Kingston 2010 - Not too shabby

Image: Scylla and Charbydis by Alana Kapell (at The Art Rental & Sales Gallery)

Good memories of the arts in Kingston, 2010 -in no particular order (the Kingstonlife.ca blog will have an order, coming out soon). Well, sort of in order,

The Happiness Project, Charles Spearin and friends, brought in by Apple Crisp
The Happiness Project house and Don Maynard's bathroom
Elton John 0 Yeah.
Gordon Lightfoot...sort of sad
All that dance at the Grand
Kim in The Year of Magical Thinking, Theatre Kingston
Thousand Islands Playhouse - 3 major shows to love (Blood Brothers, Another Home Invasion, Master Harold and The Boys - Also the Chic Gamine Concert
John's show (Trouble on Dibble Street!) at St. Law Shakespeare Fest in Prescott
All the energy from Jim Garrad and friends that went into the Sir John A Back From The Dead Concert Tour (although the title maybe...was too much fun for the room)
Don Maynard's Franken Forest at the Agnes (Particularly the Flock piece)
Modern Fuel everything
Rockne Corrigan as Hamlet in The King's Conscience...and the cabaret style set up at the Baby Grand for it
The Wm. Bremner show at the Agnes E
Writers' Fest growing all the time -but CR Avery and Joyce Carol Oates the faves
Measha Bruggergosman in tiny Syd. St. United Church
The rather strange Jonah piece led by R. Murray Schaefer himself at Sy. St. U Church
She Sings! - and I'm in it...
Cirque du Soleil...it was actually great
Trevor Strong - anything he does
The Kingston Arts Council getting the www.artskingston.ca website up (now you have to fill it, folks)
The endless consultations for City of Kingston Cultural Plan, but it's a good one
The dauntless Brenda and programming for Arts & Letters Club
The Kollaboration Kingston project - particularly Andrea Graham, Jane Thelwell, Trevor Waurechan,and Lenny Epstein, and great guidance by Lindsey Fair
Painting classes with Ben DarrahStrange painting classes with an unnamed teacher
Stuart Ross really rocking the reading scene for a too brief time
Mary's Wedding by Blue Canoe (really!)
The energy of Reel Out Film Fest
The new dedication to edgy smaller theatre at the Grand
THe artists of Kingston (are a pretty cool bunch, overall...)
And a special place of fondness (and for their tolerance of my high blood pressure!) The Arts Tarts

And, of course, getting to know new artists all the time through the old job at the Arts Council and the new one at the Art Rental & Sales Gallery.

Keep it growing, dear K-town

Moves and Visions - Quidam & Rubberband Dance

This week we got to shame the pounds back into those holiday chocolate boxes by going to see two artistically and physically motivating pieces: RUBBERBANDance Group’s Loan Sharking and and Cirque du Soleil’s first visit to Kingston with Quidam. The sense of human possibilities that even occasional visits to these venues unleashes has to be worth every penny spent on them, and I think annual visits to both the Grand’s Dance Series and the event of your choice at KRock are well worth saving up for.

It was my first Grand dance event of the season, and a long-awaited one. Compared to many dance troupes, RUBBERBANDance Group’s performers seemed particularly young: a limber and nearly gymnastic team of lithe and healthy bodies where gender power was both downplayed and equally distributed. I don’t think anyone except the founder Victor Quijada was over 30. The dancers undulated in unison and threw their bodies utterly relentlessly through sequence after sequence of a fusion of hip-hop/locking inspired and body-contact style moves, performing on top of strong and playfully jarring lighting designs and soundscapes from Stravinsky, Brubeck and Jasper Gahunia, a former award-winning “battle DJ.” The total effect was curiously delightful, and the audience fell in love with them – although the troupe’s Achilles heel is also their signature. Their total reliance on the admittedly brilliant moves and an apparent disinterest in emotional engagement, story, or greatly varying emotional dynamics also kept me from feeling entirely engaged with them. Nonetheless, the movers themselves are inspiring and the sense of exploration from Quijada and his entire team (including the designers) is palpable. I’d definitely come back again to check out the virtuosity of performers like Emmanuelle Le Phan and to see how the energetic young company is proceeding.

On the other hand, I expected Cirque du Soleil to be stunning strange eye candy and little more – but went out of curiosity to see how it would play at the KRock Centre. As ever, the scrap of a storyline inserted (a young girl who is whisked away from her boring family to another Neverland-style dimension) is almost gratuitious, but it was an entry to an utterly wonderful world of strangely beautiful and extraordinary performers and delightful visions and yet seemed like tasting a meal of wonderful strange new fruit. I love being in awe of humanity – both in terms of accomplishment and vision – and Cirque again provided huge doses of each. I also loved that I became so caught up in the sense of dream they create that I nearly had to pinch myself to remember “holy crap –those are all real people up there!” In a continually digitally enhanced world, it’s more important all the time. Quidam, although a smaller scale than their tent shows, was even more charming than the last piece I saw (Corteo) – and the rope acrobats, an “Adam and Eve” pair of gymnasts who balanced neck-on-neck for one-legged stands and other feats, the finale acrobats, and four young Chinese yo-yo jugglers were particularly amazing. I’m going back to thinking that Cirque is a must-see every few years, at least – in spite of a misplaced generalization that they have veered into sheer commercialism. (It also continues to tickle me that Guy LaLiberte came out of the same mime school I did…and he still has a hand in it all. And all those fixed point/undulating locking moves… I’m just sayin’…) Ahem, back to the gym