how to do the Diski Dance
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 7:03AM by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:
French publishing house: great catalogues that look east and south, not just west.
Darwin Grenwich sails the oceans of the world on Blue Monday, a CS36 traditional sloop, while maintaining his IT support business by email and on VOIP (403-283-1340). He is especially good on Macs. This is not an ad, just something you might want to know about.

May 23: Leigh Sherkin. Urban Ruralism: the culture of food production in urban areas. On Site review 27: rural urbanism, spring 2012
Leigh Sherkin. Farm:Shop aquaponic systemUrban Ruralism: the culture of food production in urban areas. Urban areas are expanding while labour migrates out of the countryside. Farms are becoming suburbs and a handful of companies control the supply chain. If we produce food in the city, can our relationship with food change?
Leigh Sherkin is the director of the urban planning company, specialising in community planning and regeneration. theurbanplanningcompany.com
on site 26: DIRT
onsite 25: identity
onsite 24: migration online
onsite 23: small things online
On Site 22: WAR has sold out in the print version, but you can read it online
read onsite 21: weather online
read onsite 20: museums and archives onlineonsite 20 individually archived articles
onsite 20:museums and archives has sold out in the print version, but you can read it online
read onsite 19: streets onlineOn Site 19 has sold out in the print version, but you can read it online.
onsite 19 individually archived articles
read onsite 18: culture onlineonsite 18 individually archived articles
The Canada Council for the Arts Grants to Literary and Arts Magazines
Erin Stump Projects
Torkin Manes, Barristers & Solicitors, Toronto
Saskatchewan Association of Architects
Calgary Arts Development Authority, City of Calgary, Alberta
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 7:03AM by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:
Monday, May 10, 2010 at 8:46AM
Stuart Gordon, Calgary Herald. Love Lies Bleeding dress rehearsal, May 5 2010
Love Lies Bleeding, Alberta Ballet. Jean Gand-Maitre, choreographer.
Ballet lite this isn't. It is dark, dark, dark, in the way that Berlin cabaret had its dark eroticism. By comparison it is the old Frederick Ashton-type ballets, all romantic with tutus, that seem very light. The themes of Elton John's life are large and powerful: identity, addiction, AIDS and celebrity: ubiquitous as these themes might seem, they are not normal little narratives. They are disturbing and operatic.
The recorded soundtrack belts out at rock concert volumes; many of the cuts were live versions so there is additional crowd frenzy. As no doubt in John's life itself, there is no respite: scenes, songs, costumes and crises are relentless. There is a large video screen as backdrop commenting and contextualising, and sometimes amplifying, what is being danced below it.
From the first step this ballet does not pretend, as ballet has for so long, to be about heterosexuality: it is overtly homoerotic. Along with the classic entrechats and bourrées are several Tom of Finland moments; along with dancers on point there are just as many in stiletto boots; the outstandingly revealing but traditional tights and leotards of classical male dancers are sent over the top with huge striped codpieces worn by all, male and female. Flesh glistens, buttocks are thonged, S & M clichés pound on, the audience popularity prize went to three dancers in drag.
Our wee hero, supposedly an Elton fan, but clearly Elton John as a fan of his own narrative, is mostly seen as small and nekkid, and who dresses up sometimes, but is always left on his own at the end of some dramatic event, coping alone. or not coping. The scale shift between the larger than life corps de ballet and this small person is exploited throughout: one gets the sense, that despite the sensational leaps and bounds of Yukichi Hattori (who was dancing the lead the night I saw this), there was an absolute vulnerability to the lead dancer, usually assigned to the prima ballerina in conventional ballets. The two pas de deux between men were so much more moving, and sexual, than the gender and power imbalance in the traditional pas de deux where the male is the often wooden support and armature for the fluttering, tragic female heroine.
One can see that Love Lies Bleeding has the potential to develop audiences that turn out in star-shaped glasses, platform boots and feather boas in the way that fans who go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Sound of Music do. It is perhaps inevitable, but unfortunate. Is part of John's celebrity, in this age of celebrity, that the public refuses to look past the costuming? The rose-coloured glasses, the Liberace excess, the gay hilarity of performance: they are all in this ballet, but they sit on a bedrock of terrible personal confusion and loss, also all in this ballet.
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