All in Arts Essentials
Did you know that there's a mathematical reason that you love We Will Rock You and that critics originally wrote Queen off as dinosaurs who would never make it big? We can’t wait for Classic Albums Live to bring Queen: News of the World to the Jack Singer Concert Hall this February, so it’s time for another five fun facts that you might not know about one of the most applauded rock bands of all time.
With three weeks of live performances including six co-presenting partners, 12 venues, 26 shows, 115 performances, and 150 artists, One Yellow Rabbit’s 37th annual High Performance Rodeo is ready to heat up your winter.
Here's the inside track on the festival, so get a pen ready, call your friends, and map out your return to Calgary's International Festival of the Arts. There is something for everyone in this bold, wild and cutting-edge lineup that includes concerts, ballet, theatre and so much more.
Calgary Arts Development and the Office of the Mayor are getting ready to welcome Calgary’s business and arts communities to the inaugural Celebration for the Arts hosted by Mayor Gondek. The celebration takes place from 6:30-10:30pm on Friday, November 4 in the lobby and onstage of the Jack Singer Concert Hall, Arts Commons.
The journey between debuting as an artist and progressing towards professional practice is rarely a smooth one. Wrought with not only the difficulties of cultivating skills and connections, but also having to break into the art scene in a major city is daunting. That’s where the RBC Emerging Visual Artists Program (EVAP) at Arts Commons steps in.
Long-time patrons of Arts Commons, as well as avid supporters of the arts, Rodney and Karen McCann along with their family, wanted to find a meaningful way to give back to our essential workers who have given so much to get us safely through the pandemic. The idea that they came up with, in collaboration with Arts Commons, is the Season of Gratitude program which aims to bring essential workers to productions by the Resident Companies of Arts Commons.
The Ledge Gallery at Arts Commons is the current home of Nurgül Rodriguez’ exhibition In the Vessel of my Skin, which delves into the coexistence of body and soul and the conflict that can arise from both sharing space––a concept born and exemplified to her during the pandemic. Immigration, gender disparity, and the desire to belong in a new country are all touched upon in a multitude of ways, each expressed using carefully molded porcelain.
Christopher Savage’s work, along with three other artists, is currently on exhibition in the Window Galleries at Arts Commons, and available now for online 3D tours. The design surrounding Savage’s artwork is logical and intuitive, wanting to draw the viewer in and help them look closer at the network of lines and gestural strokes spanning across his work. But how does such intention translate when the Window Galleries—where Savage along with many other RBC Emerging Visual Artists are showing—are closed to the public? Technology steps in.
Prior to every new work they created over the past four decades - and there have been a lot of them - the company members of One Yellow Rabbit asked a very existential question.
“Who are we now?” says Rabbit Blake Brooker. “It’s a question we always ask of ourselves. So, when we sit down as a group, we always ask who are we now?
“And then that [question] starts to bake and gently move into other questions: Who do you want to be? Who were you? Who are you this moment?”
They may have started asking those questions back in the mid-1980s when Reagan was president, a Mulroney was the prime minister, and phones hung on walls in kitchens - when they launched a performing arts festival called the High Performance Rodeo - but 35 years later, as 2020 turned into a year unlike any other for performing artists around the world, the question seemed more relevant and more poignant than ever.
