enjoy their trip into Mump and Smoot’s nightmare world. Oh, and there will be blood. Mump and Smoot in Anything is at the York Theatre from Thursday (April 27) to May 6.

Five events you just can’t miss this week

1

DEAD MAN WALKING (April 29 to May 7 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre) There’s so much at the Vancouver Opera Festival, but don’t let this intense gem slip under your radar.

2

THE PIANO TEACHER (To May 14 at the BMO Theatre Centre) An unforgettable chiller about evil in our world.

3

LONG DIVISION (To April 30 at the Annex) Pi Theatre’s artful take on mathematics boasts brains and looks.

4

VERTICAL INFLUENCES (To April 30 at Britannia Ice Rink) If you haven’t seen this cool new skating show, grab your woollies and get going.

5

THE ROMANCE OF THE GUITAR (April 27 at West Point Grey United Church) Daniel Bolshoy makes strings sing at this Vetta Chamber Music concert.

In the news THE WRIGHT STUFF The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra has named its new concertmaster. Nicholas Wright, a violinist with the orchestra for the past six years, takes his position immediately. The search committee, orchestra members, and VSO music director Bramwell Tovey unanimously endorsed Wright as their leader. The British-born Wright trained at the Royal College of Music in London and has played with ensembles around the world, including the BBC Concert Orchestra, and the English Chamber and London Philharmonic orchestras. He fills the vacancy left by Dale Barltrop, who ended his tenure in June 2016 to return to his native Australia. Since that time, the VSO has led an extensive search. Wright will join Tovey, who will play the piano, and violinist Jason Ho, violist Andrew Brown, and cellist Ariel Barnes in the VSO’s chamber performance of Edward Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A Minor, on Sunday (April 30) at the Orpheum. APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 23

Matisse Drawings: Distinguished Lecture Series In conjunction with the exhibition Matisse Drawings: Curated by Ellsworth Kelly from The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation Collection.

Ellsworth Kelly Dialogue Friday, May 5 at 7pm

Henri Matisse Dialogue Saturday, May 6 at 1pm Featuring prominent curators and academics Serge Guilbaut, John O’Brian, Carter Foster and John R. Stomberg and moderated by Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chief Curator, Darrin Martens of the Audain Art Museum. audainartmuseum.com 4350 Blackcomb Way Whistler, BC 604.962.0413 Programming funded by:

Afterimage

from page 22

quirement that art “not raise doubts but create enthusiasm”, the painter blasts the Philistine and crutches his way out of the meeting. From that moment on, he loses one right after another, including access to paint supplies and, eventually, food. The chainsmoking doesn’t help, but it goes with the self-abnegation that Wajda portrays as a kind of stubborn saintliness. We know that Strzemiński is estranged from his wife, the equally famous sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (Aleksandra Justa), but we barely see her, nor do we know why their preternaturally mature daughter (Justa’s own offspring, Bronisława Zamachowska) is in a kind of orphanage. There’s not a lot of his own art on display, either, so the film—gorgeously shot but doggedly repetitive in tone—asks us to invest our craggy hero with motivations that remain pure yet inscrutable. Wajda died just after this image was complete. > KEN EISNER

A QUIET PASSION Starring Cynthia Nixon. Rated PG

Henri Matisse Head of a Woman (detail), 1947 Charcoal on paper © 2016 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy American Federation of Arts

Enigmatic American poet Emily

2 Dickinson spent almost all of her

55 years confined to her strict Calvinist father’s house in Amherst. And that fact alone gives you insight into the challenging task Brit director Terence Davies has set for himself in this strangely mannered new bio pic. Davies strives to show the “quiet passion” that swirled in the reclusive artist’s heart. But because words were her life, text, not action, has to convey that inner activity. So conversation, written in highly affected 19th-century English, intermingles here with Dickinson staring out her window, reciting her poetry. Who is this woman with the searing eyes beneath the tight bun? Cynthia Nixon does the best she can with the stilted script, rooting out Dickinson’s conflicting desires. “I long for something, but I am afraid of it,” she says, and that about sums it up. She is attracted to men but fears marriage would prevent her from writing. She shuns religion, and clearly enjoys blurting out provocative opinions but follows a strict inner moral code that leads her to judge others harshly— especially her philandering brother (Duncan Duff). Male publishers who meddle with her work don’t help her pessimism. We watch Dickinson grow into a bitter, older woman who wears frosty white and will only speak from the crack through her bedroom door. Occasionally, Nixon edges too close to insanity, complete with maniacal grins and teary torment. It sometimes feels like Jennifer Ehle, as her warm, eversupportive sister, Vinnie, is the only real human at the Homestead. Dickinson was obsessed with mortality for a reason, and here we experience her painful illness and the slow death that surrounded her on a constant basis. Davies’s choice to dwell on it in such morbid detail makes for some tough slogging in the film’s last act. As for its look, the film is beautifully shot, abounding with candlelight, taffeta skirts, lace nightgowns, and brocade drapes, but the framing makes it feel still and aloof—like a daguerreotype. No lie: it’s a difficult film, dense with words and ideas, focused on an often frustrating protagonist. Still, you have to admire its austerity, its refusal to romanticize, and its fearless commitment. A little like the bullheaded Belle of Amherst herself. > JANET SMITH

KARL MARX CITY A documentary by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. In English and German with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Using grim spy photography left

2 over from the Communist era, Karl Marx City establishes a starkly beautiful black-and-white aesthetic to narrow history down to a single family’s struggle.

24 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

Petra Epperlein grew up in the former GDR and managed to get out in its waning days, eventually marrying American filmmaker Michael Tucker. Epperlein’s father, a big shot in Eastern Bloc industrial circles but never a party member, stayed behind in relatively comfortable circumstances. But he killed himself in 1999 after sending a cryptic letter to his daughter. She decided to use her filmmaking skills to find out why. With headphones over her short white hair, austere black attire, and sound equipment in hand, Epperlein makes a sometimes self-conscious tour guide. But discomfort is her starting point for this inquest, which finds her gently prodding her still-startled mother and more sanguine twin brothers for answers that barely slip out. Turns out that after the wall came down, their dad received anonymous letters accusing him of collaboration with the Stasi—the dreaded state-security apparatus that, at its height, employed almost 100,000 full-time agents and twice as many paid (or coerced) snitches out of only 16 million citizens. This terror apparatus resulted in a poisoned cornucopia of surveillance footage, which the filmmakers weave around their own material, effectively making everyone and everything look suspicious (especially in the eyes of the gargantuan bust of Marx that still looks over the city of the title, now called Chemnitz). Some of the most interesting stuff, though, is found in straightforward interviews with curators and archivists who are preserving this record of mostly banal state brutality. Their files also hold a number of possible clues for Epperlein. In the end, the explanations she receives are both more mundane and more disturbing than expected. And not as black-and-white as you might think. > KEN EISNER

CÉZANNE ET MOI Starring Guillaume Canet. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG

Any decently budgeted tale based

2 on the parallel lives of painter

Paul Cézanne and writer Emile Zola is going to have something to offer. Cézanne et moi certainly isn’t hard to sit through, and it benefits greatly from the use of many original locations in yellow-gray Paris and sunny, riverside Provence, seemingly unchanged from their 19th-century iterations. But it feels more like a cautious TV movie than the kind of bold treatment their iconoclastic work would merit. Despite their temperamental differences, Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne, who played Pierre Bergé in Yves Saint Laurent) and Zola (Tell No One’s Guillaume Canet) were also connected by their addiction to and reactions against bourgeois comfort. So viewers may be forgiven for thinking their lives were more about money than art. Indeed, almost every scene devolves into a tedious conflict about who’s the bigger sellout. “What, another new smoking jacket, Emile?” Monaco-born director Danièle Thompson wrote witty scripts for Queen Margot and her own Avenue Montaigne, so it’s surprising that she came up with such a turgid structure for this one. She, presumably, started with Zola’s letters, hence the slant toward the writer’s POV and a stuffy, overdetermined style. She sticks to the now de rigueur pattern of seemingly random time-jumping, when straight chronology would likely work as well or better. Of course, this gives the actors a chance to show off their aging makeup in more varied ways. In this and other ways, Gallienne fares better of the two Guillaumes, as the born-rich-butstruggling Cézanne gets more bohemian as he grows older, and raised-inpoverty Zola rakes in the dough for his social-realist novels and essays. Although the two-hour movie shows us the various Monets and Manets along the way, it isn’t really that interested in what these men created. Similarly, it displays the models, wives, mistresses, and maids they fought over but doesn’t spend much time with what they think or feel about these famous dudes. Couldn’t Moi be a woman for once? > KEN EISNER

ARTS

Fashion and opera fuse in Figaro > BY JA NET SM IT H

O

pera and fashion design have long had an ongoing love affair, with big names like Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Ford, and Gianni Versace all trying their hand as costumers for epic productions. Now the Vancouver Opera Festival has brought in one of Canada’s fastest-rising design stars to outfit its new staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Sid Neigum, a grad of New York City’s highly regarded FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology, to those outside the industry), is already well-accustomed to the infamous pressures of the business. He’s taken Toronto Fashion Week by storm (nabbing awards like the Swarovski for emerging talent); he’s landed his sculptural line in Hudson’s Bay’s chic boutique the Room across the country; and, more recently, he earned what Vogue called a “warm reception” at London Fashion Week last September. But even within that milieu, the affable designer admits creating costumes for an opera is, well, a task of operatic proportions. “It was 100 garments and two of each because there are two performers for each role, so it was a huge undertaking for sure,” says the Alberta-born Neigum over the phone from his Toronto headquarters. “It was just as big a job—if not bigger!—than a collection, where I would do two in a year.” When Vancouver Opera approached him last summer for the venture, Neigum jumped at the chance—not just because he is a Mozart fan, but because he was looking to extend his reach. (Among other gigs, he’s also recently partnered with Pfaff Auto on exclusive luxury-car interiors.) But

Alex Lawrence slips into Sid Neigum’s Figaro costume. Emily Cooper photo.

he also knew his aesthetic could resonate well in the operatic world: “I think there are a lot of theatrical pieces in my collection—I’ve always tried to verge on the theatrical or magical, so it’s been nice to dive into a project like this.” Neigum’s approach, working with director Rachel Peake and VO costume head Parvin Mirhady, has been to modernize The Marriage of Figaro while still playing with the farcical comedy’s key themes of mistaken identity and class conflict. “I watched it and tried to get in the mind of each character,” he explains. “What’s so different from fashion is you’re not necessarily trying to make everybody look great. In fashion you want to make everybody feel comfortable and

amazing. But with this, you may want to make something ill-fitting intentionally, or show someone trying to make themselves look too young for their age.” Known for his all-black attire, Neigum says he probably relates to the title character the most, whom he’s dressed in the same simple hue— also a symbol of the fact that, within the story, he’s a modern guy. On the other end of the spectrum is the opera’s showpiece, a voluminous, origamilike white wedding dress. “It’s made of double-bonded nylon, so it’s super structured,” Neigum enthuses. “It’s definitely the most epic piece in the show and probably uses the most fabric, with a lot of volume on the top and bottom.” Throughout, the designer has decided to colour-code the characters—not just to help you keep track of them as they disguise themselves, but to emphasize the class divisions that come so much into play in the piece. “The upper class wears jewel tones like red, deep jade-ish greens, a really rich black, and a darker purple, whereas the lower class is in more of a faded, subdued palette of greys and tans,” he explains. Momentous as it’s been trying to design costumes for an opera taking place on the other side of the country, it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable task for Neigum. And he definitely sees that his work here can benefit his fashion career as well—something everyone from Lagerfeld to Versace must have known, too. “A lot of opera fans are my perfect customer, as far as age and demographic,” he admits. And so the love affair continues. The Marriage of Figaro is at the Vancouver Playhouse from Sunday (April 30) to May 18, as part of the Vancouver Opera Festival.

Some Assembly Theatre Company presents A new play with the RHYTAG project

Home somet h ing

FRENCH ROMANTICS

wort h fighti ng for

May 3-6, 2017 SHOWTIMES Wednesday May 3, 1:30pm Thursday May 4, 11am & 1:30pm Friday May 5, 7:30pm Saturday May 6, 7:30pm

ARIEL BARNES

BRAMWELL TOVEY

SATURDAY & MONDAY, MAY 6 & 8 8PM, ORPHEUM Bramwell Tovey conductor

LOCATION The Roundhouse at Davie & Pacific 604-713-1800 | www.roundhouse.ca RESERVATIONS 604-603-5247 www.someassembly.ca PLEASE NOTE HOME addresses colonialism, body image issues, substance use and non-graphic dialogue about sexual assault.

Ariel Barnes cello*

DEBUSSY ORCH. STOKOWSKI Clair de lune MORLOCK Lucid Dreams, Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (World Première)* FAURÉ Pelléas et Mélisande Suite RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2 Maestro Tovey and the VSO’s outstanding Principal Cello Ariel Barnes proudly perform the world première of Composer-in-Residence Jocelyn Morlock’s Cello Concerto — Lucid Dreams, in a concert that also features beautiful French classics by Debussy, Fauré and Ravel. PRE-CONCERT TALK 7:05PM, FREE TO TICKETHOLDERS. @VSOrchestra

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APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 25

ARTS

From the podium to the piano > B Y A LE X A ND ER VA R TY

G

enerosity or enlightened self-interest? The two are not mutually exclusive, as Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director Bramwell Tovey well knows. For the VSO’s annual Spring Festival—which continues this weekend, after a five-day break—the London-born conductor has assembled a program of glorious music mostly rooted in the English tradition, which also happens to reflect his own heritage. And for the fourth concert in the series—at the Orpheum on Sunday (April 30)—he’s presenting Edward Elgar’s symphonic masterwork, the Enigma Variations, alongside the same composer’s Piano Quintet. The thinking, one presumes, is that hearing how Elgar worked in a chamber-music context will illuminate the riddle that is at the heart of the Enigma. Tovey doesn’t entirely disagree, but he has a slightly different take on the matter. “Well, yes,” he says, checking in with the Straight from a car en route to Uppingham, England, where he’s working with the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain. “But there’s also the purely selfish thing: I actually really wanted to play the quintet with the people who I’m playing it with.

VSO maestro Bramwell Tovey will play two key Edward Elgar works.

“It’s a deeply moving work,” Tovey continues. “And it’s a big work. It’s well over 30 minutes, and it’s full of all kinds of tributaries. In fact, it’s easily his best piece of chamber music—of, shall we say, salon music—and it fits me perfectly because of the role of the piano. So I wanted to find out what to put it with, and putting it with the Enigma seemed to be a very natural sort of idea.” After navigating the soloist’s role in the Piano Quintet, Tovey will remain at the keyboard to present an exploration of the Enigma

Variations’ musical structure and its hidden meaning. “The idea is to show how it must have sounded when Elgar first played the Variations to his wife,” he explains. “At first, he just played fragments, as a joke. And so I think it will help people to enjoy some of the humour in the piece.” The work’s title makes it obvious that Elgar is playing a game of charades with his 14 variations; each, the composer readily allowed, is a sonic portrait of a friend or musical accomplice. But many have speculated that there is some deeper structure behind the piece—that it’s an elaborate fantasy on some well-known but equally welldisguised tune, or that it somehow encodes Elgar’s philosophy of life. Tovey leans toward the latter camp. “I think that the enigma is probably the enigma of friendship and that everything else is a bit of a hoax trail, laid by Elgar to have fun at our expense,” he explains. “It’s possible to impose ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or several other tunes on it, but for me the idea of a unifying theme which is never played refers to friendship. But there are are no clues for that; it’s just my personal opinion.” The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Festival continues at the Orpheum from Saturday to Monday (April 29 to May 1).

Spanish stars hit La Tarara > B Y TO NY M O NTA G U E

F

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26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

by a kind of osmosis. “Ivan’s uncles Mario Maya and Manolete are two of the most famous dancers who ever lived. He probably experienced flamenco in the womb, and grew up with it all around,” Lea says. According to Lea, it’s easy to see the difference between the two styles. “Emilio, for instance, would do seven or nine pirouettes in a row, whereas Ivan does one or two. This is a production that could never happen in Spain because dancers of these forms of flamenco don’t meet there. Emilio and Ivan have two duets. The show opens with a footwork duel between them; later on, they display their expertise in the use of props in another face-off—Emilio performing with castanets, and Ivan dancing with the rarely seen bastón or flamenco cane, a percussive instrument that’s tapped on the floor like a third foot.” The pair are not the only Spaniards in La Tarara. The music is written, directed, and performed by one of the best-known flamenco composers, guitarist Gaspar Rodriguez from Málaga. “And we have an amazing cajón player, Davide Sampaolo, who’s moved here from Rome, and is the best in Canada,” says Lea. “We do a footwork and cajón face-off that shows his virtuosity. Our cellist, La Sirena, is someone I’ve worked with for 15 years. And the singer is Vicente Griego from a Roma family near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also dabbles in rumba, Latin, and rock, so we have an amazing finale together where he’s worked out a very old Cuban song but added rock elements. It shows our versatility in the music. “We have a really interesting mix of people who perhaps wouldn’t have met in Spain,” she adds. “What also makes this show great is that all the guests are male, which adds a different flavour, and we’re having a lot of fun with that, to tell you the truth.” -

lamenco dance faces a tricky gender issue these days: there are too few male dancers compared with the large number of women involved. It’s problematic for companies, affecting their choice of repertoire and tending to skew the overall look and feel of the genre. For her new production, La Tarara, B.C. dancer and choreographer Kasandra “La China” Lea has dealt with this imbalance by bringing two of Spain’s hottest male hoofers, Ivan Vargas and Emilio Ochando, to perform with her. “In Vancouver we’re about 500 to 600 women dancing, and you can count on your hands the number of men,” says the founder of Kasandra Flamenco, reached at her home. “In Spain the ratio isn’t much better. But at this point in my life I want to be exploring duets with male dancers from there, performing different types of flamenco.” Vargas and Ochando have backgrounds that are polar opposites, and as a consequence they dance in contrasting styles. Ochando is a bailarín—a dancer trained in ballet and classical dance. “Emilio was formerly with the national ballet. He’s won six awards in Spanish dance, classico, and escuela bolera—the one with castanets and soft shoes—as well as flamenco. He’s from Madrid and represents how flamenco looks today—highly technical, and involving a lot of training. Emilio choreographed the title piece of La Tarara, a duet we perform that’s named after the song in [poet and playwright] Federico García Lorca’s Café de Chinitas series and made famous later by Camarón de la Isla. Emilio is very skilled at working with the bata de cola—the long skirt-train I’ll be wearing.” Vargas is a bailaor—a dancer of flamenco puro, the traditional style of Andalusia. He was born in one of the Kasandra Flamenco presents La Tarara on Thursday and legendary caves of Sacromonte in Granada to a Gitano Friday (May 4 and 5) at the Norman and Annette RothRoma family steeped in flamenco and learned his art stein Theatre.

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 27

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ARTS

Parade pleases with stellar voices Show deserves accolades for searching out musical-theatre talent and giving it rich work to explore T HE AT R E PARADE

Last Tango in Berlin is Ute Lemper’s “symbolic title” for her program here.

Book by Alfred Uhry. Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Ryan Mooney. A Fighting Chance production. At the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Wednesday, April 19. Continues until April 29

Lemper travels Parade is not a feel-good musical. But there is plenty to celebrate in widely in life 2 this very solid production. Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert and in music Brown’s 1998 musical is based on the

true story of Leo Frank, a superintendent at a Georgia factory who was acte Lemper is in a play- cused of murdering a 13-year-old girl, ful mood when she picks one of the factory’s workers, in 1913. up the phone in her New Leo, a Jewish man transplanted from York City apartment, and the first thing she does is initiate a little game to see who’s more of a displaced person. She wins. Born in Germany, Lemper studied in Vienna before moving to Paris, and then spent a few years exploring what she calls “the London-Paris-Berlin triangle”. Following that, she adds, “I made my way over to New York in 1997, ’cause I was asked to perform on Broadway, and here I am, after 20 years.” But is she truly at home? That’s a different question altogether. “I am not an American,” she says. “I still have my European passport, and even though I’ve had my green card for 20 years and live in this incredible city, I miss Europe. The more the years pass, I really would love to go back to Europe—but I’m definitely not German enough to live back in Germany, not British enough to live in England, and not French enough to live in Paris, which is actually my favourite city in Europe. “I travel nonstop everywhere, all the time, and I don’t know where to feel at home.” When the singer comes to Vancouver to perform as part of the inaugural Vancouver Opera Festival, though, she might just get to settle down for an hour or two. Lemper’s current touring program is called Last Tango in Berlin, and as the title indicates, it is centred around songs associated with the German capital. But it’s not quite as simple as that: it also includes francophone songs associated with Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel, a nod to Argentine tango wizard Astor Piazzolla, and Yiddish songs that somehow miraculously survived the Holocaust. Lemper’s Berlin is ruined, cosmopolitan, vital, and sad. It also seems to exist on at least three separate temporal levels: the city of today, the wall-divided location of her artistic adolescence, and the fragile, progressive paradise that it was before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. “Last Tango in Berlin is a symbolic title,” she explains. “Last tango, last freedom, last cry of Berlin, last temptation of Berlin. And obviously it all goes back to the time of the Weimar Republic that was shattered by the Nazis. It could also be about the Berlin that I experienced in the 1980s, the little scarred island in the middle of the East Bloc, on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. And it could also be a playful way to describe the tango that Berlin itself has made through many, many chapters of evolution.” Grounding everything are the songs that Lemper is most famous for singing: the dark cabaret numbers written in the 1920s and ’30s by composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht. “Obviously, the political songs of the time of the Weimar Republic, they are kind of historical, and a little antique,” she says. “Yet there’s always a contemporary dimension to them, with our instability in these days.…These are songs of realism, of truth, songs of loss and love and war and the search for places of peace.” > BY A LEX A NDER VA R TY

U

Brooklyn, becomes a victim of antiSemitic and anti-Yankee sentiment, and his trial is a travesty, as the corrupt prosecutor loads the stand with false testimony. Leo is found guilty and sentenced to death, but his wife, Lucille, devotes herself to getting the case reopened. In the process, Leo and Lucille forge a new and deeper bond. Ryan Mooney deftly directs a cast of 24, harnessing the power of their voices and their on-stage presence as both jubilant crowd and threatening mob. There are many standout performances: Riley Sandbeck’s Leo is soft-spoken but fussy; even before his arrest, he’s a prisoner in the South, where he feels superior to the drawling, cussing men who surround him. Advah Soudack gives a stellar performance as Lucille; she’s a beautiful

singer who gives the character both warmth and unwavering confidence. William Tippery is a ferociously vengeful Frankie, the dead girl’s former sweetheart. In the relatively minor roles of factory janitor Jim Conley and servant Riley, Ricardo Cunha Pequenino steals every scene that he’s in. He delivers three of the show’s best songs: the act one barnburner, “That’s What He Said”, in which Jim delivers damning (and almost certainly fabricated) evidence against Leo; “Rumblin’ and a Rollin’ ”, a smoulderingly soulful tune in which the black servants, Riley and Minnie (Tiana Swan), sardonically note the racism surrounding the trial; and “Blues: Feel the Rain Fall”, a powerful

call-and-response for Jim and his fellow members of a chain gang. Pequenino looks set to be a star. With a few simple but loaded gestures, set designer Tim Driscoll references the ever-present danger of the play’s world: a row of nooses hangs nearly out of sight above one downstage corner, and a tree made of rope dominates the stage. Randy Charlston’s lighting is most striking when it emanates ominously from within the tree. Music director Clare Wyatt leads a four-piece band that handles the show’s many textures without missing a beat. Parade is a milestone for Mooney, whose company, Fighting Chance Productions, has been finding and cultivating emerging musical-theatre talent for a decade now. I’m grateful. > KATHLEEN OLIVER

Ute Lemper performs at the Orpheum next Thursday (May 4), as part of the Vancouver Opera Festival.

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 29

ARTS

Skate rebels tear up the ice DANCE VERTICAL INFLUENCES A Patin Libre production, presented by the Cultch. At Britannia Ice Rink on Tuesday, April 18. Continues until April 30

Britannia Ice Rink is normally a

2 place to see bleary-eyed hockey

REIMAGINING THE MUSIC OF

JONI MITC M ITC HELL

CREATED & DIRECTED BY ANDREW COHEN AND ANNA KUMAN

A P R I L 2 9 – M AY 2 0 A FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE PRODUCTION

TICKETS: 604 689 0926 FIREHALLARTSCENTRE.CA 280 E. CORDOVA

GUEST SPEAKERS

Richmond’s annual series of talks about art, the city and creating connections between citizens and their communities

MAPPING, NAPPING, AND OVERLAPPING: PERFORMANCE WITH AND IN COMMUNITIES THURS, MAY 4 | 7:00PM ERIC & MIA // INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTISTS Having a conversation with a stranger, eating a popsicle made of foraged ingredients, skateboarding in concert or sleeping at the base of a public monument are lived actions- experiences that can precipitate dialogue and affect social or spatial change. Using their collaborative practice as a case study, Calgary-based artists Eric & Mia will share the different ways in which they create community through performance. By combining the playfulness of childhood chums with the scrutiny of ethnographers, they create community-specific, relational and participatory works that invite audiences to become active agents in the creation of community. ericandmia.ca This talk will be preceded by a short performance by spoken-word poet, Dia Davina. Richmond City Hall Council Chambers 6911 No. 3 Road FREE, but seating limited. Please RSVP to lulu@richmond.ca

richmond.ca/luluseries

30 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

parents cursing their existence as they shiver in the stands at 6 a.m. practices. But a place to see art? Apparently, yes. Montreal’s Le Patin Libre has invaded the peewee-banner-lined East Van rink, turning it into a dramatically lit stage for a defiantly different kind of skating show. Gone are the furry animal costumes, sparkling Lycra, and razzmatazz of traditional ice extravaganzas. Instead, in Vertical Influences, we get five young dancers on skates, wearing ponytails, dreads, and baggy street clothes, virtuosically reinventing the form and playfully using it to upend notions of time, space, and physics. With equal amounts of sass and technique, they tear up the sheet of ice. Pity Britannia’s Zamboni driver. In the second act, when this show really finds its stride, there’s a recurring image of the five dancers standing straight and still, but gliding at fullspeed toward the audience that—after spending the first 40 minutes in the stands—is now seated on the ice at one end of the rink. To the thrill of the kids on cushions in front, they come to a stop just in the nick of time, with a barely perceptible turning-in of their toes. It’s this mix of danger and magic, the kind that can only be accomplished on two sharpened blades of steel, that these Montreal upstarts manage to harness and showcase. And it’s bizarre that no one’s ever really thought to experiment in this way before; perhaps you can chalk it up to the past conservatism of traditional figure skating. Le Patin Libre is at its best inventing other witty tricks on the eye. At one point, dancer Alexandre Hamel bends down and works his arms like a speed skater, but instead of racing forward, he moves backward. At another moment, four performers circle and swirl around in a slow-motion line while the other dances at full speed. The show is about these kinds of visual paradoxes, not how many salchows and camel spins they can do. The troupe has appeared at contemporary-dance festivals around Europe, and you can see why: the performers excel at carving out space on their frozen white canvas, playing with geometric forms. There’s still a lot of room here to aim for more ambitious ideas and meaning, but, hey: this is a pretty exhilarating start. Each skater brings a wild individuality to the proceedings, giving the show a bit of competitive B-boy and -girl thrill. Lanky Parisian Samory Ba (apparently an escapee from cruiseship ice shows) bends, downwarddog-style, and seems to pull himself at full speed across the ice with just his galloping fingers. At another point,

Vertical Influences plays with velocity, time, and space. Rolline Laporte photo.

he staccatos the ice into submission, throwing a blizzard of ice shavings at the audience. And Jasmin Boivin—in hockey skates!—appears to have triplejointed ankles and knees, working a street-dance attitude as he carves elaborate Cs into the ice. Le Patin Libre got its start in street (or at least outdoor-ice) busking, and it still has a rawness amid its sophisticated patterning. The show is a bit uneven. The opening half has some dramatic moments when the dancers appear in and out of stage fog, and it broaches some bigger ideas about belonging and alienation. But because the audience is separated from the action by Plexiglas, it doesn’t have the immediacy of the second half. The brilliance in the final part is the seating on the ice, where the audience isn’t as removed from the speed, sweat, and flying frost. It does mean you should bring a warm toque, snow jacket, mitts, and a blanket. But then every bleary-eyed hockey parent already knows that. > JANET SMITH

THREE SETS/RELATING AT A DISTANCE A Lesley Telford/Inverso production, presented by the Dance Centre. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Thursday, April 20. No remaining performances

At the intermission in Three

2 Sets/Relating at a Distance, vol-

unteers handed out tiny origamilike poetry books to the audience, ones you had to carefully unfold to find the text. They reminded you instantly of Lesley Telford’s dance—artful, intricate, and puzzlelike. After all, paradoxes, both physical and intellectual, give Telford’s new evening of work a strange allure. Each of her three pieces in this fullevening program is like a visual and mental riddle, and a lot of pleasure comes from unlocking its secrets. It’s the same kind of reward that comes from deciphering a poem—so it’s no surprise to find poetry at the core of all of Telford’s works. The opening three-dancer creation, If, depicts the way that several versions of yourself can exist within a single body, not always getting along. My

tongue, your ear plays with the contradiction that the closer a couple is, the farther apart the partners can become. And the new Spooky Action at a Distance riffs on quantum theory’s biggest paradox: that entangled particles will act in tight connection even when they are separated by massive distances. Of the three, the opener If casts the greatest spell. The dreamlike piece opens with a woman in a chair, throwing a long, dark shadow, as if in the “interrogation” that Anne Carson’s poetry, excerpted in voice-over, refers to here. But the interrogation is within the self, and soon two other dancers appear, sometimes sparring for the chair, sometimes mirroring each other’s actions, and sometimes moving each other’s limbs, like puppet masters. Set to Porn Sword Tobacco’s looping electro score, the work finds a delirious, “drifting” flow all its own— helped along by the energy and expressive precision of Stéphanie Cyr, Eden Solomon, and Maya Tenzer. My tongue, your ear is a fun duet about dysfunctional relationships that Telford first showed us at Dances for a Small Stage. Speaking excerpts from Wisłava Szymborska’s “The Tower of Babel”, dancers Tenzer and Graham Kaplan bring to life a crumbling partnership. Oh-so-familiar complaints like “How could you forget?” punctuate offbalance pairings and failed synchronization. The angular viola in Nico Muhly’s Etude 1A adds to the unsettling mood. The pair captures the piece’s odd mix of restlessness and ironic physical comedy. Or would that be tragedy? How you perceive it might depend on how your last relationship ended… The most ambitious work on the program is the seven-dancer Spooky Action at a Distance, a piece that Telford’s collaborator, poet Barbara Adler, opens by defining quantum entanglement—“so we don’t have to worry about it”. And true, as the dance that ensues, to her live spoken-word, is not a pedantic take on the scientific subject. Instead, Telford plays with ideas of action and reaction, of bodies whose movement is tied together, even when they are apart. Adler brings it all down to earth, referencing everything from Goldschläger schnapps to fishing poles. Over the course of the piece, Adler starts to ponder time and space, wondering if it is the universe that controls us, connects us, and forms our bonds with others: “To walk, is to tempt action to come upon you”; “some people happened to me.” It’s deep stuff, but Telford finds movement that captures the concepts in clear yet nonliteral ways— bodies pushing and pulling each other, using legs and forearms to nudge others into twists and turns. The overall impression is of a vibrating flurry of action and reaction. That Telford can take such heavy concepts—even quantum physics— and interpret them through dance speaks to her abilities. In other words, she can really put poetry in motion. > JANET SMITH

Program 3 May 11 12 13, 2017

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PINK MARTINI WITH THE VSO YOUTH & MUSIC 2017 New Choral Creators 8pm Friday, May 5, 2017 Ryerson United Church Vancouver Chamber Choir | Vancouver Youth Choir Kathleen Allan, George Roberts, Jon Washburn, Conductors At 150 years, Canada is still a relatively young nation, making our Youth & Music concert a perfect venue for the Choir to start its 2017 celebrations. This event highlights the delightful finalists and winners of our 13th biennial Young Composers’ Competition, plus a programme that celebrates the creativity of our youngest composers from 8 to 30.

1.855.985.ARTS (2787) vancouverchamberchoir.com

SATURDAY, MAY 13 8PM, ORPHEUM Bramwell Tovey conductor

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APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 31

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ar ts/ timeout THEATRE DANCE MUSIC COMEDY LITERARY EVENTS ET CETERA GALLERIES MUSEUMS

COMEDY 2ONGOING

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THEATRE 2OPENINGS

“performance after performance of surpassing brilliance and character”

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LONG DIVISION Pi Theatre presents director Richard Wolfe’s version of Peter Dickinson’s play about seven characters who are inextricably linked by a sequence of tragic events. Apr 26-30, Orpheum Annex (823 Seymour). Tix from $25, info www.pitheatre.com/. THE SHAPE OF A GIRL Stone’s Throw Productions presents Joan MacLeod’s play about bullying and violence between young girls. Apr 26-29, 8-10 pm, Pacific Theatre (1440 W. 12th). Info www. facebook.com/events/832632723544105/. ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF TEASE Original burlesque-style musical-theatre production inspired by the classic folktale figure of Robin Hood. Apr 28–May 13, 8 pm, Performance Works (1218 Cartwright, Granville Island). Tix $29, info www.toofly. ca/shows/robin-hood/. CIRCLE GAME: REIMAGINING THE MUSIC OF JONI MITCHELL The music of Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is reimagined in a musical experience conceived and directed by Vancouver’s Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman. Apr 29–May 20, Firehall Arts Centre (280 E. Cordova). Tix from $23, info www.firehall artscentre.ca/onstage/circle-game/.

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PARADIDDLE PARTY What was once a Vancouver institution is returning this year, with a twist: all funds from veteran percussionist Sal Ferreras’s Drum Heat, back onstage after a seven-year absence, will go to benefit Arts Umbrella. What hasn’t changed is the event’s wide-open approach to the percussive arts: tabla virtuoso Cassius Khan and Brazilian chameleon Celso Machado are among the drummers who’ll assist Ferreras at the Vogue Theatre on Thursday (April 27). But Drum Heat is about more than just hot beats: also joining the crew are the Sarabande youth choir, mandolin master John Reischman, and an assortment of fine local jazz performers. A good time is guaranteed. NAPOLEON VOYAGE Théâtre la Seizième presents the story of a man who relives his many journeys around the world. In French with English surtitles on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. May 2-6, 8 pm, Studio 16 (1545 W. 7th). Tix $26-30, info www.seizieme.ca/saison/ napoleon-voyage/. HOME Original Canadian production shares a powerful vision of hope from local diverse youth in the search for a healthy home, both within oneself and one’s community. May 3-6, Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews). Free admission, info www.someassembly.ca/.

SOME ASSEMBLY THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS HOME When a favourite local hangout is threatened with corporate takeover, two young female First Nations managers rally the regulars to save the place they call home. In doing so, they showcase the importance of their community by giving those within it a voice. Home, a play written and performed by the Roundhouse Youth Theatre Action Group, shares a powerful vision of hope youth’s search for a healthy home, within oneself and one’s community. The Some Assembly Theatre production runs at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from next Wednesday to Saturday (May 3 to 6).

2ONGOING MOM’S THE WORD 3: NEST 1/2 EMPTY Mom’s the Word Collective presents the story of a group of moms whose kids have grown, whose marriages have evolved, and whose bodies are backfiring. To May 6, Granville Island Stage (1585 Johnston, Granville Island). Tix from $29, info www.artsclub.com/. PARADE Fighting Chance Productions presents the story of a man who is put on trial for the murder of a 13-year-old factory worker under his employ. To Apr 29, Norman Rothstein Theatre (950 W. 41st). Tix $25-40, info www.fighting chanceproductions.ca/. THE 39 STEPS Patrick Barlow’s adaptation features a falsely accused hero who is thrown into an adventure and encounters murderers, villains, spies, and beautiful women. Based on the book by John Buchan. To May 6, 8 pm, Kay Meek Centre (1700 Mathers Ave., West Van). Tix $23/21/18/15, info www.theatrewest van.com/.

YUK YUK’S COMEDY CLUB 2837 Cambie, 604-696-9857, www.yukyuks.com/ vancouver/. Comedy club with Top Talent Tue at 8 pm, amateur night Wed at 8 pm, and professional headliners Thu-Fri at 8 pm and Sat at 7 and 9:30 pm. 2EDDIE DELLA SIEPE Apr 27-29 VANCOUVER THEATRESPORTS LEAGUE Some of the world’s most daring and innovative improv. #NoFilter (Thu, 9:15 pm); Firecracker! (Wed, 9:15 pm); Ok Tinder (Fri and Sat, 11:15 pm); Rookie Night (Sun, 7:30 pm); TheatreSports (Wed, 7:30 pm; Fri, 9:30 pm); Western World (Thu, Fri, and Sat, 7:30 pm). Apr 26–May 3, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Info www.vtsl.com/.

LITERARY EVENTS 2THIS WEEK VERSES FESTIVAL OF WORDS Event celebrates a broad definition of literary arts, including spoken-word poetry, storytelling, page-based poetry, and improvisers. To Apr 30, various Vancouver venues. Info www.versesfestival.ca/.

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HERE BE MONSTERS Get a sneak peek at a new show about bullying at the free open rehearsal and community forum for Monsters. The Miscellaneous Productions show conjures the monsters, real and imagined, that have haunted the lives of 14 Vancouver youths— experiences of violence, bullying, and being bullied. Loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the event happens Friday (April 28) at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.

ET CETERA

DANCE

2THIS WEEK

2THIS WEEK THE TUNNEL Heather Laura Gray’s multimedia project sees dancers move through a staged consciousness, immersed in the evolving light show as they struggle through turbulent thoughts. Apr 26-30, Studio 16 (1545 W. 7th). Info www.heatherlauragray.com/projects.html. GOH BALLET Young dancers perform a selection of classical and original ballets for the Dance Centre’s Discover Dance! noon-hour series. Apr 27, Scotiabank Dance Centre (677 Davie). Tix $14/12, info www.thedancecentre.ca/.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL Annual not-for-profit festival aims to nurture emerging talent, engage community, and spark public dialogue about photography. To Apr 28, various Vancouver venues. Info www.capturephotofest.com/. VERTICAL INFLUENCES Performed by Le Patin Libre, the production ranges beyond the limits of traditional figure skating. To Apr 30, Britannia Ice Rink (1661 Parker). Tix from $20, info www.thecultch.com/.

GALLERIES

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY 750 Hornby, 604-662-4719, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/. INTERNATIONAL DANCE DAY Take in some contemporary, hip-hop, street, salsa, 2PACIFIC CROSSINGS (works from welland Bhangra dance performances in cele- known Hong Kong artists created after bration of International Dance Day. Apr 29, their relocation to Vancouver throughout the 1960-90s) to May 28 12-7 pm, various Vancouver venues. Free admission, info www.thedancecentre.ca/.

MUSIC 2THIS WEEK VANCOUVER OPERA FESTIVAL Celebration of opera features three new opera productions and special events. Includes presentations of Otello (Apr 28-May 6, Q.E. Theatre), Dead Man Walking (Apr 29–May 7, Q.E. Theatre), and The Marriage of Figaro (Apr 30– May 18, Vancouver Playhouse). Apr 28–May 18, Queen Elizabeth Theatre and Vancouver Playhouse, info www.van couveroperafestival.ca/.

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THE COMEDY MIX 1015 Burrard, Century Plaza Hotel & Spa, 604-684-5050, www. thecomedymix.com/. Comedy club with pro-am night Tue at 8:30 pm, showcase Wed at 8:30 pm, and featured headliners Thu at 8:30 pm and Fri-Sat at 8 and 10:30 pm. 2DINO ARCHIE Apr 27-29 2BRYAN CALLEN May 4-6 2KATE DAVIS May 11-13

MUMP AND SMOOT IN ANYTHING The Canadian clown duo is confronted by a myriad of nightmarish obstacles that present themselves at every turn. Recommended for ages 14+. To May 6, York Theatre (639 Commercial). Info www.thecultch.com/.

HÉBERT MUSIQUE Tommy Emmanuel

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VSO SPRING FESTIVAL Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony present a celebration of British composers and their most popular works. Concerts include Henry V (Apr 29, 8 pm), Enigma (Apr 30, 7 pm), and Last Night of the Proms (May 1, 8 pm). To May 1, Orpheum Theatre. Info www.vancouversymphony.ca/.

MUSEUMS

THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT UBC 6393 NW Marine Drive, 604-822-5087, www.moa.ubc.ca/. 2AMAZONIA: THE RIGHTS OF NATURE (Amazonian basketry, textiles, carvings, feather works, and ceramics) to Jan 28, 2018

TIME OUT ARTS LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge. Submit listings 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.

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MUSIC

It’s called BY JOHN LUCAS

American Bison Charge Through Heavy Snow in Yellowstone National Park, November 1967, and the photograph—shot by veteran lensman William Albert Allard and featured on the front of the new Said the Whale album— shows just that. The band’s Tyler Bancroft found the photo on Reddit and was struck by it immediately. He showed it to his bandmates, fellow singer-guitarist Ben Worcester and keyboardist Jaycelyn Brown, and they loved it enough to put it on the cover of As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide. “It came from a list of the top photos taken by National Geographic photographers that were never published in a magazine,” says Bancroft, interviewed alongside Worcester at Railtown Café on a rare sunny April morning. “We thought it was kind of relevant that there were three buffalo in the front, charging forward, and in the background you can’t really see how many there are—there’s a few, so that was sort of like the supporting cast of our band currently. I thought that the three charging forward was kind of poignant.” It’s certainly a fitting image: this past January, Said the Whale announced the departure of drummer Spencer Schoening, who left the band

Looking beyond the sadness

Said the Whale’s Ben Worcester, Jaycelyn Brown, and Tyler Bancroft believe one should always be prepared for a surprise Dîner en Blanc announcement.

“Step Into the Darkness”, Worcester’s relationship with his long-time girlfriend broke down and ended, although the two Having survived some hard times, Said the Whale later reconnected and stays hopeful on As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide are, happily, still togethroughly a year after bassist Nathan Shaw also er. Bancroft and his own partner, meanwhile, made his exit. This left Bancroft, Worcester, and experienced both the emotional devastation of Brown to soldier on as a trio. Both partings were losing a child (as detailed on “Miscarriage”) and amicable; Shaw left to pursue his burgeoning the joy of bringing one into the world. Other electronic-music project, Ekali, while Schoening songs—specifically Bancroft’s “Emily Rose” and needed a break from the physical and mental Worcester’s “Heaven”—were written in response strain that goes along with playing drums in a to the deaths of friends. popular touring act for nearly a decade. “We’ve gone through a lot of shit in the past Released at the end of March, As Long as Your few years,” Worcester acknowledges. “We took Eyes Are Wide is the first we’ve heard from the some time off and had a lot of personal experinewly streamlined band. The record bears the ences, which gave a lot of emotion to the writing, usual hallmarks, including gorgeous multipart and we had a lot of messages to say, finally. When vocal harmonies and stellar songwriting contri- you’re playing music constantly and you sit down butions from both Worcester and Bancroft, but to write songs, you think, ‘What do I write songs this isn’t exactly the Said the Whale of old. about?’ Time passes, you have all these feelings, Working in (and out) of the studio with We and then the songs start flowing.” Are the City’s Cayne McKenzie, the trio found The record takes the listener to some raw and itself free to experiment with its sound, pushing painful places, but the net effect of listening to it beyond its indie-pop comfort zone with drum As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide is, mercifully, not loops, buzzing bass synthesizers, and shimmer- akin to binge-watching 13 Reasons Why. Its mesing electronic textures that surround and sup- sage seems to be that even the worst events in life port the melodies. provide an opportunity to reflect on the things Says Worcester: “It felt different in the record- that truly matter, and to appreciate the people and ing process, but it was also kind of a throwback to places you love while they’re still around. how we first started recording, Tyler and I togeth“Obviously, thematically it’s super heavy, and er, just the two of us coming up with ideas and there are songs about people dying—yeah, it’s using lots of strange sounds to fill in the gaps.” a very, very sad record,” Bancroft admits. “But “A sonic shift is natural for any band,” adds there’s an underlying hopefulness. There are Bancroft, who offers precisely zero apologies some songs that are upbeat sonically that are for changing things up. “It’s extremely boring tackling sad subjects. And even lyrically I think to play the same music over and over again. we’re both pretty positive people, and I think And also, tastes change. We’ve had maybe a few that shines through in the lyrics. Even the sadpeople say that they’re lamenting for how our dest songs on the record have a light that shines band used to sound 10 years ago, but you can’t through at the end.” expect a group of people to continue making the Tapping into the feelings that inspired these same music for 10 years. It’s tiring.” songs in order to perform them live might seem The sounds have changed, but the heart of Said daunting, but Bancroft insists that it’s a necessary the Whale has always been the songwriting of its aspect of giving the audience an authentic emoequally engaging frontmen. In the almost four tional experience. years since the release of the group’s last album, “I think you want to be experiencing those feelhawaiii, the two have had no shortage of real- ings when you’re performing,” he says. “It makes life material from which to draw inspiration. As it so much more worthwhile to be sitting in a van documented in the emotionally potent lyrics to all day and setting up and sound-checking and

putting on a show. Meaning what you say is something we’ve all strived for, and it feels so much better. It feels like you’re making a difference and it feels like you’re doing something important. If we were just singing vapid songs without meaning, it would start to get empty pretty quick.” Worcester agrees, but he notes that he would keep doing what he does even if there were no one listening. “I don’t sit and try and write songs every day to make a hit to get on the radio or something like that,” he says. “I write songs because it’s a part of me. I would do it whether I was in a band or not. When I feel whole and all the other holes are filled in my life, I just produce music. So I try to keep that up—keep my well filled.” Said the Whale plays the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (April 29).

in + out

Ben Worcester and Tyler Bancroft sound off on the things that enquiring minds want to know:

On getting emotional on-stage (Worcester): “I’ve actually shed tears while singing a song like ‘Realize’, because I was brought to that place; I was able to talk about it and get there. But then occasionally you have drunk people yelling during a song and it really makes your brain struggle to stay focused on what it is you’re doing, because you want to be there, but you’re also fighting against the current, so to speak. Almost every night when Tyler’s singing ‘Miscarriage’ I feel like crying.” On going against the grain (Bancroft): “We’ve gone and made our least radio-friendly album to date. Nobody wants to play it. It doesn’t sound like ’90s rock, which is what seems to be the flavour of the week on commercial radio.” On recording (Worcester): “We were both open to the songs developing and changing. We were both kind of excited about that prospect, and it turned out to be the most cohesive record that we’ve made.”

VOLLEBEKK WORKS WELL WITH CONSTRAINTS The question of digital versus

2 analogue is the initial topic of

conversation when Leif Vollebekk answers the phone in Montreal. But instead of discussing the advantages of glorious 24-track versus Ableton Live, the outgoing musician ends up holding forth on photography and what’s more satisfying: a great iPhone shot, or one taken on the rapidly disappearing medium of film. Vollebekk admits to being no stranger to digital and the dizzying array of options offered by gamechanging apps like Hipstamatic; check out the snaps that were part of the album art for his last release, North Americana, for proof of that. But it’s film that he still maintains a stubborn loyalty to. “I’m not very good at photography, so I’ve kind of set myself up in a way that I don’t have to be,” Vollebekk says. “I just shoot film. Most of the roll is really awful, and

then I’ll get two shots that I’m really happy with. With digital, I spend a lot of time on my computer editing them and comparing them. Shooting on film, when I take a photo I don’t even remember having taken it, and it’s nice not knowing what I’m going to get until it’s developed. Also, it makes me stay in the moment. I know I can’t take too many photos. And maybe it’s a testimony to how badly I’ve learned, but with the iPhone, the first photo that I take, I’m always like, ‘I can do better,’ so I take two or three more. But the first one is always better, because it’s what I saw and then shot without thinking about it.” That last statement helps one get a handle on Vollebekk’s third and latest album, Twin Solitude. The singer has framed the record as being a breakthrough for him, the narrative being that he got sick of his old songs and became

determined to reinvent himself this time out. So where he often sounded like a man gunning for a three-album deal with Saddle Creek earlier in his career, Twin Solitude is a record that doesn’t tether itself to one particular sound. Vollebekk comes on like an old soul trapped in a young body on the smoky, piano–flourished “All Night Sedans”, gets warm and reflective on the lovely, tapehissed “East of Eden”, and camps out on the porch for the lazySunday-morning jam “Telluride”. “Yeah, there was a crisis,” he says with a laugh. “But that’s a normal thing where you get tired of your songs and go, ‘What am I doing? Who am I? What’s next? Because it’s not this.’ So you change. Also, because I was getting close to 30, I thought I was going to become someone else in my 30s, but apparently you just take who you were

your whole life with you. I don’t know whether it was my sensitivity to media stuff, but I realized that I figured out who I am. I went, ‘I’m a guy who plays guitars and harmonica who writes songs in this tradition.’ So I decided who was in that tradition, and then wrote within those confines. And then I was like, ‘Uh, this is awful.’ ” So he changed things up. Twin Solitude leaves one wondering whether he’s more enamoured of Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, or Ryan Adams or Nick Drake, the common denominator between all those artists being they drew up their own rules. “I listen to the Velvet Underground, Ray Charles, the Beatles, and Radiohead,” Vollebekk says. “That’s my entire life, although maybe less these days. And my music had no traces of that. On this record, I don’t feel like there’s a

genre that can be imposed upon it. I’m getting many different genres depending on what people who hear it are listening to.” He’s also learned not to overthink things, something that he admits was a problem in the past. As anyone who’s ever driven themselves crazy messing with pictures in iPhoto knows, sometimes there’s an upside to keeping things simple. “Most of the songs were done really quickly,” he says. “Like ‘East of Eden’ was one take. With North Americana, if I didn’t get the sounds that I wanted, I would change studios until I did. So I’d do five or six takes of each song. If I got a good take that didn’t sound right, I would throw it away. This time, I got all the right sounds on piano, drums down at the beginning. The rule was ‘Don’t play any music, don’t play any songs, don’t see next page

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 33

Vollebekk

from previous page

have any fun’ until that was taken care of. It was nice to do a take and not end up all fucked-up about it.”

> MIKE USINGER

Leif Vollebekk plays the Biltmore Cabaret next Thursday (May 4).

Sofi Tukker is always up for a party and a drinkee Look past the deliciously hyp-

2 notic Brazil-flavoured bon-bon “Drinkee” on last year’s Soft Animals EP, and one might rightly conclude that life isn’t always a beat-driven dance party for Sofi Tukker. The New York–based duo first blew up on Spotify with “Drinkee”, a delirious mix of snake-charm guitar, junglehouse percussion, and Portuguese beat poetry. But evidently not interested in being pigeonholed, the team of Sophie Hawley-Weld (guitar and vocals) and Tucker Halpern (programming) followed things up earlier this year with “Johny” and “Greed”, a pair of darkwave singles ripped straight from the underbelly of the postwave ’80s. “There was a moment there after Soft Animals where we went sort of dark and rock-y,” Halpern says, speaking on a conference call with Hawley-Weld as

the two head to a gig in Las Vegas. “It was just something that felt right, so we decided to do it. We actually made a bunch of songs that sort of fit into that world. But now that we’ve been touring on a lot of those songs, we’re sort of inching back the other way again. We’re back to ‘Hey, we love life and we’re happy. We want to promote excitedness and love.’” Getting details on what caused Sofi Tukker’s descent into darkness isn’t easy. “Let’s just says those songs were a very specific reaction to a lot of anger and aggression that we had,” HawleyWeld offers diplomatically, if somewhat evasively. Both members of Sofi Tukker sound anything but down on the day the Straight catches up with them. They’ve been in the studio working on new material in between back-to-back appearances at Coachella. Since last year, they’ve also been touring aggressively, including both Europe and South America, with folks in Brazil embracing the duo as their own. Trace that Latin-American love affair back to Sofi Tukker’s beginnings. A basketball player until he was sidelined in college by an injury, Halpern took up DJing, which led to his mixing of tracks HawleyWeld was working on as a member of bossa-nova group.

Sofi Tukker was a blouse away from a seat at Dîner en Blanc.

Their first collaboration was “Drinkee”, in which the words of Chacal—a Brazilian poet HawleyWeld was studying with while taking classes in Portuguese—ended up set to throbbing bass, soft-focus bongos, and an ear-worm guitar hook. Soft Animals followed in early summer, with the club-thumping standout “Matadora” storming the dance floor with a caipirinha in one hand and a charango (a Bolivian stringed instrument) in the other.

Celebrating 40 years

The welcome challenge since the beginning has been translating things to a live setting. Hawley-Weld is ever-busy handling guitar and vocals, and Halpern is more than cognizant of the fact clubgoers don’t want to watch someone who looks like they’re checking their email. “It’s been really fun trying to perform while walking the borderline between a DJ set and a live-music set,” Halpern says. “We try and act things out, and we use this big book tree thing that we have.” That book tree has become an integral part of Sofi Tukker’s live shows. Pages are removed from books and then replaced with sensors, said books then hung on what looks like a futuristic metal coat-rack and hit with drumsticks, triggering samples that flesh out the songs. Even when the duo goes dark with tunes like “Johny”, the party rarely stops. “The first performance we ever did, I had a couple of controllers and I was trying to trigger in every part of every song,” Halpern remembers. “It was hard because we were trying to do everything with just two of us, which is difficult when there’s a lot more than two parts in every song. I ended up staring at the controllers the whole show and not getting to interact with the crowd at all—not that there was much of a crowd. As we performed more, I realized that the best part was connecting with the crowd.” Hawley-Weld continues: “Ultimately, the point of live music is making a connection. It’s been a relief for me to start doing this kind of music compared to what I was doing before. It’s been all about joy and connection. I literally am in the crowd for good parts of the shows. I’m so glad we’re doing what we’re doing, where we’re literally having a dance party every night.” > MIKE USINGER

Sofi Tukker plays Fortune Sound Club on Saturday (April 29).

JULY 13.14.15.16 JERICHO BEACH PARK JUST ANNOUNCED!

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry • Shawn Colvin • Barenaked Ladies • Rhiannon Giddens Mbongwana Star • Blind Pilot • Ferron and Her All Star Band • Sidestepper Andy Shauf • Kathleen Edwards • Marlon Williams & The Yarra Benders RURA • John K. Samson & The Winter Wheat • The Belle Game • ILAM Blick Bassy • Native North America • Archie Roach • Eilen Jewell • Roy Forbes Tift Merritt • Nive Nielsen and The Deer Children • Ellika Solo Rafael • Si Kahn Cold Specks • Cris Derksen • Noah Gundersen • Ramy Essam • Ganga Giri Jim Kweskin & Meredith Axelrod • Grace Petrie • Gabrielle Shonk • Wesli Emmanuel Jal • Aoife O’Donovan & Noam Pikelny • Choir! Choir! Choir! Alpha Yaya Diallo • Tomato Tomato • Chouk Bwa Libète • Matt Holubowski

Atlas Revolt’s melting pot is proving easy to love Fronted by singer-songwriter

2 Tony Dekker, Great Lake Swim-

“As I get older, I feel like the gaps are getting kind of narrower in terms of what goes into the music, and what you can play around with,” Higgins explains in a phone call from his Toronto home. “And I don’t necessarily think, playing certain songs with a band like Great Lake Swimmers and then some of my own stuff, that they’re that far apart. “Of course, when you bring the improvisational element into the performance, that does change things, because there’s that jazz flavour kind of sprinkled on top of everything: ‘We’re going to play a theme, and then we’re going to go for something interesting and unique that’s a onetime event.’ Maybe there’s a little less of that when you do more of a traditional songwriter-type thing. But in terms of the actual music, I don’t feel like they’re that different. I don’t have to flick my brain over too far to get from one situation to the other.” That both bands feature strong tunes must help. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to add a vocalist to Atlas Revolt tracks like “Electric Sinner”, with its moody bass and chiming guitar; in fact, violinist Aleksandar Gajić pretty much takes that role, playing Higgins’s melody with aching intensity. “I definitely think very lyrically when I think about writing melodies,” the bassist says. “I want things that I can sing, and that make sense—to the way my brain moves, anyways.” Higgins’s prominent use of the violin is another link between Atlas Revolt and the Swimmers. But where the admittedly wonderful Miranda Mulholland is grounded in old-time country and Celtic sounds, Gajić is anything but a folk fiddler. “He’s an incredible musician,” Higgins says of his band’s Serbian-born star. “I mean, he can play anything, which is kind of insane.…At one point he was the concertmaster of the Belgrade Philharmonic, I believe, so he’s pretty steeped in the classical tradition, and he does a lot of classical work still. But since he’s come to Canada he’s become a first-call violin player in Toronto for a lot of different crossover things. And I think in the background of his own life there’s a lot of traditional Serbian music. It’s a real melting pot over there, from what I understand.” Atlas Revolt is its own kind of melting pot, too. Guitarist Tom Juhas takes a post–Bill Frisell approach to his instrument, in that he’s not afraid to add a little distortion to the mix, while keyboardist Robbie Grunwald is a master of subtle texture. Add Gajić’s polished tone and the rhythm section’s earthy aplomb, and you’ve got a band that’s easy to love—and there’s nothing revolting about that.

mers make atmospheric folk rock with a charmingly outdoorsy, yet not unsophisticated, feel. Bret Higgins’s Atlas Revolt, in contrast, is more urban in tone; the quintet’s eponymous debut, issued on saxophonist John Zorn’s New York City–based Tzadik label, is cosmopolitan and provocative, combining state-of-the-art improvisation with Balkan beats, Latin rhythms, and indie-rock intensity. Yet the two groups have more in > ALEXANDER VARTY common than meets the ear, even beyond the fact that bassist Higgins and drummer Joshua Van Tassel Bret Higgins’ Atlas Revolt plays the WISE Hall on Friday (April 28). power them both.

TRIIBUTES - APRIL 29

The Mae Trio • True Blues w/ Corey Harris & Alvin Youngblood Hart C.R. Avery • Bob Bossin • Jim Bryson • Luke Wallace • Will Varley • Delgres Hillsburn • Korrontzi • Paul McKenna • Mélisande • Katie Moore • Jake Morley Begonia • Clinton and Lorna St. John • The Slocan Ramblers • Leif Vollebekk

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34 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

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WITCH MOUNTAIN, 11 TEEBS * FREE THE ROBOTS * LEFTO 26 CANDLEMAS & RED FANG BUSHWHACKER, KOMA MAY SOUNDS OF SOLIDARITY ALITA DUPRAY, PEACH PIT, BABY HARRY/KINGS MAY WITH RAZOR, NAILS, PRIMITIVE MAN, GATEOF SOUL, KIMMORTAL, STEEVEN K, DA GODZ 12 FUNDRAISER FEAT. 27 MUNICIPAL WASTE CREEPER, ANCIIENTS, TYRANTS BLOOD • HOSTED BY KWASI THOMAS

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50th Anniversary Issue | MAY 4, 2017 MALE DANCERS: 8:30-10PM FEMALE DANCERS: 10PM-CLOSE

1967-2017

It all originated over beers in the old Cecil Hotel in 1967. Over the last five decades, the Georgia Straight has thrilled, enraged, educated, and enlightened Vancouverites.

To advertise contact 604.730.7020 or sales@straight.com

APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 35

BILL CHARLAP TRIO • MAY 4 @ 8 PM

Grammy-winning pianist’s tight-knit jazz trio (featuring Peter Washington on bass & Kenny Washington on drums)

music/ timeout

VENUE: KAY MEEK CENTRE

MARC COHN • MAY 8 @ 8 PM

Grammy-winning singer/songwriter celebrates the 25th anniversary of his platinum-selling debut album

VENUE: NORMAN ROTHSTEIN THEATRE

CONCERTS < CLUBS & VENUES < OUT OF TOWN <

ROY FORBES • JUN 25 @ 8 PM B.C. singer-songwriter & folk legend

CONCERTS

VENUE: PRESENTATION HOUSE THEATRE

2JUST ANNOUNCED HELEN SUNG QUARTET Having honed her distinctive style with ensembles ranging from the Mingus Big Band to T.S. Monk’s Sextet to Terri Lyne Carrington’s Mosaic Project, Sung now leads a quartet comprised of some of this generation’s finest artists. Presented by Coastal Jazz. May 5, 8 pm, Frankie’s Jazz Club (765 Beatty). Tix $25, info www.coastaljazz.ca/.

Tickets: 604.990.7810 • Online: capilanou.ca/centre Capilano University • 2055 Purcell Way • North Vancouver

The Georgia Straight Confessions, an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30 • 7:30PM

KAY MEEK CENTRE • 1700 Mathers Ave, West Vancouver

THE DISTRICTS Philadelphia rock band tours in support of upcoming release. Jul 8, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $14 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/.

Scan to confess NEW ORLEANS INSPIRED CUISINE

It’s all about geometry In life you have to avoid three geometric figures. 1-the vicious circles 2-the love triangles 3-and the square minds

Although I’m sure witnessing your tapdancing and stomp dance routines while listening to your arguments is probably something quite special to behold in person; your downstairs neighbours are probably not so impressed...C’mon people lets have some respect for those dwelling below.

When you finally start to realize how much the person you’re with is all talk and zero delivery, it makes it easier to let go of the love.

It’s the little things To the man who came through my work at 6:00 a.m. and brought me a coffee, you really did make my day. It might not seem like a big gesture but for me it meant a lot that a complete stranger thought of me and gave me a gift. I attempted to give you money but you smiled and said “pass it on”. And that, I will. Thank you.

Open but closed

Visit

KENDRICK LAMAR American hip-hop musician performs on his The Damn. Tour, with guests Travis Scott and D.R.A.M. Aug 2, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths Way). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $129.50/79.50/49.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

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I am really tired of people in open relationships acting as if they are more enlightened than monogamous people. why? Because we feel jealousy? A normal human emotion? Correct me if I am wrong but having feelings doesn’t make you unenglightened.

to post a Confession

36 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

JAYMES YOUNG Los Angeles–based pop-electronica singer-songwriter performs on his Feel Something Tour. Jul 15, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $15 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. SIX60 New Zealand soul-electronica band tours in support of latest album, Six60 (2). Jul 26, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, The Imperial (319 Main). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $16.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

Notes to upstairs neighbours

Here’s the thing.

DARCYS Toronto alt-pop duo composed of Jason Couse and Wes Marskell. Jun 9, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Fortune Sound Club (147 E. Pender). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $15 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

MAY 4

5oth Anniversary Issue

MAY 11 Urban Living Issue

604.730.7020 | sales@straight.com

ROYAL BLOOD English bass-and-drums duo tours in support of upcoming studio album, How Did We Get So Dark?. Aug 8, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale Apr 28, 9 am, $31.75 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. BURNABY BLUES + ROOTS FESTIVAL Annual celebration of blues and roots music features performances by Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, Matt Andersen, Sue Foley, Leeroy Stagger, Jesse Roper, Murray Porter, Little Miss Higgins, Jesse Waldman, and Kaya Kurz. Aug 12, doors 12 pm, show 1 pm, Deer Lake Park (6344 Deer Lake Ave., Burnaby). Tix on sale Apr 28, 12 pm, $55-220 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. ZAC BROWN BAND American countryrock band tours in support of latest platinum-certified album Jekyll + Hyde. Aug 18, doors 6 pm, show 7 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths Way). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $95.25/63.75/43.75 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. KINGS OF LEON American rock band performs on its Walls Tour, with guests Dawes. Oct 11, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths

see next page

SHOUT OUT LOUDS Swedish indie-pop band composed of Eric Edman, Ted Malmros, Adam Olenius, Bebban Stenborg, and Carl von Arbin. Nov 12, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Venue (881 Granville). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, $20 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

2THIS WEEK

SAID THE WHALE Vancouver indie-rock band performs songs from latest album, As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide. Apr 29, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $25 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

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$23.50/hr, benefits offered after 1 yr, high school/equivalent, speak basic to moderate English, 2 yrs cooking exp, excellent customer interaction & service, respectful, self-motivated & good team player. Main duties: prepare & cook complete Italian meals or specialty foods & create decorative food displays for special events such as half buffet & catering, instruct cooks in preparation, cooking, garnishing & presentation of food, plan menus & create new recipes, supervise cooks & other kitchen staff & requisition food & kitchen supplies. Email: wholesale1@cioffisgroup.com Cioffi’s Meat Market & Deli Ltd. 4158 East Hastings St. Burnaby BC V5C 2J4

SEASONAL

Hiring Musicians and MORE! Summer opportunities in a West Coast rainforest! Apply online capilanogroup.com

Glaziers (All Levels)

Install window and door systems for commercial projects. Must have transportation to job site and must be fit as some heavy lifting required. Send resume to: admin@glastech.ca Fax 604-941-3113 www.glastech.ca

HOSPITALITY/FOOD SERVICE Butcher

The Produce on Kerrisdale (Sandy Farm Market) is hiring PERM butcher $16/hr 40hrs/wk 10days paid vacation. Duties: Cut, trim, bone, tie and grind meats, etc. High School, Completion three-year meat cutting apprenticeship or Completion college with meat-and-fish-cutting training program, English. Mail: 2072 W. 41St Ave. Vancouver, BC, V6M1Y8 Email: produceonkerrisdale@gmail.com PERM & F/T Line Cook Yakiniku Chosun BBQ Izakaya (Yakinikuya Japanese BBQ) is hiring for PERM & F/T Line Cook. Wage $15/hr.+tip. 40 hrs/wk.10 days’ paid vacation. Duties: Make meals such as Sushi, Sashimi, BBQ & etc. Min. 2-3 yrs. cook exp./COMP. High school/English. Send resume by mail at 793 Jervis St. Vancouver, BC, V6E 2B1 (work location) OR email. yakinikyu28@gmail.com

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FUNKY WINKER BEANS 37 W. Hastings. Evil Bastard Karaoke Experience seven days a week. IVANHOE PUB 1038 Main, 604-608-1444. Pub with live bands on weekends and open jam night Sun from 4 to 8 pm. Open at 9 am with breakfast and daily food specials. Pool tourney Thu. No cover.

For up-to-the-minute, searchable Music Time Out listings, visit

www.straight.com

LAURENCE JUBER American rock musician and former Wings lead guitarist. Apr 29, 7-9:15 pm, Kay Meek Centre (1700 Mathers Ave., West Van). Tix $40/30, info www.frontofthelineproductions.com/.

EMPLOYMENT

BACKSTAGE LOUNGE 1585 Johnston, 604-687-1354. 2BACKSTAGE EXTRAVAGANZA Apr 28 2THE KOMBUCHA MUSHROOM PEOPLE Apr 29

FRANKIE’S JAZZ CLUB 765 Beatty, 778-727-0337. 2JAMES DANDERFER’S EAST-WEST QUINTET FEATURING QUINCY DAVIS AND NEIL SWAINSON Apr 28 2HELEN SUNG QUARTET May 5

RAILWAY STAGE AND BEER CAFÉ 579 Dunsmuir, 604-564-1430. Vancouver’s original live-music venue reopens with a facelift. 2CAMARO 67’ Apr 27 2DOPEY’S ROBE AND NEEDS Apr 29 2JOKES May 2 2COCO JAFRO May 4 2HIGHLAND EYEWAY May 6 RICKSHAW THEATRE 254 E. Hastings, 604-681-8915. Live bands some nights. 2D.R.I. Apr 26 2DUNE RATS Apr 28

REAL ESTATE

STUDENT HOME STAY

HAVE YOU GOT A SPARE ROOM? TAMWOOD INTERNATIONAL is looking for warm and welcoming homestay families in East Vancouver, North Vancouver, and Burnaby. Exchange memorable experiences and enhance your cross cultural communication skills by hosting our motivated students, aged 16+ from all over the world. Host families are required the whole year round. For more information, please contact homestay@tamwood.com or call 604.695.2818

2COOLAID SHOW 3 Apr 29 2ASPHYX Apr 30 2CJ RAMONE May 4

RIVER ROCK SHOW THEATRE River Rock Casino Resort, 8811 River Rd., 604-2478900. 2MELISSA ETHERIDGE May 5

OUT OF TOWN 2JUST ANNOUNCED BUMBERSHOOT Seattle’s 47th annual music and arts festival features concerts by dozens of world-class acts, including headliners Flume, Lorde, and ODESZA. Sep 1-3, Seattle Center (Seattle, Wash.). Tix on sale Apr 28, 10 am, at www.bumbershoot.com/.

TIME OUT MUSIC LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit listings 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.

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savage love I’m a 31-year-old gay male. I’ve

been with my fiancé for three years, and we are getting married in the fall. I’ve got a question about initiating sex in my sleep—I read somewhere that “sexsomnia” is the “medical” term, but maybe the Internet invented that? According to my fiancé, I have initiated or performed some kind of sex act in the middle of the night and then gone right back to sleep. The next day, I don’t remember anything. This freaks me out for a couple of reasons: My body doing things without my mind being in control is concerning enough, but it feels kinda rapey, since I doubt I’m capable of hearing “no” in this state. My fiancé doesn’t feel that way; he finds it sexy. The other thing—and maybe I shouldn’t have read so much Freud and Jung in college—is that I’m worried my body is acting out desires that my conscious mind doesn’t want to acknowledge. According to my fiancé, the last time I did stuff in my sleep, I rimmed him and told him how much I wanted to fuck him. Rimming isn’t a typical part of our sex life (although I’d like it to be), and my fiancé has never bottomed for anyone (I’ve topped guys in prior relationships, but in our relationship I’ve only bottomed). Is my body doing things that my mind won’t admit it wants to do? Is there a way to prevent it from happening? > SEXSOMNIAC HOPING EVENTUALLY EAGER TRYSTS STOP

Sexsomnia is a real and sometimes troubling phenomenon, SHEETS, and not something the Internet made up like Pizzagate or Sean Spicer. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says sexsomnia is real—a real clinical condition—but they prefer the fancier, more “medical”-sounding

name: sleep-related abnormal sexual behaviours. Dr. Michel Cramer Bornemann, a lead researcher at Sleep Forensics Associates (sleepforensic medicine.org/ ), describes sexsomnia as “sleepwalking-like behaviours that have sexualized attributes”. And sleep-rimming your delighted fiancé definitely counts. “Sexsomnia may be expressed as loud, obscene vocalizations from sleep [that are typically uncharacteristic of the individual while awake]; prolonged or violent masturbation; inappropriate touch upon the genitals, buttocks, and breast of a bed partner; and initiation of sexual intercourse,” Bornemann said. “The vast majority of sleep disorders are not reflective of a significant underlying psychiatric condition.” So your unconscious, late-night gropings/initiatings/rimmings don’t mean you secretly desire to be an asseating top. And there’s no need to drag poor Sigmund or Carl into this, SHEETS, since you’re not doing anything in your sleep that you don’t desire to do wide awake. You wanna rim your fiancé, you’ve topped other guys and would probably like to top this one too—so neither of the examples you cite qualify as desires your “conscious mind doesn’t want to acknowledge”. (Unless you wrote me in your sleep.) Like all sleep disorders, sexsomnia is just something that happens to a very small number of people, SHEETS; there’s no need to endow it with deeper meaning. Take it away, Dr. Bornemann… “The brain is made of approximately 100 billion neurons, or electrical connections that allow effective communication between brain subunits. As with all electrical systems, errors in transmission may occur— these are called ‘switching errors’. In

> BY DAN SAVAGE sleep, switching errors may activate previously quiescent areas of the brain while other areas remain off-line. In sleep-related behaviours, it is thought that deep-seated subunits near the sleep-wake generating centre become triggered, which activate primal automatic behaviours. Simply stated, electrical-switching errors in sleep may unleash the animal that actually lies within us all—sometimes to an extent that may have unintended criminal or forensics implications.” In most cases, sexsomniacs will hump a pillow or jerk themselves off. The sexsomniacs who tend to make the news—the ones we hear about— are the “unintended criminals” Bornemann alluded to, i.e., people who have sexually assaulted someone while asleep. Luckily for you, SHEETS, your fiancé is okay with your “primal automatic behaviours.” But you might wanna watch Sleepwalk With Me, an autobiographical film by Mike Birbiglia, a comedian with a sleep disorder. Birbiglia wasn’t initiating sex in his sleep—he was jumping out of windows. A danger to himself and others, he sought treatment and is no longer jumping out of windows in his sleep. You’re not a danger to yourself or others currently, SHEETS, but if you got a new partner or your current partner’s feelings about surprise middle-ofthe-night rimjobs were to change, you could be a danger. So you should chat with a doctor now about drugs and/or other interventions. “My catch-all advice is to read this book called The Promise of Sleep by Dr. William C. Dement,” Birbiglia wrote in an e-mail after I shared your letter with him. “He’s sort of the father of sleep medicine. He talks about sleep hygiene ex-

tensively, i.e., how to have the best night’s sleep possible by avoiding TV, eating heavily, drinking, etc., a few hours before bed. I know this isn’t exactly an answer to SHEET’s specific question, but getting a better night’s sleep could probably help him across the board in ways that he doesn’t even realize.”

My boyfriend wants to visit a private gay sex dungeon in Europe this summer, but we want to play only with each other. Any tips on getting to play in an actual dungeon without having to put out for the guy whose dungeon it is? > REQUESTS A CURIOUS KINKSTER

Put Berlin on your itinerary, RACK: Google “SM Apartments” or “Hoist Basements”; break out your credit card; splurge; and send pics.

I’m a straight married male. My wife has a very close male friend who happens to be in a poly marriage. Recently, my wife said she would like us to be able to date others, have sex, romance, et cetera but still remain a married couple. She specifically wants to date her friend. I am struggling. I am not closed off to having a conversation about nonmonogamy, but I struggle with the thought of her having a boyfriend. I want to be able to give this to her, but I feel like my mind and body are not letting me. Any advice is so much appreciated. > HELP UNDERSTANDING SPOUSE’S BLUNT AND NEW DEMAND

“Introducing nonmonogamy into an existing monogamous relationship

can be tough, especially when it wasn’t your idea,” said Cunning Minx, host of the Polyamory Weekly podcast, who has been providing poly news, advice, and insights to the masses since 2005 at polyweekly.com. “It’s even more stressful when there is a potential partner waiting in the wings! Yikes!” While Minx is a poly activist and advocate, HUSBAND, she thinks both parties need to be on the same page before going poly. And before you take that step—if you take that step—Minx thinks you need to ask yourself some questions. “HUSBAND should do a fear inventory,” Minx said. “What is he afraid of? What would it mean to him if his wife had a boyfriend? What if she wanted to love a woman—does the penis make a difference? If so, why? Then he should sit with his wife and take stock of the health of their current relationship.” You can say no to opening up your marriage, HUSBAND, but your wife may decide she wants out of the marriage if no is the answer—basically, this is a circumstance where one of you is going to have to pay a pretty steep price of admission. Either you’ll have to accept polyamory or your wife will have to drop it. There isn’t really a middle ground here—or is there? “It’s perfectly acceptable for HUSBAND to self-identify as monogamous while his wife practises polyamory,” Minx said. “It’s a difficult path and will require a high level of internal security and self-awareness on his part, but ultimately your selfidentity is your own decision.” On the Lovecast, the world of cuckolding: savagelovecast.com. Email: mail@savagelove.net. Follow Dan on Twitter @fakedansavage. ITMFA.org.

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Sweet & Petite Hot Mature ♥ Female loves to pamper!♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ REASONABLE RATES ♥ ♥ ♥ In/Out calls. Early risers welcome!

Kayla 604-873-2551

SARAH in SURREY

NEW GREAT HOURS!! 11:30am - 9pm. Sometimes weekends. I'm well proportioned, HOT& READY with a BIG BOOTY! 38 yrs old. Kind, Clean, Pretty & love to enjoy! Let's have an amazing non-rushed experience in my classy apt. Fetish by request. No text or Blkd. calls. Sarah 604-441-5440 Appts preferred.

GORGEOUS BEAUTY Gentle & Sweet, Petite and Exquisite. Local, Elegant Super Service!

Call 778-926-1000. Van East.

Well Worth It! Vancouver area

Kelly 778-714-0824 APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 39

NOW SELLING

A WATERFRONT COMMUNITY BY PINNACLE

1 Bedroom 2 Bedroom 3 Bedroom Residences from 620 sq.ft. to over 3000 sq.ft. plus 600 sq.ft. balcony. Penthouses with spectacular terraces and roof top decks. Access to pool and fitness facilities at Pinnacle Pier Hotel. Step out to a wealth of fine restaurants, shops and markets. come home to Cascade.

CascadeAtThePier.ca | 604.984.0906 s ale s pre sen tation cen tre

19 9 Vic tory Ship Way, North Vanco u ver Open 1 2PM - 5PM daily (Fridays by appointment)

40 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT APRIL 27 – MAY 4 / 2017

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