Performing Arts
Event
Feb 19, 2009
The ninth annual Chutzpah pushes the envelope in many ways. Already known for its lineup of music, theatre, comedy, and dance showcasing Jewish performers and content, the festival now moves into the broader community (previous incarnations were sequestered at the Jewish Community Centre). Festival favourite Rain Pryor, daughter of comedian Richard Pryor, delivers her jazz/blues comedy cabaret Pryor Experience. Various venues.
Event
Jan 1, 2009
This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink tribute to Viennese culture sees dancers from the Vienna International Ballet, along with esteemed ballroom dancers, move to music by the Strauss Symphony of Canada and the Vancouver Opera Orchestra. It all unfolds under the experienced baton of Turkish conductor Imre Kollar.
Event
Feb 22, 2009
Dance Allsorts presents Martha Carter’s unique “style-fusion” brand of contemporary dance. Her moves go beyond ballet, new media, and classical disciplines to explore the public’s preconceptions about ability and disability in her presentation of Twisted, a work inspired by her personal reflections on scoliosis.
Event
Jan 22, 2009
As part of the Global Dance Connections series, the Dance Centre presents Hiroaki Umeda’s While Going to a Condition and Accumulated Layout (Western Canadian premiere). Umeda’s choreography is an exercise in hybridity: he draws on hip-hop, butoh, and even mime techniques to inform his contemporary arrangements, and matches dancers’ movements to sounds and lights. Beware the strobe.
Event
Feb 20, 2009
As part of the Chutzpah Festival, Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company performs its contemporary choreography to a range of music, from sonorous Hebrew chants to cha-cha. Twenty dancers take the stage in Deca Dance, a corporeal collage that explores the possibilities of movement and the breadth of bodily expression.
Event
Jan 21, 2009
A remounting of SkyDive, by Governor General’s Award–winning playwright Kevin Kerr, is a welcome thing. Two actors are suspended above the stage for the entire play, which is a psychological telescoping of a 30-second freefall. Jungian dream analysis, ’80s pop music, and extreme therapy combine in this highly physical performance.
Event
Jan 10, 2009
Caroline Cave, who stunned the city with her last Playhouse appearance, in The Syringa Tree, has the title role in August Strindberg’s 19th-century drama about a count’s daughter who falls (very inconveniently) in love with her father’s manservant. This new version of the play, which places the action in 1964 Mississippi, is conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs.
Event
Jan 22, 2009
The electric Lois Anderson, one of the city’s top actors, tries her hand at directing in this Theatre at UBC production of the Euripides classic. In a 90-minute translation, the ultimate scary mom murders her children to get back at cheating dad. Two-and-a-half millennia after its conception, Medea remains a relevant meditation on domestic tragedy.
Event
Jan 6, 2009
The newest theatre work from Battery Opera’s David McIntosh departs hourly from the Alibi Room on an intimate guided tour that explores notions of history. Every Tuesday evening in January and February, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Event
Jan 22, 2009
In an age when the women in Sex and the City count as “self-actualized,” there’s something refreshing about Somerset Maugham’s tale of middle-class marital wrangling. Constance (Shaw Festival regular Nicole Underhay) takes things into her own hands when she discovers her husband’s infidelity. Morris Panych, a master of bitterness, directs.
All Rights Reserved © 2009