Mollie Kaye

Aerialist Kaelyn Schmitt plans to ignite the circus arts scene in Victoria. I PLUG THE METER ON HERALD STREET and head into the Union Pacific. Winding my way past the people and pastries I spot a young blonde woman who must be Kaelyn Schmitt, sitting quietly with her latte. The only giveaway of her profession—aerialist, acrobat, and founder of Ignio Circus Company—is her unusually strong-looking shoulders. I wonder if anyone else in the cafe realizes she’s capable of amazing feats—flipping, contorting, and suspending herself by one foot from a trapeze, flying through the air. Like Elastigirl from The Incredibles, Schmitt looks like a regular person, but has hidden superpowers. She spends six months of each year in Europe, performing at hundreds of shows for rapt audiences. But her goal is to base her personal and creative life in her beloved hometown, and help establish Victoria as a centre for circus arts. Kaelyn Schmitt (Photo by Warren Zelman) Growing up, Schmitt didn’t dream of running away and joining the circus, but that’s how it turned out. All four kids in her family were extremely athletic; she started competing as a gymnast at age 10, training exhaustively and travelling far and wide. “Like any kid, I wanted to go to the Olympics,” she recalls. “At 14, I started to realize I wouldn’t be going.” The repetitive requirements to perfect the same moves wore her out. “I loved gymnastics,” she says, “but I just wanted to keep learning acrobatics, new tricks. That’s not the way it works—you do your routine.” When Schmitt “retired” in grade 11, she went from “25 hours a week of training, to ‘what do I do with myself now?’” Like most teens, she partied on the weekends and got into trouble here and there. To stay active, she played rugby, and started working as a gymnastics coach. She found out about circus school in grade 12, and something clicked. She would train, audition, and get accepted into a class of 30 students at the intensive, three-year circus college École Nationale de Cirque (ENC) in Montreal. Since graduating from ENC, Schmitt has performed as a professional trapeze artist for 10 years in 27 countries. Though it’s been exciting and rewarding, she yearns to put down roots and be closer to her family here. At 29, she also knows she’s got about five years left of doing daily shows on a trapeze for months on end “or I won’t be able to walk when I’m 50.” To make her living here, though, she must create a professional context for herself. Not a lot exists in Victoria, as far as contemporary circus goes. “There’s Cirque du Soleil every year or two years, but not a lot of professional shows for people to see,” Schmitt observes. Contemporary circus, in her view, is a mix of dance, acting, and acrobatics, offering opportunities for myriad artistic collaborations and thought-provoking social commentary. “I think it’s extraordinary, and I want to share it and make it more accessible on Vancouver Island.” Schmitt was behind the scenes of the launching of two brand-new circus schools here. Island Circus Space (ICS) at 625 Hillside, which she co-founded with performers Jake West, Lisa Eckert, and Coral Crawford, offers classes for students aged 6 through adult, and aims “to build a contemporary circus infrastructure for Victoria.” Because of her overseas commitments, Schmitt advises and teaches at ICS, but can’t be consistently present for all the practical aspects of running the business. She is grateful to Eckert and Crawford, “talented, hardworking women, who did incredible job of setting up a beautiful space.” Then there’s the Victoria Centre for Circus Arts (“The Rising”) at 1047 Langford Parkway, offering classes for everyone from toddler to adult. It was founded by Sarah Scheunhage, who shares Schmitt’s passion to bring circus arts to her hometown after performing worldwide. “It’s super exciting,” Schmitt enthuses. “Now there’s two places in town for people to learn…and we can grow that community. Both are excellent schools, with excellent teachers. They’re really well-set-up, safe environments, very professional.” Last winter in Berlin, stationed as a performer and artistic supervisor of a long-running show, Schmitt saw a performance at a theatre she’d once performed in. “I wasn’t impressed,” she says, “but before I can talk down someone else’s work, I should try it myself—do a whole show. So I thought, ‘Let’s bring circus to Victoria, let’s build a circus community here in Victoria. I can perform, and also build the [production, direction and management] skills at the same time, to be ready for when I can’t perform anymore.” Schmitt founded her brand-new production company, Ignio Circus, to create cutting-edge, contemporary local circus shows. In early July, Ignio (Latin for “ignite”) is offering their first production, “Eyes Up,” examining smart-phone culture and how we connect with each other. International performers are being brought in to join Schmitt and other local artists and musicians. “Often we use technology as a vehicle for communication, but when we take it away…there is awkwardness and beauty,” she explains. “Each of us has an inner desire to connect…it’s becoming a lost art, face-to-face interactions. ‘Eyes Up’ is exploring what it is to be human, what it is to communicate with technology, and without it.” Working with youth, Schmitt has found that circus arts provide powerful healing for many emotional issues. “Circus is physically denying what you think is possible,” she says. “Everyone has similar potential from birth to do something physically extraordinary. Circus is a neat little reminder to push the limits of what you’re capable of.” Some of the troubled or disabled kids she’s coached “couldn’t catch a beanbag, and had been written off by society.” Soon, though, they learned to juggle, even though “they thought they were never going to accomplish anything physically.” While they had a slower learning curve, it was “profoundly humbling to witness them progress, to see how much confidence and enjoyment they had learning. Circus is a powerful tool.” On Saturday, August 11 at 7:30pm, Ignio Circus is staging “The Open Hearts Gala” at the Metro Theatre to support NEED2, a Victoria nonprofit providing live online chat and in-person suicide prevention support every day through counselling, workshops, and education to youth in grades 8-12. The evening will showcase international circus professionals along with new local talent, offering an “awe-inspiring evening” of acrobatics, magic, comedy, music, and dance. All proceeds benefit NEED2 Suicide Prevention Education and Support. All-ages tickets are $25 and available at www.ticketrocket.com beginning July 3. In 2004, performance artist Mollie Kaye relocated to Victoria. As the then-mother of two young children, she was disappointed there wasn’t a circus school here. She is delighted this is now being remedied.

A BC biologist and artist wants his work to draw attention to what is here…and what is missing. SOMETIMES ABSENCE can give us a clearer vision of the truth than what is present. Scientists extrapolate from what is missing as much as from what is there; artists create impressions of life that supersede reality by choosing to omit certain details. Sculptor Guthrie Gloag is both an artist and a scientist, and in 10 full-scale wildlife pieces he’s offering at his second solo show at Madrona Gallery, he uses descriptive and narrative aspects of absence to create his imagery and telegraph his message. If we encounter an animal in the wild, we don’t need to see every individual hair or claw to fully experience its energy and character; when we see an array of driftwood shapes on a beach, we know that it’s wood without seeing the entire tree it came from. To create his sculptures, Gloag carefully selects beach-sanded fragments of cedar and fir, which are inventoried and assembled in a months-long, improvisational process. Using decking screws and drills to affix the unaltered wood fragments to each other, his works gradually come to life as solutions to his self-created, organic visions, resembling three-dimensional “puzzles.” There is no set plan or armature, only layers upon layers of evocative shapes that begin to describe an animal’s presence. His sculptures are a dance of abundant detail and lack of information, forcing the viewer’s brain to create the impression of surfaces, details, and aliveness. "Coastal Wolf" by Guthrie Gloag “I have learned as I’ve built my process that sometimes the absence of a piece of wood is beneficial; to create negative spaces is just as important,” says Gloag. “The hollow is there, and the shadow creates an animal’s eye for the viewer.” The realistic size of his work is also an integral part of the experience. “I try to stay true to scale; I find that it creates a presence…for the viewer. There may be some exaggerations, like extending legs to enhance a sense of movement, but I try to stick to scale.” The relative size of each animal, as compared to a human viewer, is a visceral experience for Gloag, who depicts only subjects he has observed directly, sometimes during his field work as a biologist. Guthrie Gloag The allegiance to realistic scale means that when he depicts a subject like a grizzly bear (and yes, he’s been near enough to one in the wild to say it made him “feel small”), there are certain logistical issues, like door widths, transportation vessels, and sheer weight—Gloag is up for all of it. “It’s a challenge I love…the process of conceiving something in my mind and then setting forth to make it in three dimensions, I find immense joy in it.” He learned the hard way with his first Grizzly piece, which couldn’t be removed from his Vancouver apartment without being disassembled. Now on Bowen Island, Gloag and his young family live in a home that includes a 600-square-foot studio he uses for sculpting; he’s enjoying that it has double French doors. The largest sculpture Gloag created isn’t in a gallery, or part of someone’s private collection; it’s in the woods, “somewhere in BC,” far off the beaten track, where the artist intends for people to come across it incidentally. The 14-foot-tall mastodon is, for Gloag, a message about extinction and preservation, and a labour of love. He completed it “under cover of winter” a year and a half ago, the seasonal rains ensuring he would be largely undetected as he backpacked 100-pound loads of thousands of driftwood pieces to the site, assembling a massive, one-ton sculpture that has gotten coverage on CBC and become a destination site for the adventurous. I ask whether the sculpture has been disturbed by those who manage to find it. “It has been a test of humanity, and so far, humanity has passed,” Gloag reports. “People have been very protective of it. They love the sentiment of it; it’s a message of conservation. People are interacting with it, and leaving it as it is.” "Black Bear" by Guthrie Gloag As a child growing up in North Vancouver’s Deep Cove, Gloag says the ethic of conservation got woven deep. “I was always in nature, in the wilderness, identifying birds with my mom, going out in the boat with my dad. The intrinsic importance of nature was instilled in me from a young age.” While he didn’t identify himself as an artist, “Art has always been a necessity; to build, to create.” The young Gloag made fantasy figures out of clay and built forts in the woods. As a UVic student earning his degree in biology and environmental studies, he was “looking for a creative outlet. I tried stone sculpture, but was not very good at it. I tried painting as well.” During a vacation with his wife on Galiano Island in 2011, he assembled a life-sized driftwood sculpture of a deer on the beach, and “it kind of clicked. Sometimes people say, ‘I’m not good at art,’ but you just need to find your medium.” Gloag started out sculpting with only a passion to please himself, and a self-assigned mission to comment on both the majesty and fragility of wild creatures. He left his sculptures right where he made them, letting others anonymously encounter them on the beaches or hiking trails. He started to notice, though, that his efforts were getting “collected,” and when Madrona Gallery owner Michael Warren ended up at Gloag’s home for a casual dinner party, conversation immediately turned to finding him a wider audience and developing his career as a professional sculptor. “He wasn’t even at a point where he was considering there would be a market for his work,” Warren says of the fortuitous meeting. “As soon as I saw it, I was blown away, as far as the impact of it and how it’s constructed. For me, it immediately connected all the dots of this place—the material that he’s using is of this land; the subject matter he’s creating are all animals he has experience with in his biology and conservation work; and the aesthetic, his own personal style, connects with the roughness and the feel of this place so well.” Gloag’s work has indeed found a wider audience, and his pieces are now part of collections all over the globe. Response has been so positive that many are waiting their turn to have “right of first refusal” on his sculptures as he completes them. The ten pieces in the Madrona Gallery show will no doubt be snapped up, but it’s worth taking some time to be in the presence of these “animals,” created by an artist who is reverently conjuring the majesty of a particular animal’s presence—while starkly commenting on the increasing absence of wild things in our region. “Instinct,” works by sculptor Guthrie Gloag, June 2-16, opening reception 1pm–4pm Saturday, June 2, Madrona Gallery, 606 View St. More info at madronagallery.com or 250-380-4660. Mollie Kaye is a visual artist who grew up with a biochemist mom and a biophysicist dad. She appreciates the creative and scientific sensibilities that Gloag brings to his work. CBC Arts' 2017 video about Guthrie Gloag:

Local artists’ studios rarely seen by the public offer a glimpse into a disappearing world. IT MAY NOT OCCUR TO THE TOURISTS and locals walking among Chinatown’s storefronts, but there’s a whole community of people living above the grocery stores, furniture shops, and restaurants. Many have called this quirky neighbourhood home for decades; a disproportionate number of them are artists. What originally drew them was cheap rent and a charming, decayed-around-the-edges aesthetic; what’s held them is the sense of solidarity and survival as rapid gentrification prices them out. On a rainy April afternoon, I visit the 700-square-foot, brick-walled studio space shared by husband-and-wife artists Denise Nicholls and GJ Pearson. Their tiny home floats above the Herald Street shops like a lucid dream someone had about a Tim Burton movie starring Alexander Calder. “It’s the opposite of minimalist,” quips Nicholls, a graphic designer who creates jewellery and paintings under the name Firehorse Designs. A floor-to-ceiling collection of their friends’ art on the walls is lit by two enormous windows. Pearson’s intricate wire, fabric, and found-object sculptures—some with motors—which he refers to as “toys,” perch atop most surfaces, float suspended from the ceiling, or are mounted to the walls and shelving that hold books, tools, and boxes of materials. “This space is what I’ve always wanted to live in,” says Pearson, as we drink home-brewed kombucha and cozy up with the studio’s two cats on an intimate grouping of upholstered furniture. The historic building, originally used as meat lockers, feels secure to him as a rental; it was re-done in the late ’90s. “We’re not in any danger of being renovicted, because it’s new-ish,” he says. Before choosing the space “on a whim,” the couple lived on the family farm in Central Saanich; Pearson had a separate studio—a barn—that was twice the size of their current home. He doesn’t miss anything about it. “I’m much happier in this space. I love being next door to Opus [art supplies], we’re across the street from great coffee shops, we have a community of artists, and I don’t have to have a car anymore.” I ask Nicholls what visitors’ general reaction is when they see the place. “They don’t know where to look first,” she says. “It’s a series of vignettes; there’s probably 100 places you could look and see something.” As Pearson works on what resembles a small Viking ship at his desk, I try to take it all in, and fantasize about the artist’s life I might have had. “We live like children,” Pearson admits. Nicholls concurs. “I’d always wanted to live in Chinatown since I was a little kid. I love living surrounded by the things that we make, and the things we’ve collected from other artists.” The couple considers themselves fortunate to have gotten into the rental market when they did, but Nicholls says, “We’re trapped here. I mean it’s great, because I love the space,” but she does find the size limitations restrictive at times. She says they could never afford a larger unit at today’s rates. “More and more gentrification is starting to happen in the neighbourhood; it’s kind of like a switch went off, as soon as the Union Building went up, and now all the buildings are falling to developers.” The units that are currently being developed are truly tiny, Pearson says. “If this place had been renovated now instead of 20 years ago, it would be half the size,” he says. “Basically, you’d have one window, and that would be it. The new standard is 250-400 square feet, just enough room for your laptop and a fold-down bed.” “Or,” says Nicholls quietly, “to run an airbnb.” A few minutes later, she slips away to do just that—to supplement their income and remain, for now, in the hidden, eroding artists’ colony of Chinatown. To see more of Pearson’s drawings and kinetic sculptures, see gjpearson.com; Nicholls’ work can be purchased at firehorsedesigns.bigcartel.com. Mollie Kaye is Focus’ arts editor.

Four musicians are Canada’s—and Mexico’s—first graduate-level string quartet. IN THE BOWELS OF THE BUILDING that houses UVic’s music department, I traverse corridors where scores of students rehearse in tiny, individual practice rooms. A muted cacophony of discordant trumpet, piano, and flute is punctuated by a soprano trilling through a Handel aria. They’re all making music—in different keys—within a few feet of each other, but they’re not playing together. Each privately hones their own skills, achieving individual excellence on their chosen instrument, hoping to earn a degree in performance. I’m here to meet two violinists, a cellist, and a violist—all from Mexico—currently enrolled in the University’s graduate music program. They’re practicing together, in one room, as a group. Instead of working toward individual degrees as soloists, they are earning their masters in performance as a string quartet. When Cuarteto Chroma (Chroma Quartet) began their studies here last fall with UVic’s resident string quartet, The Lafayette, it was the first time in Canadian history that a group of players entered a graduate music program to earn a collaborative performance degree. Cuarteto Chroma (l-r): , Ilya Gotchev, Manuel Cruz, Felix Alanis, Carlos Quijano I find the four men of Chroma playing together in a quartet-sized room, instruments in hand, going over new repertoire. Each of them has uprooted his personal and professional life in Mexico to come to UVic and earn this degree as an ensemble. They’ve now successfully completed their first year, will head back to Mexico for the summer, and return for their final year of study in the fall. Already, they have had a vital and positive impact on the school community and the local music scene, playing at Hermann’s with the Ryan Oliver jazz quartet performing chamber music concerts in unexpected places. Their graduate journey is requiring equal parts sacrifice, hard work, shared vision, and conflict resolution skills. “I got married in 2015, and the quartet started in 2015,” says Chroma cellist Manuel Cruz. “So, I got married twice.” The group chuckles. “Being in a string quartet is like being married— except instead of having sex, we have music,” quips violist Felix Alanis, and an uproar of hearty laughter fills the room. Someone mutters that music can be better than sex, and there’s more laughter. Clearly these guys have excellent rapport, but it’s not all fun and harmony in every moment, Alanis admits. “You travel together, you eat together, you rehearse together—you fight together. It’s hard, because even though you want to play music with these other people, it doesn’t mean that we really think the same. All the kinds of fights you can have about little things—or big things—always happen.” Just like any marriage, I say. “But with three people,” quips violinist Carlos Quijano. More laughter. Music history is littered with the corpses of bands, projects, and quartets that fizzle out, amicably part ways, or violently implode. “What happens to our quartet happens to every quartet,” Alanis says. “We are friends, but it’s always tricky to keep that friendship after the rehearsal.” Surfing the tides of conflict, the group agrees, is perhaps more important even than musicianship, and they couldn’t have asked for better advisors and mentors than the Lafayette string quartet, who have weathered it all—and are still playing together after 31 years. Alanis says Chroma members are awed by, and grateful for, the four women advisors’ wisdom, perspective and counsel. “It really helps us when we can ask them, ‘What do you do? How do you manage that?’” Ann Elliott-Goldschmid, Lafayette violinist, thinks Chroma has all of what it takes to become a world-class string quartet; that’s why the group was accepted into the program. As solo string players, she says, “They are really, really good.” As a quartet, they have “a real ‘sympatico’ quality about them…they’re really remarkable—wonderful, generous people, extremely empathetic. They listen really carefully, are respectful to each other and everyone around them, and they have embodied a beautiful way of communicating with each other.” What a quartet needs in order to truly gel and achieve the highest level of excellence, she says, is time together, “to hone their skills, to learn each other’s strengths and idiosyncrasies, to read all of that nonverbal communication that goes on in a string quartet.” “They have really given up a lot to come here,” she continues. “Two of them are fathers; the amount of dedication that they have to each other, to go through what they’ve gone through to make this a priority in their lives...I’ve learned enormous amounts from working with them, in terms of the discipline they have. I’m humbled by them.” These particular men are “the archetype of who we want for the program. They’re each individually strong; they are wonderful role models for the other graduate students and undergraduates; they work hard…I can’t say enough about how great that has been for everybody at the school.” Chroma plays a couple of short pieces for me: an intense, dark movement from a Schubert quartet, and a lush, heart-rending arrangement of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The small, carpeted room gives nothing back acoustically, yet their renditions sparkle and snap with complex, technical beauty—and a whole lot of soul. I say I’ve never heard a string quartet play a show tune. Alanis says they are always eager to experiment and explore. “We try to be as open as possible,” he says. Violinist Quijano adds, “In Mexico, people like classical music, but they haven’t had a lot of contact with quartets,” and by offering many different genres, including Latin American and familiar melodies, more listeners can connect with their music. The sense of inclusion goes both ways, and all the musicians of Chroma report that Victorians have been welcoming and enthusiastic. Violinist Ilya Gotchev, who was born in Bulgaria, then studied and worked in Mexico—and also Brussels—finds British Columbia delightful, but the high cost of living is a challenge. “Fortunately,” he says, “we have a scholarship through the University. It helps.” Elliott-Goldschmid says the greater community reaps many benefits from having Chroma in town, but unfortunately, their scholarship is not as generous as she would like. “We need donors…and more funding for our music students; UVic is not a wealthy school.” She says Chroma’s long-term professional sustainability hinges on their versatility as performers. “They are fabulous, because they can do it all—they can play late Beethoven, Brahms, tango—and pull it off. They really are the ‘real thing.’ We’re trying to attract those kinds of students, who have the talent and open-mindedness to do it all.” She says she regrets that as a young player she didn’t have that same kind of broad spectrum of repertoire. “I feel like [The Lafayette string quartet has] learned so much from them.” As Chroma shape-shifts into an orquestra tipica and plays an Astor Piazzolla tango for me, I can hear all of their individual passion, technical prowess, and expert give-and-take. I can just see the dancers punctuating the musical phrases with precise feet and romantic flourish. After the penultimate bar, the shared effort, rhythmic pulse, and pleading voices of the strings is released. Four smiles of satisfaction now greet each other over four bows poised in unison as the last chord fades. Cuarteto Chroma will perform in a free public recital on September 28 at 8pm in the Philip T. Young Hall at University of Victoria. They’re also looking for some music-loving Victoria homeowners who would like to host chamber music performances. To contact them, and for a list of their upcoming performances, see cuartetochroma.com. Mollie Kaye spent some time in solo practice rooms as an undergraduate soprano, but is happiest, like the members of Chroma, performing in a group. She sings with The Millies, a vocal trio.

Painter circumnavigates Vancouver Island DANA STATHAM has packed a lot into the last year, most of it living—not painting. She’s very early into an artistic career that doesn’t, at this point, feel like one to her. The amount of time she’s been able to devote to her creative endeavours isn’t as much as she’d like, but she also fears making art into something she does to pay the bills. Right now, she makes her living doing something entirely unrelated, but has a designated studio space developing in the home she recently purchased and is renovating with her new husband. Stylistically, if artists E.J. Hughes and Maud Lewis had a “love child,” it could very well be Statham. An auto-didact like Lewis, she imparts both joy and reverence into her acrylic-on-canvas coastal imagery with the detail, sophistication, and draftsmanship of Hughes. Response to her work has been very positive; she sold out her most recent shows on Hornby Island, where she’s spent a lot of time and which she loves to paint. She’s eager to see how Victorians will receive her work. "Mystic Beach" by Dana Statham, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic on canvas I congratulate Statham on her past success; she demurs. “There’s something so unique about Hornby; it’s so many people’s ‘happy place’ and haven—they want any piece of it they can get…to take home with them.” Yet when she was painting arctic scenes during her time in Nunavut, “even that, people related to, and were excited about, so I don’t know...capturing the sense of place is what people love and connect with.” Dawn Casson, owner of The Gallery at Mattick’s Farm, says it’s more than just the subject matter of Statham’s pieces that her clientele is eagerly queuing for. “I’ve already got people asking if [her pieces] are available for sale before the show.” When she says that they have to wait until the pieces are hung, “They say, ‘I’ll be phoning you at 10am on the 26th, then,’” Casson recounts with a chuckle. “We’re very excited about her pieces,” Casson continues. “I can’t wait to see what they look like hanging on the walls…it’s just going to be stunning.” She discovered Statham’s work the modern way—on Instragram—and tracked the artist down to see if she’d be interested in having a show there. Statham, whose bike commute to her work at Saanich Peninsula Hospital took her past Mattick’s Farm, says, “I would pop into the gallery, and it was like [Casson] had curated all of my favourite artists into one spot,” so she felt she “would be in good company. I was happy to say yes.” "San Josef Bay" by Dana Statham, 36 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas While Casson would have loved to create a solo show for Statham, this past year of life, work, moving, renovations and marriage all meant just seven pieces to display. To create a full show, Casson has partnered Statham with painter Wendy Oppelt, a veteran of the gallery whose loose, lively, “macro-impressionist” painting style serves as a foil to Statham’s meticulous, graphic compositions. Statham says of her seven paintings, “I plotted them all on a map,” and they ended up being a “circumnavigation of Vancouver Island…from the very north end at Cape Scott Park, to the Lochside Trail, Mystic Beach, Tofino…it happened to work out that it was a coastal exploration.” In the past, she would paint from imagination, but now works with photographs “to get the subtleties right.” While she knows people will likely be familiar with the vistas, she does take “a heavy dose of artistic license to tweak a composition…I try not to get too tied to a photo; it takes the fun out of it.” Paintings by Dana Statham and Wendy Oppelt, The Gallery at Mattick’s Farm, March 26-April 22, Monday-Saturday 10am-5:30pm, Sundays 11am-5pm. Opening reception April 14. 1-4pm. 109-5325 Cordova Bay Rd, 250-658-8333 or thegalleryatmatticksfarm.com. Mollie Kaye is Focus Magazine's arts editor.

Zelda Dean sees theatre as a way to break down barriers. MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH ZELDA DEAN is at the old brick Congregation Emanu-El Synagogue on Blanshard. She’s enthusiastically welcoming people who have come to see the Neil Simon play she’s directing. A friend of mine in the cast invited me, and I’m feeling pretty disoriented. “There’s a theatre in here?” I ask incredulously. Black curtains and a simple stage are set up in a room with about 80 chairs. Although my expectations are not high, I get a surprisingly wonderful evening of inspiring theatre, and I’m intensely curious about Dean and her tiny, synagogue-based company, Bema (pronounced “BEE-ma”) Productions. We arrange to meet on a sunny Thursday afternoon, again at the historically significant synagogue, which was consecrated in 1863. This time, I get to see both Dean and the theatre in their day jobs: she is the synagogue’s office manager, and the theatre looks like a smallish cafeteria, adjacent to a commercial kitchen. I shake my head, marvelling at how the space was so cunningly transformed. She explains that a congregant—after hearing Dean confidently quip that she could easily create a “black box” theatre in the space and stage performances there—stepped up with some cash and said, “Okay, do it.” Zelda Dean (Photo by Tony Bounsall) This is the magic—and mystery—of Dean, a small but mighty force to be reckoned with. The spry, elfin woman in her mid-70s has an enthusiastic, can-do twinkle, and clearly, her wheels are always turning. As we chat, I can almost hear the sound of the gears. She comes up with a vision and inspires people to help her realize it; wherever she is, big things get done. When she was asked to handle the congregation’s administrative tasks, she saw “they needed a tough old bird.” A fierce advocate for the synagogue and their generous, progressive initiatives in the community, their funding shortfalls served as her inspiration to create Bema Productions, whose ticket revenues directly support Emanu-El and other Victoria non-profits. Dean isn’t just any office manager. She has a long, successful history in the performing arts, and was a major part of expanding the Calgary theatre scene. She and her husband helped found that city’s largest community theatre, and in the 1980s, they created two successful dinner theatres that ran for over 11 profitable years, employing “most of the union actors in Calgary.” Completely unsubsidized, the industrious, creative couple fortified the city’s cultural offerings and launched the careers of many Canadian performers. The couple retired from their stage-based endeavours in the ’90s and relocated to Victoria to be near their adult daughter who was on her own with young children. Dean then focused primarily on family, and says, “I thought my theatre career was finished.” Between amateur and professional productions in Calgary, she had produced and directed 110 plays. “It was a great run, I had lots to be grateful for…I let it go.” Dean was approached a decade ago to fill the position of office manager, and “be the hub of the wheel here.” The grandkids were older, so she said yes. Her work showed her “how much good the synagogue was doing, but the place is not rolling in money.” Then came the congregation’s 150th anniversary. She got pulled into an arts committee, “kicking and screaming,” to create six public events for 2015. One of the six events was a small original theatre production, a collaboration with UVic. “It rekindled a little flame that I thought had gone out, and I started to think, ‘What could I do? They’re always struggling for money…I’m a professional director, entrepreneur…I can make good theatre; I can find good people.’” Find them she has. Bema’s production of Old Ladies Guide to Survival won Best Drama at the 2016 Fringe. Professional actors often take parts in Bema casts as unpaid volunteers, enjoying what one reviewer called “detailed, sure-footed direction…parsing mood shifts and embracing the steely drama beneath the jokes.” The company’s upcoming summer play is the Canadian premiere of Kalamazoo, a drama (with funny moments) about a mismatched couple, written by Mel Brooks’ daughter Michelle. The April production, Lessons, is also a drama, and another Canadian premiere, written by Wendy Graf. Dean wants to entertain, and yet hopes all of her productions will make a difference. “I don’t want to lecture people, or pound them on the head with it. I want to make them laugh, cry…think about something maybe they haven’t before.” For 17 Stories, Bema’s inaugural production, Dean commissioned a script from award-winning Canadian playwright Caroline Russell-King; she wanted a piece that addressed grief and loss. Seventeen people were interviewed about different kinds of losses: pets, jobs, family members. “It was almost overwhelming,” she recounts. “I had six actors who portrayed 65 characters in 17 different stories. The audience was blown away.” In Hebrew, the word bima means “altar,” and Bema’s name is an homage to the sanctuary where some of its performances take place. While this theatre company isn’t a religious thing, its core group of volunteers are synagogue congregants. With only about 1000 identified Jews in Victoria, the vast majority of Bema’s growing audience is gentiles who probably wouldn’t have otherwise ended up inside the building (unless they’re touring the historically significant landmarks downtown). Once inside, she hopes everyone can appreciate well-produced plays whose messages transcend any creed or ideas of separateness. Dean must have déja vù; her earliest theatrical organization efforts were in 1960s Calgary, at a time when Jews were not allowed to join the country clubs. As one of a handful of people collaborating with a transplanted rabbi and his wife to create community theatre productions that brought Jews and non-Jews together—onstage, backstage, and in the audience, “we set out to get more people into a synagogue, to see ‘hey folks, we’re all the same. You’re not going to get hit by a lightning bolt as soon as you walk in here.’” With Bema, she says, “I want to use plays that say something that’s of value, in an entertaining way, and I want to open the doors of the synagogue.” Bringing diverse people together to perform and to watch is only part of the picture. Bema is also channeling resources to non-profits. The 12 performances of their last show, Neil Simon’s Prisoner of Second Avenue, brought in 1100 people. “We raised $8500 profit for the synagogue for their programs, and six non-profit shows where each charity raised $1000,” Dean says proudly. “People believe in what we’re doing, so they are generous with their time, energy, and creativity. We’re a joyful company to work for; the thank-you letters blow me away.” Among many charitable initiatives, Congregation Emanu-El supports families in need through the Burnside-Gorge Community Centre, creates birthday parties at Our Place, and sponsored a Syrian refugee family. As someone over 25 years younger than Dean, I’m humbled by her seemingly boundless energy and productivity, but I can tell working hard is her happy place. “People ask, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re 76 years old’…I have to. Creative people have to create; we can’t not.” She’s no martyr, though. “I’m giving, and I’m receiving. If we don’t get something out of what we’re giving, we can’t do it for long. I get tremendous satisfaction out of creating a piece, and knowing it is a benefit to others…As artists, we have to be getting something out of it for ourselves. I feel grateful that I have this opportunity to do what I love doing, and at the same time make a difference, helping to make the world a better place.” Bema Productions presents Lessons, written by Wendy Graf, directed by Zelda Dean. April 12-22 at Congregation Emanu-El, 1461 Blanshard. Tickets available online through ticketrocket.com or call 250-382-0615. Mollie Kaye can only hope her own work as a performer and writer is, in some small way, making the world a better place.

Conductor Yariv Aloni lands, learns, and leads in Victoria. THE CUSTOM-DESIGNED MUSIC SPACE Victoria conductor and violist Yariv Aloni and his cellist wife Pam have added to their cozy, mid-century home nestled at the foot of Mt Tolmie is a “wow,” but it isn’t fussy. After we descend a staircase and traverse a dim hallway, the spacious room, featuring vaulted ceilings and huge windows, seems to come from nowhere. Brilliant, warm, open, and full of unexpected treasures, it is much like Aloni himself, who inspires these same descriptors as a musician and leader. His unexpected journey—from a humble kibbutz in Israel, to where I encounter him now in this magnificent room—was, he says with a smile, “serendipitous.” Aloni is perhaps best known here as the conductor of both the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra (GVYO) and the Victoria Chamber Orchestra (VCO). He’s had both of these gigs for over 30 years combined, which speaks volumes about his skill and strength in the role. High-level amateur groups can be very tricky to manage. Players who aren’t drawing a paycheque from rehearsals and performances are motivated solely by their love of music. If he fawns, flatters, or bores them, he’s sunk. If he overwhelms or paralyzes them with fear, likewise. Within realistic boundaries, he inspires them to push their edges and achieve excellence. At the end of every successful concert, he leaves them with the sense that they, not he, accomplished great things. Yariv Aloni If this sounds simple, I can assure you: it is not. In the world of conducting, or any type of leadership, it is the stuff of genius. The brilliance Aloni brings to his role in this community came through fortuitous connections and opportunities at just the right moments. When happily and humbly articulating the highlights of his development and career as both an instrumentalist and a conductor, punctuating phrases with laughter and smiles in his enthusiastic, Hebrew-accented English, he gestures with his hands as if working marionettes from above—indicating that a larger force was at work, orchestrating every nuance of his musical path. In the communal 1960s kibbutz Aloni called home during his childhood in a rural part of Israel, musical training was deemed a luxury, and not offered to everyone. Aloni’s parents were musicians, but they didn’t decide how and when he and his three musical siblings would be educated. Children were tested to ascertain what strengths they had; 8-year-old Yariv’s assessor decided he had “a good ear,” and gave him a violin instead of the coveted piano lessons he’d seen his older sister receive. “All I wanted was to play the piano…and I was devastated,” he says, chuckling heartily. “But then I got the violin, and I was very intrigued.” Still enormously upset about not being given piano lessons, the determined boy taught himself to play on one of the kibbutz’s communal instruments. “That showed them, a little,” Aloni says slyly. As a teenager, Aloni was introduced to the viola, and says, “The moment I started playing it, I found my voice. Instead of playing notes, I started playing phrases, and started playing music. Instead of words, it was sentences.” As a player in the regional kibbutzim youth orchestra, he had the joyful new experience of performing music “that you can’t play alone.” From there, he discovered chamber music, “and then the world just opened, it was like an explosion.” At 19, he and three other teenagers formed a string quartet at Isaac Stern’s newly-founded Jerusalem Music Center. “The quartet changed my life; we started doing concerts, we went abroad, we met many great players that came to give master classes…The Guarneri Quartet came to listen to us,” he says, and arranged for them to study at the University of Maryland. Like many successful young string players, they ended up amicably parting ways, and Aloni was immediately snapped up by Penderecki, a Wisconsin-based Polish quartet looking for a viola. In 1991, they were invited to be quartet-in-residence at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Far from his culture of origin, Aloni says he surprisingly felt more comfortable. “I was a bit like a fish out of water in Israel,” he admits, saying the tendency to “say exactly what you are thinking all the time” in that culture didn’t really jive with his sensibilities. Europe had its attractions, but he was always aware of being “other;” in Canada, he felt he belonged, even as a “foreigner.” At a festival he organized in Waterloo, Aloni met his wife Pam, the cellist in the UVic-based Lafayette String Quartet. If they wanted to live together, one of them would have to bow out of their group. We all know which one did: the Lafayette has celebrated over three decades with continuous personnel, and Aloni sees his move west as another fortuitous decision. “Everyone I was meeting said, ‘Welcome to Victoria!’ It was kind of shocking to me, especially after the years in the US, and even Israel. There had been a sense of community there, but never as strong as I had felt it in Victoria…things just started to unfold for me.” After relocating here in 1994, he was offered the opportunity to conduct the VCO, and gamely took on the challenge, even though he “hardly knew how to conduct.” After a year or so, he says, “I kind of ran out of knowledge.” He scanned the horizon and saw that acclaimed Hungarian conductor János Sándor had landed at UVic as Artist-in-Residence and Conductor of the University of Victoria Orchestra and Chorus. (Sandor subsequently was also appointed Music Director of the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra, where Aloni became the associate conductor, then successor after Sándor’s death in 2010). Immediately after seeing Sándor conduct, he said, “That’s what I want.” He approached the maestro and requested instruction; Sándor said he had never taught conducting, but agreed to try. What followed was over a decade of edification and mentorship. “He became really almost like my father,” Aloni recounts tenderly. “What this man gave me was everything I knew about conducting…Most people study for two years, and then you start conducting, and you learn as you go. But I had the privilege of working with him and conducting at the same time for more than ten years…It was a wonderful relationship.” Sándor inspired Aloni to revel in the leadership and coaching role of working with youth and amateur adult players. “I get to know a lot of musicians, not just my colleagues in the symphony or at UVic. There’s a whole bunch of amazing musicians and players who don’t do that for a living…they’re as dedicated as professionals…they do it really because they love it, and that’s an incredible blessing, to work with people like that.” In March and April, Aloni will be conducting two concerts with the GVYO, which features the best players in the region, ages 13 through university. “They’re an amazing orchestra. I think most people in town would be incredibly surprised. People who have never heard the orchestra, before they come to the hall, they may imagine a school orchestra,” but, at times, he says, “if you close your eyes, you don’t know who’s playing. They sound as good as anyone, at least to my ears,” Aloni says with a proud smile. “I may be a little biased.” Aloni is able to achieve the highest levels of musicality with his players because he seems to have extracted every ounce of learning and compassion from his own challenges and triumphs as a person and as a musician. He has humility, but is not self-effacing; he is eager to take responsibility for his mistakes; and he can celebrate his achievements as his own, without excluding others and the roles they have played in facilitating them. Sitting in a comfortable chair, talking about his good fortune to do what he loves, he marvels at how every experience, in retrospect, fits together, as if it were all arranged just for him. After spending time here in this surprising, well-planned space on a sunny Victoria morning, it does seem meant to be. Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra, conducted by Yariv Aloni, March 11 and April 29, 2:30pm, Farquhar Auditorium. $10 - $25, UVic Ticket Centre, 250-721-8480, www.tickets.uvic.ca, Victoria Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Yariv Aloni, April 27, 8:00pm, First Metropolitan United Church. $15-$20, Long & McQuade, Ivy’s Bookshop, or at the door. 250-598-1966 or victoriachamberorchestra.org. Mollie Kaye was also raised in a musical family, and loves that Yariv Aloni remembers attending a workshop in the 1980s given by her violinist uncle, Tom Kornacker.

Could a victim-centred approach be a better fit in cases of sexual harassment and assault? TRUMP, WEINSTEIN, MOORE, FRANKEN, THE RCMP…Every hour, it seems, more are added to a dizzying list. But remember the 2014 Dalhousie Dental School case, where “gentlemen” students waxed horrific on Facebook about their over-the-top, sexually violent predilections? The men were initially suspended. Then some of the female students referenced in those ghastly posts said they preferred a restorative justice process—an approach that involves facilitated dialogues and co-created, positive-action agreements—rather than university sanctions or criminal indictments. The media was outraged. Talking heads rolled. How dare these women demand some namby-pamby, non-punitive process, when the overwhelming public consensus was that the offenders must be expelled? Oh, the irony. Women finally come forward to break their silence around the near-ubiquitous sexualized aggression woven into our workplaces, only to be silenced again in a “justice” where “authorities” dole out punishments. Victims’ needs and input are not just ignored, but derided: “Ladies, these men have offended you. Now step aside, and let Law and Order restore your honour and make you safe. Your offending male classmates will not get a wink and a nudge; they will be destroyed for their transgressions. This is how we will make things better for you—it’s fear of punishment that prevents bad behaviour.” Except it doesn’t actually work that way. Even the death penalty does nothing to deter violent crime. A Public Safety Canada study concluded that “compared to community sanctions, imprisonment was associated with an increase in recidivism…longer sentences were associated with higher recidivism rates.” So why are we in such a rush to punish—to lock people away, fire them from their jobs, and put them on registries—especially in cases where sexualized aggression is involved? Shouldn’t we listen to victims, and support what they think should happen next? I SPEAK WITH A RESTORATIVE DIALOGUE FACILITATOR in Victoria who has worked on sexual assault cases (and for confidentiality reasons, declines to be identified). She tells me about a man who had committed rape. His lack of empathy was noticeable, but so was the fact that he genuinely didn’t understand sexual assault. The restorative justice process transformed his attitudes: “He was just floored by what women have gone through…how this plays into the bigger social fabric. He had never learned any of that. [He wondered] ‘Why don’t they teach this to us in schools? Why didn’t anyone teach us about consent? This is probably the most important thing I will learn in my life, and I didn’t know it.’” The facilitator tells me, “He made drastic changes in his life…It was really impressive to see him transform—in his thinking, in his behaviour, in his demeanour…the person who walked [in] a year later was not the same person. It was phenomenal.” In certain cases, the facilitator notes, “whatever things [offenders] have gone through in their own lives, they have closed themselves off. It is absolutely possible to help those people open up again and start feeling and start empathizing, and I’ve seen that happen.” At Restorative Justice Victoria, I ask Complex Case Manager Jessica Rourke if she believes restorative approaches can be successfully applied to local sexual harassment or violence cases. (Disclosure: I am a volunteer facilitator at Restorative Justice Victoria, though like other volunteers I am not insured to handle such cases there). She says “Yes,” and that from her perspective, “Most sexual assault victims want two things: for the offender to know how extensive the negative impact of their behaviour was, and to walk out of there feeling confident that he is not going to do this again, that he is not going to [harm] someone else.” But, she asks, “how are you going to know that? What do you need to feel [confident about] that—what does that look like for you?” Restorative dialogues, when offered, she says, answer those needs and questions, and are what many victims say will bring them a sense of safety, healing, respect and hope. So why do we reflexively insist on punishing offenders, without victim input? If it’s agreed that the long-term solution to sexual aggression is for men to become more empathetic and self-aware, are we serving that goal by limiting victims’ recourse to only the punitive courts or the shaming media? To develop empathy, offending men must hear from the women who have been affected by their actions, and understand the devastating impact they’ve had. Rourke has observed that the criminal justice system isn’t optimal for this: “There’s no room for ‘could you learn from this and change? Could you become a better person? Could you repair some of the harm you have caused?’” The victim, too, is sidelined. “The State is now the victim, it’s the State vs the Offender—your experience is now taken away from you…you’re a spectator.” The offending Dalhousie dental students expressed gratitude for their experience in the restorative justice dialogue with their female classmates. They wrote, “We learned that saying sorry is too easy. Being sorry, we have come to see, is much harder.” They realized that it was not only their female classmates, but future patients and the larger community who were traumatized, and added, “We deeply regret if this has made even one person more reluctant or afraid to access the oral health care they need and deserve.” Though university sanction guidelines called for expulsion of the men, the women in the Dalhousie dental class who participated in the restorative justice process were always adamant in their desire to graduate alongside their male classmates. “We are a part of a generation in which inappropriate sexualization is more common and widespread than ever before and we have become used to this,” they wrote. “More than [simply accepting the male students’ apology], though, we have seen the men learn why they are sorry, and what that requires of them.” THE TSUNAMI OF REVELATIONS IN THE MEDIA has helped illuminate both the nature and extent of sexual harassment. In Canada, we learn, $100 million is being set aside for a possible 20,000 harassment claims within the RCMP. Over 30 percent of Canadians surveyed in a recent federal government report say they have experienced sexual harassment at work. Of those, 94 percent are women. An Insights West poll, released December 6, found that 50 percent of Canadian working women experienced some amount of sexual harassment in the workplace—though more than 40 percent of victims felt they should “handle it on their own” rather than report the behaviour, fearing for their jobs and seeing no palatable choice for meaningful resolution within the current landscape of options. In a December 5th New York Times article by Nellie Bowles, businesswomen were asked about the widespread revelations of power abuses, and the sometimes swift and draconian consequences meted out to the offenders—without due process or dialogue with their victims. Most agreed that “a reckoning for the sexual misdeeds of men in the workplace was a long time coming. But ask the question ‘What do we do about it?’ and the answer has become as wide ranging, nuanced and intensely personal as the offenses themselves…Most of all, many women are wrestling with how this reckoning will work in practice: Who is the judge, who is the jury and what evidence is admissible.” Gillian Lindquist, executive director of Restorative Justice Victoria, agrees there isn’t a one-size-fits-all, punitive approach that can be applied meaningfully in sexual aggression and harassment cases, especially if significant time has passed since the incident. She feels more could be done to bring nuance into deciding consequences such as firings or being placed on a registry. “If you committed this assault 15 years ago, it has a huge impact, but have you changed? There hasn’t been any discussion of this. It’s just, ‘Boom, you’re gone.’ Maybe some of the women do want that, but maybe some of them don’t. I haven’t heard of a single case where someone has asked them.” Most of us would agree that victims’ needs and desires should be integral in justice outcomes. Research tells us that perpetrators of sexual aggression are more likely to change course when they understand the direct impact they’ve had, and are given constructive actions to take, rather than simply being shamed or punished. If the criminal justice system isn’t currently set up to serve either of these goals effectively, and the government isn’t providing alternatives, the community needs to step up and provide a container in which these dialogues can occur. Successful restorative dialogues in sexual aggression cases like the one at Dalhousie Dental School require funding for facilitators with extensive professional training. Neither the criminal justice system nor any of the (largely volunteer) restorative justice programs here on the Island offer consistent victim access to such resources. Until funding is provided for a new, parallel system, which would provide supported dialogues between offenders and victims, many offenders will be subject to disproportionately harsh, unproductive punishments, and victims will continue to endure the demoralizing, demeaning process of proving—to the media or the courts, “beyond a reasonable doubt”—they have been harmed. “Wouldn’t it be amazing,” posits Rourke, “to have survivors of sexual assault creating the system?” Writer Mollie Kaye is a volunteer facilitator at Restorative Justice Victoria, and believes that empathy-based, victim-centred dialogues are far better than punishment as a strategy to restore trust and heal communities.

One of Canada’s most acclaimed songwriters plays Victoria—his new home. WHEN I SIT DOWN WITH acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist Stephen Fearing, the first thing I want to know is how he ended up living in Minneapolis 35 years ago. Knowing what a hotbed of songwriting talent it’s been, I wonder if this Vancouver-born, Ireland-raised son of musicians made a calculated, early-career decision to put himself in close proximity to Prince, Tom Waits, and the legendary First Avenue nightclub (also, it was my home for awhile). As we sip steaming beverages on a rainy morning at Discovery Coffee, the tall, lanky, bespectacled Fearing tells me no, it was way more random than that. In his final year of high school, he became fast friends with a kid named Paul who arrived in Dublin as a foreign student from Minnesota. “He was a classic midwestern Minnesotan young man, and because I was born in Canada, there was a tenuous connection,” he laughs. When they graduated, Paul asked Fearing what he planned to do next. “I didn’t have a clue, so I went to visit him in Minneapolis.” Stephen Fearing (Photograph by Mark Maryanovich) After witnessing the empowered life young adults were enjoying in America (“freedom personified”), Fearing turned his visit into a two-year stay. He was a cultural novelty and social success as an “Irish guy.” In Minneapolis, he had his first girlfriend, paid cheap rent, got odd jobs under the table, and played his first gigs—in the myriad coffeehouses scattered around the Twin Cities. Without realizing it, he’d landed in something of a singer-songwriter’s paradise, a “perfect place…a great place to start doing what I’ve done.” Escaping “financially depressed” Ireland during the dark, punk-rock Thatcher era was a primary goal of many young Dubliners in Fearing’s generation, and Minneapolis was indeed a fortuitous place to land, given the overall trajectory of the music industry. “What I didn’t understand in Minneapolis was that I was getting this great education in live performance,” a skill set so essential—now more than ever—to his ability to support himself as a modern-day musician. “[Performing] is what I love to do, and as much as I love making records, I don’t make my living from that.” Sellout crowds have been a hallmark of Fearing’s 2017 North American and European tour. The music business, he says, has had an inversion: Artists used to make recordings in the studio, and tour to support the sale of those albums. Up until a few years ago, he explains, it was “the record gets airplay, and people buy it in quantities so that you don’t have to tour—touring was a loss leader so they could sell more records; a way to visit the territories and get the DJs on side.” Now, he says, “it’s the other way around; the record gets me a little bit of attention, so when I play live, I can get an audience. The only way for me to make a living is live work.” Fearing’s most recent solo recording, Every Soul’s a Sailor, is his ninth. It is beautifully written and produced; highlights include the crooning, swoon-worthy title track, and an Arlo Guthrie-esque political rant on Trump, called “Blowhard Nation.” The entire album has garnered impressive critical praise. “I love making records. I love going into the studio and spending hours and hours tweaking stuff.” The trouble, he says, is that the care he takes doesn’t necessarily translate into people hearing what he intended for them to hear. Digitization, compression, and distribution through streaming sites like Spotify means “it ends up on somebody’s iPad, crushed down into a tiny file that sounds like crap. There’s no way around that, except to fly around on airplanes, and have a carbon footprint as big as Sasquatch.” His upcoming performance in Victoria will require minimal carbon; he will traverse a few blocks of Foul Bay Road to get himself and his guitar to UVic’s Farquhar auditorium to play with bassist Rob Becker and drummer Leon Power. Fearing and his family moved to Oak Bay a couple of years ago from Halifax, and the change has been a good one, he says. Between performing on the road and madly renovating the heritage home they bought, he hasn’t experienced a whole lot of the social landscape. Closer proximity to family, he says, coupled with economics, inspired the relocation from east to west, but as he’s getting to know this place, he likes it a lot. Twenty-first century Victoria has surprised him in many ways; the artisanal startup businesses—and the youthful passion making them succeed—impress him. “I lived in Vancouver, and I would never have moved to Victoria back then. It was this provincial, snooty place where your parents went to have a holiday. That is so no longer the case…the hipster, gen-Y or whatever it is thing is pretty impressive, how people are drilling down and reinventing the wheel. I grew up where milk was delivered in horse-drawn wagons…pre-superstores, pre-even-large-grocery stores. There was the butcher, green grocer, baker—people here are rediscovering and reinventing that, with small businesses making the best coffee, the best prosciutto, the best pizza—wrapping it all up in ‘this amazing paper [their] friend makes up-Island out of rice husks,’” he says with a laugh. Fearing, a founding member of the Juno-winning band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, is something of an artisan himself—a crafter of lyrics and melodies that rely heavily on low-tech, old-world, time-honed skills. “What I do is quaint,” he says. “I play and sing. I’m more connected to the minstrels of the court than what’s being played on the CBC top 20. Change is happening very quickly, everywhere…I keep thinking if I hang in long enough, there’s a sort of ‘geezer factor’ that comes along,” he laughs, alluding to the older songwriters who enjoy a resurgence of popularity when the young and hip rediscover them. He’s certainly made himself relevant with his “Blowhard Nation” song, written in the earliest days of Trump’s efforts as a candidate. “I don’t wanna live in a blowhard nation / With a king in a tinselly crown / When the whole thing wobbles and the wheels come off / You know what’s gonna go down,” goes the opening line. “At the time, Trump seemed like a loud-mouthed distraction,” Fearing recalls. “I thought, ‘Why am I writing this song, they’d be insane to elect him, he’d never become president, there’s no way.’ I couldn’t believe the arrogance of this person, and thought I might pull [the song] out now and then…I’d say to the crowd, ‘Remember him?’ Maybe I’d play it once a year…But then Trump became leader of the Republican Party, and then he got elected, and holy fuck, I thought, ‘I’m gonna be singing this song every day for the next two years—or four years.” Fearing’s face dissolves into an all-too-common grimace of fear and exasperation. “I just can’t imagine four years.” Happily, Fearing’s next four years will surely include more touring and performing, since audiences keep enthusiastically gathering to hear him do his thing. The BBC calls him “without a shadow of doubt, one of the best songsmiths on the planet. Quality albums…stunning shows.” As long as he can carry on, he says, and manage the physical demands of being on the road, he’ll continue to do what he loves most—what he learned to do so very well in the coffeehouses and restaurants of Minneapolis back in 1980. Stephen Fearing and his trio will perform in the concert “Every Soul’s a Sailor,” Sunday, January 28, 7:30pm, Farquhar Auditorium, UVic. Tickets: student/alumni $28, general $38, University Centre Ticket Centre, tickets.uvic.ca or 250-721-8480. Writer and singer Mollie Kaye, who performs with The Millies, lived in Minneapolis for 15 years, starting in 1989. She played in many of the same venues Stephen Fearing did.

UVic’s School of Music turns 50 with one of its first grads at the helm. BACK IN THE 1960s, when the University of Victoria’s music program was in its infancy—and classroom space at a premium—there was a fortuitous juxtaposition of audio and visual, one that birthed a fundamentally collaborative community. The physical spaces may have improved and expanded, but the prevailing spirit of the place is one that supports cross-pollination of the disciplines, leading to the boosting of creative potential that launches graduates on paths toward fulfilment and success. “When I was a student, we didn’t have a music building; we were at the end of the education building, right across the hall from the visual arts department,” says Christopher Butterfield, a composer, professor and current director of UVic’s School of Music. “We all hung out together; it always made me fond of an interdisciplinary approach.” Christopher Butterfield (Photo by Ken Straiton) Butterfield took his first classes in the music department in 1969, but recalls with a laugh, “I bombed completely—flunked out.” He went back a couple of years later, more prepared to participate in the new program. “It was kind of an amazing place; there were incredible teachers here, we did wonderful stuff. I remember the four years I spent as a student being a very happy time. I don’t think the school has fundamentally changed,” he says, even though enrolment in the department has nearly doubled, and ample classroom space allows for full encapsulation of the musicians and composers. The journey that led Butterfield from cradle to captain of the University’s music department had both visual arts and musical components, but music was consistently the predominant expression of his own creative spirit. “When I was at school, I learned a lot about visual art, and hung out with a lot of artists—I married one at one point,” he laughs. “I think it’s important for people to know about other disciplines; they have a lot to teach a composer about form, time, structure. We need all the help we can get, so it’s useful to look at things outside music: architecture, poetry, film, cooking, whatever.” Like many musicians of his generation, he started out in an atmosphere of fierce rigour and harsh exactitude—the polarity of the free-wheeling, “anything goes” 60s and 70s arts paradigm. When that openness was offered to him at UVic, it built on his foundation of solidly-won skills, and Butterfield is cogent of the fact that now, in the post-hippie digital age, some particular skills can’t be glossed over; they are essential to supporting the creative process. “I teach first year composition, and have for 25 years. We don’t use computers; we use pencil and paper. It’s like drawing; it’s good to be able to draw from the subject and sketch, sometimes your pencil goes off in funny ways, you say, ‘I wouldn’t have done that if my hand hadn’t gone to sleep…’ You have to have some real knowledge of instruments in order to compose successfully, that’s what it boils down to. It’s not a matter of picking out any note and plunking it down; you have to get there from somewhere, and you have to leave there and go somewhere.” Butterfield advises his composition students to “know the common sense of the instrument” they are writing for, and “what works and doesn’t work. The only way around that is to work with instruments, work with people, get them to show you things. Ask about range—can you get from here to there? It never ends, you never get to the end, figuring out what will work and what will not.” UVic, Butterfield explains, is somewhat unique in being exactly the sort of place where composition students and student musicians can learn from each other this way, by working collaboratively—where composers can delve deep into how to play instruments, and musicians can have fresh opportunities to apply their artistry to new, exciting, creative work. “It’s always been part of the culture of the school that you can get your peers to play your pieces. That isn’t always the case in other [schools].…it’s something that contributes hugely to the spirit of the place. What the composers are writing can be pretty demanding and challenging, and the [student musicians] get right in there and do it.” His students can trust that he knows whereof he speaks, since his credentials and successes have contributed to the arts far beyond the confines of UVic. His stage, chamber, vocal, and multimedia works have been performed across Europe and North America. He studied as a boy chorister with Sir David Willcocks at King’s College, Cambridge from 1961–66; earned his bachelor’s of music in composition with Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria; studied at the State University of New York; and co-founded a rock group and did performance art. He was resident composer of the Victoria Symphony from 1999 to 2002, and his works are recorded on the Artifact and CBC labels. In 1992, he was appointed assistant professor of composition at UVic, and in January of this year, became director of the UVic School of Music. I ask if this recent ascendance to such an enormously significant leadership and administrative role has impacted his experience on campus. “To say it’s different would be an understatement,” Butterfield says wryly, but, “I have extraordinary people in my office. That’s the pleasure of it. In the administration end of things, they’re all way smarter than I am. They save my bacon daily.” Part of agreeing to the director post was taking on the happy—but behemoth—task of coordinating of the School of Music’s 50th anniversary festivities. The musical programming aspect is clearly Butterfield’s “happy place,” and he is especially excited about the “big concert” scheduled for early December. “We thought we’d go to town on performing—have lots and lots of performances, mostly using alumni who we would bring in to do recitals and concerts, and that has worked really well,” he enthuses. To celebrate their 50th anniversary, from December 1-3, the school will be having their first-ever reunion, and the December 2 Gala Concert evening’s scale is magnified by that context. Maestro Timothy Vernon will conduct the UVic Chorus & Orchestra in G. F. Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis, and Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture. School of Music faculty pianist Arthur Rowe and trumpeter Merrie Klazek will appear as soloists in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for Strings and Trumpet. “That’s a big show,” Butterfield comments. “It’s kind of exciting to have Tim here to do it with us…Tim’s in the amazing place of having this opera company [POV] for the last 25 years; it’s an amazing thing to have in a town like this.” Butterfield's greatest satisfaction, he says, comes from seeing UVic graduates go on to shine. “I’m passionately interested in…what happens to students I might have taught here…It’s amazing what’s being done by people who used to go to school here.” To name just a few: Gordon Wolfe (BMus ’93) is Principal Trombonist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and teaches the country’s top young brass players at the Glenn Gould School. Cassandra Miller (BMus ’05) is an artistic director, composer, and winner of the 2011 Jules-Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. Elsewhereless, a chamber opera composed by Rodney Sharman (BMus ’80) with libretto and direction by Atom Egoyan, has been staged over 35 times in several countries. A recent facebook page set up for alumni got inundated with positive recollections naming the specific qualities of collaboration, connection, and community that Butterfield himself revelled in as a student—and continues to foster as an instructor and school director. “[This school] seems to generate its own community,” he says. “People are definitely part of the thing in a larger way than just coming to classes.” UVic Chorus & Orchestra Gala Concert, December 2, 8pm, Farquhar Auditorium, UVic. Cake reception follows. $10 for alumni (ONECard required), $25 regular, $20 seniors, $10 students. www.finearts.uvic.ca/music or 250-721-8480. Victoria writer and musician Mollie Kaye enjoys collaboration and community-building as the soprano voice in The Millies, an a capella vocal trio.

The beloved Victoria-based Canadian roots band continues to evolve and thrive. CHRIS FRYE AND I meet at the Discovery Coffee shop Downtown. As I walk in the door, I recognize his tall, lanky frame immediately, even though he’s way in the back by the sugar-and-cream station. We take our beverages into the quieter, next-door space, sit down at a big, dusty wooden table, and I ask him about The Bills—how they formed, how they keep it alive, and where they see themselves heading as they enter their third decade. Although The Bills are technically a “Victoria-based band,” only two of them still live here in town, and there are precious few local gigs these days. (In 1998 you might have seen them at Pagliacci’s.) In September, the three current members of the band’s 1997 founding roster will join with three who got away to perform a 20th anniversary concert. The jovial, energetic Frye plays guitar and sings lead, as he did from the start, and his fellow enduring Bills veterans are Marc Atkinson on mandolin and guitar, and Scott White on upright bass. The current roster is rounded out by Victoria fiddler Richard Moody and Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Adrian Dolan. The Bills: (l-r) Scott White, Marc Atkinson, Richard Moody, Chris Frye, Adrian Dolan Atkinson and White formed the Juno-nominated group in 1997. “They decided they wanted to do something acoustic,” Frye says. “I was actually a guitar student of Marc’s, and there was a bass student of Scott’s—Oliver Swain—who Victorians will know…and another guy named Paul Dowd, who was a guitar student of Marc’s as well.” Atkinson,White and Dowd abandoned their familiars in order to diversify the instrumentation of the group. “Marc started out playing this tiny little keyboard accordion that he had. Scott picked up the fiddle—even though he was a bass player and hadn’t played much, if any, fiddle. I was playing guitar and singing, and Ollie was playing bass. Paul picked up the banjo.” Since most of them were learning as they went, “It was a place to workshop, and to grow our musical palette,” says Frye. “We all just dove into this thing to learn together. ‘Let’s pick up the greatest acoustic music from anywhere; anything you hear, bring it to the band, and we’ll start learning it.’” Local music lovers flocked to hear what was then called “The Bill Hilly Band.” (After a few years, they shortened it to “The Bills,” which, Frye says with a laugh, “we had been calling ourselves internally anyway…we call each other ‘Bill’ still, to this day. If you say ‘Bill,’ you know at least one of the other four members of the band will respond.”) Early on in their successful first year, White landed a job in Germany, playing bass for a Cirque du Soleil production. This inspired the band to undertake a nine-week busking tour of Europe (and inspired Atkinson to shed his extra accordion pounds by taking up the much-lighter mandolin). “We played on streets from Strasbourg to Copenhagen to Prague…Venice, Berlin…we really gelled as a band,” Frye recounts happily. “We learned so much music together. We were just there to play. We’d wake up in the morning, we’d learn some new music, then we’d go down and try it out somewhere.” Big-city busking was the purifying fire that helped them distil their first big hits. “That instant feedback you get in a busking environment is really valuable,” Frye explains. The band quickly purged any numbers that were duds, and refined the ones that gathered crowds and tips. As they got hired to do paid gigs indoors, they brought along the riveting presence and repertoire they’d developed through trial and error on the unforgiving street-corners of Europe. Returning to Victoria, bolstered by their overseas success and determined to grow, the band took on fiddler and “great experienced showman” Calvin Cairns to fill the slot left open by White, who remained in Germany. “We realized we got this thing that’s happening—it’s acoustic music, high-energy, playing global anything we hear…it might be African or Brazilian or the British Isles, eastern Canada…we put it all together in this melange that was just really exciting.” Their first album, The Bill Hilly Band, came in 2000, Frye says, and included a few of their own compositions (today, it’s all original material, penned predominantly by Frye, Atkinson and Adrian Dolan) plus some “super original arrangements,” and included the band’s signature improvisational style. Having picked up three new young string players, the Bills were now a sextet, the white-hot incarnation that hit the road and toured the Canadian festivals, putting The Bills squarely on the national musical map. The Bills, Frye says, think of themselves as a rock band as much as a folk band. “In our hearts and in our minds and in our ears, and what inspires us” ranges from Led Zeppelin to The Beatles to Django Reinhardt. The latest record, Trail of Tales, has a more “pop and rock” sound, he says. “There’s even secretly some drums on this record,” he adds with a diabolical grin, “and we never had drums before…don’t want to tell anybody we did that, but there it is, on the record.” While roots will always flavour what The Bills create, “One of our goals as a band is to keep working on something that people might someday identify as a ‘West Coast sound,’” Frye says. “‘Early 20th century roots music from the West Coast of Canada’ is our objective.” A fingerstyle guitar instrumental on the latest album is called “Pebble Beach,” named for a secret spot on Hornby Island, which is Atkinson’s current home. This sense of place is important to Frye. When it comes to penning lyrics, “I have always been very interested in where we come from. Stories from here…imagery that’s very ‘Southern Vancouver Island’ or ‘British Columbian.’” Nominated for another Western Canadian Music Award (“Best Roots Record” this year; they won “Entertainer of the Year” in 2006), The Bills are independent, self-produced, and book their own gigs. “It’s pretty interesting to run a band in the 21st century,” remarks Frye, “there is so much access to everything so easily, electronically. There are a lot of really good bands out there; the competition is tougher than it’s ever been.” This drives them, he says, but not to tour constantly; it’s now quality over quantity, and they savour their opportunities to convene. “We won’t have seen each other for a month or two, we land in Heathrow and say ‘hi everybody!’ at the airport, and off we go to do the tour, and then we jet off again. It’s kind of a fun way to live. It’s like we’re some secret underground espionage folk squad.” The Bills—20th Anniversary Celebration at Alix Goolden Hall, Friday, September 22, 7:30pm. Tickets: $30.50 with some discounts available. 250-386-5311 or ticketfly.com/event/1529046 Victoria writer and musician Mollie Kaye sings with The Millies, a secret underground espionage vocal trio.

Suzanne Snizek wields her flute as a weapon against bigotry and suppression. WE'VE ALL SURELY LEARNED the history lesson: Professionals in the arts and sciences, the “intellectuals” and “creatives,” get suppressed—or eradicated—by authoritarian regimes and despotic leaders. Those people who can extrapolate, interpret, question and rebut are seen as a tremendous threat to the lockstep, unthinking allegiance the fascist government requires. Needless to say, whatever the “subversives” are producing—books, paintings, plays, musical compositions—must be buried or destroyed. Add in a centuries-old ethnic bias, and those creators and intellectuals are conveniently cast as “enemies.” So it was with the learned and artistic Jews in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe during the era of the Third Reich. Many talented and accomplished refugees fled to “friendly” countries like Canada, the US, and Britain. They were not necessarily welcomed with open arms, but grudgingly accepted, and only after “extreme vetting.” Even if they were permitted to resettle, they were still suspect, subject to discrimination, and, at times, segregated and interned without warning. It’s precisely this type of bigotry, and the suffering and mayhem it causes in innocent people’s lives, that awakens award-winning flautist and UVic faculty member Suzanne Snizek’s passion for social justice. A longtime activist, she has built community around and raised her voice against the unjust detentions and horrific torture meted out in the name of “national security.” And she has found a way to combine that passion with her accomplished musicianship. Suzanne Snizek (Photograph by UVic Photo Services) Snizek has performed on flute with such diverse notables as the National Orchestra of Taiwan, the Moody Blues and Roger Daltrey. She also served as co-principal flute of the Bel Canto Opera Company of Philadelphia. Now, as a professor, Snizek augments her teaching of flute performance with academic research and musical recordings that unearth and resurrect the “forgotten” works of composers who were suppressed in the first half of the 20th Century. It was during doctoral studies at UBC that she first figured out to combine her passions. Most doctoral flute candidates choose something fairly tame and flute-related for their thesis, but the petite, soft-spoken Snizek didn’t fit that mould, and initially felt somewhat adrift. “Some people know what they want to do; I did not. My first year of study, I had no idea what I would do. I wanted to choose a topic that had larger ethical questions,” she says. “I didn’t think I could sustain interest in a research area that was just narrowly about the flute. I love to play the flute, I love to teach the flute—but I don’t love to talk about the flute, necessarily,” she says with a laugh. Snizek says she stumbled upon her research topic “by accident, like most things,” coming across the work of a composer who’d been in a British internment camp. “In 2006, I started looking at this. I was so ignorant about this; I didn’t know there were British internment camps,” she explains. “In 1940, [the British government] decided to intern all ‘foreign national aliens,’ including Germans and Austrians. Overnight, they went from ‘protected refugees’ to being arrested and interned indefinitely.” “They were seen as suspicious because they were from those ‘enemy’ countries,” Snizek continues. The British back then, like the US today, perhaps, “didn’t quite seem to understand the nature of the war they were fighting: ideology, not national boundaries.” So 70,000 people were interned, about 90 percent of them Jewish refugees. “The intention of the camps was not to exterminate people, but it was a place where they would be held because they were ‘under suspicion.’ It was a huge blow psychologically to people who had lost everything, and had just gotten their footing again. You can imagine how devastating that would have been.” Snizek says her research into the impact of the internment on the musical landscape was breaking new ground, and it generated a lot of excitement. “In 2008, musicians hadn’t really looked at the British internment at all. There were historians who’d looked at it in a general view; lots of work had been done on that, but no one looked at the music and musicians specifically. That was my doctorate. Because it was unusual, and no one had looked at that aspect, I was invited to Cambridge in 2010 to give a paper.” This past May, Snizek received a REACH Award at UVic. These awards “celebrate the extraordinary teachers and researchers at UVic who are making an impact in the classroom and beyond,” according to a University press release. Most of what Snizek teaches at UVic is performance, “which means I’m responsible for teaching all the flute lessons,” she says. She also teaches the integrated performance seminar, and coaches chamber music. Part of Snizek’s mission is to perform and record the suppressed music she unearths. “The problem [for composers is that] it’s almost as if you have one window of opportunity to get your work out,” she says. “If you miss that window, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to get it disseminated and performed.” To help remedy this situation for at least a few composers, Snizek recorded five works last summer, all formerly suppressed. “One of them is by Weinberg, a trio, a great piece. It’s only been recorded a couple of times. There’s a lag between what scholars are looking at and what the average flute player is playing. Recording helps…nudge that process along a little bit.” Snizek says the recording was the product of 12 musicians from both within and outside the University, as well as several UVic colleagues who donated their time and talents as performers and producers, including recording engineer Kirk McNally. Funding was provided by the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island, and a University of Victoria Internal Research and Creative Project Grant. There will be an opportunity to experience the intersection of Snizek’s academic research and flute performance on Saturday, July 15 at 2:45 at the University of Victoria School of Music (Phillip T. Young Recital Hall). Snizek and UVic theorist and pianist Harald Krebs will present three works, one of which is a solo flute piece by Günter Raphael, a composer identified as a “half-Jew” by the Nazi regime. As a result, Raphael lost his position at the Leipzig Conservatory, and his work was banned by the Third Reich. Snizek and Krebs recently performed together in Germany. This presentation at UVic will be by donation. Writer Mollie Kaye sings with The Millies, a Victoria-based trio.

Her paintings put female nudes in the “power position.” MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with artist Nicole Sleeth was in January. “About Face,” a group show at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV), featured two of her paintings, including “Valerie II,” a life-size reclining female nude. It stopped me in my tracks. Sleeth’s deft, Sargent-esque handling of the paint and crystalline rendering of the gaze of the model—so arresting, alive, confident, and challenging—froze me to the spot. I locked eyes with her for several minutes, she naked and I clothed, in a room churning with people and conversation. I felt humbled by the strength and defiance in Valerie’s expression. Here was her skin and flesh, uncovered, to behold. Yet even in her vulnerability, she was clearly in control, dictating the terms. That, Sleeth says, is precisely the desired effect. In her series “Gaze,” nude women are the subject, but not the object. Every aspect of these images is about shifting power and agency back to the model, beginning with the vantage point: We, as viewers, are slightly below them, looking up. Sleeth’s unapologetic rendering of the flesh, in all its detail—and the gaze, in its stunning revelation of the spirit—quietly but definitively puts these naked women in charge, even as we stare at them. Nicole Sleeth (Photograph by Tony Bounsall) Sleeth herself has a matter-of-fact air; when she took the dais at the AGGV to speak about her work, she was concise and articulate. A calm, steady, business-like gamine in black, she is still willing to reveal herself—judiciously. Intrigued by her work and impressed by the way she so clearly explains it, I was delighted to see her and her paintings again as part of the Chinatown “Hidden Spaces” artist studio tour in April. We subsequently arranged to meet for an interview. WHEN I ARRIVE AT HER FISGARD STREET STUDIO, it is populated by several women from the “Gaze” series, and I take them all in. Some I’d seen on the studio tour, some are new to me. Giving each one brief but full consideration seems an imperative. I can’t ignore any of these women—and not just because they are mostly larger-than-life size. "Jade" 60 x 44 inches, oil on linen "Marcela" 61 x 32 inches, oil on linen "Venessa" 65 x 28 inches, oil on linen I learn a bit about Sleeth’s background, how she came to Vancouver from Ottawa, leaving behind her business career to teach and create art, and subsequently relocating to do the same in Victoria from a spacious studio in Chinatown. She did not attend “art school,” but studied with Bob Grant at his atelier in Ottawa for eight years. “My work previously was more narrative; I was painting the figure, but putting the focus on the story and the background…I hadn’t given myself permission to focus on the figure itself.” The watershed moment, she says, came in March 2014 at a workshop at the New York Academy of Art, where she honed her vision under the guidance of Alyssa Monks. “Alyssa is an amazing teacher and painter; it’s hard to find people who are both. Alyssa gave me focus with my work. I just wanted to paint the figure; I didn’t need any justification. It allowed me to give myself permission to do that, and I haven’t really looked back,” says Sleeth. “The workshop was about painting from a photo reference, and how to do that well, what pitfalls to avoid. I brought some photos of a model I’d worked with in Vancouver, without knowing much about photography.” Sleeth says she takes about 4000 photos of a model for each painting. “I can see little changes, an intake of breath—it’s like a flip book. I find not just a photo to work from, but a point at the arc in their motion…though I’m working from a static photo, I have their motion in my head.” Sleeth gives a lot of credit to her models, particularly her first “Gaze” subject: “She brought such presence and confidence, and the photo I used had such attitude. It was refreshing for me…to see a painting of a woman who was challenging the viewer. That’s where the underlying theme came through. The model I was painting was staring right back at me; I felt like I was getting to know her…I already did know her, but now it was in a way that was very active, and had a back-and-forth. I was doing work on the painting, and the painting was doing work on me.” While it’s true that the individual paintings in Sleeth’s “Gaze” series don’t each have an overt “story,” there is a powerful sense of narrative—and dialogue—when viewing these works. “I didn’t want to objectify anybody I was painting,” explains Sleeth. “In our culture, it’s particularly easy to objectify women. I wanted to find a way of painting nude women…that was powerful, and not objectifying.” By placing herself and her camera on the floor when photographing her subject, Sleeth automatically puts the model in the “power position,” and says, “I realized while I was painting, the eye contact was doing a lot of the work.” That first model telegraphed her personality, and “the way she posed was very confident. Not sexualized, and not hiding. Not taking the viewer’s approval into consideration.” “Take-me-exactly-as-I-am-or-don’t-take-me” image-making of and by women is happening across disciplines right now, from dance to film to burlesque shows. I want to know if Sleeth considers herself part of this “movement,” and if she’s purposely avoiding depicting models whose bodies conform more readily to culturally-dictated beauty ideals. “I think there’s a lot of power in seeing people, and women in particular…as they really are, because we’re so often shown such a narrow segment of body types and appearances,” Sleeth explains. “So yes, I hope to be part of that movement in a way, but I also want my work to be…more timeless than that? That happens to be a trend right now, and it’s a great one—and things change, too. I don’t want to be specifically influenced by that.” Sleeth says she gets a lot of feedback about her work, much of it from women who like what they see. “It’s so amazing when someone comes up to me and says, ’You paint real women, this is what women actually look like.’ They say, ‘I look like that,’ or ‘I used to look like that,’ or ‘my mother looks like that.’ Just seeing women represented in an honest way without seeking approval for it, and without seeking judgement—good or bad—is, I think, a very refreshing thing for people. I know it is for me.” There’s blowback, too. Sleeth insists “even if people are having a negative reaction, I want to hear about it…I’ve been told I should be ashamed of myself for painting women so explicitly, not covered up…I’ve had people say, ‘I don’t know who would allow themselves to be painted like this.’ [Or ask if] I have a problem with men? [Or suggest] that some models are too heavy, too fat to paint. It always tells me more about the viewer than the painting. I welcome critique of the work, but not critique of the models, because they’ve done a great service to me in posing, and it’s a very brave thing to do.” Ultimately, Sleeth says, she is simply following her own inspiration and instincts as an artist. Any social commentary about women’s empowerment in her work is, she says, in the eye of the beholder, but her process with her models is often intimate, transformative, and “entirely on their terms; I don’t have any preconceived ideas about how I want somebody to pose…I think that [modeling for this series] can be really empowering for people. It’s their body being seen, but it’s not just their body. I very rarely paint somebody without their face. I think that’s a large part of keeping their individuality present, so their humanity is there, still, and their agency.” Nicole Sleeth will be exhibiting at both the Sooke Fine Art Show and the Moss Street Paint-in this summer. Writer, editor, puppeteer and singer Mollie Kaye performs with The Millies.

Playwright Janet Munsil directs a painfully timely American classic at the Roxy. THERE'S A BITTERSWEET NOSTALGIA evoked by a play like Born Yesterday, the comic morality tale about unlikely heroes interrupting schemes of illicit influence and profiteering in Washington, DC. Garson Kanin’s classic post-war piece is a biting political and social commentary, calling out both the underestimation of women’s intelligence and the corrupting influence of money on politics. The nostalgia comes from the sweet, and now seemingly quaint, notion that underhanded, back-room dealings (much less overt, broad-daylight corruption) could be spoken to, and ultimately thwarted. For those unfamiliar with the play, smarmy junkyard magnate Harry Brock brings his showgirl mistress Billie Dawn with him to Washington. He frets that her lack of erudition is a liability to his business dealings, so he hires righteous young journalist Paul Verrall to polish and educate his arm-candy. Billie Dawn awakens, and realizes how corrupt Harry is. She then attempts to interfere with his efforts to bribe a Congressman into passing legislation that would make Brock’s business even more profitable. Hilarity ensues, albeit edgy and uncomfortable hilarity. Blue Bridge Theatre brought esteemed local playwright and director Janet Munsil on board to wrangle their staging of this American chestnut. Of taking on this particular directing gig, a year or so after leaving her longtime post at Intrepid Theatre, she says, “I gravitate toward comedies for sure. It is a comedy; sometimes it’s billed as a ‘screwball comedy.’ Billie Dawn is one of the iconic ‘dumb blonde’-mold chorus girls, who over the course of the play is introduced to education, and is revealed to be a highly intelligent woman. It’s not that her outer trappings are being changed; this is about the opening of her mind. About her empowerment to stand up to the oppressive situation that she finds herself in.” Janet Munsil Seventy years after its original run on Broadway, the play haunts us with its relevance. How have we not come farther in seven decades? Did Blue Bridge Theatre decide to program this piece specifically to highlight the events unfolding in Washington today? “Although it was written in the ’40s, there are certain things in it that really resonate right now,” agrees Munsil, who says it’s a “tragic accident” that the appearance of the show in the theatre’s 2017 lineup is so excruciatingly apropos. “Not just with [Billie Dawn’s] personal story…but the bribing of a congressman, corporate corruption angle, political angle—it’s very timely right now. We don’t have to push on it very hard in the show; it feels like a satire for today.” Actress Casey Austin will play Billie Dawn, which, Munsil says, is a “very iconic role. In the film, she’s played by Judy Holliday, and it’s the role she was most associated with.” Jacob Richmond plays her “junkman millionaire boyfriend” Harry Brock, and Jonathan Mason, who currently lives in the UK, plays Paul Verrall, the fine young upstanding journalist, who, we can imagine, would bristle mightily if he were ever accused of propagating “fake news.” Directing at the Roxy Theatre is new for Munsil, who says, “I’ve been really impressed with what they’ve been able to do with sets, considering there isn’t a backstage. They…give an impression of having a lot of space in what is really a tight area.” Born Yesterday set designer Barbara Clarahue and costume designer Graham McGonagle both have experience with the Roxy, making Munsil’s job easier. As Victoria audiences witness this revival of a vintage play that couldn’t be more current, Munsil imagines that, yes, many theatres worldwide will surely be reviving it too. “It’s so on-the-nose, but this stuff is right there, in the script. It will be fun and entertaining from that perspective. It should be funny and uncomfortable,” she says, “which is my favourite kind of comedy.” Born Yesterday, at Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, directed by Janet Munsil. May 30-June 11, The Roxy Theatre, 2657 Quadra Street. Tickets, $20-$47, phone 250-382-3370, online at bluebridgetheatre.ca, or in person at 2657 Quadra Street.

The June concert series celebrates the natural power and intimacy of chamber music. I HAVE VIVID MEMORIES of my cellist father hosting some of the other local symphony musicians to play chamber music in our home. During the summer, I would be allowed to stay up and listen, perched at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas. Nothing about those evenings was sedate; there was no chance of me falling asleep as they played. My recollections are of raucously dynamic music-making—quiet passages and sudden, impassioned chords flying from the strings, percussive flourishes ringing out from the piano, all of it punctuated now and then by booming cascades of adult conversation and laughter. Every molecule of the drywall and furniture seemed to be reverberating; it felt as if the house might explode. The energy and intimacy of those evenings, and the power of that music, was a privilege to know. While grand orchestral works played in large halls certainly yield magnificent experiences, there is something precious that gets lost. For each instrument in the orchestra is a powerhouse unto itself. It’s easy to lose sight of this when eight violins, six violas and five cellos are on stage, all blending into one sound. When one player performs each part in a smaller venue, it’s astounding how much volume and richness reverberates through the air. There is a visceral connection one feels to the music and the musician. It is a pleasure to hear the individual instrumentalist’s style, timbre and phrasing, each one of their notes in the co-created texture easily identifiable, yet supporting the whole. This is the essence of chamber music. Victoria concert pianist Lorraine Min is passionate about sharing it with other musicians—and small, fortunate local audiences. She is co-artistic director of the Eine Kleine Summer Music festival (EKSM), a delicious, petit-four miniature of a music series that takes place each year in the verdant splendour of West Saanich, and typically sells out. Lorraine Min The 30th anniversary season of the EKSM sounds like it won’t disappoint. It kicks off with an afternoon performance at the Unitarian Church on June 4. One of Canada’s brightest young stars, concert pianist Jan Lisieki, was previously featured in a Victoria Symphony concert, and this will be his first time playing a solo recital here. There will be some well-known Bach on the menu, as well as some familiar Chopin and Schubert, but also a little-known Schumann piece which, says Min, was written later in the composer’s life. “As a pianist and performer, I find the warmth of [Schumann’s] spirit incredible,” says Min. “He wasn’t just looking to further his own music and career. He wanted to celebrate and encourage other musicians around him.” Whether Min is conscious of it or not, she clearly is engaged in the same mission. Now in her third year of being co-artistic director of the Eine Kleine Summer Music festival, Min says the festival began with a Victoria couple whose daughter played the cello. “They wanted her to have good musicians to perform with, so they started to present concerts with more professional musicians in town, who played in the symphony or at UVic. They wanted her to have that wonderful experience…They valued and cherished the idea of chamber music, and the ambience that goes along with it, to have it be in an intimate setting, in the country…that’s what makes Eine Kleine so unique.” The popular series of concerts take place in two small venues “outside the hustle and bustle of the city,” explains Min. They are indoor events, but, she says, “You see rolling meadows, trees, flowers, the beauty of nature…that was very important, and that has remained a tradition with this festival.” The First Unitarian Church, she says, “has lots of windows and natural light” and offers scenic views of the countryside. While the concerts at both the Church and at a new venue—Church and State Winery—are not “lawn-chair and picnic blanket with animals and babies running around” concerts, Min says the modicum of formality indoors offers an enhancement to the intimate and powerful experience. The silence, she says, “allows for that wonderful dynamic range, where you can play very soft, like a whisper, or have silence, which is powerful, palpable—then play big, and with body. It really does need to be in an environment where there is silence, so everyone can feel the music come to life that way.” Chamber music, Min says, is “so very different from playing in a larger ensemble. Each instrument has its own individual voice, and they are all interconnected together…there is something really magical about that.” She adds that playing music “with colleagues you admire and work well with on a personal level elevates the music as well. Something that we treasure and do our best to maintain at [Eine Kleine] is that feeling…that can only exist with this small group of you on stage together.” On June 11 and 12 the program will feature the EKSM debut of dual instrumentalist Barry Schiffman. “He is an equally beautiful violinist and violist,” Min enthuses, and the repertoire chosen will feature him playing both. The concerts will also feature founding Lafayette String Quartet cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni, Min on piano, Terence Tam and Julian Vitek on violin, Kenji Fuse on viola, and Laura Backstrom on cello. The Muse Ensemble takes centre stage for the third presentation of the series on June 18 and 19. Tam, Backstrom, Fuse and Min comprise the quartet. Min says The Muse will bring an extra element of celebration during this 30th anniversary series. “We are excited to perform the program that is going to be on our upcoming CD; we will have our CD launch during that weekend.” The fourth and final concert on June 25 and 26 features Suzanne Lemieux, principal oboe of the Symphony of Nova Scotia. Min says the program will feature a contemporary virtuoso piece that features not just show-off moments for the piano, which, she says, is “typically the case—it’s not unusual to hear a pianist having to play very technically challenging and dazzling music, but to hear an oboist do the same is quite remarkable. This piece is extremely virtuosic and challenging.” The Bach double concerto for violin and oboe will close the EKSM, the symmetry of which pleases Min. “We begin the season with Bach, and we end the season with Bach.” Eine Kleine Summer Music concert series, June 4, 11, 12, 18, 19, 25 and 26. Tickets, $25-$110. Order form available at eksm.ca, or call 250-413-3134. You can also order online at eventbrite.ca. Writer Mollie Kaye performs with The Millies, a Victoria-based vocal trio. For those who can't make it to the Festival, here's Lorraine Min with the Emily Carr String Quartet playing Chopin's Concerto No. 1, 3rd movement:

Exhibition of paintings April 29 to May 25 at Martin Batchelor Gallery OUR BODIES BEHAVE SO DIFFERENTLY when they are submerged in water. Gravity is counteracted by the liquid support; reflection and refraction of light distort our shape; and a kind of languid, alternate-reality ensues. Victoria-based artist Lisa Hebden captures the other-worldly qualities of the underwater figure in her exhibition entitled “Swimmers.” The paintings are oil on canvas, featuring brilliant colours and nearly-life-size or larger figures, creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy of experience—and immersion. “When people swim, there’s often a return to playful, child-like behaviour,” explains Hebden. “Of course, there’s posturing and strutting too, but also an abandonment of the restraints of land. We shed a bit of our ego when we are neck-deep in water. I’m interested in who we become when we are weightless.” Hebden’s application of the paint mimics a certain type of “jumping into the water,” beginning with underpainting and building up layers. “This technique is also a way into the canvas,” she explains. “I basically attack the big white square with colour, then I don’t feel as precious with it. That initial, intuitive mark-making frees my hand.” Hebden won national recognition in 2003, receiving an award from the Canadian Federation of Artists, and has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout BC. Her work has been featured in International Artist Magazine, the Vancouver Sun, and Victoria News. Her paintings can be found in private and corporate collections in Canada, the United States, Germany, and Australia. “Swimmers” opens with a reception April 29, 7-9pm at Martin Bachelor Gallery, 712 Cormorant St. See www.lisahebden.com. Mollie Kaye is a Victoria writer and musician.

In honour of their 30th anniversary, the Lafayette String Quartet performs Shostakovich’s complete string quartet cycle. NOW ENTERING THEIR FOURTH DECADE of performing together as the original members, the four musicians comprising the internationally-acclaimed Lafayette String Quartet are an impressive embodiment of the word “ensemble”—the Latin components of which mean “at the same time.” Noting an intake of breath, tensing of a lip or shifting of weight, these women can instantaneously “read” each other musically as they explore different avenues of interpretation of the repertoire, falling effortlessly into real-time synchronicity—in a fraction of a second—even during performance. The story of how these women travelled through decades together to achieve such continuity, depth and success as worldwide performers and artists-in-residence at UVic is rife with mystical coincidences and convergences, just as any “coming together” should be. It’s one thing to “come together,” and quite another to stay together, especially for 30 years. The initial heady rush of “Wow, isn’t this great? We get along so well!” can, over time, insidiously devolve into discord, with unspoken assumptions, seething resentments and unresolved conflicts—leading to nuclear explosions that make reassembly of the whole impossible. String quartets are no different really from rock bands, business partnerships, and marriages when it comes to the basic facts of human relationships, their limitations and vulnerabilities. So what’s the secret of the Lafayette String Quartet (LSQ)? How did these women end up celebrating 30 years of playing together professionally as a quartet? Violinist and LSQ member Sharon Stanis credits a fortuitous connection to a cherished mentor when the four were graduate students studying music at Indiana University—a connection which created a foundation of meaning, structure and purpose for the group’s working relationship, making it more sustainable, perhaps, than those who have tried to rely on talent or chemistry alone. “I would not be having this conversation if we hadn’t met our mentor,” Stanis insists. Stanis, for her part, didn’t dream of ending up in a string quartet. She grew up in Ohio, and held a vision from childhood of someday playing for the Cleveland Symphony. She had fits and starts of a career that might have gone that way, but in the end, fate seemed to dictate a different path, one she doesn’t regret, but didn’t envision. “Our mentor changed the course of my life,” she says. Rostislav Dubinsky was first violinist and an original member of the USSR-based Borodin quartet. He was also a friend and professional associate of composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Recordings of Shostakovich’s string quartets by the Borodin are hailed as some of the greatest ever made. Dubinsky and his pianist wife eventually immigrated to the US, and he ended up as a faculty member at Indiana University, where, in the early 1980s, he first noticed the potential of the young women as an ensemble and hounded them into forming a foursome. “He is the father of our quartet,” says Stanis. “We sat down with him when he was 60 years old, and played through the third and eighth Shostakovich string quartets. We got on a plane and performed at Sarah Lawrence College. When we graduated, he said, ‘Girls, whatever you do, keep the quartet, keep the quartet.’” In the years after they left Indiana University, luck would have it that they all ended up in Detroit, not playing as a quartet, but all with gigs. Still, they couldn’t shake Dubinsky’s insistence that they heed his advice and accept their destiny of being a quartet. In 1986, the Lafayette was formed, and the four women would drive from Detroit to Indiana to “drink from the well” and work with Dubinsky. After all these years, Stanis says, “It still is a high, that synergy, it’s like an out-of-body experience sometimes, where you feel like you’re flying, it’s just a great feeling. That feeling was definitely a draw in our younger years, because it wasn’t always perfect. But that feeling of being a part of a whole, contributing, emotionally engaged, there’s nothing like that.” The string quartet repertoire, Stanis says, ended up being more inspiring than she ever expected, and the pull to continue to play it was another aspect of their bond. “We stayed together because of the music; [string quartets are] some of the most beautiful chamber music in the world, written to express the composer’s most intimate feelings. To have one [person on each] part, and have that responsibility within only a quartet of players is pretty special.” Now at UVic, surrounded by music scholars, and having access to that kind of support and inspiration, with the time to delve more deeply into repertoire has been inspiring as well. “I have to also give credit to UVic,” Stanis continues. “In 1991, they hired us to be quartet-in-residence, which has been a very important thread” in the Lafayette’s sustainability. It’s what made it possible for them to be able to perform the complete Shostakovich cycle. “[UVic] has allowed us to take on these kinds of research-based projects—delving into 15 quartets of one composer is a great opportunity.” The series of five concerts the Lafayette will perform in February at the intimate Philip T Young Recital Hall is a “journey,” Stanis explains. “Our scholars will be giving the context and educating the audience about what they are hearing” as each of the 15 string quartets Dmitri Shostakovich wrote over his lifetime—during the oppressive and restrictive Soviet era—are played in chronological order. Shostakovich, Stanis says, “was such a clever guy. He was able to write music that was maybe thinly veiled or veiled enough that it seemed on the surface to be conforming to what the Soviets wanted, but in reality, there was a sense of expressing himself. There is a slow movement in the 6th quartet—there’s a certain place in the music—if you’re into it about a minute—it’s as if you’ve been mourning the death of someone, and then a ray of light comes through and your life is transformed.” When I reference a quote from Shostakovich where he laments the limitations of Soviet party constriction, saying he “would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm; I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage,” Stanis replies, “What he did give is some of the most poignant, tender, spiritual and transcendent music—and he was able to rebel without being seen as a rebel. That’s a very powerful thing.” Perhaps in humorous reference to his own experience of being “captive” both in the USSR and in a string quartet, Dubinsky wrote to his “girls” in 1996: “Dear Lafayettes, my sincere condolences on your first 10 years of hard labour in a string quartet. May Almighty God give you strength and wisdom to keep the Quartet as long as you live.” Dubinsky died in 1997. One can only imagine his delight if he could hear their ensemble now. The Lafayette String Quartet (violinists Ann Elliott-Goldschmid and Sharon Stanis, violist Joanna Hood, and cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni) performs the complete Shostakovich Cycle of 15 String Quartets. February 3–9 at the Philip T Young Recital Hall, University of Victoria, with eminent scholars Michelle Assay, David Fanning, Judy Kuhn and Pat McCreless. Tickets at the www.ticket@uvic.ca or 250-721-8480. $25 for each concert or $100 for a 5-concert pass. Mollie Kaye gets her own experience of “ensemble” singing with The Millies, a Victoria-based vocal trio.

Victoria Jazz Society presents the Jerry Granelli Trio and the Victoria Children’s Choir. BY 1965, Christmas in North America was beginning to get a bad “wrap.” The overt commercialization and commodification of the Saviour’s Nativity was being analyzed and discussed, after enjoying a blithe bloating into 20th-Century capitalism’s most essential yearly selling event. Meanwhile, cartoonist Charles Schultz was making tens of millions each year creating the world’s most successful syndicated daily comic strip, populated by characters who were plenty jaded and analytical themselves. Nevertheless, they were still very attractive to the executives at Coca-Cola, who were keen to find a way to purchase and air a children’s animated Christmas TV special as a promotional vehicle for their products. They approached CBS, who approached Schultz. The cartoonist jumped on the opportunity and created a moody, religion-trimmed, somewhat subversive anti-commercial tale, employing his perennially-depressed leading man Charlie Brown to lament the fact that no one seemed to be remembering the “real” meaning of Christmas. Producer Lee Mendelson, a jazz aficionado, was a big fan of Vince Guaraldi’s work and contacted the musician to commission a soundtrack for the animated special. The project was done in a rush over a six-month period and aired in December of 1965, with most of the creative people involved anticipating a colossal flop. Guaraldi and his trio had recorded the soundtrack in just three hours. Jerry Granelli, Guaraldi’s drummer at the time, was 24 (it was his first paid recording gig). The musicians hadn’t seen the animated special and were given minimal information about its story. “We were just trying to play good music,” Granelli recalls. Instead of flopping, the special was a runaway hit, an instant classic, and is rebroadcast annually. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program in 1966. The soundtrack album was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007, and added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important American sound recordings” in 2012. The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s recording includes edgy re-imaginings of carols like “What Child is This” and “O Tannenbaum” (my particular favourite is a meditative riff on “Little Drummer Boy”), along with Guaraldi originals like “Linus and Lucy,” which endures as one of the most recognizable jazz recordings ever made, and serves as many a child’s introduction to the form. “Christmas Time is Here” employs a children’s choir singing plaintive lyrics (hastily penned “in about 15 minutes” by producer Mendelson, who couldn’t find a lyricist) encouraging us to seek goodwill year-round, set against a relentlessly melancholy series of descending arpeggios, and has taken its rightful place as a modern classic, performed worldwide by choirs young and old. It seems every organization involved with musical endeavours inevitably puts on a holiday-themed show each year, but not so for the Victoria Jazz Society. According to executive director Darryl Mar, this offering of Jerry Granelli’s touring reprisal of 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is “our first Christmas-related presentation in all of the 30-plus years I have been involved.” Granelli, the drummer and only surviving member of the trio who recorded the original soundtrack, emigrated from the US to Canada in the 1990s, and for 48 years, had never played the repertoire again—until he convened a new trio and performed it as a fundraiser in Halifax a couple of years ago. It was received with such enthusiasm that Granelli agreed to tour across Canada, which took him as far west as Vancouver last year, but not quite to Victoria. Mar explained that the timing last year just wasn’t right. “They offered it to us for a date in November, and we felt that it was too far away from Christmas,” he said. But this year, the timing was right, and he expects a sellout show at the Oak Bay High School’s brand-new Dave Dunnet Community Theatre. Granelli, for whom the Charlie Brown project was but an early and bright blip in an illustrious, decades-long professional recording career, has performed in Victoria before, and brings along celebrated Canadian musicians Simon Fisk on bass and Chris Gestrin on piano. The Victoria Children’s Choir will provide the vocals for the performance, says Mar. “In each city the trio hires a local children’s choir to perform, and we arranged for the VCC,” who, incidentally, performed recently at the Legislature for the visiting royals. The entire original soundtrack will be performed, and Granelli will share plenty of intriguing background and juicy anecdotes (hence the “Tales” part of the title of the show). There is no limit to how much nostalgic fervour this album brings up in those young enough to have been children when it started airing annually, and the Granelli shows have sold out in most locations. For the Jazz Society’s first Christmas offering, this is a fitting one, since Mar was unwilling to compromise on quality or musical integrity. “It’s the perfect project,” he says. “The time of year is right, and it’s been highly recommended by colleagues across Canada.” Perhaps channelling Charlie Brown himself, Granelli commented to the CBC in 2013 on reprising the album and speaking about the experience. “There are so many memories. All my friends who were on it are dead.” And why didn’t he perform the music for decades, when it had been so incredibly successful? “I think I was a little too serious and immature, but this had a life of its own. It crept up on me…What really touches me is that people know that music, and they enjoy it.” Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas, with the Juno-nominated Jerry Granelli Trio and the Victoria Children's Choir is on Saturday, December 10, 8pm, Dave Dunnet Community Theatre at Oak Bay High School. Tickets: $35 advance/VJS members/students, $39 at the door. Advance tickets, Victoria Jazz Society Office, 202 - 345 Quebec Street or 250-388-4423, Lyles Place, and the Royal & McPherson Box Office 250-386-6121, or online at www.rmts.bc.ca. Mollie Kaye remembers anticipating the special airings of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” each December, and thought the music—and the Peanuts characters’ dance moves—were the best parts.