When your season is engulfed in flames
Victoria counts flowers. Toronto slogs through brown slush. We burn winter to ashes.
Thanks to Yukon Educational Theatre, which has once again stepped forward to feed our pyromaniacal instincts, a torch-lit procession will set out from the SS Klondike at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday.
It will be led by a sinister puppet creature: the stylistic embodiment of winter himself.
The procession will end at a massive bonfire at Robert Service Campground where the puppet will be cast into the blaze sparking a pagan-like celebration.
Revellers are invited to write down their winter-long resentments onto scraps of paper, and gleefully watch as the papers are transformed into harmless ash by the roaring bonfire.
SLIDESHOW
Holy Mount Kailash, Batman!
In 2006, Whitehorse resident Shelagh Smith traveled to Tibet’s Mount Kailash—a holy site for Hindus, Buddhists, Jainists and Bons alike.
On Tuesday, Smith will showcase a slideshow of her visit, to be followed by a screening of Leaving Fear Behind—a documentary about Tibetan resentments towards the Chinese occupation.
In the leadup to the Olympic Games, two filmmakers set off across Tibet to ask ordinary residents their real thoughts about China, the Olympics and their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
The footage was smuggled out of Tibet. Soon after, the filmmakers were detained by the Chinese government, where they remain today.
Tuesday, March 24 at 7 p.m. at the United Church (enter through the side).
FILM
Eight glasses a day
“The wars of the next century will be fought over water,” predicted World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin in 1995. Only eight years later, when the conflict in Darfur began partially over water, it appeared he was right.
Clearly, a world with golf courses in the Nevada Desert and privatized aquifers in West Africa is un-sustainable. With droughts and waterborne illnesses killing millions every year, it’s only a matter of time before the issue of water comes to global blows.
Naturally, a right-to-water “awareness” movement has cropped up.
And the first weapon of any awareness movement is, of course, a documentary narrated by a celebrity.
Enter Blue Gold, narrated by Malcolm McDowell, of Clockwork Orange fame.
“A line is crossed as water becomes a commodity,” says the film’s official description.
“Will we survive?”
Yukon College lecture hall, Sunday 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Panel discussion to follow film. Admission is by donation.
VISUAL ARTS
Art to premiere at arts centre
Owen Williams, the S-drawing guy, has finally left the Yukon Arts Centre, to be replaced by an entirely new range of exhibitions at the public gallery.
Sorry, by Nova Scotia artist Cathy Busby, showcases images of apologies by modern public figures and celebrities—each image cropped to highlight the mouth of the speaker.
Luckily, she had no shortage of medium.
Scouring dumps, museums and private collections, Catherine Beaudette sought to document the less-highlighted personal stories of the Klondike Gold Rush through objects.
Using the technology of old (stereoscopy) and the technology of today (video installation), Marten Berkman looks at the “bridge between urban industrial culture and the earth’s remote and wild places.”
“As his work uncovers layers of meaning in the land, media technology becomes part of our ecology, in forming bridges of perception with the Earth,” reads Berkman’s description.
Opens Thursday March 26th at 7:30 p.m. at the Yukon Arts Centre.
Dances with mountains
Natural vistas are to the Yukon visual artist what a drunk Prince Harry is to British paparazzi.
Watercolourist Stephanie Ryan takes the oft-painted landscapes of the Canadian North and imbues them with unique, dreamlike appeal through vivid paint-by-numbers motifs.
Tiny human figures sometimes find their way into Ryan’s scenes. Yet the mountains, rivers and trees carry their own humanity. Water splashing around a rock attains the look of a grasping appendage. A swirling river is caught within the matriarchal grasp of a motley mountain range.
Navigating their canoes and kayaks through the wilderness, Ryan’s human figures are not trespassers in a wild land. Rather, they are part of an organism.
Stephanie Ryan’s show To West Taku Arm opens Friday, March 20 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The show runs until April 26th.
THEATRE
Freezing time
He was a murderer, adulterer and maniac. But most know the name Eadweard Muybridge not for a torrid personal life, but a series of revolutionary photographs that proved that horses do allow all their hooves to leave the ground during a gallop.
Studies in Motion, a pioneering theatre piece by Vancouver’s
pioneering Electric Company Theatre, examines the tortured life of Muybridge amid haunting live-action tableaus of his photographic studies.
Until the end of life, motion obsessed Muybridge. Nude figures, bison, cats, ducks and high jumpers all became subjects of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, a precursor to the modern movie camera.
Seen today, Muybridge’s images are critical bodies of scientific knowledge—but they also speak of an unsound mind. In one series, he photographed a naked man running in a catlike gait.
By creating a new reality where action is neutralized into scientific data, the Muybridge of Studies in Motion attempts to absolve himself of his past wrongs, and reconstruct his life and sanity.
The stage is gridded, amid which Muybridge’s motion-capture studies stirringly come to life around him.
March 25-27 at 8 p.m. at the Yukon Arts Centre.
Early Bird Special: March 24 at 5:30 p.m. seats only $10.
EAT
(It’s between Panama and Nicaragua)
Unlike their Mexican counterparts, Costa Rican chefs have no desire to demolish your taste buds with spice.
On Saturday, the cuisine of Costa Rica will play a starring role in a dinner fundraiser by the Whitehorse Heritage Festival Society.
Bananas, plantains and fresh corn tortillas are expected to make an appearance. The Heritage Festival Society asks only a $10 per plate donation, but amid inevitable gastronomic ecstacy, diners may well surrender the deed to their house.
The palatable action begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church on 4th Ave.
Contact Tristin Hopper at tristinh@yukon-news.com
