Pages

Sunday, January 13, 2008

An arts funding group created to build the cultural Olympiad in Vancouver announced $1.7 million fund for 24 British Columbia arts organizations.



B.C. arts projects get $1.7M in lead-up to Olympics

An arts funding group created to build the cultural Olympiad in Vancouver announced $1.7 million in funding on Thursday for 24 British Columbia arts organizations.

Among the projects getting the nod are a new jazz work celebrating the hockey rivalry between Canada and Sweden, a sculpture about the pine beetle destined for Prince George, B.C., and dance for Vancouver's downtown Eastside.



The successful projects, to be completed by the end of the year, were announced by Arts Partners in Creative Development, a partnership of the provincial government, the City of Vancouver, Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Foundation, Vanoc and 2010 Legacies Now.



The group has $6.5 million to invest in arts events over three years, with the idea of creating cultural events that could run at the same time as the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.



The largest grant went to the Prince George Regional Art Gallery Association, which won $201,850 to commission Alberta's Peter von Tiesenhausen to create a 20-foot bronze sculpture called Balance, that will be a meditation on the pine beetle epidemic.



The Vancouver Art Gallery won $75,000 to commission a new work, an installation by local artist Reece Terris that will occupy the main atrium of the gallery.



Called Ought Apartment, the piece will be a tower with six stacked apartments that reflect the styles of the last six decades of housing in Vancouver.



Axis Theatre Society of Vancouver, working with Montreal's Centaur Theatre, were successful in getting $115,000 toward a production of Don Quixote, an adaptation of the classic novel by playwrights Colin Heath and Peter Anderson.



They will perform the work using mask, mime, puppetry, acrobatics and other innovative theatre techniques.



The Coastal Jazz and Blues Society will commission Canadian clarinetist Fran?ois Houle and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson to collaborate on a work called Ice Hockey: Canada vs Sweden. The society has won $90,000 to create and perform the work.



The two will create music based on the rules, systems and culture of ice hockey, an Olympic sport and an important part of the culture of both countries.



The Dancing on the Edge Festival has been awarded $150,000 to commission 10 new dances for the festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2008.



Dances will be performed in Downtown Eastside



Choreographers such as Serge Bennathan, Joe Laughlin and Tara Cheyenne Friendenberg have been asked to create new works. Three of the dances will be performed in public areas in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.



Several of the projects have an international element.



The PuSH International Performing Arts Festival has asked Berlin's Rimini Protokoll theatre group to develop a new theatre work for and about Vancouver.



Rimini Protokoll are famous for creating works for specific locations based on exhaustive research of a city and its life. The project has won $160,000.



The Kootenay School of Writing won $50,000 to commission 18 Canadian and American poets to create new works.


The poets, who are also experimenting with theatre and electronic formats, are to present their pieces at an international conference in August 2008 looking at emerging trends in poetry.


Other projects include:


- $130,000 to the Vancouver Chamber Choir for a variety of chorale works by famed composer R. Murray Schafer and Britain's John Taverner, as well as other Canadian and international composers.


- $95,000 to develop Where the Blood Mixes, a play by First Nations artist Kevin Loring backed by Kamloops Western Theatre, Toronto's Luminato Festival and four other theatre groups.


- $100,000 to create an outdoor performance piece with music, aerial acrobats and new media for the town of Whistler, B.C.






Technorati : , , , , ,
Del.icio.us : , , , , ,
Ice Rocket : , , , , ,
Flickr : , , , , ,
Zooomr : , , , , ,
Buzznet : , , , , ,

'Wondrous Life' tops critics' fiction lists



The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," by Junot Díaz, associate professor in writing and humanistic studies, has been named best novel of the year by critics at Time and New York magazines, topping their influential "must-read" lists.


Time described the book as a "massive, heaving, sparking tragicomedy," while New York hailed its "miraculous balance" of comic-book plots and "honest, messy realism."


Díaz's novel was also cited among the best novels of 2007 by critics and reviewers at The Village Voice, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Publishers' Weekly.


A poll of more than 100 critics and authors also cited "Wondrous Life" as best fiction of the year. Initiated by the National Book Critics Circle, the poll surveyed new releases in fiction, nonfiction and poetry.


A round of critical praise greeted "Wondrous Life" when it was published in September: Book critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described "Wondrous Life" as both a comic portrait of a lovesick second-generation Dominican geek and a harrowing meditation on public and private history.





Technorati : , ,
Del.icio.us : , ,
Flickr : , ,
Buzznet : , ,

MIT Grad students' fanciful clothing designs reflect emotions


MIT


Graduate student Adam Kumpf sits on the chair at the desk that he has made part of his clothing for the MIT visual design class Give Me Shelter.







Wearing their art on their sleeves
MIT students are always in motion, so their projects for the advanced visual design course, Give Me Shelter, featured clothes and accessories to help navigate the gaps between work and home, self-confidence and unease, and under- or over-stimulation.


Adam Kumpf, graduate student in media arts and sciences, designed EscHome, a wearable office consisting of a chair and a desk embedded in a pair of black pants. A garment that provides the comforts of work--structure, stability, solitude--amid the pressures at home, EscHome's chair and desk are made from lightweight carbon fiber rods, aluminum joining blocks and fabric to match the pants.


Kumpf (S.B. 2005, M.Eng. 2007) deconstructed EscHome with glee. "The structural rods are hidden within small zipped pockets and situated along the femur, so they don't interfere with walking or sitting. Unzip the pockets; position the rods; in a minute, you're hiding in work."


Mary Hale, graduate student in architecture and planning, took on space, gender and mobility in her plastic dropcloth and electrician-tape pantaloons, the Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass.


Hale, whose modeling session required a 15-minute bond with the Shop-Vac to inflate Body Mass, wanted to create body-wear that functioned like a book for mental escape, subverted physics (especially gravity), and enhanced mobility and personal ease.


Body Mass achieves all this, Hale said, tipping forward and back on her personal sea. "But it's with a twist: she who dons this body gains its lightness and freedom by assuming a culturally undesirable physical proportion--a volume at least ten times greater than her actual size. It's a means of mental escape and an envelope of new personal space," Hale said.


For Angela Chang, graduate student in media arts and sciences, the ripple of silk, the scratch of linen and the hush of polar fleece convey information about the wearer's identity and activities. The experience of a blind friend who could only hear a circus performance inspired Chang to amplify these sounds.


She designed a garment for hiding and a garment to dramatize dancing. Her wool isolation scarf is equipped with two speakers, ambient noise circuits, conductive thread, and a microphone in the back to control the volume in relation to ambient noise. It cocoons the wearer inside a white-noise bubble--like having a therapist's waiting room on your head.


Chang also designed and sewed a raw silk, bell-sleeved, dance-party shirt--with thanks to Regina Moeller, visiting associate professor of architecture, for the sewing instruction. "The basting stitch, pattern language, sewing machines--these were technologies I didn't know," said Chang.


Chang augmented the shirt's typical rustling sound with an amplification circuit, sewing two microphones inside the sleeve-ends and two speakers near the neck. Movement broadcast through the speakers dramatizes dance-floor action for the vision-impaired.


Moeller, a German artist, author and publisher, co-taught Give Me Shelter with Ute Meta Bauer, director of the visual arts program. Moeller delighted in the interdisciplinary ferment of the body-wear class, she said.


"What I loved about this class and about MIT is that the twelve students came from different fields and they all helped each other," said Moeller.




Technorati : , , , , , ,
Del.icio.us : , , , , , ,
Flickr : , , , , , ,
Buzznet : , , , , , ,