Imprint and In Print

Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver's fantastic new music collective co-directed by my SFU colleague Owen Underhill, has a new show up at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, with performances continuing this afternoon and tomorrow evening.

The program features three world premieres: Minx, a short orchestral work by Vancouver Island composer Rudolf Komorous; Cut Flowers, by Linda Caitlin Smith, a lush setting of 44 lines taken from the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for orchestra and soprano (the superb Phoebe MacRae); and Imprint II, an ambitious collaboration between Underhill and choreographer Henry Daniel (also a colleague at SFU) that combines music, dance, film, and multi-media installation, and that in putting all of these elements together makes fantastic use of this terrific new theatrical space.

Read David Gordon Duke's review of the evening in the Vancouver Sun here.

Meanwhile, in today's Globe and Mail we learn that the Victoria Fringe Festival, like Vancouver's event, is the latest community arts festival in the province to be denied a gaming grant this year. But not because they're a "commercial enterprise," as was claimed earlier by Rich Coleman in justifying the freezing out of festivals from eligibility for such grants. No, in the government's latest Kafkaesque (not to mention, tautological) logic, they have written (in an unsigned letter, no less) to Victoria Fringe Director Ian Case that the hugely popular 23 year-old festival does "not reflect the community, regional or cultural characteristics of [its] community," and is thus ineligible for a grant. Clearly, as with grants to municipal school boards and social programs across the province, Campbell and his band of philistines are just making their arts policy up as they go along.

In between trying to get their stories straight for the Basi-Virk trial, no doubt.

P.