Started and managed by Noah Bick, Passovah Productions is behind many of Montreal’s great independent music shows and groups. In a nutshell, Bick describes the recent festival as “building off the Passovah model, which is a lot of pay-what-you-can shows, a lot of local bands we’ve been working with for years.” This year’s festival was bigger than ever, breaking away from previous moulds by featuring bigger bands at numerous venues and some ticketed shows. Still, Bick emphasizes, “The festival needs to be local – that’s what it is, and it needs to be a representation of the artists I’ve been working with over the last couple of years.”

Last year, the festival operated as a fundraiser for the Immigrant Workers’ Centre. The size of this year’s festival and the number of bands playing spurred a change, as proceeds now go to those involved. Passovah’s charity component manifests itself this year in a compilation of songs by 45 of the featured acts available as a pay-what-you-can playlist. 100 per cent of the proceeds go towards the Ange-Aimée Woods Memorial Bursary for journalism students at Concordia.

“It feels cool to not only compensate myself and compensate the bands, but to pay someone […] to run the shows,” says Bick about this year’s differences. While Bick’s commitment to company growth may smack of selling out, Passovah remains committed to supporting and building relationships with local artists. The growth of the company and festival also means growth in Passovah’s ability to work with and promote Montreal artists.

As for the performances themselves, the short 20-minute sets from local favourites all packed a punch, and big names such as Suuns and PS I Love You impressed eager crowds. Passovah holds events all year, but Bick explains that “what separates the festival is the density of acts – you’re getting 60 acts in four days.” The festival atmosphere was different from Passovah’s individual year-round events – this is of course unavoidable when a set list comprises up to ten performers rather than the regular three, and word of mouth brings crowds scurrying.

The biggest stand-outs? Hard-to-Google band Country got the crowd up and dancing at Casa del Popolo on Thursday night, and Seoul calmed it back down with shimmery ambient beats that were worth the half-hour set-up time. Divine candlelit outdoor sets from Charlotte Cornfield, James Irwin, and The Sin and the Swoon were the perfect soundtrack for a food truck dinner of a single giant meatball from Ô Soeurs Volantes. Each night was slick and well-managed, but still intimate, remaining accessible with mostly pay-what-you-can entry policies.

It would, however, be a mistake to declare that Passovah defines Montreal’s indie music scene – it is an anglophone company firmly based in an area known for its glut of former McGill and Concordia students from out of province. This year’s festival featured comparatively few women performers, and dropped the all-women-fronted-bands day that was a stand-out of last year’s festival. Instead, an event co-curated with monthly queer dance party Cousins aimed at diversifying the festival. Passovah operates within a context that is dominated by English-speaking white men, but its by-donation events and commitment to compensating artists for their work are steps forward for Montreal’s music scene.

For newcomers to Montreal, Passovah is definitely a name to watch out for – check out a lamppost near you for the latest posters, or passovah.com for more reliable information.

The compilation playlist for the Ange-Aimée Memorial Bursary is available here and you’d be hard pressed to find a better crash course in today’s Montreal bands.

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If descriptions such as “dungeon crawler game with some rogue elements” or “turn-based survivor RPG with some permadeath elements” get your pulse racing and your thumbs itching, there’s a new genre to explore; or rather, a genre that’s been around for ages and is reaching a renewed level of prominence. DIY-designed games made and produced independently of a gaming corporation have been around since the early days of computers, and were certainly springing up like pixelated daisies long before Sony, EA, Ubisoft, and Nintendo came to monopolize the gaming market. But in the heyday of the console-based gaming industry, if you wanted to game, you basically had two options – go to an arcade, or buy a console.  Those options necessitated you partake in the industry’s releases, designed by a flurry of worker ants who spent their entire working lives making eyebrows for Assassin’s Creed, and sold for extremely high prices on already-expensive consoles. But with the expansion of cellphone technology, everyone has a potential gaming device in their hands.  And with open source avenues such as the App Store and Google Play, anyone can get their idea out there.

Another factor that has egged these indie gaming initiatives on is social media. A constant theme at the workshop was ‘don’t make your game in the dark’; launching a Facebook page to promote your project not only gets the word out, but it’s an invaluable source of feedback.

Talking to Chris Powell of Imaginary Games (one of the start-ups that Execution Labs works with) after a panel, I was curious to ask exactly what he meant when he mentioned female players were a demographic that wasn’t enjoying 3D graphics as much as 2D. It turns out that Facebook analytics told the group that 70 per cent of those interacting with the page were girls, and that test graphics in 2D received more positive feedback than those in 3D. While this can hardly lead to a conclusion that female gamers are less stoked about 3D graphics, it certainly seems useful for a creative director.

This led me to question Powell about participation of women in the gaming world in general. In his experience, there does seem to be a labour divide. The two women in his group, Imaginary Games, are painters and illustrators (and they comprise two of the three women on all the teams currently supported by Execution Labs, according to information available on Imaginary Games’ website). One of them, a co-founder named Elin Jonsson, recently won the “Most Prominent Female Developer” award at the gaming association Casual Connect. Her prize, as displayed in a photo uploaded to Imaginary Games’ Facebook page, was jewellery from Tiffany’s.

There are further challenges facing the indie gaming industry. Jason Della Rocca, co-founder of Execution Labs and host of the panel, pointed out that the big gaming corporations are starting to catch on to the wealth of creativity and motivation driving these start-ups, and have begun to incorporate this into their latest consoles. For example, the upcoming ‘eighth generation’ of home consoles, and the crowdfunded Ouya, which runs Android software and can be used as a developing kit (this itself is a new genre of console, and could be described as truly ‘indie’). Of course this is exciting; corporations are acknowledging the underdog, providing a platform for creative expression, and broadening the variety of gameplay and open source mentality. But if free games created by indie developers become widely played by major console gamers, who is profiting? The group that gets millions of people playing their game for free, or the company selling the consoles to those players? Already, indie developers as well as established corporation apps are benefiting – to a huge extent – smartphone companies like Apple, as applications become a must-have day-to-day accessory in the mobile communications world.

The future is certainly bright for indie developers – the platforms and the technology are out there for anyone to do their thing.  But be aware of the dark side: going indie means you are independent in every sense of the word. You are your own PR, legal team, creative director, CEO, CFO, business manager, the whole shebang. Familiarise yourself with the risks, do your research, set realistic goals, and put yourself out there.

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The Classics department’s staging of Hippolytus, written by Euripides and first performed in 428 BCE, hammers this point home with a blaze of miscommunications, vengeance, sensuality, lust, betrayal, and forgiveness. Lynn Kozak, assistant professor in History and Classical Studies and organizer of the department’s now-annual play, spoke of how tragedy emphasizes “how out of control our lives are,” and evokes emotions that are viscerally real.

The protagonist, Hippolytus, is an overwhelmingly self-righteous virgin who refuses to worship the goddess of love, Kypris (also known as Aphrodite), instead devoting his worship to Artemis, goddess of chastity and hunting.  Kypris is so offended she takes revenge, making Hippolytus’ mother-in-law Phaedra fall in love with him.  Things take a turn for the tragic when Hippolytus’ father Theseus returns.  The human characters prove to be far more complex than the deities, managing to provoke both annoyance and sympathy from the audience.

While Phaedra agonises over her unrequited love and Hippolytus raves against the uselessness of women, the chorus offers its opinion on the unfolding events at every opportunity.  12 cast members scattered through the audience move about freely, dance sensuously, mourn, and rant as the occasion demands.  In the cavernous space of La Sala Rossa, with the audience scattered around tables, the effect was immersive and multisensory in a way theatre often doesn’t dare to be.

Adding to the sensory experience was the surprising and successful electronic soundtrack composed by Nick Donaldson, aka Virek, who graduated from McGill with an MA in Music Technology in 2011.  Heartbeats and horse hoofs mingled with ethereal synths – and a fair smattering of doom-laden bass – in a way that both blended into and enhanced the tension of the unfolding drama.  When asked why this genre should be chosen for the soundtrack, co-director Carina de Klerk explained, “Because it’s synthetic, and the restaging of classical plays is synthetic.” While “synthetic” is more commonly interpreted as “artificial,” in this sense, I’m more inclined to think of it in its second sense, as a combination: the mission to stay true to the text, paired with the realities of staging a play for a 21st century audience.

Speaking about the translation process, Elizabeth Ten-Hove – who played Hippolytus, and contributed to the translation – said, “It was a lot of fun! You’re always translating in class but it was really interesting to come together as a group and talk about the translation. It has to sound good in English. It’s not just about getting the right meaning, it’s the right shade of meaning.”  The task of translation was clearly not taken lightly, with contributions from eight students under the purview of de Klerk and Kozak.  While modernized, the resulting play flows smoothly: idiom was well integrated, and the chorus retained the sense of poetry – while avoiding any forced rhythm or rhyme – that set their interjections apart from the emotionally-charged dialogue and soliloquy of the principal characters.

Most would agree that ancient Greek is a dead language.  But its legacy is certainly living, and performances such as this one take that legacy out of the classroom – where, indeed, it is liable to remain trapped in an endless recitation of conjugations and declensions.  Kozak enthused that “performance makes [classical plays] real in a way that reading doesn’t, especially with translation, you get stuck in every word.”  For her, staging classical plays is essential to her project to “bring Classics to a wider audience.  I don’t like that Classics is just a niche thing.”  Only one third of the cast are “hardcore Classicists,” as Kozak described them.  Rather, many came to the play out of interest in the culture and in acting.

The overall response among the cast was that the whole thing was a lot of fun.  “We take the darkest parts of ourselves and bring them out for the world to see!” Thurber remarked, with a huge smile on her face that completely vanished when she took to the stage to pour out the doomed fate of Phaedra.

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“They’re not actually very good. Throw it away if you don’t like it.”

I dropped it in the trash on my way to the bathroom. I could still hear him singing in the kitchen, falsetto thirds and fourths wondering whether the avocado was ripe.

“Is this one soft enough, no, not quite yet, this one, but this one is soft enough.” When I re-entered the kitchen he was scooping out the flesh with a spoon, standing over the sink, growing old.

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On November 2, 1960, the ribbon cutting of the National Theatre School, or École National de Thêatre (NTS/ENT) was marked with the words, “I declare the National Theatre School ouverte.” That was fifty-one years ago. The school was, from its founding, supposed to be “truly bilingual.” Now, to mark its demi-centenary, students in this year’s graduating class staged the school’s first ever bilingual production, En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, an edited version of several works by playwright Jacob Wren. Described as a “neo-post-digital-clash-reality-based performance,” it ended up being a confused diatribe about the state of theatre, what theatre is, capitalism, totalitarianism, the family unit, overpopulation, the current economic crisis, and, of course, Quebec’s language divide. As you learn when you spend any amount of time around NTS/ENT, that awkward, double-barreled acronym is not the only sign that the school’s bilingual project has been about as succesful as that of the country it represents.

I spoke to the school’s CEO, Simon Brault, on the phone about the school’s approach to language.

“It was always meant to be – since the very beginning – a place where Francophone and Anglophone would study and train and experiment and develop their capacities of doing theatre at the same time in parallel,” Brault explained. “It was always understood that these two communities would be in Montreal in the same building, sharing the same space.”

NTS/ENT was created in response to the Massey Report of 1951. A survey of the state of the arts in Canada, the report highlighted many shortcomings in the country’s cultural sphere – and in particular, in opportunities for Canadian students to study arts in Canada.  The report suggested state funding to remedy the situation. This funding was meant to be be regulated by the autonomous Canada Council for the Arts, and to prevent talented Canadian artists from leaving the country to study – and never coming back. This brain drain was a problem for many art forms. But theatre, where cultural capitals were already well established in New York and London for Anglophones and Paris for Francophones, was particularly hard hit. Under these conditions, it was hardly surprising that theatre people were leaving the country. As the Massey report noted, “facilities for advanced training in the arts of the theatre are non-existent in Canada… Young actors, producers and technicians[…]must leave the country for advanced training, and only rarely return.”

So, in 1958, the Canadian Theatre Commission (CTC) struck a committee to found a bilingual school in Toronto. They soon realized that Montreal, as a bilingual city, made more sense as a location. Over the years, the school tacked on programs that cover every aspect of the theatre: acting, playwriting, directing, set and costume design, and production.

However, in many ways, the school has fallen short of true bilingualism.  The French and English sections are socially and pedagogically separate, save for one class (set design). The two language groups sit separately in the cafeteria, by and large, barely making small talk. The English section has classes on Saturdays, while the French section does not.  The English section recruits theatre professionals from all over the country to teach.  For the French section, recruitment is limited to French-speaking professionals. No one I talked to seemed to think there was anything wrong in this stark separation.

Brault defined the school as “more co-lingual than bilingual… In the sense that each language has its own territory.”  It’s hard not to imagine that Brault is talking about something larger than the school here.

Chris Abraham, co-director of En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize and an NTS/ENT graduate in Directing (1996), agreed with Brault’s description of the school as “co-lingual”.  “It’s definitely not a bilingual school,” he told me on the phone. “Language on the French side is a political entity. The fact that students are there training to speak French on stage is connected to the politics of the day in Quebec, and certainly we experienced that in the project.”

To be fair, the logistics of organizing a bilingual production are formidable, by all accounts. Because the two sections function so differently, the process took a considerable amount of time and compromise.  “If you want to be serious you need a much longer process, because French and English don’t have same training – not only taught but practiced,” Brault explained.

Abraham encountered this in the day to day business of producing the show. “As much as there was excitement… there was also apprehension,” he said. “Not just because of the political content of the piece that we were working on, but the prospect of working…in two languages.”  He described it as “very, very difficult initially, when everything had to be translated into two languages… But over the year we spent working together we found an equilibrium, we found what needed to be translated and what didn’t.”

By virtue – if it can be counted as one – of its location in a province where language is so politicized, the NTS/ENT has to deal with conflicting ideologies, not simply administratively, but in the context of each individual’s relationship with language.

Lois Lorimer started studying Acting in 1978.  For such a tumultuous period of Quebec’s political history – the province’s first separatist Parti Quebecois government had been elected two years earlier – Lorimer recounts her time at the school as one that somehow lacks concrete political context.  “It was exciting, and even though much was happening in Quebec politics, being theatre artists bonded us in a way,” she wrote in an email.  “We were running around in our leotards from class to class with no time even to do laundry, training our bodies, our voices, dealing with texts in different languages but still were part of a universal alchemy of live theatre. It was thrilling to us English students to live in Montreal, where actors and artists seemed respected.”

Among the students I spoke to, the general consensus is that the language divide is more practical than political.  Abraham echoed Lorimer, saying, “I think the divisions within the school are largely to do with the fact that the students are kept incredibly busy in their time at the school. The moments for social interaction tend to happen outside of school… There’s always been a curiosity about what the other program’s doing, what the nature of their pedagogy is.  I think classes do see each other’s work, especially the public components.  The divisions are not by design.”

Darcy Gerhart, a second-year in Acting, concurred: “It’s strange because their program is completely different… We operate in the same building but it’s sometimes like two different schools.  [Language] is a hard barrier to break, especially socially.”

***

En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize  presented language as a field of conflict. “You will see,” Brault promised me, “the play is really a dealing with the differences and critics and challenges of translation, and of living together when you are different.”

The performance lived up to its billing in this respect, at least.  The audience was summoned to its feet for the national anthem in English and French. A whimsical reenactment of the story of the Tower of Babel – the biblical fable of man’s attempt to reach God, resulting in divine wrath and the separation of humanity into distinct linguistic groups – was meant as an ode to the richness and poetry of mistranslation. But it devolved into a cacophony of yelled complaints about language, hurled between the English and French performers.

“[The fight scene] was created through improvisation,” Abraham explained.  “It was interesting because there wasn’t a lot of explicit tension within the group over language. We had to really ask people to give voice to the things they sometimes thought.”  The things they thought of had an unnerving ring of truth – they frequently triggered a “someone else thinks that too?!” epiphany in me.  For example, does “I try to speak French, I do, but you always reply to me in English!” sound familiar?  Or the Quebecker plea for immigrant Anglos to at least try to engage with a culture that increasingly defines itself by its language?

The play, as its title promised, swiftly launched into a discussion of criticism. At first, the theory that when you critique something, you are supposing there is a better version of it somewhere – an idyllic version that is attainable only if the criticism is heeded.  The words of Leszek Kolakowski rang loudly through the theatre while projected images of war and destruction flashed across the screen above the actors’ heads.  “We need a socialist tradition that is aware of its own limitations, since the dream of ultimate salvation on earth is despair disguised as hope – the will to power disguised as a craving for justice.”

Message after ideological message bombarded the audience.  Don’t have children! The nuclear family is the root of all evil!  Theatre is dead!  Somewhere within this, the language issue got lost. Every speech was translated immediately, but instead of resolving the question of bilingualism it seemed to accept its failure by presuming the need for translation in one of Canada’s few truly bilingual cities.

***

When I heard this was the first bilingual production the NTS/ENT has ever staged, my reaction was predictable: what took so long?  Isn’t it supposed to be a bilingual school?

When I put the question to him, Brault replied, “I don’t think it took so long. If it had been a goal of the school, it would have happened fifty years ago.”

Despite Brault’s insistence that a bilingual production was never a goal of the school’s, the CTC’s mandate was to create a bilingual school. In this respect, the school has not succeeded.

However, it has to be asked, does that matter?  Is it even practical to have a bilingual theatre school? For the majority of students, an imposed bilingual pedagogy would compromise learning: in such a high-intensity program, starting on a new language would seriously detract from getting ahead in the cut-throat world of theatre.  Abraham sees this as the reason for the bilingual production’s fifty-year wait: “It’s more to do with [the fact that NTS/ENT is] a training institution, it exists for that.”

“Entertaining the idea of classes together is dangerous,” Gerhart echoed. “It’s a little scary to me because it could get in the way of the work.”

“We’re learning how to act, we’re not learning French,” she said. “That’s maybe the flaw, maybe the beauty of the school. It’s not and I don’t think ever will be a bilingual place because the number of bilingual actors out there is very small.  I don’t know if it should be really, in terms of the training. I’m going to work in English Canada, or parts of the world that speak English. As much as I aspire to be bilingual, English is my first language.”

Anyway, the notion of “bilingual” is ambiguous: does it mean fluency in two languages, or respectful accommodation of two languages? Within the Quebec school system – which requires all students to attend French-language schools, unless their parents have been schooled in Quebec in English – NTS/ENT’s system is very accommodating.  My impression of the linguistic divide within the school is that it’s a constructive exposure to another culture, rather than a restriction on communication.

This is most likely why the school has shifted to billing itself as “co-lingual.”  As Brault explained, “The notion of ‘co’ means the goal is not to integrate everything… There is constant conversation exchange.”

For students like Lorimer, the resulting atmosphere was exciting. “I found my experience of actor training at The National Theatre School enriched by Quebec culture and language, and I like to think we got along and learned from each other,” Lorimer wrote.

But, for Gerhart, this isn’t enough.  She lamented that “the school doesn’t make a huge effort to integrate the programs,” saying it’s something that often comes up at student association meetings. One thing Gerhart said she and other English students wished for was “a chance to see [the French program’s] work. We get very little notice about the French shows that are going on, and I think that would be easy to integrate, and we wouldn’t need to speak the language to appreciate the theatre.”

The same applies outside the school: the English program works its schedule around major English-language productions in Montreal, but makes it difficult to attend French-language ones.  “There’s something about theatre that transcends language,” said Gerhart. “It’s not a necessity [to understand].  If the acting is good you don’t need to know the language.”

***

It seems telling that Canada’s preeminent school for performing arts should grapple with the French-English divide this way. Such struggles are at the heart of Canada’s national identity. Brault calls the school “a real microcosm of this country, [and] of the arts sector.”  With the dominance of Anglophone art in Canada, and the corresponding determination of Francophone art to assert itself, Brault is certainly on to something.  Art in this country is not bilingual – neither in execution (granted, books alternating between French and English would be impractical), nor in appeal or intention.

However, the numerous successes of the NTS/ENT should not be underestimated.  It was formed to keep Canadian artists in Canada, and over the last fifty years the resulting talent has reinvigorated Canadian theatre.  If the school does not represent what bilingualism “should” be, it may be because Canada doesn’t. The anglophone Ontarian who feels herself vaguely “enriched” by Quebec’s presence in Canada is much more common than the truly bilingual Montrealer who straddles both cultures with familiarity and ease. After all, the majority of the country is English, and so is the majority of arts exposure, funding, and creation. In Quebec, the roles are reversed.  As Gerhart notes, “we’re in their city, we’re kind of the minority.”

In the Youtube trailer of En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, a girl crouching in a porta-potty explains, “This play is about translation and the relationship between French and English in Canada, and the art in Canada, as far as theatre goes.” While the play’s tangled political soapboxing could be analysed far more deeply, its biggest success may have been the implicit significance of its very existence.  “It was a big thing for the school to do,” Abraham, the co-director, said. “Supporting this project from both sides of the administration and being engaged in a very technically involved show required a lot of conversation between both sides of the school, and I hope that will have a positive impact.”

If the school is indeed a microcosm of the Canadian arts world, then this production has some interesting things to say about the divide within our national culture – and even about whether we even have one. The show made it to the stage: that is no small feat, and a step forward, no doubt. But in its confusion and dissonance – and the persistent problem of translation – the performance, like the school itself, reminds us that we have a ways to go.

As Lorimer, class of 1981, put it: “I thought it a tribute to the school, which is a co-lingual institution, and would have been surprised not to have both languages. It was thrilling to see the two classes merged together and working collaboratively. Also amazed that this was the first time this was done in the history of the school.”

The post Bilingualism gets stage fright appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“Community Captured” will culminate in a photography exhibit in McGill’s Education Building. Photos from participants will be displayed, and a few the photographers themselves will be present to speak about their work and how it represents their notions of community and social justice.

Fifty disposable cameras were given to individuals across the city. Tanya De Mello, a McGill law student involved in organizing the project, mentioned new refugees, live-in caregivers, people on lower incomes, people involved with programs focusing on increasing literacy, a mental illness centre, ASTT(e)Q (Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Québec), and a centre for research on race relations as collaborators in the endeavour.

Badat focused on documenting  his religion, and the Islamic community of downtown Montreal.
This had its own complications, and despite the potentially unifying notion of a Muslim community, Badat found barriers. “When you go to the Concordia area, there are some Muslim shops where you can buy Halal meat and stuff so I tried to get some poses from them. It wasn’t really easy – each time I had to introduce myself and explain the project, and what was difficult for me, and why they didn’t always say yes, is because I don’t speak Arabic… I’m French… All this background is difficult for people to understand, they sometimes didn’t really trust me… It’s a lot of energy to explain it and make a shot.”

“Community Captured: takes place on Thursday March 24 at 7 p.m. in the main lobby of the McGill Education Building.

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Thousands of U.K. students have been protesting across Britain since the Conservative-led government announced plans to implement austerity measures late last year. These measures will raise the cap on tuition for U.K. universities to rise to £9,000. This is a three-fold increase on the current cap of £3,290 for students starting university full-time from October 2012.

Hero Austin, community and welfare sabbatical officer for the LSE Student Union, and Ryan Hickey, a Master’s student in Political Theory, discussed the efforts of the LSE students and faculty against tuition hikes.

They spoke of events that targeted the wider LSE student body, rather than only those involved in student activism. Events such as balloon drops and flashmob dances were used earlier in the year and were said to be particularly successful.

Austin explained that these activities engaged students who would not have been interested in participating in more radical activities, such as strikes and protests.

Speaking two weeks after the conference, organizer SSMU VP External Myriam Zaidi, admitted that turn-out “wasn’t great” due to poor promotion and the upcoming reading week. She stated that this “made it less of a conference and more of a workshop” but maintained, “it was really needed.”

Students in Quebec have also been protesting proposed tuition hikes this year. Since 2007, the provincial government has increase tuition $100 per student per year, and students expect this number to increase even more when the five-year policy expires in 2012.

Both the provincial Finance Minister Raymond Bachand and Education Minister Line Beauchamp have called for a fee increase of approximately $500 per year for three years beginning in 2012, according to La Presse.

Although this is a far lower percentage increase than the one being forced upon students in the U.K., the atmosphere at the conference was that tuition hikes set a precedent that students must not accept.

“People say, ‘Well, this is okay, it’s just a little jump, whatever,’ but as soon as you surrender, there’s no limit to where they’ll go,” said Zaidi. “If you give up the right to education, if you can put a price on an education – whether it’s $100 or $10, 000 – you’ve lost a big fight.

“You’re accepting the rhetoric that…education is not a right, it’s an investment. … You’re removing the idea of education as being a social benefit and a societal institution. That’s what [universities] are supposed to be,” she added.

The proposed increase will also affect out-of-province students, whose tuition is comprised of the Quebec rate in addition to the out-of-province supplement.

“They [LSE students] realized that the bureaucratic way is not the way to get things done, and that now they had to do more direct action, as in going through civil society organization and grassroots organization,” said Zaidi. “And that was interesting because that’s what students have been trying here this year, and the government and the administration is not backing off.  So when you try everything, the only thing you have left is your sign and your voice to go outside and protest.”

Student groups at McGill protesting against the tuition hikes are using similar tactics to those employed at LSE.

U1 Arts student Robin Reid-Fraser attended the conference and is organizing the upcoming SSMU Mobilization Committee (Mob Squad) event “FlashMOB – Dancing Against Tuition Increases,” was inspired by the  discussed at the conference.

“Since the beginning of the year a number of us have been working on the issue of the coming tuition increases, and we’ve all been paying close attention to other student protests around the world,” Reid-Fraser said, “We had already talked about doing an action that would be quite visible in order to increase awareness on campus… After the video conference with the LSE students, we felt even more inspired and empowered, and the plan for the flashmob really started to come together.”

The flashmob is set to take place this afternoon in the Y intersection at 1p.m.

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Our session was accompanied by the chattering songs of a number of budgies in the window. Jason, reading from my astrological chart and tarot cards, gave me little specific information about my future, and what he did say wasn’t concrete. Instead, what I came away with was a compendium of good advice. Jason was a neutral stranger – I didn’t spill my life story to him, but he asked such specific questions and gave such specific ways to proceed – based on what the chart told him, that I was able to draw tangible suggestions. I can’t tell yet how accurate or otherwise his predictions may be, as I only went this past Tuesday.

The whole experience did not feel mystic, spiritual, or occult. Jason wasn’t trying to convert me, or impress me with spookily accurate details about my life. Nor could his readings be written off as general enough to apply to everyone – the common skeptical view of fortune telling, and one that certainly was my own perception of the field after reading too many horoscopes in old copies of 24 Heures on the bus. The Sun Tarot website describes their mandate: “Just as each person is unique, so is each reading. It can be a question, a need or clarification. All points of view are valid and respected. The mystical, spiritual, or mundane – the choice is yours,” and this is the atmosphere I felt.

Jason first came across the occult when he was 15 years old. After trying a communications spell that resulted in falling down several flights of stairs, and being arrested (the police mistook him for somebody else), he threw the spell into the sewer. But, he said, “the spell worked, invariably” – twenty years later, he had conquered his shyness. Despite initial skepticism he continued to study astrology, using early computer programs in the eighties to write and then sell astrological charts.

But it took longer for Jason to get into the occult that Sun Tarot now also focuses on. “I was not all that open… I remember one day somebody said they were burning black candles. I thought, burning black candles? That’s witchcraft, you know, that’s fucked up… Despite having this openness I was pretty closed-minded on some levels. Then over time I got involved in a spiritualist church. I went there for a while and a man read for me.” This reader’s predictions – while “so wrong” at the time – all happened: the new woman, going back to university, becoming a very good tarot reader. “I put a lot of energy into learning it…it’s a lot of effort.” This led him to a job in an occult shop in Montreal, and finally to the place he runs now.

I asked about the usual demographic. Four Ph.D. math students in the past week, Jason noted, and none of them knew each other. College professors, professional people, even a psychiatrist once – and “dancers, hookers, criminals. So a broad spectrum of people.” Although more women come in than men, he said, he prefers reading men. “Some of the nicest, and maybe more serious life-affirming decisions have been made with men.”

Our curiosity for the future is insatiable, and demand for soothsayers will continue as long as this trait lasts. “People have been doing my line of work since the beginning of time,” Jason pointed out. “Can you peer into the future?” he asked rhetorically. “To some degree you can. We all have archetypes…So [with] our ability to tap into an archetype, we’re able to push the window a little bit forward. If you work with people, a question and an answer in this moment in time is absolutely true for this moment in time… But when you leave, your life continues on. So it’s the decisions you make along the way that are going to show us your outcome.”

Sun Tarot is at 5012a Parc. Phone 514 313 9767 for more information.

The post On the cards and in your hands appeared first on The McGill Daily.

But there are certain artists who, despite having a great deal more to offer, never get acknowledged beyond the exposure the mainstream media gives them. Yann Tiersen is one such artist – most people have only ever heard of him as “the Amélie guy.”  But the soundtrack he composed for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film is only a sampling of his work. Most of the tracks came from his back catalogue – including his albums La Valse des Monstres (1995), Rue des Cascades (1996), and Le Phare (1998) – and provide only a glimpse into his style as a composer.

On February 21 at Metropolis, his second time in Montreal, Tiersen will promote his new album, Dust Lane, released October 11 last year. On first listening, the album is refreshing – even more so if all you know of Tiersen is the ripply tinkly piano that accompanies Amélie’s adorable little doc-martin-ed feet across the cobbles of Montmartre. Certainly the technique of minutely-harmonized themes repeating over each other, shifting up and down scales, recalls this earlier work. Much of Tiersen’s music comes across as profoundly solitary – his reliance on the piano and accordion, while limiting the use of vocals, conjures images of a lone street musician playing for an audience of a near-empty felt hat and a stray dog. But Dust Lane is altogether more communal. Each track is vast, choral, layered, swelling with synths and voices and drums and musical boxes plucked out of dilapidated Loire Valley attics.

This is an album that needs to be an album.  Each track bleeds into the next with caramel-like smoothness – but sad caramel, tainted with the sound of mournful sighing winds and the droning electronic whines that remain in the aftermath of the choral orgasm that explodes about  seventy per cent of the way into every track.

Listen to the album from start to end.  Then keep listening, because there’s one more track, the best one. The joyful and deceptively innocent-sounding orgy that is “Fuck Me” invokes raw, passionate sex with an intensity that will make you either yearn for it or raise your eyebrows, but you won’t be able to stop it.

The post Yann Tiersen at Metropolis appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Whenever immigrants arrive in a new country, the most tangible thing they bring is their home cuisine. Since India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947, immigrants have been coming to the U.K. in a steady flow. This peaked between 1965 and 1972, meaning that many Indians currently living in the UK are second- or third-generation. Indian cuisine has been such a strong presence for so long that it is now a recognized and fundamental element of British food. (I should mention now that although I’m using the term “Indian food” – as is the habit throughout Britain – this umbrella term really includes a wide array of influences and dishes from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the entire Indian subcontinent.)

This is evident in every supermarket freezer aisle and argument over where to get takeout. I searched for “curry” on the website of supermarket giant Sainsbury’s and got 160 results. I was struck by the apparently endless amount of ways to interpret “curry” – I was offered a tin of Heinz curry beans with sultanas. But perhaps a more salient example of adaptation is tikka masala – the U.K.’s most popular restaurant dish, so widely interpreted that no one knows the particulars of the original recipe. That is, if there ever was an original recipe – speculations of its origin range from the Indian region of Punjab to Glasgow, to seventies Soho, London. The only common ingredient in its countless variations appears to be chicken: I have had dry, saucy, spicy, mild, yoghurtey, and tomatoey versions. But I suppose, with a name as vague as “mixture of spices,” this is understandable.

The Indian dishes most popular in the U.K. pretty much all come from the north-eastern state of Uttar Pradesh, which is responsible for favourites such as samosas, palak paneer, korma, and raita. But coming to Montreal, I met more unfamiliar territory. Indian food here consists of  Parc Ex and samosa sales – and both outlets are very different from what I was used to. Samosas here cater to the North American craving for deep frying. Restaurants themselves are ruled by thali: a mix plate of a couple different dishes, in portions that can really only be described as morsels, offering a taster of different styles in a manner too restrained for my appetite.

But before I had Indian food in Montreal, I tried it in India, when I accompanied my father on a work trip. Despite only staying and eating in hotels – the neuroses of my father coupled with a hotel bill covered by a host conference meant I had to shy away from street food – the experience was vastly different. Instead of thick, creamy sauces with huge chunks of meat, sauces were thinner and more flavourful – the spices fresher, more exactingly prepared. One evening, in Bangalore, I escaped a dinner-table discussion on the subsidiarity of law and the obligation to obey, and found a law student who gave me a panipuri from a stall within the hotel’s gardens. The stall owner poked a hole in a ball of dough with a thumb stained by years of handling spices, and loaded the cavernous inside with water, tamarind, chili, the spice mix chaat masala, potato, onion, and chickpeas. Without exaggeration, it was the tastiest thing I have tried in my life – that indescribable balance of flavours is something that has been lost in the commercial Indian food options in the U.K., which have learned to cater to milder British taste buds.

Food is making the world smaller. When people move between countries, they take with them the most personal and necessary thing: how to eat. This is so wrapped up in culture, upbringing, and a sense of home that it is hard to shake off the traditions of your nationality’s cuisine. But the influence of host countries on imported traditions is unavoidable.  Far from being detrimental to food, this phenomenon has resulted in a wider variety.  Each country does another country’s cuisine differently, and you’d be surprised where the real gems are found – Italian food in Malaysia is far closer to the original than Guido Angelina’s. Basically, if you’re at all interested in culinary evolution, just try out everything, everywhere.

The post The proof is in the paneer appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Securitas have been at McGill since mid-May after the University cancelled their existing contract with their former security company, the Bureau canadien d’investigation et d’ajustement. The Executive Committee of the Board of Governors (BoG) first approved the companies new contract on December 14, after the firm sent in a bid in reply to McGill Procurement Service’s call for tender.

Securitas Canada has been criticized since August 2010 for sending letters to its Halifax workers dissuading them from unionizing.

These letters violate the international agreement Securitas signed with Union Network International, and with the Swedish Transport Workers Union in 2006, in which it promised to aid employees in forming unions.

Dave Bush, an employee of the Service Employees International Union in Halifax, is working with Securitas employees on a campaign to get Securitas to honour this agreement.

Although reluctant to be quoted, as the campaign is still in its early stages, he spoke of the general proceedings.

“Basically we’re sitting on a list of violations [of the international agreement],” he said over the phone.  “But we want to wait for the right time. …My hands are tied.”

Elise Graham, Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students Nova Scotia, commented on the importance of unionization for security guards on university campuses.

“I am part of the student union at NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art and Design], so obviously we believe that unionized workers and unionized students are stronger together than they are un-unionized,” she said.

“Here at NSCAD we have 24-hour access to our campuses so students can go into our studios and work in our studios and use the equipment for school.  So we have security guards during the evenings and we know that having unionized workers would mean more stability in their jobs, we’d be seeing the same workers time and time again, and we could develop a relationship with them,” she added.

When asked whether the labour allegations affected McGill Security Services’ decision to employ Securitas Canada, Pierre Barbarie, Associate Director of Security Services, said, “We look at the company on how best they can provide the services we need, and that’s how we base our decisions.”

Barbarie said that the reason for choosing Securitas rested on its scale.

“Securitas is a renowned company all over the world,” said Barbarie. “It has contracts all over the world, agents all over the world. … So in order to attract the best possible candidates in terms of agents, they’re definitely a huge player in that.”

Barbarie and Security Services chose Securitas in conjunction with McGill’s Procurement Services department. The BoG has not yet officially approved the decision, as they have not met since the contract was awarded.

SSMU President Zach Newburgh anticipated that the contract would be brought up for review at the next BoG meeting, as the Executive Committee would be required to submit a report.

In an email to The Daily, PGSS president and BoG member Alexandra Bishop wrote, “The basics of the contract were presented to the BoG Executive Committee by Michael Di Grappa, Vice-Principal Administration and Finance on December 14 and approved. Previous consultation included the Selection Committee involved with the public call for tender, Legal Services and Procurement Services.”

“I do not know what will be in the report to the BoG beyond the basics that the Executive Committee recommended the approval of the contract,” she continued.

She also stated that Securitas’s was the only bid received.

The post New security contract now in effect appeared first on The McGill Daily.

His father had left school at 14, as did everyone at the time unless they could afford to pay to go on to grammar school. But eventually he landed at the rail yards. “My father thought he had a wonderful job,” my granddad says. “He said he was enormously lucky because he had a job for life. And he was quite happy just to stay in that job, there was no competition, no applying for jobs. … Whereas if you were in the shipyards in those days, or building, as soon as the ship was launched you were out of a job. … You had no permanence, no surety; it was a very tricky thing.”

This all-or-nothing career was still the main option facing young people in my grandfather’s day, forty years later. For him, the difference between going into the shipyards or going into the railway was decided by a now-legendary exam: the 11+. If you passed, you stayed in school until 18. If you failed, you stayed in school until 14 – not doing very much in the meantime, by my granddad’s account – and then you went to work. “I remember going to school, and when I came home for lunch I could pass people who had been in the junior school with me who were black from head to foot working in the shipyards at 14 and 15 years old,” my granddad remembers.

When the Jarrow shipyard closed in 1934, unemployment plunged the area into depression. The response was one of the landmark labour movements of the 20th century. The Jarrow March of 1936 is still remembered today as being remarkable not only for its scale – 200 marchers walked almost 300 miles to Westminster – but its lack of significant impact. Unemployment remained high until, and even after, the renovation of industry brought a ship-breaking yard and engineering works in 1938, and the protesters returned on the train, using the £1, which was all they were given for their efforts.

Art was the only thing that mattered for my granddad, but he has unable to practice it at school. His first exhibition, at age ten, was at a local agricultural fair – called a Leek Show because of the North East’s specialty: huge leeks. His painting was crammed in among the pastries and the jams and the cabbages. The Second World War, which broke out when he was nine years old – meant that when the previous art teacher retired, he was never replaced.

No one was unaffected by the war. But when my grandparents talk about it, they don’t have much to say because it became their daily lives, imbued with an banality that seems unbelievable today. Why do they not clam up with horror at the memories? No one in my family died, was bombed or evacuated far from their family, or fought in the front lines. Listening to their memories, I get the impression that my grandparents grew up with an awareness that they were at war, but at the same time, that was just how life was.

My granddad’s school was taken over for “the war effort,” and my granddad was evacuated to his grandmother’s for a couple of years to escape the bombings that faced most of Britain’s built up residential areas. With his father being called up for the Royal Navy, my granddad’s mother was too lonely at home, and so he and his sister returned home, attending school for the half-day a week that was available to them.

My granny also felt the effects on her education, but that was about all that was affected. She was five at the time, and homeschooled. “Granny had a lovely war,” she says. “I stayed in Alnwick with granny and granddad. Granddad was invalided out of the First World War, he was a stretcher-bearer.”

When my granddad later continued to grammar school, after the 11+, “an awful irascible old headmaster” made him take an extra year. My granddad pinpoints this instant specifically as “one of those great quirks of fate.” It was while he was doing his extra year at school that he met my granny – “If he hadn’t come to the grammar school, to re-sit his O-levels, you might not be here!”

“Oh that’s right, I met little Beatrice Humble,” she says. “Do you know, she was only four-foot-two. Tiny little thing she was.” Their banter is wonderful to watch, makes me long to be back in their big suburban-village house, the wall-to-wall carpets and bacon sandwiches and entering through the back door because the front is saved for formal guests and the postman. “Every year they took a full photograph of the whole school and when I was in the third year I was sat at the front with the first years,” my granny continues.

“Cross-legged, at the front, because she was only two-foot-three.”

“No, four-foot-two!” No one in my family – on either side; my parents both came from families of late bloomers – is allowed to forget the heights of various members during their teenage years. My mother was in children’s shoes until she was 14, I have grown two inches in seven years, and my father was three inches shorter than his younger sister at 15.

This extra year not only served to ensure my own birth, but brought my granddad so close to the mandatory age for conscription that he put off his entry into art college. Even though the war ended when he was 15, conscription continued until 1960. After completing his service in the airforce – during which he never actually got off the ground – he followed his father into being a railway clerk. “He was hopeless at it!” my granny points out. The stationmaster declared him “a disgrace,” and it was then that he finally decided the only recourse was art college.

My granddad went to art college in Sunderland. A working-class boy from an impoverished corner of the northeast going to art college was an unusual thing. His mother was originally against his ambition, fearing  that all painters were drunkards. (She herself had left school at 14 to work at a local building company, where all the painters – presumably, because of their exposure to turpentine – turned to drink.) Nevertheless, it was she who went to the art college in Sunderland and asked about applying. “My mother instigated it,” he says, “because she realized I couldn’t do anything else. And I think everybody thought that.”

Because of his teacher at Sunderland, Harry Thubron, he managed to get into the Royal College of Art in London. Thubron revolutionized post-secondary art education, shifting its focus to the general study of colour and space, rather than specific skills. From his teaching, the Foundation Course evolved. This is still the standard qualification required for studying art, design, and architecture in the UK, and many of my high school friends went on to do it after graduating.

Under Thubron’s tutelage, my granddad also won a competition held by the Daily Express newspaper. The painting was bought by Lord Beaverbrook, who put it in his gallery in New Brunswick. And as a result of this competition, he won a travelling scholarship, took a break from the Royal College – which he admits he “shouldn’t have done,” but was again pushed into it by Thubron – and lived in Venice for a year.

During this year, in 1955, he didn’t learn a word of Italian. But he made a lasting friendship at a trattoria in the tiny and obscure Campo San Toma, which proved useful when I visited Venice almost fifty years later with my mother and brother, as the overjoyed owner plied us with bread. He later used the leftover scholarship money to take his wife there for their honeymoon.

As an art student, my granddad’s education had revolved around the use of the life model. He spoke at length about the influence of the Greeks on Western civilization through their art. “Greek sculpture was unlike anything else. It drove you to movement. Egyptian sculpture, Mesopotamian, Sumerian, you name it – you fell down in front of it, it was massive, absolutely awe-inspiring. Greek sculpture wasn’t, Greek sculpture was man-sized and it was dynamic, and you wanted to walk round the back of it, you wanted to dance with it! It’s marvelous, Greek sculpture, when you see the final high point of Greek sculpture, it’s absolutely lifelike, naturalistic.”

Once employing three nude models, Sunderland – and most other art colleges – no longer employs any. With the collapse of the life model came the collapse, says my granddad, of figurative art. Art students became individualistic creatures, and art became about the psychology of the individual. The individuals who would go on to form the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, all went to art college. That they all evolved into performing artists was no coincidence – they were part of a movement whose purpose was to blur the lines between art and performance. “They just wanted to perform,” my granddad points out. “The artist became more important than the art he produced in many ways. … The Andy Warhols, the Damien Hirsts, are stars in their own right – they just make objects that become sensational, you know. But a lot of it is ‘roll up, roll up, come and see the fat lady.’”

My granddad taught at art school after coming out of college, entering the world of teaching just as that role was losing its impact on those taught. “Slowly but surely there were students doing this sort of thing that really didn’t want any connections with life drawing at all, and the model and this sort of thing,” he remembers. “They would bring things in that they found on a scrapheap and put them all together and give it a name, just stick things together and hope that it would be greater than the sum of these parts eventually.”

As an art teacher, my granddad found it hard to adapt to these attitudes and perceptions of art. He says it became very difficult to teach art history – to teach principles and ideas and foundations that were readily rejected.

Instead, rejecting teaching studio art entirely, he taught a history of ideas – what is non-figurative art about, what is Impressionism about: the painting of ideas rather than action. Brought up to believe that art was naturalistic, a straightforward explanation of history and culture, teaching studio art became difficult.

“And ever since then,” he continues, “my job as a painter has been to find a language, a way of producing paintings that try and make some sense of that collapse of tradition, of figuration.” Growing up, I only saw a certain style of his artwork – ruined castles nestling in grassy sand dunes, summer afternoon cricket scenes, little cartoon birthday cards stuck to the mantelpiece.

But these, he says, he painted to make money. He says he no longer paints figuratively. “It’s not what I paint because I have ideas, you see. If you saw the ideas things, now they’re not figurative anymore. Now there’s a reason why they’re not figurative anymore and this is the difference. … Why don’t they have any life models anymore? Largely because if you’ve heard of the Enlightenment, you’ve heard of revolutions: political, social – it changed the way society regarded history and the past. We ditched things, got rid of things, revolted against all sort of things – kings, we cut kings’ heads off, and things like that. Now what does it leave you with if you ditch history? You ditch figuration.”

The study of art has been the driving force behind my granddad ever since he can remember, and the circumstances surrounding his becoming an artist are a remarkable example of coincidence. “My father never thought, never imagined he would make any progress,” my granddad tells me. “Now, I was probably one of those people who said, ‘oh no, I think I can do better than that.’ I could have been a railway clerk! I hadn’t had any ambition and if my mother hadn’t had any ambition I probably would have been.” He broke out of the social hierarchy ingrained in his upbringing (he was once chastised by a great-aunt for daring to have a conversation with the vicar) and travelled the world.

But to keep this in context, the beginning of his post-secondary education was representative of a growing trend. More people were staying in school, could afford to stay in school. Whereas his parents left at 14 because they didn’t have the money for grammar school, the only requirement for him to keep going was a basic knowledge of math and English. Despite being a “late bloomer,” he had the opportunity to bloom, and the hour-long treatise he gave me on his theory of art was the result.

My granny comes back into the room to say goodbye. “I bet you’re bamboozled!” she says. “It would have been a much simpler thing to ask granny about what she did in the war. She had a much simpler life.”

“Gathering mushrooms!” my granddad laughs.

“I had a lovely war, Naomi.”

“Gathering mushrooms.”

The post My Avant-Grandfather appeared first on The McGill Daily.

From their origins in the late 16th century, operas were originally confined to court entertainment. But by 1637 Venice was publicly producing operas in an early Baroque style that was looked down on by the upper classes. Opera’s tragicomic crudity was the pop culture of the masses, but various reforms throughout the centuries – as well as changing attitudes towards music in general – refined the general reputation of the genre to what it is today: an outdated bourgeois past time.

According to Patrick Hansen, director of opera studies at McGill’s Schulich school of music, this is a “silly” stereotype. “[It] really is an old-fashioned thing put out by the media in the late 20th century,” he said over the phone. He pointed out that OPERA America, the umbrella group for all North American opera companies, has proven through studies that while ballet and symphony audiences are shrinking, opera audiences are growing. And the key demographic reflecting this growth is the 18-25 range. “One of the reasons for this,” Hansen continued, “is music videos. Once MTV came along and videos became popular all over the world, they started telling stories through music. That’s what opera is, it’s very very visual, we’re telling a story.”

With their transgenerational appeal, stories are the best way to introduce opera to a younger audience. This fall, Opera McGill started its educational outreach program in both French and English primary schools across the city. The workshops are comprised of nine presentations in both English and French schools centred around Hansel and Gretel – the opera composed in 1923 by Engelbert Humperdinck that will be staged by Opera McGill in November. “It’s really important to reach kids about opera before they start forming opinions that it is either boring, or only for the rich, or other such terrible stereotypes,” Hansen emphasised. But it’s not just primary schools – Hansen is planning to take abridged performances of January’s production of La Boheme into CEGEPs this coming spring.

Bigger opera companies can extend similar outreach programs on an even greater scale. Pierre Vachon, Communications-Marketing director for Opera de Montreal, spoke on the phone about the efforts the company makes to create education programs that focus on young people. “We open rehearsals three times a year to 12 to 17 year olds, so that they can attend free,” he continued. “[We hold] a matinee for primary school students between 10 and 12 years old. They come once a year and we do a workshop with them.” The biggest educational outreach program offered by the company is CoOpéra, an annual workshop for 125 fifth- and sixth-graders that runs from September to May. “For an entire year they are working with opera,” Vachon said. A 2009 documentary on the project entitled Les Petits Géants won the Gémeaux award, a prize for French Canadian television, last month. As well as going to primary schools, Opera de Montreal performs ad-hoc in Berri-UQAM metro station at rush hour to promote every production they do – a strategy to “have first hand contact with the artists,” said Vachon. “[It’s saying we’re] accessible, we’re urban, we’re like everybody else except we sing. [It helps] us to make it almost trivial. I want [opera to] be there, be everywhere… have fun with it.”

On the level of production itself, Opera de Montreal is trying to hire younger singers. Vachon described Rigoletto, their current work, as “traditional, [with] traditional ages, 40-50 [year old cast members]. [But with ] certain productions, La Boheme for example, the entire cast and soloist are young, almost as young as the roles they’re playing, [so they’re] very sexy, not traditional divas.” Casting younger singers is essential to ensure that music graduates are encouraged to go into the art.

As a live theatrical performance, staging is critical in opera. That is where both Opera McGill and Opera de Montreal have managed to succeed in creative ways – involving students not only in the backstage elements (singing and acting classes, writing workshops, and costume departments, for example) but in the visual presentation of the work itself. Speaking about Opera McGill’s project, Hansen said, “we asked the students (usually aged 8 to 11) to create artwork with crayons and markers depicting a scene from the story. We have hundreds of pictures of gingerbread houses, forests, witches, etc. We are going to be using these pictures projected onto a backdrop to create the set “design” for our production.” Vachon highlighted how the company responds to the desires of young people regarding the opera experience. “We did a younger survey: would you like a more traditional or more modern view of the opera? 90 percent preferred traditional. [They said] “we want to go back in time and we like the 16th century sets and everything”… We need to dream, we know it’s spectacular and we want the spectacular to wow us.”

Hansen presented the case differently, though. “Opera has changed dramatically over the past decades, we’re literally not your parents opera,” he said. The downside of this, according to him, is that it becomes harder on the older generation that still wants traditional staging. This isn’t happening – instead, companies are pushing the boundaries of what live theatre really is through the creative process of opera.

Vachon acknowledged that there are “a lot of preconceived ideas about the expensiveness of ticket prices,” and this is probably the greatest turn-off for students. But thanks to renewed interest in spreading opera to a younger generation, avenues are opening up to making this more affordable. Opera de Montreal releases a set number of tickets at $30 for 18-35 year olds, and Opera McGill’s performances are free.

A few weeks ago, I received a ticket out of the blue to Opera de Montreal’s current production, Rigoletto. A pitiful hunchback, jealous courtiers, a beautiful maiden, her royal lover, a hired assassin, his whore of a sister, mistaken identities, sacrifice, curses, revenge, murder, played out in a red velvet cave to music that has moved audiences for decades. Nothing compares to seeing opera live, and this passion isn’t dying. McGill’s opera program – while fiercely competitive, with only six currently doing the master’s degree – sends its graduates to opera programs all over the world. The focus of these outreach programs will ensure that these hopefuls will have an audience when they make it to the stage.

The post It ain’t over appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Over the summer, the Blackader-Lautermann library got a makeover. Large wooden tables – big enough to host four students and their respective MacBooks, with enough room to spare to keep the volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau separate and content – were replaced with grey slabs of some material that has probably never been near a tree. McLennan and Redpath are going the same way. The wooden carrels have been replaced by more grey tables, with translucent plastic sheeting doing a bad job of preventing distraction. Sounds are less muffled. The chairs are moulded to fit a spine slightly more curved than my own. The camaraderie that springs from having to duke it out over a power outlet – and the universal love that burgeons in everybody’s heart for the one person who thought to bring an extension cord – has gone.

Putting my fear of change aside, recent upgrades to library furniture at McGill certainly reflect a trend of shifting thought within the field and philosophy of education. There are three issues of import within this philosophy: liability, fanatical desire for improved performance, and a belief in the ongoing battle of education versus apathy.

When I was at nursery, we were taught how to spell and then we sang songs about bluebells and executions. If we fell over and scraped our knee, no one batted an eyelid. Nowadays, if a child so much as spills water on him or herself there are a plethora of forms to fill out for liability purposes, from “injury: got wet,” to “treatment: a cuddle.” Ridiculous extremes of liability dog the education system all the way through to university – as is so evident in McGill’s ongoing dealings with various student groups. As far as personal study goes, a library is the most important resource for students. If a library looks bad, it reflects badly on the institution. Schools and universities are all about appearances, and several highlighter-coloured ottomans and an army of sleek new desks seem to do the trick.

Popular rhetoric insists that good study spaces equal better results. It is maybe for this reason that the Cyberthèque – with its ass-numbing fast-food booths, voyeuristic alien pods, and gigawatt fluorescent lighting – is consistently busier than, say, Birks reading room. Reminiscent of 1920s Ivy League colleges, its solid wood tables and brass lamps provide comfort, healthier lighting, and utter silence. This dream-library is made all the better by a lounge just steps downstairs, complete with microwave, to compensate for not allowing food near the books. Seemingly not harassed by the University, Birks is so old that you have to take your shoes off to protect the floor – and the fact that the whole study experience is exponentially better than that of the Cyberthèque is testament to the redundancy of making libraries modern for modernity’s sake.

As for education versus apathy, I doubt that a new colour scheme is going to get students racing for the stacks, incorrigibly keen to do their readings for once.

What makes students want to study is not good furniture, it’s good teaching and a well-structured, interesting course. The most a library can contribute is a welcoming and industrious atmosphere – something that cannot be achieved by harsh plastic and distracting gimmicks.

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Subjects of famous photographs are often left behind by history. The photographer takes the Pulitzer, while the subject remains unknown until coming out to the media decades later. Such is the case with National Geographic’s “Afghan Girl,” the nurse being kissed in Times Square, and the woman who became the face of the Great Depression. But Kim Phuc didn’t fall into the background – after being used by the Vietnamese government as a “national symbol of war” in propaganda films and interviews, she was granted asylum by Canada when she and her husband walked off a plane at a stop-over in Newfoundland. She was invited to the 1996 Veterans Day ceremonies in Washington, D.C., which led her to start the Kim Phuc Foundation to support children disabled by war, and to provide funding for similar organizations.

Now based in Toronto, part of her mission involves giving talks across the country, many of them at Campus for Christ events. This evening, McGill’s chapter will be hosting her. Andrew Williamson, a continuing education student and member of Campus for Christ, said “[Kim] is coming to talk about how her faith helped her to forgive. She ended up meeting…the man who bombed her village, and because of her faith she managed to forgive him.”

There are many ways of dealing with war, and faith is one of these. Kim’s viewpoint is explicitly Christian, and the talk will focus on her faith, but as a representative of the civilian perspective on war, she has garnered international and secular acclaim. Kim’s image came to define two decades of conflict in Vietnam, and her account of her experiences and the faith they engendered will not fall short of riveting.

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Kim Phuc will speak tonight at 7 p.m. in Leacock 132. Price is $5 at the door, and refreshments will be served.

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