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Composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s Met prep

by on April 20, 2012 in Leighton Artists' Colony, Theatre

Composer Ricky Ian Gordon in the Valentine Studio, Leighton Artists' Colony. Photo: Kim Williams.

It’s tricky to leave home when you love your life. As someone who lives in Banff, I understood completely when Ricky Ian Gordon told me this in our conversation in the Leighton Artists’ Colony, as he rounded out his third week of his Fleck Fellowship residency. Although life is grand in New York, a chance encounter with Kelly Robinson, director of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre, brought Gordon to Banff.

“You need to extract yourself from your particular distractions and look at your work in a new way,” he says. “This place is very different. Usually there are small groups of artists. You aren’t sharing a dining room with 200 people. It’s so spectacular and beautiful here. It’s both intimate and epic.”

Following the success of his 2007 opera The Grapes Of Wrath, Gordon was invited into an opera commissioning program launched by Metropolitan Opera General Manager Michael Gelb, and he’s connected with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, composing music for an opera version of her play Intimate Apparel. She’s writing the libretto. “I sent Lynn a Facebook message to see if she had any desire to do it, and she did.”

Gordon has been working on the Met material here in Banff. “I was struggling for the first few days trying to find my voice. Lynn is not done with the libretto, but she told me it starts with a Cakewalk,” he says (Cakewalk is an early-20th century popular music and dance form that originated on Southern slave plantations). Writing that piece of music was his Banff breakthrough.

Working on a few projects, meeting artists from other disciplines, and doing an impromptu live performance in the Club has given him a few ideas. “If I come back to this place, and I would like to, I think it would be in a different capacity, possibly supervising a workshop or working with Kelly.”

 

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Kick-ass woman in a man’s world

by on April 5, 2012 in General, Theatre

Kelsey Miller, lighting technician work study behind the scenes of Live! with Kelly. Photo: Kim Williams

“Technical theatre is largely a male-dominated industry,” says Kelsey Miller, who’s here as a lighting technician work study. She’s currently the only woman on the technical stage crew in the theatre department here at the Centre. “It’s my first time working on an all-but-one male crew, and I actually just feel spoiled. It’s like I’ve got a club of guys who are like my brothers constantly looking out for me.”

Kelsey Miller on the set for Live! with Kelly. Photo: Kim Williams

Arriving just two weeks ago from Red Deer, where she studied theatre and lighting design, Miller hit the ground running with her first project in Banff as a general technician for Live! with Kelly. “Last weekend has set my standards for this work study very high. I’m expecting everything to be that fast-paced and on-the-fly,” she says. For Live! with Kelly, Miller and the crew had to do almost everything at least four times before it was right.  “Television isn’t as choreographed as theatre. We’d hang the lights, they’d look too bright on camera so we’d reset the lights and then the colour would be off,” she says with a laugh. “In theatre, it’s much more planned out, so for Live!, I learned how to react and adapt quicker than I’d ever had to before.”

Miller’s next behind-the-scenes project will be the Spoken Word  events this week and next in the Club. “I’m excited! I don’t know what to expect from the Spoken Word events. All I know is I’m ready for anything.”

 

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Live! with Kelly’s audience!

by on April 3, 2012 in Film & Media, General, Theatre

For the last two days, crowds of Kelly Ripa fans have gathered, waited, waited some more, and then finally debuted as audience members for tapings of Live! with Kelly, in our Eric Harvie Theatre. I caught up with a few Ripa enthusiasts, before and after the show, and despite the long wait to be seated in the theatre, everyone was extremely complimentary and friendly. I guess Kelly just has that effect on people!

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Podcast: Puppet Theatre Intensive

by on March 5, 2012 in Events, General, Theatre

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop inspires creativity and imagination during The Banff Puppet Theatre Intensive.

Participants make puppets of their own that often reflect their personality. Photo: Manuela Buechting.

In January, 24 participants came to The Banff Centre to take part in a Puppet Theatre Intensive lead by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Little did they know that over the next 2 weeks they would enter a world of imagination and collaboration; one where puppets made the rules.

No matter what the object is…the right person putting their energy into that object makes it alive.

In this episode of The Banff Centre Podcast you’ll hear program facilitator Juanita Dawn and participants Tangle Caron & Chris Duthie tell the story of how puppets inspired them in magical ways.

Listen to the podcast and then check out The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s performance, Ignorance, on Thursday March 15, and Friday March 16 in the Margaret Greenham Theatre.

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Behind the music: composers and commissions

by on March 3, 2012 in General, Music & Sound, Theatre

From one of two outdoor performances of John Luther Adams' Inuksuit, June 2009. Photo: Don Lee

In 2010, The Banff Centre’s Music department commissioned innovative jazz composer Danilo Perez to write a composition for the Cecilia Quartet, winners of the 2010 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Scheduled to premiere in Toronto in 2013, Danilo will accompany the quartet on jazz piano.

Danilo’s piece is just one in a long line of original works commissioned and co-commissioned by The Banff Centre. In June this year, Banff audiences will hear a new commissioned work by jazz trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas, celebrating his tenth and final year as director of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music. Over the years, Dave has shifted the focus of this program to creating new and original music, so it makes sense that he’ll wrap things up with this new piece.

Canadian composer, Taylor Brook’s original composition Against the Morning, and Bob Becker’s score for string quartet, piano, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba and timpani were both commissioned and premiered at The Banff Centre in 2011. In 2010, the Common Sense Composers’ Collective, the Afiara String Quartet and the Cecilia String Quartet joined together at the Centre, collaborating on eight commissioned works.

The Gruppo Montebello project rehearses Taylor Brooks' Against the Morning, Fall 2011. Photo: Don Lee

In 2009, Omar Daniel‘s dramatic original score underpinned his work Penelope and Odysseus, created for the Penderecki String quartet and an innovative use of onstage live electronic processing, to accompany a performance from Dancetheatre David Earle.

Alaskan composer John Luther Adams‘ unique outdoor percussion piece, Inuksuit, was created as part the Roots and Rhizomes Percussion residency here in 2009, and was performed on the Centre’s outdoor grounds on the evening of the summer solstice, and then again in a remote location in Kananaskis Country. Since then, the work has travelled to New York for performances in Morningside Park, and at the Tune-In Music Festival at the Park Avenue Armory (a performance that New Yorker music critic Alex Ross called “one of the most rapturous listening experiences” of his life), and was featured as part of the Round Top Music Festival in Texas.

Composer John Adams, during a Banff Centre creative residency in 2009. Photo: Don Lee

Notably, John Adams’ String Quartet co-commission (with Stanford University and the Juilliard School), created for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, has toured around the world since it’s world premiere at Julliard. The quartet performed the work’s Canadian premiere in Banff in 2009, with Adams conducting.

The Banff Centre continues to commission works from artists for a variety of projects. Coming up, bluegrass duo the Kruger Brothers will transform The Banff Centre’s Shaw Amphitheatre on August 25th this year with an original work that mixes chamber music and storytelling with a commissioned piece for strings, woodwinds, and percussion, based on the theme of the Swiss guides’ enormous impact on mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies.

 

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In the studio with the kling klang kings: ScrapArtsMusic

by on February 21, 2012 in Arts, General, Music & Sound, Theatre

ScrapArtsMusic's Christa Mercey and Spencer Cole workshopping at TBC last week. Photo: Don Lee.

As a theatre studies graduate, I’m always excited to meet others who share my enthusiasm for the dramatic arts, and at The Banff Centre, theatre enthusiasts are never hard to find. I recently caught up with ScrapArtsMusic, and the group’s unique outlook on theatrical experience, mixed with their passion for performance, is inspiring and innovative.

“We give everything we’ve got to this project,” says ScrapArtsMusic founder Gregory Kozak. He’s joined by designer Justine Murdy and four lively performers: Spencer Cole, Christa Mercey, Greg Samek and Malcolm Schoolbraid. Together, they jump, dance, laugh, drum, blow, slam, and sweat, creating a truly spectacular (and surprising!) performance.

ScrapArtsMusic, making their kinetic harmony. Photo: Don Lee.

“We create music from the materials around us,” says Murdy. “When we started the project in Vancouver, there were so many construction sites that were throwing away amazing resources that looked so beautiful and had incredible sound. We wanted to take the scrap and transform it with artful intention.”

When the curtains rose at the Eric Harvie last Saturday, the audience hushed into a collective gasp at the absolute beauty of the group’s instruments: drums, horns, percussion pieces, and even a xylophone, all crafted from metal and scrap parts.  Then, as the performance began, the whole theatre became alive with an overwhelming kinetic energy created from the interaction between the performers and their scrap art.

Since 2001, the group has visited The Banff Centre a total of five times. “This is exactly what we want to have…the environment at The Banff Centre is so special,” says Mercey.  With the availability of the audio technician workstudies, the rehearsal space, and the support from staff, ScrapArtsMusic has been able to perfect, and adapt, their personal live performance repertoire.

Gregory Kozak, founder of ScrapArtsMusic. Photo: Don Lee.

“Liveness is the root of what we do,” says Schoolbraid. “Anything we add, like choreography or comedy, is just the salt on top to make the flavor come out.”

The group received a standing ovation from the Banff Centre audience last Saturday. They’ll now set out on tour throughout Eastern Canada and hope to return for a Banff Centre residency in the near future.

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