Anya Wassenberg Sway Magazine Archive

Monday, August 13, 2012

New Stan Douglas display at The Power Plant Gallery

19 December 2011 No Comments

Stan Douglas
Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio
The Power Plant Gallery
231 Queen’s Quay
on view to March 4, 2012
By Anya Wassenberg

Everything old is new again in Entertainment, an exhibition that brings the work of Vancouver based artist Stan Douglas to Toronto. The expansive white space of the Power Plant Gallery gives the show of new black and white photography a dramatic and theatrical kind of presence that adds to its impact.

The show includes pieces from a larger group of work under the Midcentury name at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. In his re-examination of that era, Stan recreated a professional photographer’s studio circa 1946 – 51. He used authentic period equipment and present day actors in thematic groupings that present the era’s obsessions: sports, spectacle, fashion and entertainment. He captures the optimistic mood of the times, an era eager for distraction and looking to shake off the post-war blues. The prints have a nicely dimensional quality.

One wall displays a double row of the “Malabar People” portraits, ostensibly patrons and staff of a fictional 1950′s nightclub of the same name. They include various types like Single Woman I and II, a Taxi Driver, waitress, owner/bartender and a Female Impersonator who’s dressed as conservatively as the Student, albeit with an ascot tie.

Half the show includes much larger images which take up half a wall on their own. There is a circus theme with a knife juggling woman, and a vividly freakish clown who juggles oranges. Along a sports theme, a field full of genteel and white clad gentleman play cricket. The images were shot in Vancouver but could be any North American city.

My favourites were Dancers I and II. Captured in strobe lighting, the images are elegantly kinetic. I was also captivated by Hockey Fight, which looks at a scuffle in the stands from above. I liked the sense of composition; it captured the combination of staginess and spontaneous action common to photography of the period. His approach is journalistic, and inspired by photographers and influences of the time.

In re-examining the past, the artist draws parallels with the present. On the fashion side alone, I was struck by our respective era’s mutual affection for fedoras, long wavy hair, pearls and full skirts. His subjects are multi-racial, in contrast to the overwhelmingly Caucasian images actually represented in mainstream post-war advertising of that era in North America.

The results seem neither truly dated nor entirely contemporary. They have a kind of timeless quality that doesn’t accept easy categorization, despite their accessibility. It’s an interesting show that’s worth checking out.

Stan Douglas is an internationally recognized artist whose work has been shown all over North America and in Europe. Recent solo exhibitions have included the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007), and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007). He has been included in recent group exhibitions at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2008), International Center of Photography, New York (2008 and 2009), ZKM/Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2010), and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). His work is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

‘Memphis’ the musical hits Toronto

8 December 2011 No Comments

Image: Bryan Fenkart and Felicia Boswell

Memphis – Opening Night December 7, 2011
Winner of 4 Tony Awards in 2010, including Best Musical
Playing at the Toronto Centre for the Arts till December 24
Presented by Dancap Productions Inc.
By Anya Wassenberg

If the ratings don’t go to shit, and we don’t get killed, you’re hired.

Everybody wants to be black on a Saturday night!

Momma told me there are limits for a dark-skinned girl in a fair-skinned world.

You wouldn’t think a musical about race relations in the Bad Old South and forbidden love between a white man and a black woman would be an entertaining night out, but Memphis is hugely so, driven by the compelling storyline and powerhouse vocals all around. The first song and dance number begins within minutes of the curtain rising and the frenetic pace keeps up to the very end of the show.

Huey Calhoun is a brash, illiterate white boy in love with black music – and a certain pretty black singer – who has the crazy idea to play what was then called “race music” on white radio stations. In the days of segregated Tennessee in the earl 1950’s, the centre of the radio dial, (which got the most reception of course,) was reserved for white music along the lines of Broadway tunes and crooners like Perry Como and Roy Rogers. The left of the dial, which was typically distorted and got limited reception, was designated for black music. The character of Huey is loosely based on the real life figure of Alan Freed, a disc jockey who did just that, giving a new generation its bold and infectious new music, and who is often credited with coining the term “rock ‘n’ roll”.

Huey has to deal with Mr. Simmons, his sceptical boss at the radio station, a racist Mama, Felicia’s hostile brother Delray and Felicia’s own reluctance to cross the race lines in a time when it could and did have deadly consequences. The romantic storyline intertwines with the classic “I’m gonna make you a star” dynamic, but the dark realities of the times intrude on Huey’s dreams in sometimes violent ways. The script cleverly uses humour and the energy of the song and dance numbers to balance out those grimmer moments.

The Tony-winning original score and music come from Bon Jovi founding member David Bryant, and while the sound is definitely along the lines of rock ‘n’ roll, it makes no attempt at any kind of period authenticity. It’s got the bouncy and irresistible flavour of early rock ‘n’ roll without becoming a carbon copy, in other words, and features some gorgeous churchy harmonies along with the impressive vocal acrobatics. An ingenious two-tier set seamless shifts from radio station to TV set to apartment to nightclub in a few seconds with lighting changes and a few drop panels.

The logic of the story is a little shaky in spots (it’s a musical!) but it’s held together convincingly by the strength of the two leads in Bryan Fenkart as Huey the gutsy rebel and Felicia Boswell as the black woman who has to play her cards just right to get anywhere in her starkly black and white world. Felicia is an incredible singer and the two paired well together both as romantic interests and musically in the duets. While the vocals were strong all around, a highlight was Julie Johnson as Huey’s Mama, who brought the house down with her epiphany song,” Change Don’t Come Easy”.

There was a big and appreciative crowd on opening night (with a few seats left on the balconies) and many of the show’s luminaries were in the house, including choreographer Sergio Trujillo. Pick up your seats early for what is sure to be one of the holiday season’s hottest tickets.

Photo by Paul Kolnik

Visit www.tocentre.com/mainstage/memphis for tickets and more information

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba at The Great Hall

28 November 2011 No Comments

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba
The Great Hall, Toronto
November 27, 2011
Presented by Batuki Music Society
By Anya Wassenberg

He begins to play from off stage and people stream in from all corners of the room to crowd the huge dance floor, entranced. In the hands of Bassekou Kouyate, the four-stringed ngoni can sing like a harp or wail like an electric guitar; slow and bluesy or lightning quick.

The band comes on stage, weaving together the sound of four of the traditional ngoni instruments along with calabash, percussion and powerful vocals from Amy Sacko into compelling and hypnotic music and the cavernous Great Hall fills up quickly with dancing bodies.

Born into the griot (or musical) tradition in a small village in Mali, Bassekou’s father and older brother were adept ngoni players. His career began in earnest after moving to Bamako at the age of 19 and meeting the young Toumani Diabaté. They made their first recordings together. Along with learning to play the ngoni like it was part of him, he brought the instrument which traditionally took a secondary role out front and created the band as it exists today to showcase its bright sound and flexible playing style.

He’s played with many other musicians, including American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck. The ngoni is the banjo’s ancient African cousin, and Bassekou is one of the collaborators on the Throw Down Your Heart project, Béla’s search for the banjo’s roots in Africa. Bassekou Kouyate’s latest CD, the highly regarded I Speak Fula was released in 2008.

On stage, he’s an engaging and down to earth presence, focused on the music and connected with the crowd despite his apology for a lack of English vocabulary.

He played a generous 90-minute set without a break, and each member of the band had a chance at the spotlight including Amy, (also his wife,) who impressed with a display of vocal agility and expressiveness. The songs range from blues syncopations – and he makes sure we know it’s West African blues – to an insistent and rapid fire pace, and many tunes would be at home in any contemporary jazz set list. As Bassekou played a solo, the other three ngoni players picked out harmonic counterpoints, the beauty of the music always at the forefront. It’s never about technique for its own sake.

The opening act, Toronto-based Daniel Nebiat, hails from the east side of the continent in Eritrea, but what he shares with Kouyate is an innovative affection for traditional instrumentation. He’s been playing the traditional krar – a five or six stringed harp-like instrument that dates from ancient times – since he was a child. The songs, mainly from his 2008 release Hakimey, which features both original songs and traditional Eritrean music and is sung in Tigrinya, drew the crowd in to the dance floor within the first few bars.

He’s added innovations to the instrument like electronic pick-ups, and the sound comes in somewhere between that of the harp, guitar and mandolin. He plays it rhythmically, accompanied by keyboards, drum machine and a bassist. It was a surprisingly full sound that adds a danceable groove to the traditional melodic and rhythmic elements.

Bassekou Kouyate and Daniel Nebiat both use a love of tradition as a springboard for bringing those traditions into the modern musical world in a way that doesn’t need the boundaries of geography to explain it. From West Africa or the Horn, in Tigrinya, Fula or French, none of the distinctions seemed to matter to the dancing and satisfied crowd.

NuJazz Festival: Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue

18 November 2011 One Comment

By Anya Wassenberg

Direct from The Big Easy, a red hot blast of New Orleans jazz fired up the Toronto stage last night in the form of Trombone Shorty and his band Orleans Avenue. From the moment he took the stage wielding his trombone in one hand and a trumpet in the other, Trombone Shorty played the capacity Opera House crowd like a rock star and dazzled them with a high octane set.

Trombone Shorty, AKA Troy Andrews, is nothing short of a phenomenon. He’s the younger brother of trumpeter and bandleader James Andrews and grandson of singer and songwriter Jessie Hill, and was playing in his own band at the tender age of six. He’s in supreme command of his game and has an astonishing facility with the trombone – at one point playing a riff for what felt like five minutes before taking a breath.

You’d call his music nujazz with shades of guitar rock, funk, soul and RnB, and he kept the music coming relentlessly with just a smattering of talk between tunes. Orleans Avenue plays ultra-tight with a busy and rock steady rhythm section of bass, drum kit and percussion layered over with melodic harmonies from both tenor and baritone sax, guitar and the phenom himself, who cycled between trombone, trumpet and an agile voice on songs like “Craziest Things” (a personal favourite).

He wrote or co-wrote all the songs on his latest CD For True, released earlier this year, which features guest artists (and fans) like Kid Rock, Lenny Kravitz, Ivan And Cyril Neville among others, and his first CD, Backatown, was Grammy nominated in 2010. While the front four of saxes, guitar and Trombone Shorty traded off solos, sometimes in rapid fire succession, and he was generous in acknowledging the band’s prowess, there was clearly only one star firing up that stage. It was a full on assault of sound that had the packed like sardines crowd in perpetual motion.

Trombone Shorty’s set was preceded by hometown opening act The Heavyweight Brass Band. The innovative quintet got the evening off to a great start with their fresh take on the New Orleans style, featuring trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, drums and a dancing sousaphone player who amazed with riffs as nimble as any bass player’s. He doubles on vocals too, and had the crowd in the palm of his hand for a slow and sexy version of St. James Infirmary Blues. Their music is a combination of classic and modern standards, originals penned by various members of the group and stylish arrangements of pop tunes – last night we were treated to Justin Bieber – and it’s lit up by their obvious enthusiasm for the genre along with impeccable chops.

That big and multi-racial crowd included everyone from university students to retirees, proving the vast appeal of the music. Maybe jazz is the universal language

Find out more about Trombone Shorty at www.tromboneshorty.com; Heavyweight Brass Band www.heavyweightsbrassband.com
For more info on NuJazz Festival, visit www.nujazz.ca

D’bi.young Anitafrika shines in word!sound!powah!

9 November 2011 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg
word!sound!powah!
written and performed by d’bi.young anitafrika in repertory with blood.claat, and benu
Trilogy Premiere continues to December 4, 2011 at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre

Fifty years done pass and nothing change. Jamaica get independence and we poor de same way

d’bi.young anitafrika is a mesmerizing performer, a controlled tornado of energy on stage as she fleshes out a dizzying range of roles from naive schoolgirl to strutting revolutionary and sinister cop in word!sound!powah! It’s the final piece in her sankofa trilogy, currently playing at the Tarragon Theatre.

As it begins, young Benu is being detained and interrogated by a raging police constable about her role in an election day rally in Jamaica that ends in a hail of bullets and an assassination. The fictional – but not so fictional – story is set against contentious elections taking place in 2012. It’s an ingenious idea that wraps the Jamaican story in the context of the actual uprisings and Occupy movements that are grabbing the headlines today, giving it a much broader context; watching the rich get richer and the politicians spout meaningless promises is certainly not exclusive to the people of Jamaica.

d’bi shifts seamlessly between anguished Benu and her savage captor, and the interrogation scene punctuates the piece at various points. Along the way, we see her joining with fellow students at the Cultural Centre and the Poets in Solidarity movement five months before. She illuminates a host of characters and segments from smiling politicians giving speeches to the swaggering leader of the revolutionaries, (the self-styled ‘Robin Hood of Poetry’). It unfolds as storytelling, dub poetry, movement and music, ranging from humourous to intensely dramatic moments and everything in between.

Stage design is both simple and effective, and largely in black and white. A Jamaican flag adorns the front of a desk, and behind it a lyrically twisted white rope structure fans out along the ceiling. The rope structure is elegant and adds a rhythmic element to the stark black, cleverly expanding the stage to include the entire back space of the Tarragon theatre and by extension us in the audience too. At various times in the piece, we were part of the play as fellow members of Poets in Solidarity. d’bi, her lithe form all in white, fully inhabits all the characters she plays down to subtle inflections in voice and accent and physicality. It’s a tour de force performance.

Three musicians are on stage to provide a combination of sounds, cues and musical accompaniment under the leadership of talented multi-instrumentalist Waleed Abdulhamid. They play an intriguing combination of percussion, guitar and bassoon; their presence is both instrumental to and part of the story as it unfolds.

“It’s time to break these chains,” she chants in one of the poems, and d’bi challenges the audience’s perceptions at times, pushing buttons about Gaddafi, Africa, single mothers and poverty, among others. Those political points are swept up in her captivating performance but remain in the air, no doubt as intended.

It’s thought provoking theatre that never loses sight of its twin goal – to entertain and captivate the audience.

word!sound!powah! is alternating with the sankofa trilogy’s earlier pieces, blood.claat and benu – check the Tarragon Theatre’s schedule for specific dates.

d’bi.young antiafrika is an afrikan-jamaican-canadian dubpoet, monodramatist and educator. She is the founder and artistic director of yemoya international artist residency, and is the curator of badilisha poetry x-change in Cape Town, South Africa.

She is curretly on a 15-month global tour of her new album, 333, which launches December 5th at the Lula Lounge in Toronto, and of the sankofa trilogy which is due to be published this winter by Playwrights Canada Press.

Written and performed by d’bi.young anitafrika
Set and costume design by Camellia Koo
Lighting design by Michelle Ramsay
Musical direction by Waleed Abdulhamid
Musicians: Jeff Burke, Kurt Huggins and Laurence Stevenson
www.tarragontheatre.com/season/1112/the-sankofa-trilogy/

FELA! the Musical

26 October 2011 2 Comments

Sahr Ngaujah as Fela

FELA! the Musical
At the Canon Theatre to November 6
By Anya Wassenberg

In a word, FELA! is fabulous. Broadway veteran Bill T. Jones has created a unique theatrical construct that erupts on stage in a vibrant whirl of colour and movement set to the insistently danceable pulse of Afrobeat, the music created by its namesake. The Canon Theatre becomes Afrika Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria, the nightclub founded by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and lights up with an energy that does justice to the legacy of this musical and political icon.

The show starts as the musicians – a 10-piece band under leader Aaron Johnson – filter on stage and begin to play. The scenario is this: it’s Fela’s last show at the Shrine. He’s leaving Nigeria for safer- and hopefully more profitable – shores after the death of his mother, Funmilayo. As part of his nightclub show, he talks to the audience and tells some of his story as it leads up to the fateful raid on his compound in 1977 by the Nigerian military, during which his mother, a political firebrand and feminist, was thrown from a window. She died about a year later of her injuries, setting up the “present day” of the musical itself.

Fans of Fela will love it, but you won’t have to know the background to enjoy it. The narrative delves into the origins of his music, a synthesis of jazz and West African highlife that germinated during studies in London and came to full fruition after he hears James Brown and his dirty guitars back home. As he explains, the bass is the real key to the music. Later, he talks about his sojourn in America, where he meets Sandra, the Black Power activist who ignited his political ideas. He returned to Nigeria wielding a heady combination of politics and music that was hugely popular and set him up for his violent confrontation with the country’s military rulers. Here, projections give us the harrowing words of the survivors, including a woman who had a knife and bottle later removed from her body at the hospital.

The show glosses over his real life and well documented misogyny – Fela the man was never afraid to speak his mind – but does reveal the dichotomy of his character in that he was also heavily influenced by the women in his life. He famously married 27 women at the same time, most of them his back up dancers; you may have dim views about polygamy, but these were no shrinking violets. They were proud co-revolutionaries. (In real life, he described the mass marriage as an act of solidarity with the women who’d suffered with him during the raid.)

book, developed by Jones over some five years or more, offers a skilful blending of anecdotes and narration with the “real time” action of the play, all of it constantly erupting into song and dance.
The set and costumes are a riot of colour, aided by projections above the set and on screens to either side that sometime showing newspaper clippings that follow the stories on stage.

After a year on Broadway and tours to London and Lagos, this cast is as solid as it gets. It’s a real tour de force for star Sahr Ngaujah as Fela, who’s talking, singing or dancing for the majority of the 2+ hours of the show, with notable contributions by Melanie Marshall as the ghost of Funmilayo and Paulette Ivory as Sandra. The smaller roles and ensemble players are also uniformly spectacular – there’s often more on stage than you can take in at one time, an explosion of kinetic energy.

Perhaps best of all, you can leave your ideas about a staid, quiet evening of theatre at home – this is an interactive performance. Sahr not only talks to the audience, he demands a “yeah yeah” now and then, singing occasionally, and he even had us up dancing at one point as best we could in the confines of our seats.

At the end, the packed house rose on their feet immediately for a standing ovation. You really must get to see it.

THE CREATIVE TEAM
FELA! was conceived by Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis and Stephen Hendel based on the life of Fela Kuti. The design team includes Scenic and Costume Designer Marina Draghici, Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel, Sound Designer Robert Kaplowitz and Projection Designer Peter Nigrini.
Starring Sahr Ngaujah as Fela, Melanie Marshall as Funmilayo, Paulette Ivory as Sandra, Ismael Kouyate as Ismael, Gelan Lambert as the Tap Dancer & Egungun, Rasaan-Elijah “Talu” Green as Djembe-‘Mustafa’

Ensemble: Sherinne Kayra Anderson, Jonathan Andre, Cindy Belliot, Nandi Bhebhe, Catia Mota Da Cruz, Nicole Chantal de Weever, Jacqui Dubois, Poundo Gomis, Jeffrey Page, Oneika Phillips, Thierry Picaut, Jermaine Rowe, Daniel Soto, Jill Marie Vallery, Iris Wilson, Aimee Graham Wodobode

Cairo 20×20: The Mascot Café & Art Gallery

18 October 2011 No Comments

Mahmoud Hamdy

By Anya Wassenberg
Cairo 20×20
Located at 1267 Queen St. West, Toronto
Continues to October 30

It doesn’t cover much in the way of square footage but Cairo 20×20 goes a long way to fleshing out a portrait of Egypt’s capital city as a vibrant metropolis with all the complexities of any big city and a particular Egyptian flair along with its historical baggage both ancient and recent.

The show features the work of 20 Egyptian artists and designers who were asked to express their thoughts and feelings on Cairo on 20cm x 20cm canvasses. It’s not a lot of space to get a message across but the talented group displays a thought provoking range of ideas which are displayed in a grid along one of the walls of the café. Beside the works and in the same order are a set of print outs where you can learn about the artists, including urls and emails for further contact.

Most of the pieces are drawings in various media, with a little collage and photography thrown into the mix. They come in a range of styles and the small format forces a distillation of ideas. A few are political in nature, but perhaps contrary to expectations shaped by North American media coverage, most are not, often delving into the minutia of Cairo’s urban landscape and experience.

One of the more overtly political pieces comes from artist Ahmed Hefnawy, whose work features a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian general led the Revolution of 1952 which overthrew the monarchy and established him as the country’s President from 1956 until his death. He’s rendered saluting in uniform, duplicated in a circular pattern that takes the form of a Swastika; he also instituted Egypt’s decades long military rule, as the artist’s notes point out.

The everyday life of the city emerges from many of the pieces. Random Samples by Samer Baghat depicts three “typical” citizens of Cairo, including a man and two women in hijabs. Fashion and commercial photographer Hussien Shaaban gives us teenage girls in a messy bedroom sporting golden masks of Tutankhamen and Anubis the jackal god.

Ahmed Hafez

You can see elements common to Middle Eastern and Muslim art throughout the display, many featuring the inclusion of Arabic text, patterning and bold colours. Mohammed Nabil’s vibrant geometric patterns were inspired by Cairo’s traffic, and along similar themes, Ahmed Hafez’s piece took its inspiration from the cluttered dashboard of taxi drivers, depicting a collection of familiar icons from the taxi meter to air fresheners in the shape of minarets.

Ibrahim Youssef, who also curated the show, includes a drawing of the city in the form of a syringe, because, as his artist’s statement says, “Cairo is like a drug, you occasionally get high, but – there are always side-effects.”

It’s certainly an interesting way to soak up the pleasantly eclectic neo-Victoriana vibe of The Mascot the next time you’re on Queen Street West.

Artists:
Ahmed Foula, Ibrahim Islam, Noha Hesham, Mohamed Fahmy (Ganzeer), Ibraheem Youssef, Ahmed Hafez, George Azmy, Amr Okacha, Habiba el Ghandour, Hussien Shaaban, Mahmoud Hamdy, Bassem Gad, Ahmed Abdal Moneim, Salam Yosry, Mohamed Nabil, Ahmed Hefnawy, Yasmin Bahig, Nagla Ghaith, Samer Bahgat, Sherif Adel,
Exhibit curated by Ibraheem Youssef

Ibrahim Islam