Category Archives: Festivals

Some of the long-form improv at the Fringe

3 Replies

As usual, there are lots of opportunities to experience improvisational theatre at the Edmonton Fringe.  Edmonton has lots of improv performers and fans, and improv works well with Fringe audiences.  And the way improv works is that you can never see all of it, because every performance is different.

This year I saw three long-form improv shows, Scratch, Rocket Sugar Factory, and Off Book the Musical.  Long-form improv creates one (or more) coherent (more or less) narratives throughout the performance, and wraps them up by the end of the show.  (Or else it leaves enough loose ends to make you come back for a sequel, as in the local improv soap-opera Die-Nasty.)  As you can see from that attempt to define long-form, improvisational theatre starts with some rules or guidelines but doesn’t necessarily stick to them.

Rocket Sugar Factory is the company of Jim Libby and Jacob Banigan, North Americans who currently perform in Austria.  I loved their show at last year’s Fringe so I made a point of fitting them in this year, and they didn’t disappoint me.  They started by getting suggestions from different sections of the audience – starting with audience suggestions is one of the improv traditions.  The performers built affectionate rapport while collecting suggestions in the intimate setting of the Walterdale Theatre, and because their separate conversations were simultaneous the result ended up more of a surprise.  In the show I saw, they concocted a horror tale (which was more of a classic ghost story) set in 19th century England.  Both performers made effective use of accents and body language to distinguish among their characters and delight the audience.  They switched roles frequently, occasionally confusing me but mostly following each other’s lead to build a funny creepy story.  Jim Libby’s occasional corpsing (falling out of character momentarily to laugh at what was going on) did not detract from the audience’s amusement and illustrated that they were having fun.  Rocket Sugar Factory has one more show, tonight at 6:30 pm.

Scratch is the show of Arlen Konopaki and Kevin Gillese, both of them Rapid Fire Theatre alumni who are currently working (separately) in the USA.  It’s playing at the Princess Theatre, to packed houses of fans.  The theatre isn’t an ideal venue, because it’s long and narrow, making it hard for the performers to hear audience suggestions.  Both of them wear cordless mics during the show, and they were easy to hear thanks to tech Cadence Konopaki.  Their style is very physical, and I could see that the mics were inconveniencing them, though.  In the show I saw, very physical included climbing Mount Everest, flying around as Game of Thrones dragons, playing piano, lumbering around as a yeti, and a lot of admirably athletic simulated sex.  Like the performers of Rocket Sugar Factory, it’s clear that Arlen and Kevin have been playing together for a long time, the way that they pick up each other’s cues, switching roles seamlessly and spinning around to signal a transition into another scene or set of characters.  In Scratch, most of the show had scenes alternating among three separate stories, with some fitting together at the end.  Scratch plays tonight at 10 and tomorrow at 3. 

Off Book is a completely improvised musical-theatre performance.  It’s a Rapid Fire production at the Yardbird Suite, which seems to be a great venue for performers although it is probably visually a bit unsatisfying for people sitting at the back since there aren’t any risers.  The acoustics are good though.

Rapid Fire Theatre hosts Off-Book performances sometimes as part of their regular season long-form improv offerings on Saturday nights, so if you enjoy this show you can watch the Rapid Fire website and Facebook group to see when you can see more.  The troupe is led by Matt Alden, and accompaniment is provided by the talented Joel Crichton on keyboard.  Other performers in the show I saw were Amy Shostak, Joleen Ballendine, Kory Mathewson, David Walker, Vince Fortier, and I think Jocelyn Ahlf.  Starting from the audience suggestion of a graveyard as location, they generated all the tropes of musical theatre from a catchy ensemble opening number “It’s a great day to be dead!” to a romantic plot with supporting sidekicks, impeccable rhymes, occasional dance numbers, harmonising two musical themes, a deathbed solo, and a tidy ending recalling the melodies explored earlier.  I thought that the performance I saw was particularly strong, and I thought that the venue was more conducive to appreciating the nuances of the lyrics than Rapid Fire’s usual space in Zeidler Hall at the Citadel.  Off Book plays today at 2:30, but is probably sold out.

Rent, Borderland, and other stories: Fringe 2013

4 Replies

On Sunday I arranged to take a night off from working backstage at God on God, because that was the only way I could see Rent.  God on God’s VUE review has three stars, by the way, and is running every night at 8 pm and Friday and Saturday at 10pm too.

Of course, I fitted in a few more shows as well.

Borderland – Izad Etamadi’s one-person show about a gay man leaving Iran, one of the eleven countries where homosexuality or sodomy is a crime legally punishable by death.   The performer plays three characters – Navid the would-be refugee, Zia who helps him escape, and Leila, a woman who takes care of him after he moves to Turkey and gives us glimpses of her own story as an “ugly woman” in a patriarchal culture.  His portrayal of Leila, and his transformation to the female character by turning his back and flirting his hips while donning a headscarf, were amusing without quite crossing into ridicule.  I wanted to hear more of that character’s story.  The performer also sang unaccompanied, both in Persian (I think) and in English.  The English material was original and in the musical-theatre idiom, and it reminded me somehow of local musician Joel Crichton.

Nashville Hurricane – I missed seeing Chase Padgett’s 6 Guitars at last year’s Fringe, so I was curious about his 2013 show.  This year’s solo performance reminded me of a short story, the kind of short story that’s an affectionate sad portrayal of characters in the rural South and in the music business.  He spoke as four characters, each with his or her own mannerisms and accent.  The eponymous character was a young musician who was probably autistic, and the others were various adults in his life.  The show I attended was sold out, and I didn’t look at my watch once.  Chase Padgett was so good that for a little while I felt like my own storytelling aspirations were futile.

Capital City Burlesque’s Elvis Odyssey – This show had solo pieces and group numbers, loosely tied together with the themes of Elvis Presley music and a global survey of cultures.  Along with nine or ten burlesque dancers, all talented, attractive, and seeming to enjoy themselves, other features of the show included Tim Mikula (of Rapid Fire Theatre and Doctor Jokes) as master of ceremonies, an impressive troupe of belly dancers called Les Trois Femmes, and costumed support staff – the Panty Zamboni and the Merch Girl.  I hadn’t seen this troupe before and I definitely want to watch for their shows in future.  An interesting note is that their Sunday-afternoon Fringe shows are “covered”, meaning that the dramatic finish of an act usually involves sparkly pasties on top of a bra.  This is a bit odd, but probably a nice touch to expose them (ahem) to a wider audience.    The show started a little late and ran a bit later than scheduled, which was frustrating to me at a satellite venue during Fringe when I had another show elsewhere to get to shortly afterwards.

Excuse Me … This is the Truth – This well-done story gently poked fun at the culture of contemporary enthusiastic Christianity, as backdrop to the sweet tale of a boy (Jessie McPhee) caught between his bossy longtime girlfriend (Joleen Ballandine) and a new friend (Lianna Makuch) who appreciates his interests and makes him notice that his girlfriend has been making all his decisions for him.   Also, they throw candy into the audience.  Really good candy.

Rent:  the Musical –Strathcona Alumni Theatre, the Linette Smith company that did Spring Awakening last year, is doing a production of the recent Broadway musical Rent, about a group of struggling artists in New York City’s Lower East Side.  Many of the characters are HIV positive.  As the story starts Christmas Eve they’re all unhappy for various reasons, including the threatened eviction alluded to in the title.

There’s a cast of 14 and four musicians, squeezed onto the small stage along with a couple of scaffolding fire-escapes.  But they use the space well (and look more comfortable than the audience squeezed onto risers).  I haven’t seen other productions of the live show, just the movie, but in this production I was immediately captivated by the story of Collins (Hunter Cardinal) and Angel (Jordan Mah), rather than focusing on Mark and Roger (Cameron  Kneteman and Maxwell Theodore Lebeuf) and their parts of the story.  Hunter Cardinal stood out for me because he projected his character’s emotions so powerfully.  The scene in which Angel dies in thrashing agony as Collins tries to comfort him and himself was particularly effective.  Cynthia Hicks was also delightful to watch, portraying Mimi with a mix of allure and loneliness.  Maureen (Emmy Kate Devine)’s defiance and performance-art show, Joanne’s and Benny’s (Morgan Melnyk and Christopher Scott) uptown discomfort with the bohemian crowd, and the minor characters’ contributions to the plot and strong musical support (especially from Gabriel Richardson and Lauren Derman).  It’s a long show (two hours ten minutes plus a short intermission), but it is well-paced and everything moved smoothly.  (As a brand-new stage manager, this impresses me more than it used to.)  The musical accompaniment was well balanced, allowing all lyrics to be heard in the small space but still sufficiently powerful when needed.

I believe that it’s sold out for the remainder of its run.  This is no surprise, with the cast list full of names to watch in musical theatre, and a production worthy of them.   Sometimes for BYOV shows there are a few tickets at the door, though.

The first seven shows I saw at Edmonton Fringe

3 Replies

Ask Aggie: The Advice Diva – Last year at Fringe I enjoyed Christine Lesiak’s clown alter ego Sheshells and her partner Rocket in Fools for Love.  This year Christine Lesiak has a one-person show with audience participation, and it’s also delightful.  When the audience comes in, you get a card on which to write a question about love, sex, or relationships, and you put them in a little box on stage.  Aggie is fabulous, flirtatious, flexible (as suiting a physical-comedy expert, she draws each question from the box in a different way, including with her toes) and five times widowed.  She alternates reading and answering the audience’s questions with scripted material responding to frequently-asked questions with stories about her experiences with her various husbands, the best of which is the musical number “Vibrators are a Girl’s Best Friend”.

They Call Me Mister Fry – This was a storytelling show by Jack Freiburger of Los Angeles, talking about his first year as a teacher.  The story had some familiar elements – middle-class career change into teaching, dreamed of teaching at a fancy surburban or private school, didn’t get the job, landed underprepared in inner-city school, got in trouble with rigid rules or bureaucracy (in this case, No Child Left Behind oversight), made a difference for some kids, and decided to stay.  The performer did a good job of portraying Grade 5 students with shifts in posture.

Waiting for Bardot – Trevor Schmidt plays an aging Brigitte Bardot pursued by a journalist (James Hamilton) who gets more than he bargained for.

Rocket Sugar Factory – Jim Libby’s and Jacob Banigan’s long-form improv show.  I saw this troupe at last year’s Fringe, before I had gotten involved in doing improv myself, so I didn’t appreciate then just how good they were at creating characters and a plausible narrative.  Jim Libby seems to create more of the ideas and Jacob Banigan follows them.  I would definitely watch these guys again.

RiderGirl – Colleen Sutton’s one-person story about becoming drawn in to the world of Saskatchewan Roughrider football fandom known as Rider Nation, and how her shared enthusiasm and commitment to the team connects with other events in her life.  I expected it to be a funny affectionate portrayal of the phenomena I encountered this summer in Saskatchewan, and it was.  I did not expect it to make me cry, which it did.

Happy Accidents in Something Simple – this was a collection of short pieces by local clown performers.  My favourite was the musical ensemble directed by Scooby (Mary-Lee Bird), which included a propane tank turned into a well-tuned steel drum as well as a trombone and percussion on various found objects.

Life After Breath – another clown show, this time one long narrative about two characters, Nona and Squee, coping after the death of a third.   Neelam Chattoo’s Squee, the younger or more dependent character, was particularly endearing.

Edmonton Fringe

Leave a reply

When I was little, I loved parades.  Our town had two parades a year, one in June  (Flag Day Parade) and one in December (Santa Claus Parade), as well as a parade of Scouts and Guides without any floats or give-aways.  One year there was construction on the main road and the parade came right in front of our house!  I loved everything about the parades, from the candy-cane giveaways to the bagpipe bands and uniformed dance troupes and the quarter-size milk delivery truck with a moo for a horn.  Our family always arrived early at our watching spot on the sidewalk outside the Stoney Creek Dairy ice-cream bar and convenience store, right after the parade turned the corner.

The summer I was nine, I joined my first organized sport, a softball team.  There were lots of exciting things about being on a team – wearing a uniform, getting to cheer and shake hands afterwards even when we lost, getting to ride in the back of a pickup truck to the away games in the country.  And partway through June, our coach told us about another exciting opportunity.  We were going to wear our uniforms and march in the parade with all the other softball teams.  I was going to be in a parade. And the real parade, not just the one my Brownie pack marched in.

But after I ran home to tell my parents the thrilling news, I realised that if I was going to be in the parade, I wasn’t going to be able to watch the parade.  No craning my neck watching for the next entry and trying to remember which floats or bands or baton-twirlers we hadn’t seen yet. No more competing with other kids for thrown candy and other freebies.  No more deciding which band was my favourite and looking hard to see if any of them had women in them.  I was going to miss out on all of that.

Mum and Dad said it was up to me, that I could skip marching if I wanted to, it wasn’t a requirement like going to softball practice.  I discussed it with my coach, who didn’t really care and couldn’t see why I was torn up by the decision.  But it felt like a huge symbolic choice, losing the magic and giving up my childhood forever, in order to be on the other side, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.  Finally I decided on a compromise.  I would join my team at the marshalling point in the high school field and march the first half of the parade, then drop out when I saw my family and watch the rest of it.  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best I could do, when I wasn’t able to let go of either experience.

I feel the same way right now about the Fringe Theatre festival.  I’ve been an enthusiastic audience member at Edmonton Fringe for five previous festivals, from tentatively going to a few plays and the beer tent by myself the first week I lived in Edmonton, to seeing 35 performances last summer when I wasn’t working.  And after last year’s Fringe I decided to keep some of that energy in my life by going to lots of local theatre year-round, which led to taking improv classes, volunteering at Rapid Fire Theatre shows, and starting this blog.

So the logical next step was to volunteer at the Fringe this year, or to get involved with putting on a show, or something like that – to become part of the Fringe instead of just a playgoer and donor.  I signed up to work in the beer tent, and when I heard that some improv class friends were producing a show they’d written, I asked if they needed help and they needed a stage manager.

But when the festival programs came out, I started circling shows I wanted to see, and looking at what I could fit in along with my various commitments and a day job, and suddenly it was like the parade all over again. I want to be part of it, but I also want to be running from venue to venue with a fistful of tickets in my hand talking to other playgoers about what else I should see, just like I did last year.  I want to help make the magic without losing the chance to experience it from the audience.  I’m not nine years old any more, but I’m making the same choice now that I did then – the choice to do a little bit of everything.  I’m not getting enough sleep, and I’m paying to park rather than taking my bicycle and using transit, but it’s been wonderful so far.  It turns out that the Fringe is just as magical on the inside as it is from the audience.   The volunteer experience is well-organized and inclusive.  And helping to produce a show that makes people laugh is more rewarding than I thought it would be.

The 32nd Annual Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival runs until next Sunday August 25th, mostly in Old Strathcona but also at La Cité Francophone, downtown, and on Alberta Avenue.  Tickets are available on site and on line.  Notes and recommendations will follow soon.

Edmonton Folkfest 2013

Leave a reply

I’m a relative newcomer to Edmonton Folkfest, having only been to four of them (I first moved to Edmonton on the Monday morning after Folkfest 2008.)

Every year the folkfest people tinker with some aspects of the festival to make the well-run thoughtful weekend even better for more people.  Some of those little changes are easy to be grateful for right away – for example, the closing of Stage 4 in order to give good sound quality on Stages 3 and 5, and leaving the Stage 4 area as a place to enjoy shade and relative quiet in a loud busy weekend, and moving the lower tarp lottery to behind the Muttart Conservatory where there is also grass, shade, and a little space to spread out and make a bit of noise early in the morning.

But sometimes the little changes are harder to get used to.  This year, I was disappointed in the new location for the bike lockup.

I love the Folkfest arrangements for a lighted supervised bike parking area with claim checks.  Since I worked out a cycling route to get from my home in Ritchie to the Folkfest site without challenging hills or busy streets, I’ve almost always gone to Folkfest by bike.  It has always seemed easier to me than learning where to park nearby and carrying my chair and other gear to and from the parking, or travelling by bus also with a significant amount of walking-uphill-with-chair.    But with the bike lockup at the Bennett Centre, just outside the main entrance, it was never quite big enough and getting out of there in the dark through the congestion of the taxi stand was always challenging.  So this year the bike lockup was set up on top of a hill behind the Muttart Conservatory – near the top of the Stage 6 viewing area, but of course there are some fences in between.  It’s a great setup.  Except that with my limited energy, I have to walk the bike up the final hill and rest before unpacking my gear, and then I have to walk most of a kilometer to the gate (1.2 km total from the bike corral to Stage 6) carrying my stuff, and at the end of the night there’s an uphill walk again.  And I can’t do it.  Not and have fun all day and have energy to dance.   I still love the idea of biking to Folkfest, but on Saturday and Sunday I took taxis.

Once I got in the gate, everything was great.  Interesting tasty food, good friends, musicians both familiar to me and unfamiliar, and good weather as long as I stayed.  (I didn’t stay long enough on Sunday night to encounter the thunderstorm.)   My favourite new musical discoveries of the weekend were Good for Grapes, from Surrey BC, and The Head and The Heart, from Seattle.  I also loved dancing to Delhi2Dublin (whom I’ve heard at previous Edmonton Folkfests and at Blue Skies in rural Ontario) and I loved being swept into memories by Bruce Cockburn’s voice in his mainstage show.

Photos: Sean MacKeighan of Good for Grapes, dancer and singer of Niyaz, box office with their job done.

good for grapes 6 dervish 2 box office done

More photos:  Makana, Langhorne Slim

makana langhorne slim 3

January playbill

Leave a reply

I’d noticed before that sometimes food businesses with a holiday rush sometimes close for vacation in January – bakeries, restaurants, vendors at Strathcona Farmers’ Market.  But I’d never noticed before this year that theatres and performance spaces might also be dark at the start of the year.  It seems a little counterintuitive that there isn’t much to watch between Christmas and New Years, when people with academic schedules might have time off and be done their pre-Christmas to-do lists, but it does make sense for performers to take a break after New Year’s, when it’s cold and dark and the viewing public might be feeling frugal or unsociable.

Both Rapid Fire Theatre and Die-Nasty were dark between Christmas and New Year’s, but then jumped right back in to their weekly entertainments.  Rapid Fire is now filling up Ziedler Hall for many of their Friday-night and Saturday-night shows, so fans should buy tickets on line or line up early.

Other companies have been in rehearsal, meaning that several shows are opening this week.  The new Canadian opera Svadba, in Serbian with English subtitles, is playing at C103, the space formerly known as Catalyst Theatre.  Azimuth Theatre previews Free-man on the land at the Roxy starting Tuesday (tickets here).  A Clown Double Bill opens Tuesday at The TACOS Space in that awkward bit of neighbourhood that nobody can decide whether to call Ritchie, CPR Irvine, or “you know, behind Wunderbar, there” (tickets through Tix on the Square). Westbury Theatre, Transalta Arts Barns, welcomes the musical Legally Blonde starting Wednesday.

Deep Freeze Festival wraps up (see what I did there) today, Ice on Whyte sparkles in a couple of weeks, and ForkFest fills up January.  So if you’ve been hibernating the last couple of weeks, it’s  time to bundle up and check out what’s happening in Edmonton entertainment.

The Prairie Bowl – a different kind of tournament!

Leave a reply

I’ve played in, watched, and volunteered at lots of hockey tournaments, so I know the routine.  You see the list of teams coming from other towns and you’re excited about seeing new talent, while wondering whether the home-town kids are really as good as you thought.  You might get there early on the first night and see the organizers setting up the charts on the wall where they will update the standings throughout the weekend.  You wonder whether the winter weather might be slowing down some of the out-of-town competitors, so it’s a relief to see each new cluster of unfamiliar and bewildered faces get welcomed by the organizers.

The lobby fills up, because lots of fans want to be part of this inaugural event.  You pick up a program and find out that the visitors are from Winnipeg, Calgary, and Red Deer.  A second Calgary team starts play Saturday night, and like any partisan hockey parent you wonder whether that’s fair.  You line up at the concession stand and stock up on red licorice – but you notice that they don’t serve burnt percolator coffee, and they do have beer.  That’s a clue that this is a different kind of tournament.

After they tear your ticket and let you into the auditorium, you get more clues.  It’s warm!  And the seats in Zeidler Hall are comfortable!  The MC introduces a panel of judges who will hold up scorecards, but you’re used to that from watching figure skating in the Olympics.

The first game is between Red Deer and Winnipeg.  The team captains, Serge from Red Deer and RobYn from Winnipeg, shake hands, and the action starts.  And the audience starts to laugh.  Because what you’re watching is the first-ever Prairie Bowl of Theatresports, the somewhat-competitive loosely-codified short-form improvisational-theatre scheme invented in 1981 in Calgary by Keith Johnstone and nurtured locally by Rapid Fire Theatre.

If you’re a frequent Rapid Fire attendee, you’ll love seeing the best of the Rapid Fire company mixing it up with less familiar performers from the other teams, all on top of their game.  On the first night of play, there were lots of jokes with good-natured local colour – the Donut Mill in Red Deer, the Calgary-Edmonton hockey rivalry, crime in Winnipeg, and the lack of tournament representation from Saskatchewan. Apparently there is improv in Saskatoon and Regina but they couldn’t make the schedule work this time.  There was singing (spontaneous musical numbers about dishwashing), dancing (expressive movement in a Chinese restaurant), and physical comedy (the garbageman with a sore back finding a dead body over and over again, the four-bodied drummer showing his/their moves).  Joel Crichton provided musical cues and atmosphere on the keyboard, last night’s MCs were locals Kory Mathewson and Joe Vanderhelm, and members of all teams took turns as judges and as opening-act free-improv players.

I don’t know if this is the kind of tournament where they give Most Valuable Player awards, but RobYn Slade of Outside Joke (Winnipeg) and Ryan Hildebrandt of the Improv Guild (Calgary) are both delightfully expressive.  It was also reassuring to see the judges assess a penalty (sitting out one round while wearing the Ring of Shame) to a visiting player who used a rape metaphor, and to see clear acceptance from everyone on stage that the penalty was appropriate and the rape analogy inappropriate, establishing the boundaries of respect and good taste in a genre without many boundaries.

If you enjoy watching improv theatre, or if you’re curious about what this phenomenon is all about, this is a good weekend to come check it out.  There are two shows Saturday night, at 7:30pm and 10:00 pm, and the playoffs are on Sunday night starting at 7:30 pm, all in Ziedler Hall at the Citadel Theatre.  Tickets are available at the door for $12, or you can order over the phone or on-line here.  There is convenient indoor parking in the Library Parkade (which seems to run underneath everything on the east side of downtown) for $5 cash.  You can also get to the Citadel from the Churchill LRT station without going outdoors.  Outside Joke from Winnipeg are in the early lead after two rounds of play, but the scores have been very close and all teams are still in the running.

First four years in the Festival City

Leave a reply

Stratford’s also called the Festival City, but they only have one. Edmonton’s called the Festival City because they have a lot of events. I’ve lived here for four years plus a week, and here are some of the numbers.

  • Fringe – 5. I haven’t missed a year at the Fringe Theatre Festival. It’s the closest to home of all the events, accessible by bike or bus, and it’s easy to participate in.
  • Winefest – 4. Haven’t missed a year at this one either, but it’s in February.
  • Folkfest – 3.
  • Heritage Festival (aka Heritage Days) – 2.
  • Giant Used Book Sale at the Downtown Library – 2.
  • Ice on Whyte – 2
  • Taste of Edmonton – 1
  • Canada Day Fireworks – 1
  • Sonic Boom – 1
  • Oilers games – 1
  • Eskimos games – 1
  • baseball games – 1
  • Film Festival – 0
  • What the Truck – 0
  • Deep Freeze – 0
  • Silly Summer Parade – 0
  • Capital EX – 0
  • Freewill Shakespeare – 0
  • Rocky Mountain Food and Wine Festival – 0

What other festivals should I be watching for and trying to fit in?

Folkfest 2012

Leave a reply

This year I don’t really know why, but I mostly didn’t go listen to musicians from cultures other than North American ones. Maybe another year with more energy I’ll seek more of them out again.

Also, I noticed that when I drifted in to a session late and missed the introductions, I didn’t end up that engaged. It had more to do with that than whether I was sitting close. I will try to remember that, and try leaving early instead.

So here’s a list of who I saw, I think, edited once to add some I forgot.

Arlo Guthrie – Guthrie Family Reunion – This was fun, because there seemed to be a whole bunch of relatives including small children who were comfortable singing into a microphone. The best parts were listening (and seeing from up close) to a very familiar voice doing City of New Orleans, and getting to sing along to This Land is Your Land, with no question except that it would be with the words I learned as a child (and was shocked to learn later in life that they weren’t original).
Emmylou Harris – I didn’t stay very long because I don’t really like her music and I wasn’t enjoying myself enough to expend spoons.
La Bottine Souriante – This was a fun mid-afternoon mainstage performance of traditional-style Quebecois music, with fiddle, guitar, a brass section, etc and a joyful wiry-middle-aged-looking stepdancer/ percussive dancer named Sandy Silva.
Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder – a bluegrass band. I don’t like bluegrass. I guess they were good.
Mary Chapin Carpenter – She did not do Passionate Kisses in this concert or in the session I went to, but I enjoyed her performance
James Vincent McMorrow – Oddly awkward Irish singer with a guitar.
Jim Cuddy Band – singer from Blue Rodeo. I saw part of the set from our farther-back tarp and don’t remember much
Mavis Staples – more of a gospel set than I’d expected from the writeup. She got Bonnie Raitt to come out for the singalong Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which was fun.
Bonnie Raitt – I liked her performance a lot more than I expected to.
Wool on Wolves – This is a local band billed as folk-rock but they use a lot of the chords and rhythms that I call “my kind of music”. I will definitely watch for future local gigs.
The Dunwells – a new rock band from Leeds who are GREAT.
Johnny Clegg Band – For this concert and the next one, I mostly sat off to the side in the sliver of shade at Stage 3, except when I needed to dance. He told stories of his life and musical collaborations through the changing times in South Africa.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo – They did “Homeless” from the Graceland album.
Dry Bones – By the time I went to their concert I’d seen them in a couple of sessions and played their album at home and while cycling to and from the festival site. So it was no surprise that I had a great time. Besides Nathan Rogers (who should probably get a whole post to himself, I have such a crush) his bandmates were also good especially Leonard Podolak who was funny.
TNile – She’s a singer-songwriter from Gabriola Island. I watched the end of her concert while standing up in the shade at the back of stage 7. That is where I learned that I can dance and knit at the same time and enjoy both, because I couldn’t help dancing.

Sessions with the following combinations of musicians
Dry Bones, Lindi Ortega, The Barr Brothers, David Wax Museum – David Wax is a weird twitchy dude. Lindi Ortega (hmm, I thought I’d seen her in three sessions but this list is only two) did “Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” twice, which was too many, but was otherwise interesting to listen to and look at.
Rose Cousins, Jim Lauderdale, Pokey LaFarge, New Country Rehab – I liked Rose Cousins quite a bit, but was kind of bored with Pokey LaFarge and New Country Rehab.
Valdy, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lori McKenna, Suzie Vinnick & Rick Fines – This was a neat session. I can’t remember specifics though.
Dry Bones, The Dunwells, Lindi Ortega – This morning session was called “Question Box”, and it started with Nathan Rogers (of whom, yeah) going into the audience with a box with pen and pad of notepaper attached, for people to write questions for the musicians. I took the box from him to write a question but couldn’t come up with a very amusing one; still, though, it was fun to have it read out and answered. This was my first glimpse of The Dunwells. Nobody else was dancing at that stage and I wasn’t quite sure where to dance on our side of the stage, so that was the only time during the weekend that I wanted to dance and didn’t.
Geoff Berner, Wool on Wolves, Scott Cook, Kim Beggs & T. Nile – This was another of the sessions that I came late to so wasn’t very engaged, and I didn’t get to hear much of Wool on Wolves. I liked the others, but had trouble figuring out who was who. Kim Beggs is from the Yukon.

Unlike last year, I stuck around to the very end of the finale, where the volunteers go on stage and everyone sings Four Strong Winds. Last year it was neat to hear the song as I re-packed my bicycle and headed out through the neighbourhood to the path home, but this year I wasn’t feeling impatient so it was neat to stay on the tarp singing with some of our crowd.

Folkfest 2011

Leave a reply

I didn’t go to everything. Well, nobody can, because for half the time there are six stages going on at once. But also, I chose to pace myself by leaving early a few nights, arriving late one day, and skipping a couple of sessions to have down time.

For lots of the side-stage time slots, they schedule sessions, three or four acts together with some theme, and they take turns or jam together playing each other’s songs or covers or old standards. This is sometimes really fun to listen to and watch, and it looks like it’s fun for the musicians too. When I had a choice between a session like this and a concert, I almost always picked a session.

My notes are a jumble of whether they were good, whether I enjoyed them, whether they are my kind of music, and stuff I barely remember. I think that there are lots of musicians who do great live shows, but whose recordings I’m not likely to enjoy as much; I’m not entirely resolved on how to figure that out though.

The concerts I saw:
Angelique Kidjo – I got there partway through and wasn’t quite into it but she seemed really lively.
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – very lively, neat harmonies. Someone I talked to Friday didn’t like them but I did.
Gipsy Kings – they were great. I knew of them before but hadn’t really listened.
Lissie – impressive young woman
Taj Mahal Trio – old bluesman. To me the blues is more drinking music, and I’m not so fond of it in concerts.
Noah and the Whale – these ones I had pegged from the description as “my kind of music” and I wasn’t far wrong. Young, English, indie-rock, conscious-hipster suits and hairdos. I hadn’t heard of them before so I was thinking “I bet their music’s been on the soundtrack of “Being Human”, but oddly it hasn’t been yet. So far, I actually liked their concert better than their CD.
Kíla – I think this was my favourite first-time listen. They sing in Irish and play traditional instruments but their sound is more hard-driving rock-ish. I loved watching their bodhran player, and I hope that I manage to express that much joy and energy in anything I do.
Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band – a mix of instrumental jazz and bluegrass, which I have to admit made me sleepy.
Blackie and the Rodeo Kings – Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, Tom Wilson. Were also great.
Deer Tick – the only side-stage concert I saw. They were new to me and good.
Andrew Bird – violin, guitar, and whistling – I actually didn’t listen to him that much, although I was sitting there for the whole set. Oops.
Lyle Lovett and his Large Band – Everything this guy said between songs was weird, or an unfinished thought.
kd lang and the Siss Boom Bang – k.d. lang was really in fine form. I have never seen her in concert before. A friend said that she used the same setlist at Calgary folk festival. She played some of her old familiar songs “Miss Chatelaine” and “Constant Craving”, some other people’s songs, Neil Young’s “Helpless”, a Talking Heads song, and “Hallelujah”, and I forget what else. She seemed relaxed and comfortable and funny on stage.

Sessions I went to and short sets between mainstage acts:

Clancy, Bracken, and McCarthy, Delhi2Dublin, and JP Cormier – I loved Delhi2Dublin at Blue Skies, and I sought them out here so I could dance. It was also neat to see how they combined with the traditional Celtic musicians and traditional Cape Breton fiddler, doing some jigs and reels together and then playing backup on each other’s songs.

The Once, De Temps Antan, Jeremy Fisher, and Amelia Curran – I got there after the introductions, so I’m not positive that the woman whose voice I loved was the woman in The Once.

James Keelaghan, Tim Robbins, Sean Rowe, Mary Gauthier – This was the best session I attended, with a theme of “And they call it democracy”. James Keelaghan was the host. He is like another Stan Rogers – he looks like my favourite university librarian and he made me cry. Mary Gauthier was fascinating, and her backup fiddler Tania Elizabeth was extremely cute. And one of Tim Robbins’ backup guitarists looked very familiar to me. I never did place him, except to guess that maybe I just think he looks like the TV character John Munsch.

Colin Linden, John Rutherford, Amos Garrett, Matt Andersen – I loved Matt Andersen at Blue Skies, and I still think he’s great. But I was mostly overwhelmed and should probably have taken a break, since I don’t remember much about this session.

Bill Bourne, Kat Danser, Ky Babyn, John Rutherford, Kayla Patrick – this session of Alberta musicians was recorded for a CBC radio show, so it was more polished and programmed than most. Kayla Patrick and Ky Babyn are both very young local singer-songwriters and I imagine I’ll run into them both again. Bill Bourne is sort of a weirdo. Kat Danser is a local young woman with a huge powerful bluesy voice and songs full of unsubtle innuendo, like a younger Georgette Fry.

Serena Ryder, Brandi Carlile, Jeremy Fisher, and Deer Tick – this was a good session and my only chance to see Brandi Carlile whom everyone was talking about. Serena Ryder is hilarious.

Tweeners I saw/heard between main stage sets included Matt Anderson, Mighty Popo, Kat Danser, and some more I forget.

Musicians I missed: Brandi Carlile on mainstage, Garnet Rogers, The McDades

Musicians I bought recordings of: kd lang, Kíla, Noah and the Whale, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, James Keelaghan, Mary Gauthier, Blackie&the Rodeo Kings, delhi2dublin, Kat Danser.