Setting stone for artist Mark Leckey

by on April 28, 2012 in Visual Arts

Installing BigBoxGreenScreenRefrigeratorActions in the Walter Phillips Gallery. Photo: Kim Williams

Four of the people from our preparatorial team at the Walter Phillips Gallery moved this giant slab of Rundle rock into the gallery this week. The rock plays a key role in Mark Leckey‘s exhibition BigBoxGreenScreenRefrigeratorActions, which will be on in the gallery through July 15. An iconic natural building material in the Bow Valley (it’s all over the Banff Springs Hotel and many of the Banff Centre’s buildings), there are only two Rundle rock quarries still in operation. One of them, Kamenka Quarry, near Canmore, loaned this stone for the show.

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Post-pro with artist and filmmaker Jeremy Collins

by on April 26, 2012 in Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, Film & Media

Jeremy Collins and Jessica Dymond working on "The Equation" in one of the Banff Centre's edit suites. Photo: Kim Williams

I’ve been at The Banff Centre since November as a video editor work study in the Film and Media department. One of the best things about the job is the variety of people I get to work with, and last week I had the pleasure of working with Jeremy Collins. Jeremy won The Banff Centre Award for Creative Excellence at the 2011 Banff Mountain Film Festival for his film The Wolf and the Medallion, and was back at the Centre to put the prize (post-production assistance) to good use, working on his newest film The Equation. It’s a short film about the quest for (and discovery of) beauty. Jeremy’s talent as a fine artist come through in the film’s distinctive aesthetic.

This project was a change of pace for me, but it was a treat. The Equation is a fiction film, and my background is primarily in documentary (though both genres always come down to storytelling). I have to admit, also, that I was a little nervous about working on a project that was already so developed — Jeremy had already done a very good rough cut of the film. My fears were completely unfounded. Jeremy’s enthusiasm put me at ease right away, and we established a very good workflow in a very short amount of time. We worked close to 60 hours in four days that week, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The Equation is premiering this weekend, at the 5 Point Film Festival in Colorado.

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Total request with Joel Plaskett

by on April 25, 2012 in Audio, Podcasts

Podcaster Camara Miller backstage with Joel Plaskett. Photo: Kim Williams.

We’ve all experienced a first day on a new job, and it can be tricky. Take notes in a meeting or make thoughtful eye contact? Bring a lunch or plan to go out and meet some colleagues? How far can I stretch the ‘casual’ in ‘business casual?’

Luckily, my first day here was not only successful, but also simply a great day. I’m the newest member of the audio work-study team and my first task was getting some questions ready for my inaugural interview with Joel Plaskett: singer-songwriter, Canadian gem and one of my favourite artists.

The interview went splendidly, and once I turned off the microphone, I told him that I love the old Thrush Hermit song Before You Leave, but I especially love his rarely played acoustic version of the tune. It’s a beautiful song about heartache and, after almost ten concerts I’ve followed Plaskett to, I’ve never heard it played live.

He told me that he wasn’t sure if he could play the tune, but admitted that he does enjoy performing it. I left the request at that and thanked him for the interview. By the time the acoustic set of his show rolled around I had forgotten all about our chat and was enjoying each song.

 Then I heard this…

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Stay tuned: we’ll be posting Camara’s full interview with Joel Plaskett as a podcast.

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George Ryga: The really early years

by on April 24, 2012 in General

A 1949 Banff Centre writing class, with instructor W.G. Hardy (left).

Our archivist, Jane Parkinson, writes: A 1949 Writing class with faculty W.G. Hardy. The member of the group who later had the most success as an author — for his 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe — was the farm boy in suspenders at the back, George Ryga. He came to Banff from northern Alberta for two summers on scholarships, saw his first play here and was mentored by several superb faculty who recognized his talent. As an interesting side note, he also discovered the power of art as social commentary here, when he lost his support from the external funder for circulating a poem protesting against the Korean war.

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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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“May the horse be with you”

by on April 19, 2012 in Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival

With 17 Kicking Horse Coffee flavours to choose from you may have a hard time picking a favourite. But you could ask the 60,000 Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour viewers, who’ve been recieving coffee samples at 75 different world tour locations. Last year, Kicking Horse Coffee joined the Banff Mountain Film Festival as an award sponsor, and this year decided they “wanted to take it up a notch,” says Kicking Horse rep Mia Ciona. “We really felt we were reaching and connecting with like-minded people.” The key was to get people to try the coffee. They offered to send coffee samples (beans, not hot coffee) to tour locations, and at some of the locations set up their own booth.  An ever-expanding fair-trade coffee roaster based in the beautiful town of Invermere, B.C., Kicking Horse Coffee culture is now taking on the world.

Check out minute 6:40 to see how their Jedi mind trick works:

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