YEAR IN REVIEW | 11 Innovative Canadian Arts Groups Who Made The Pivot
By
December 24, 2020
In early 2020 the entire world underwent a major transformation. The planet was consumed by a pandemic that altered life as we knew it. The arts sector was impacted more than most, leaving the idea of live events as a potentially serious health hazard. The very thought if it seems contradictory. None of us know how long the pandemic will last, although we suspect it could be quite some time. Now, after nearly ten unprecedented months, as a community, we are finding our rhythm.
Here is our list of Canada’s most innovative arts leaders and groups who made the pivot against the odds (in no particular order).
A Messiah for the multitudes, freed from history s bonds
Half of the 12 soloists in Messiah/Complex are Indigenous, including Diyet van Lieshout, a mezzo-soprano from Yukon, who is filmed traipsing through the snow in her traditional mukluk boots. Alistair Maitland via The New York Times.
by Dan Bilefsky
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- A gay Chinese Canadian tenor struts through the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia, joyously proclaiming that evry valley shall be exalted as the camera focuses in on his 6-inch-high stiletto heels.
A Tunisian Canadian mezzo-soprano reimagines Jesus as a Muslim woman in a headscarf.
In Yukon, an Indigenous singer praises the remote snow-covered landscape in Southern Tutchone, the language of her ancestors.
This is not your grandparents Messiah
This is not your grandparents Messiah
By Dan Bilefsky
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A gay Chinese-Canadian tenor struts through the streets of Vancouver, joyously proclaiming that ev ry valley shall be exalted as the camera focuses in on his 6-inch stiletto heels.
Messiah/Complex soloist Julie Lumsden on set for her video shoot on Lake Louise, AB.
Credit:Daniel Thomson
A Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano reimagines Jesus as a Muslim woman in a headscarf.
In Yukon, an Indigenous singer praises the remote snow-covered landscape in Southern Tutchone, the language of her ancestors. This is not your grandparents
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Handout
In a normal year, Canadians flock to churches and concert halls for their annual fix of the holiday staple Handel’s
Messiah. Yet in 2020,
Messiahs are hard to come by, because of the pandemic and its shuttering of the performing arts as we know it. Up there with office holiday parties, an indoor space filled with people joyfully hollering the Hallelujah Chorus is decidedly a risky activity.
Messiah
Paul Wells: Ten camera crews across the country, a dozen soloists performing in a half dozen languages and one remarkable version of Handel s Messiah. Paul Wells, Maclean s Updated
December 11, 2020
Near the end of Part I of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio
Messiah, a singer urges listeners to spread the good news of Christ’s birth. “Oh Thou that tellest good tidings to Zion,” she sings, “Get up into the high mountains.”
In any production, much depends on accidents of timing and place. In the extraordinary version of the
Messiah that Toronto’s Against The Grain Theatre will reveal this weekend in a free webcast, the soloist for Oh Thou That Tellest is Diyet van Lieshout, a member of Kluane First Nation in southwest Yukon. She was filmed at the edge of the Kluane Icefield, the world’s largest non-polar ice field, a shelf of ice thousands of square kilometres in size. The high mountains are present, too, in the form of the Saint Elia