The lessons are offered by Kepkaa, a relatively modest organization dedicated to the promotion of Haitian Creole and Afro-Caribbean culture in Montreal. Whitman, the 19th century American poet who sung his fledgling nation into being, ends up being an appropriate spectre to invoke at the beginning of a class that turns into a long discussion on the history and culture of a troubled country. “There are many root causes of under-development in Haiti,” Labuchin begins, visibly deciding how to disentangle the topic for us. Over the next three hours, he sketches out a dismal national narrative: 15th century colonization by the Spanish resulted in the decimation of the country’s native population, and was followed by French rule relying on imported African slave labour. A brutal civil war at the end of the 18th century ended in independence that ultimately isolated the small country from the rest of the world. If nothing else, Labuchin wants to make sure we remember that, “The history of Haiti is a history of blood.”

By the end of the night, we still haven’t cracked open a Creole textbook – partially for my sake, as the other students are three classes in, and would have left me in their dust, but also because the course is meant to cover more than just language. The president of Kepkaa, Pierre-Roland Bain, explained over the phone that young Haitian-Canadians are eager to dig up their roots. “They learn about themselves,” he told me. “They start with the language, and then they will buy books to learn about the history, they will ask questions, they will go to activities to learn more because they feel that they’ve missed something – that there’s something they don’t have.” Unsurprisingly, Afro-Caribbean history is sorely lacking from the curricula of most Canadian schools. “You need someone to help you to find it, to know it, to read it to you,” Bain said.

It’s hard to imagine a better person to tell that story than Labuchin. He’s a literary force in his own right, as it turns out – handing out scripts for an opera called “Maryaj Lenglensou” (or “Le Mariage Lenglensou,” in French), he declares cheekily, “Rassoul Labuchin is the name of the artist.” I later found out that it’s celebrated as “the first black opera in Haiti,” and is the only show in Haitian theatre history to have been performed in 37 cities. The story tackles traditional operatic themes of passionate love and betrayal: a young sexton proposes to his beloved, only to have his jealous friend sabotage the marriage. The triangular mess snowballs into a fatal disaster that gives the story its name – Lenglesou is a voodoo spirit associated with violence and tragedy. It hardly seems coincidental that, like his country’s past, Labuchin’s magnum opus is a history of blood.

Labuchin warns that next class will be strictly Creole-only, and nobody groans. As Bain explained, the students come on their own initiative: “Most of the time the parents say, ‘If you speak Creole, your English will be very bad.’ But the young generation, they are not satisfied with that. So they learn by themselves, and when they get together they speak Creole most of the time.” Fostering a community of young people on the basis of language is, for both Bain and Labuchin, Kepkaa’s main “rezon pou être.”

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Yet it has consistently been one of the top three most performed operas in North America, and according to Opera McGill director Patrick Hansen, it’s probably the most beloved: “I think a lot of people would say Bohème is the numero uno,” he told The Daily in an interview. The opera’s production value more than makes up for its subject matter’s dearth of decadence: with a cast made up of 100 students and one dog, it’s the biggest and most expensive of the 15 operas the company has mounted over the past four years.

Hansen has no problem accounting for Bohème’s perennial appeal. “I think the thing that really makes it powerful is that it’s a story about young people – very passionate artists, musicians, painters, philosophers…students, basically.” Fans of the Broadway show Rent, he pointed out, will notice that the musical lifted its basic plotline, characters’ names, and whole swaths of music from Puccini’s piece. “It’s just an opera about passion and love and being youthful, and it hits older people, it hits middle-aged people, its hits young people the same way. You know, it’s the bohemian lifestyle,” he said.

But Philippe Sly, who plays the painter Marcello for the first half of the production’s run, thinks that university-aged viewers will feel a special affinity with the storyline. “Just as a student, as a young person, someone who’s trying to find their own individuality, to define it…I can really relate to my character in a kind of profound way,” he said.

La Bohème is an opera entirely about ordinary people trying to navigate ordinary relationships, and a weak rapport between actors can make the entire thing fall flat. This cast has no such problem. From the very first scene, the actors portraying the motley crew of beatniks play off each other with sketch-comedy timing and an irresistibly youthful sense of fun. Hansen explained that his primary focus as a professor has been to help the actors physically embody their characters; for the male actors, this involved developing more exaggerated and polished versions of their day-to-day student selves. “We could have placed this in the McGill ghetto. It would have been easy,” Hansen laughed.

Instead, he and conductor Julian Wachner took a more traditional route, taking their cue from Puccini’s own inspiration – Henri Murger’s La Vie de Bohème (1851), a collection of linked vignettes set in Paris’s Latin Quarter in the 1840s. Their decision not to modernize the setting only throws the continuity between then and now into sharper relief. “These people on the stage are just like you, except from a century ago,” Hansen explained.

But there is, of course, one major difference: the people onstage are jaw-droppingly talented. Elias Berberian, who plays Rodolfo, has a  voice that is booming and velvety-smooth, skipping sweetly over the notes with perfect pitch; Sly’s sonorous verbrato is no shabbier. Moments when the four male leads harmonize could melt even the most stubborn opera-phobe. Moon-faced Véronique Coutu plays tragic, tubercular Mimi with a sweetness that is at first kind of cloying, but well-matched to lines like, “I’m happy and I love lilies and roses.” She comes into her own as the agonies of love and illness begin to take their toll – the weight of her desperation is palpable. Hiather Darnel-Kadonaga hits the nail on the head as Musetta, the squealing coquette with a heart of gold. You can hardly blame Hansen for boasting that this is the easiest production he’s ever directed, “because the cast is so talented.”

Hansen and Sly agree that this is the ideal show for first-time opera-goers to dip their toes in the water. “It’s almost made for ADHD folks,” Hansen said. “Seriously, it moves so quickly – there’s not a wasted moment.” “Very tight knit,” Sly added. His director agreed: “Exactly. It goes from one great moment to another great moment to another great moment.” The two only have one final warning: newcomers might just get hooked.

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Last year’s Isla features the same mellow, moody hybrid of jazz and modern classical music that characterized the band’s first effort, though they’ve upped the ante a bit. “Knee-Deep was composed while busking in a very relaxed atmosphere, and as such the tunes are quite charming, lighthearted, and acoustic,” explained saxophonist Jack Wyllie. “Isla was written over the course of a month in mid-winter in a shed at the bottom of our garden – it was a much more intense atmosphere, and I think that comes across. We went much deeper into the musical ideas and were able to introduce electronics.”

But new technology hasn’t led them to drop their signature instrument, the Hang. A more placid cousin of the steel drum, it lends their sound its distinctive shimmer. Too distinctive, at times. “It can be quite frustrating when you’re seen as being all about the Hang at the expense of the music,” Wyllie said. “This is partly why we are keen to move away from it.” He added, “If it were a person, it would probably be Jennifer Aniston: very attractive, and great in Friends, but unable to grow out of that first role.” Whether they hang onto the Hang or not, it seems unlikely that they’ll go back to collecting one-pound coins in instrument cases anytime soon.

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Kalmunity isn’t new on the block; the group has been performing at the Sablo Kafé on Beaubien for the past six and a half years. They’ve developed such an impressive following that the group has outgrown its haunt. On October 6, Kalmunity is moving to the larger, more centrally located Le Consulat – and not without a bang. “It’s gonna be a huge party,” says Lady Katalyst, a hip-hop artist, poet and member of the collective.

Katalyst, whose real name is Katherine Blenkinsop, explains that one of the collective’s main objectives is “to bring improv music to Montreal, bring improv music to peoples’ minds.” She describes an artistic process that truly does sound organic: the performers hash out their plans in the wings during a show, “layering more and more ideas on top of each other.” The result is an international fusion of hip-hop, funk, jazz, soul, and spoken-word poetry. Since Kalmunity’s roster of performers is constantly in flux, rehearsals are a non-event. “We’re growing tracks right on the spot,” Katalyst says, with a hint of pride. “We really don’t know what we’re going to do.”

But Kalmunity’s project is social as well as musical. Katalyst declares that above all, “we want to communicate.” The collective functions as a forum for “people in communities who don’t normally have a place to bring forth their issues,” to initiate dialogue, and express hope for change. Though many of Kalmunity’s artists hail from the Caribbean, the collective allies itself with any group that feels marginalized within Montreal society. “We want to bring a voice to the voiceless,” says Katalyst, stressing that out of this comes “messages that are really uplifting.” The group’s ultimate objective is inherent in its name – besides a play on the word “community,” Kalmunity is a reminder that “you can’t have unity without calm.”

Possessing sheer talent and a social agenda, though, are not the only prerequisites for gaining entry into Kalmunity’s ranks. “Some people have an excellent message, but they just don’t get the vibe,” Katalyst explains. That vibe, it seems, contains an element of old-fashioned teamwork; within the collective, all artists are on a level playing field. “It involves a certain degree of letting go of your ego, and if you can’t do that then you can’t perform with us,” she says.

Katalyst has grand aspirations for the imminent change of venue. “We love [the Sablo Kafé],” she insists, “But we’ve pretty much hit the ceiling. This year we wanted to expand, so people can dance and move around.” The collective hopes not only to make room for its current devoted regulars, but to attract even more: “We want to allow more people to see what we’re doing…to get the audience who doesn’t know about Kalmunity yet.” The inaugural celebration at Le Consulat features a guest appearance by D’bi Young Anitafrika, an author, playwright, actress, poet. “She’s strong, gifted, and in your face,” says Katalyst. “One of the best poets in Canada, North America, and well – the world.” And if that isn’t enough to draw you, Katalyst assured that “it’s going to be pretty crazy.”

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While popular shows like “So You Think You Can Dance?” have made dance more accessible, it can still seem daunting to those who, like myself, are largely unfamiliar with the artform. A friend recently related the story of how he’d burst out laughing in the middle of a professional dance performance and found himself unable to stop. He hadn’t found anything particularly funny – the solemnity of the piece had simply become too much for him. Perhaps the fear of experiencing something similar has kept me a stranger to contemporary dance thus far. But Destination Danse organizer Marie-Josée Beaudoin notes that this event is “entirely approachable” for first-timers, providing one with the opportunity to “discover something new.” The press release reads like a travel brochure, encouraging you to pack your suitcases for a cultural escapade.

The journey is composed of four works by four separate artists: “Matter” by Julie Nioche, “Press” by Pierre Rigal, “Le Cri” by Nacera Belaza, and “Abstraction+Gravité” by Fabrice Lambert. Beaudoin describes the pieces as “very different” from one another. “One is more emotional, another more intellectual, another acrobatic,” she says. Yet together “they form a portrait of France today.” The acrobatic piece – Rigal’s – explores the unfolding of an existential crisis; Beaudoin insists that, weighty subject matter aside, the show is a remarkable gymnastic display. Belaza’s “Le Cri” combines spirituality and sensuality, while Lambert’s performance uses illumination to reflect upon our collective human consciousness, and how it will drive us toward the future – I’m guessing that’s the intellectual piece. Nioche’s “Matter” is an homage to three women with whom the artist lived for three years, and has been praised for its outstanding visual beauty. The four works run consecutively each night, and can be viewed together or separately, though it seems like seeing just one would be missing out on the full experience.

“The performers are really a new generation of dancers in France,” Beaudoin explains. “French dance has traditionally been influenced by classical ballet, but the dance that has been emerging over the past couple of years has been freed from the constraints of classical technique. It involves a lot of mixing techniques and disciplines; it borrows from cinema.” Beaudoin’s passion for the art is quite evident, and entirely infectious. Her advice to newcomers is to “experience slowly, seeing a number of different approaches to discover what you like.” She believes that this event is a great place to start, and emphasizes its uniqueness. “It’s a kind of dance that we don’t usually get to see in Montreal,” Beaudoin says. “We often get big groups who have been doing this for 20 or 30 years, but rarely such young choreographers. That’s what makes it so special.”

Destination Danse: France offers you the opportunity to expand your horizons, through both its theme and through the art form itself. And even though school’s been in session for less than three weeks, who doesn’t already need a vacation?

Destination Danse: France runs through September 26. Tickets can be purchased at agoradanse.com or by calling 514-525-1500.

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Don’t be misled by the event’s somewhat uninviting title, which Chevrier admits “can sound a little aggressive:” all the activities are entirely free, in both English and French with translation available. Examples of workshops include “Zine Production,” “Feminist Radio,” and “Silkscreening for the Revolution.” On-site childcare and food will also be provided, free of charge. Chevrier explains the motivation for Back Off! “comes from the idea that we see problems; we’ve seen and talked about those problems for a long time, and we now want to act…with energy and enthusiasm.”

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The same label has often been applied to the novel for which the piece is named, which Shalabi cites as his composition’s most immediate influence; its five sections draw their titles from the book’s five chapters. Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling Against the Day is not for the faint of heart. It mingles a dizzying number of subplots and characters, paying homage to several different genres while never committing to one in particular. “I’d always wanted to do something with the book,” Shalabi says. He had worked with Land of Kush “only twice before” when organizers of the Montreal festival asked him to create another piece with the group, and gladly “gathered up the musicians again.” At a loss for what to write, however, he found himself looking to Pynchon as his muse.

While Shalabi’s “Against the Day” shares its namesake’s tendency to evade classification, this was not the link on which the musician crafted his project. His inspiration, quite simply, was light. The novel “is structured around light,” he explains, “and [light] becomes a character in a really interesting way.” One narrative thread traces the groundbreaking scientific advances made in the West in the years leading up to World War I – the discovery of the photon, and the connection between electromagnetism and visible light – that led to a widespread obsession with illumination. Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of the second Industrial Revolution, makes a cameo; Tesla “was doing many interesting things with light,” says Shalabi, “but was seen as a freak.” The story, he further explains, “is about those moments where no one knows what’s going on, but it’s all really exciting.”

Writing for an Egyptian classical orchestra, and of Egyptian origin himself, Shalabi noted a striking parallel between this relatively modern fixation with light and the heliocentrism of ancient Egyptian religion. Pre-Islamic peoples “worshipped light and the sun as a technology,” and it is this “occult quality” of light that re-emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West. “Light again became a mystical thing,” Shalabi marvels. “They returned to a cosmology that was actually thousands of years old.” The novel itself acknowledges the “connection between Occident and Orient surrounding light and what it was,” which forms the basis of Shalabi’s piece.

This conceptual link between East and West is evident within the music itself. Though modelled on Egyptian classical music, “Against the Day” features a synthesis of Middle Eastern, North African, and Western influences – the sounds of the Middle Eastern oud, for instance, mingle with electronics. The piece revolves around three vocal solos, for which the singers themselves crafted the lyrics; Shalabi allows for long stretches of instrumental improvisation in between these solos, creating a sense of spontaneity and ephemerality. The result is a complex cacophony that somehow blends.

A number of reviewers have used the word “euphoric” to describe the performance, but Shalabi reveals that he has no fixed intention for the overall effect. “I don’t have anything specific that I want [the audience] to get out of it,” he says. “But I like music that transports, and I hope people enjoy it.”

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The films play silently on three white walls of the small, bare gallery space, inviting viewers to quietly contemplate the artist’s flirtations with disaster. In Fall 2, we watch as Ader, cycling down the streets of Amsterdam, suddenly and deliberately steers his bicycle into a nearby canal. In Broken Fall (Organic), the drop is more drawn-out: he moves further and further out onto the branch of a tall tree, eventually dropping into a stream below. Also included in an adjoining room is the famed I’m Too Sad To Tell You, a close-up of the artist’s face as he struggles to convey a difficult piece of news. Sitting in pitch-darkness across from Ader’s life-sized image on a television screen, as he vacillates between pained sobs and attempts at self-composure, we feel ourselves to be part of an intimate conversation. In all four films, the viewer is invited to engage directly with Ader in a sympathy that is heightened by complete silence.

In a somewhat convoluted press release for the exhibition, France Choinière claims that Ader’s work “sets out to render a generic depiction of Romantic emotions through the conceptual experience of staging them.” The emotions she is referring to are the terrible awe and trepidation that one experiences when confronted with the sublime, that quality of sheer magnitude and power usually ascribed to forces of nature. The Romantics believed that a bewildering confrontation with the sublime led one to a state of enlightenment crucial to the creative process. But Ader’s art, rather than a creative product of awe and terror, is a depiction of the artist actually experiencing these feelings. Setting himself up for a fall, he portrays himself being literally overcome by the sublime forces of gravity. I’m Too Sad To Tell You, while ostensibly of a different nature than the other films, shows the artist similarly conquered by another force – that of overpowering grief.

In each of the Fall films, Ader’s demise results from a curious mixture of his own action and superior forces – he is thus the hero of a sort of highly literal miniature tragedy. In Fall 1, for example, though he sits himself in a rickety chair on the roof of a two-story home, it is decidedly gravity that pulls him down into the shrubbery. As spectators, we are helpless to prevent the tragic climax, and can only cringe as our hero surrenders to the inevitable. Despite this, the atmosphere of the films is far from somber. Ader performs his stunts with a slapstick theatricality that recalls the silent comedy of Charlie Chaplin; in Broken Fall (Geometric), he leans precariously to the side repeatedly before toppling onto a wooden sign, as we knew he eventually would. By toying with viewers’ expectations, Ader forms a relationship between hero and spectator that prevents the conceptual aspect of his work from being isolating.

It is this element of human connection that makes the films oddly compelling, intellectual considerations aside. Ader’s silent falls, unmistakably deliberate, suggest the ways in which human beings are both fearful of and responsible for their own acts of falling – falling in love, falling out of love, falling from grace. Like Ader, after plummeting, we can do nothing but brace ourselves against the impact.

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The narrator is a young woman from Western Canada attempting to document her life in scrapbook form. Though described in the publisher’s summary as “quirky,” she seems almost painfully normal – aside from a burning desire throughout her adolescence to become Mormon. This desire is supposedly born of the fact that her parents are German and Croatian immigrants, who insist that distressing memories of their former lives remain firmly buried. Denied complete access to her history, the narrator vainly seeks to fashion an alternate identity out of the Mormon life introduced by her best friend, Vera. Eventually, the death of her father begins a process of extraction from a faith that she never convincingly believed in – this extraction is meant to be the novel’s dramatic focus.

The story is told in anecdotal fragments that jump backward and forward in time, and feature a plethora of subplots: the narrator’s first post-Mormonism love and its failure, her relationship with her parents, her current successes in the field of social work, and her dramatic reunion with Vera after years of estrangement, to name a few. Each of these plots fights for attention, and as a result, none is sufficiently developed. Much of the raw material is promising – the narrator’s mother, for instance, is a convincing portrait of a woman so firmly committed to her adopted Canadian identity that she withholds a crucial part of herself from her daughter. The evolution of their bond from one between parent and youngest child to one between two grown women resonates soundly, and would benefit from a paring down of debris.

Markotić also isolates her reader with spontaneous bouts of stylistic creativity. A rapid-fire summary of the founding of Mormonism, rendered nonsensical by esoteric allusions and cheeky babble, is nothing short of a headache: “Where’s Hyrum now? Away in a manger. More eggs when the chickens wake up, and fewer when they miss their mothers. A hop and a skip, and two jumps to the moon. Adam was born in Kansas City, but then he left.”

Similarly, the sporadic annexation of the narration by secondary characters, sometimes without warning, is both jarring and cheesy. And, though admittedly a minor grievance, the frequent use of “cuz” for “because” is somewhat baffling, considering that slang is employed nowhere else in the book.

The scattered nature of the story is intentional, for it is indeed meant to be read like a scrapbook. It would not be characteristic for the narrator, who does not have the patience to keep a plant alive or read a decent novel (“It’s too hard to pay attention,” she says), to organize her memoirs in chronological order. But Markotić takes on more material than this style can handle, and the novel fails to cohere. The sense of confusion is only heightened by the author’s slapdash effort to bring everything together in the end: in a convenient twist of fate, there is a Mormon temple located in the small German town where the narrator’s mother grew up, and where the two women have travelled to reopen the past together. Our hero is able to symbolically walk past it en route to explore the history of her newly-revealed, rightful origins. Unable to partake in her satisfaction, the reader is left at the end with a handful of scraps that simply don’t create a rational whole.

The post The past in pieces appeared first on The McGill Daily.

From the small stage of Mile-End’s Le Cagibi café, Sherwin Tjia directed these encouraging words at the colourful assortment of people filling the room. The crowd was gathered to participate in the inaugural Monthly Mile-End Spelling Bee, a charmingly nostalgic event meant to give over-the-hill prodigies a second chance to shine.

Though I began the evening with absolutely no intention of competing, I found myself impulsively overcome by the desire to make up for a childhood spelling bee career thwarted – before its inception – by a classic case of stage fright. That, and I don’t value my dignity very highly to begin with. Throwing caution to the wind, I added my name at the last minute to the dozen-long list of hopeful spelling bee champs.

Tjia was the evening’s organizer and its emcee. A former McGill Daily columnist, he is now the brains behind Perpetual Emotion Machine Productions, a team that arranges a variety of weird and wonderful happenings around Montreal.

“I like to create strange events that are participatory and slightly experimental,” Tjia explains, “so that people aren’t just watching a show, but creating it.” The unpredictable nature of these “shows” is, for Tjia, the best part. “I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” he told the crowd, before officially commencing the evening. “I run these events to [find out].”

Feeling a bit like a guinea pig, but in a delightful way, I began to size up the competition. To my left was a man wearing a (rather tight) yellow t-shirt that read: “Newsday Spelling Bee Champ.” Later introducing himself as Joseph, he told me that it was a souvenir from a bee he won in the first grade. “But I lost at the next level,” he recalled, not without a hint of wistfulness. “The word was ‘bigot.’”

Also contending was a woman, somewhat older than the rest of us, who inexplicably went by the name “Shira Shakira” – and did a bit of a jig when she introduced herself to the audience.

Besides having unusually mature contestants, this bee was also more forgiving than the traditional sort: we were allowed two strikes before being eliminated, and were given a series of coupons to help forestall humiliation. “We hate to see you fail,” said Tjia. One such coupon permitted the bearer to skip a difficult word, provided that they immediately bought the host a drink. But as the competition wore on, old-fashioned stalling turned out to be the most popular tactic. At one point, Shira Shakira requested the etymology of a word three times before Tjia finally insisted that she “just spell it already.”

When my turn arrived, I realized with sudden embarrassment that my hands were trembling. But it was hard to remain nervous for long. The room was filled with an over-the-top yet Infectious camaraderie, as contestants vigourously clapped and cheered each other on. I began to get pretty absorbed in the game, even a bit competitive. In the end, I was eliminated after botching the word “tourniquet,” but was genuinely glad when Joseph emerged as the evening’s champion. Perhaps now he can finally put the “bigot” incident to rest.

Those who regret missing the first bee are in luck as Tjia intends for it to be a monthly occasion. Perpetual Emotion Machine Productions is also holding several other events in the next couple of months, including a Love Letter Readings Open Mic Night and a Slowdance Night.

“I’ve discovered that people have a hunger for strange events,” says Tjia. “But they also like the familiar, so I try to incorporate facets of both.” He hopes that the resulting shows are welcoming rather than isolating, and judging by the Spelling Bee, he has achieved success – that’s double C, double S.

Perpetual Emotion Machine can be found online at facebook.com, just like the rest of us.

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