arts

Streetcars, Satan, and other successes

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

This has been a bit of an action-packed week, so I just wanted to reflect on some recent successes and thank the people who’ve contributed to them.

First is that thanks to you guys, we reached our fundraising goal on indiegogo to send An Evening With Satan on tour! On behalf of everyone at Punctuate! Theatre, thank you to everyone who chipped in. For a new, small theatre company, $1000 is a great boon to our performers, and will definitely make life easier this week as they bring the show to the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

Second, last weekend’s Shareable Neighbourhood walk on Streetcars had far and away the best turnout so far. It was really inspiring to see so many people with such zeal for learning more about Old Strathcona, especially on a chilly Saturday morning. This time it was led by Earl Grotzki, a local history buff who’s been volunteering with the Edmonton Radial Railway Society for about a decade. You can check out the pictures on the Facebook group.

One of the Shareable Neighbourhood walkers takes a picture of me taking a picture of him on the streetcar
We had some comedians in the crowd for the streetcar ride with last weekend’s Shareable Neighbourhood.

Did you know that when the North Saskatchewan River flooded in 1915, they put a train on the Low Level Bridge to keep it from being torn away by the current? I do now.

Third, Terra Informa has just been picked up on a new station in BC: Kootenay Co-op Radio on CJLY 93.5 FM in Nelson. Sure, it’s just one more slot on one community radio station, but I take it as a big vote of confidence for the show. Not only is Kootenay Co-op Radio the station that produced the highly listenable Deconstructing Dinner, Terra Informa has gone through some dramatic transitions lately.

Relentlessly positive long-time producer Steve Andersen left this summer, as did a bevy of other great interviewers, so Kathryn Lennon, Matt Hirji and I have stepped in to take on some of his work in cultivating new voices for the show. Every week, I go back and listen to stories from the old team to understand how they made thoughtful, engaging radio out of everything from garbage sorting to the worst coal plants in the world. It’s a testament to the hard work of the new contributors like Annie Banks, Morgana Folkmann and Hamdi Assawi that a station like Kootenay Co-op has added us to their lineup.

Last but not least, I’ve been scooped up as the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation’s new communications officer. I’ve been a fan of ACGC for many years (and were a fan of mine earlier this year with the Top 30 Under 30 profile). Starting at the office today, I was even more excited to see that they take international development and cooperation as seriously and critically as Trent University does.

So from a rich new intellectual environment to the efforts of my colleagues being recognized, this has been a pretty good week. Thanks to everyone who’s made these things possible.

Satanic Circulation and 1000 Tiny Gestures

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

Today I come to you to make a humble request on behalf of Old Scratch himself, Satan. Or rather, on behalf of Punctuate! Theatre‘s great new play An Evening With Satan, on now at Edmonton’s Fringe. And two things have got me really excited to make this pitch to you.

Elliott James' Satan looks into a mirror, darkly
You’ll be close enough to bump horns with Satan at the show. (Photo credit: Killin’ Photography – April Killins)

First though, here’s the pitch. I’m a new board member at Punctuate!, and I am so so pleased that this is the first of our plays I’ve seen. An Evening With Satan is a dark, funny, and very rude show written and starring Elliott James (whose face just seems to hold an improbably number of disturbing expressions). The dark lord is summoned for an intimate evening to ask us why we live our lives in fear and regret, rather than embracing the joy of being alive. Along the way he shows a little of his vulnerable side, and you’ll probably show some of yours when he asks how many folks revel in bath salts, murder, and sodomy.

The Edmonton Journal’s Jason Markusoff called Elliott’s Satan a “seductive” and “charming, goateed high priest,” and we’re gearing up to take his dark delights on the road. After the Edmonton Fringe, Elliott and the (equally scandalous) director Elizabeth Hobbs will be heading to Vancouver’s Fringe Festival. As with all good endeavours, that’s going to cost money. So we’re in the middle of an Indiegogo campaign to make it happen.

Indiegogo, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an indie funding website like Kickstarter. You pitch in a little bit to make a big idea grow. In this case, you can get cool perks like complimentary tickets and signed posters. We’re aiming to raise $1000 to pay for these guys’ travel costs and hey, maybe eating along the way. We’re halfway there so far.

The first reason I’m so excited about this is I saw it last night at the Fringe, and it’s great. Elliott and Elizabeth share some genuinely outrageous moments, and made me think about my own ideas of pleasure, pain and vengeance. This is why I signed up to support Punctuate!: it’s a little theatre company with a big mission to create bold, intriguing original work that will grab you by the tie and make you sit up and pay attention to your life. And bonus, the play’s on tonight for half-price at 11:15 PM at the Daily Discount booth, too.

The second reason I’m so excited is because these kind of indie campaigns are warming the cockles of my heart lately. Roman Mars made a gigantic ask for his podcast 99% Invisible this month. He was raising money to pay a producer and get some videos made, and once he passed his first target he wondered if he could do something ground-breaking, and get 5000 supporters for his tiny show.

It didn’t matter how much you donated, he just wanted people to feel like they were part of creating something exciting, and it reminded me of something Stuart Mclean did. A couple of years ago Stuart Mclean was in Edmonton doing a Vinyl Cafe Christmas performance, and he was raising money for one his listeners, for medical expenses or something. I don’t remember what the money was for but I remember he asked folks not to donate too much, because he wanted the outcome to be the product of many small gestures, many people making a small choice to help each other out, to add up to something inspiring.

An Evening With Satan made me smile and cringe in all the right ways, and I think it’s worth a bucketload of support. If you can chip in anything, $5, $10, $25, head to Indiegogo before August 30th, you’ll be helping make something magic happen. The perks are nice, too. But that’s my pitch.

The 99% Invisible gang did it, by the way. I know we can, too.

Finally some good news for CBC: Kate Adach the music writer

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

You may have heard that it’s been a pretty awful week for CBC. The federal budget cut their funding by about $115 million, and it’s been trickling down in cuts like closing the Halifax studio where This Hour Has 22 Minutes is filmed with a live audience, and shutting down Radio One’s essays-from-abroad show Dispatches.

It’s a shame this is happening now, at a time when the network has been trying ambitious things with its music channels (the new CBC Music app is pretty fly) and trying to deepen its local relevance with expanded news coverage in Calgary and BC. Of course this affects me too, having worked with CBC and having so many colleagues still there.

5 Reasons Why Flying Down Thunder & Rise Ashen Will Get You Moving
Photo Design by Ghassene Jerandi/CBC Music

One tiny glimmer of good news, though: they’ve got a worthy new music writer in Kate Adach. My bias is bare, of course: she’s a friend and intellectual muse. But she’s off to a good start with this piece on 5 reasons you should listen to recent Juno nominees Flying Down Thunder and Rise Ashen. I only wish she’d included more of their personal history; the story behind their mix of electronic and traditional Anishinaabe music demands retelling.

Kate’s a great storyteller, incidentally. Just check out this article she wrote: Happy people live longer, just ask a 104-year-old. It soothes another one of my biases: stories that show what people have to offer, rather than just what they need.

More to the point though, how reasonable do you think the federal budget cuts to CBC were? What do you think about the plan to make back some revenue by adding commercials to Radio 2 and Espace Musique?