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The Fringe Festival runs Sept. 7-17. Many members of the Jewish community are involved, including ira cooper (see video:). Check out the full offerings at vancouverfringe.com

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Category: Arts & Culture

Vazana at Chutzpah! Fest

Vazana at Chutzpah! Fest

Nani Noam Vazana performs at the Rothstein Theatre Nov. 11 as part of this year’s Chutzpah! Festival. (photo from NaniMusic.com/ProLadino)

Gracing the cover of this year’s Chutzpah! Festival guide and posters is Nani Noam Vazana. The Amsterdam-based musician is one of the only artists in the world writing and performing new songs in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. The JI spoke with her when she last came to Vancouver, in 2017, and did so again, ahead of her Nov. 11 Chutzpah! show at the Rothstein Theatre.

“The concert in Vancouver is a part of my international Ke Haber tour that will take me through 15 countries,” said Vazana. One of the highlights of the tour will be a concert at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, she said, “where I’ll have the honour of documenting my new Ladino songs for libraries and universities all over the world and make them available for Ladino research.”

The tour features mostly songs from Ke Haber but will also include “some traditional Sephardic songs and surprise covers – different to each show!” she said.

Ke Haber incorporates a millennial’s perspective – hers – into the writing of songs “in an old, almost extinct language,” she said, explaining that “Ladino is a language of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages (Spain and Portugal of our days). My grandmother has roots in Portugal and she and her family sailed to Morocco from Porto in the 1400s. That’s where she grew up and where my parents were also born.

“In the ’50s, both my parents’ families immigrated to Israel and my father wanted to leave the past behind so he actually forbade us to speak Ladino at home,” she continued. “The only times I had contact with the language was when I was left alone with my grandmother. It was the language of witchcraft and mystery because she would only use it to speak to me in secret and tell me magical fairy tales that I actually thought she made up herself, because nobody else knew them. We sang songs in the kitchen while cooking, and it was all seeping in through the senses, very inviting and very curious.”

Vazana’s grandmother passed away when she was 12 years old.

“One of my first memories is of me and my Nona (Grandma) sitting at the kitchen table, peeling beans and singing ‘Los Guisados De La Berendjena,’ a song about seven recipes for eggplants. She hardly spoke Hebrew and my father forbade us to speak Ladino…. But, it seems, you carry this love subconsciously in you wherever you go, because, 15 years after my Nona passed away, I visited Morocco for the first time and heard people on the street singing the same lullaby she used to sing to me when I was a little girl. All of a sudden, those forgotten kitchen songs came alive and I started a long journey searching for songs and melodies that led me to release my traditional Ladino album Andalusian Brew. Sometimes, all it takes is just a sound or a scent and you’re transported to a life you’ve forgotten.”

After performing traditional repertoire for a few years, Vazana felt a yearning to write her own songs, and she dove into an exploration of the language. “I visited a scholar in Leiden, who showed me a lot of texts at an ancient Jewish library, but I wanted more,” she said. “So, I dug deep into medieval poetry and started learning the rhythm of the stanzas. Based on existing rhythmical formations, I started writing my own lyrics in Ladino, concerning questions we ask ourselves today, and, I must admit, I found a lot of correlation between where we are now and the medieval Iberian population.”

Vazani described Ke Haber as “an album of new songs that sound old, or maybe the other way around.”

“There are songs in the album that speak about female empowerment, like my song ‘No Kero Madre,’ a mother-daughter dialogue about the will to break free from the arranged marriage tradition and marry out of love,” she explained. “What a lot of people don’t know about Ladino is that it is a matriarchal language, so the relationship between mother and daughter is put on a pedestal, as the highest form of love in existence.

“In my song ‘Sin Dingun Hijo Varon,’ I describe the transformation of a transgender teenage girl who wants to be recognized as a boy. The father tries to kick her out of the house but the mother steps up and accepts her child as a boy.

“My song ‘Una Segunda Piel’ is about a Sephardic retirement ritual where your family and friends sow around you the shroud of the dead! You lie down in a cocoon, meditate and think about the troubles you want to leave behind. When the cloth is done [with], it goes into the cupboard, symbolizing all your troubles, and you emerge from it as if shedding your skin. That’s why the title is ‘Una Segunda Piel,’ which means ‘A Second Skin.’

“For my song ‘El Gacela,’” she said, “I composed music to an ancient text by Shmuel Hanagid, which is a love poem between two men. When the song was published, some people claimed that I was ‘outing’ the Jewish saint, but I think if he already published this work, he was out in the first place.”

The recording of Ke Haber, which started in London, England, in 2020, was complicated by COVID.

“I had to figure out a creative way to finalize the project, so we started recording remotely,” she said. “That’s really hard, because programs like Zoom have latency, so you can’t really record with other musicians simultaneously. We had to overdub – can you imagine playing music when the band is not in the same room? We all came to the studio whenever we were able to travel from Columbia, Chile, the Canary Islands, Bosnia, Israel, India, the Netherlands and Poland! That’s why the album is also a colourful tapestry of musical traditions and cultural aspiration from all over the world.”

While COVID was a quiet time touring-wise, “it was also a turmoil of creativity,” said Vazani, “because I just couldn’t sit still at home and wait for the world to pass by. So, I broadcasted house concerts every week, learned to edit video and record sound, which led to facilitating multicam broadcasts for other artists, such as the West East Orchestra.

“I also started doing voiceover gigs, overdubbing cartoon characters for animation and narration for documentaries and commercials. I also dabbled in emceeing when hosting online events and I hosted my own weekly podcast, interviewing [professionals] from the music industry about tips for emerging musicians.”

She received offers from music colleges and music industry conventions worldwide and hosted masterclasses and panel discussions for more than 30 institutions. “Eventually,” she said, “I was commissioned by the Dutch national TV broadcast NPO to create and host my own television series that will start airing in 2024.”

In addition to all that, Vazani teaches at the London Performing Academy of Music and the Jerusalem Music Academy, and is chair of the Amsterdam Artist Collective. She is also a guest lecturer at Codarts University, Rotterdam.

She enjoys being active – “for the mind and the soul to stay agile, we gotta train them,” she said. “This is my mental gym.”

And she’s not that interested in achievements, she said, though she has garnered several awards. “I am interested in being on the road as much as possible with my music,” she said. “This translates in my mind into happiness, and that’s not a fleeting experience, it’s a state of existence.”

To support Vazani’s music and receive content in return – all the music she has released, for example, and exclusive meet-and-greet sessions – readers can join her music family at nanimusic.com/family. For tickets to her performance at Chutzpah! and the whole festival lineup, visit chutzpahfestival.com. The festival runs Nov. 2-23.

Format ImagePosted on September 22, 2023September 21, 2023Author Cynthia RamsayCategories MusicTags Chutzpah!, Judeo-Spanish, Ke Haber, Ladino, Nani, Nani Noam Vazana
VIFF films explore humanity

VIFF films explore humanity

Filmmaker Sam Green will narrate live his documentary 32 Sounds, which is part of the Vancouver International Film Festival. (photo by Catalina Kulczar)

“There’s a thing in documentary filmmaking where, after you’ve done an interview with someone, you need to get what’s called room tone,” shares director, writer and editor Sam Green in his film 32 Sounds. “Room tone,” he explains, “is basically just sitting still for about 30 seconds or so and recording the sound of the room; this can help out a lot with editing later. I’ve been making films, which is kind of just marveling at people in the world, for 25 years now, and there’s always something odd and wonderful about this moment. An interview takes a person to other times and places and, now, they’re just here in the present, sitting with the sound of the room.”

Watching some of his interviewees, as they struggle or embrace sitting in silence for a few seconds, is one of the many highlights of Green’s latest documentary, 32 Sounds, which screens Oct. 5, 7 p.m., at the Vancouver Playhouse, as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s specialty program VIFF Live. New York-based Green will be in town to narrate the screening in-person, and audience members will be given headphones to wear, to help make the experience as immersive as possible.

The film premièred in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival. It exists in three forms: one as described above, but sometimes also with live music by composer JD Samson, who wrote original music for the film; another designed for an immersive at-home experience; and a theatre version without the in-person performance aspect. Watching the film at home without headphones was not ideal, but it was still enjoyable and mind-opening. There are parts where it would have added understanding and had greater impact to have heard something in only the left ear or only the right one.

32 Sounds is not just auditorily stunning but a visual pleasure, and intellectually stimulating, as well. Though there are explanations of how humans hear and how sound affects our bodies, the documentary is more philosophical than scientific. It presents concepts like the idea that all the sounds that have been made in the world should still be out there somewhere, “tiny ripples vibrating,” as contemplated by mathematician Charles Babbage, who is credited with having invented the computer, in the 1800s. If we had the right device, mused Babbage, we should be able to listen again to every joke, declaration of love or angry word ever uttered, narrates Green. “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” wrote Babbage in 1837.

In 2022, Green wrote: “I’ve made many documentary films over the years, and each one has changed me in some way, but none as much as the film I just recently finished called 32 Sounds. The film weaves together 32 different recordings as well as images, music by JD Samson, and voice-over to create a meditation on sound. Or, put a different way, the film uses sound to consider some of the basic features of our experience of being alive: time and time passing, loss, memory, connection with others, and the ephemeral beauty of the present moment.”

From the sound of a womb, to a cat purring, to fog horns, to a man who captures the sound of bombs landing nearby as he’s recording his music, Green masterfully takes viewers (listeners) on an emotional journey. We get to see how movie sound magic is made by foley artists like Joanna Fang. We meet sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim, who talks about the deaf community, as well as hearing people’s perceptions of her work. Edgar Choueriri, professor of physics at Princeton, plays part of a tape he made for his future self when he was 11 years old. And we get to know a bit about composer and academic Annea Lockwood, 81 at the time of filming, who had been recording things like the sound of rivers for more than 50 years. Lockwood fundamentally changed how Green thinks about sound, especially a point she makes in the film: “There’s something I started writing about a year ago: listening with, as opposed to listening to,” she shares. “And it’s my sense that, if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment … we’re within it and we’re all listening together, as it were.”

32 Sounds has much to recommend it, including the chance to get up and dance, if you choose, when Green pumps up the volume on Sampson’s music, so you can “feel the sounds in your whole body.”

Accepting oneself

image - William Bartolo as Daniel, left, and Daniel Gabriel as his secret lover, Isaac, in a still from Cut, which is part of VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy program
William Bartolo as Daniel, left, and Daniel Gabriel as his secret lover, Isaac, in a still from Cut, which is part of VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy program. (image from VIFF)

Sound that you can feel in your whole body plays an important part in the short film Cut by Samuel Lucas Allen. In what may – or may not – be semi-autobiographical, Cut tells the story of Daniel, a high school student who tries to hide his Jewishness and his queerness. At key moments, the original score created by Sam Weiss thrums with tension, underscoring Daniel’s inner conflict.

Despite being somewhat heavy-handed – there is nothing subtle in this film, perhaps because it is only 19 minutes long – Cut is interesting, well-acted and put together. It opens with a Chassidic man holding a rooster, then shows Daniel cutting his hair, which falls onto a copy of Merchant of Venice, from which the teen will eventually have to perform, by memory, Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Daniel’s room has drawn images of men on his walls, in various poses, apparently his own work.

The film defines its three main elements: kapparot, as a “Jewish ritual where a chicken is blessed and slaughtered in the place of a person, to atone for their sins”; tefillin as a “pair of leather boxes containing portions of the Torah, worn by Jewish men in their morning prayers”; and cut, “a slang term for circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin, usually performed for religious reasons.”

It is mainly the Jewish aspect that Allen deals with in this work. Daniel is able to walk away from a gay slur, but not an antisemitic one, and, in the end, he is reconciled to himself and his Orthodox father by the mystical Chassidic man’s performing kapparot over him. We witness Daniel’s acceptance of being Jewish, but are left to wonder if he comes to accept his queerness, an aspect of his being that conflicts with Orthodox Judaism, though his soul would still be considered divine in religious circles, even if he engages in homosexual acts, which are prohibited by the Torah.

Cut is featured in VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy, a program for viewers aged 18+, in which the films’ “protagonists discover that sorting out their lives can be much more difficult to achieve than they realized.” It screens Oct. 5, 6:45 p.m., and Oct. 7, 12:15 p.m., at International Village 8.

The Vancouver International Film Festival runs Sept. 28-Oct. 8. For the full schedule and tickets, visit viff.org.

Format ImagePosted on September 22, 2023September 21, 2023Author Cynthia RamsayCategories TV & FilmTags identity, Judaism, LGBTQ2S+, Sam Green, Samuel Lucas Allen, sound, Vancouver International Film Festival, VIFF
VIFF 2023 ticket giveaway

VIFF 2023 ticket giveaway

A still from the film Kidnapped, which is set in 19th-century Italy. In it, a 6-year-old Jewish child is abducted by papal soldiers who inform his parents that the boy was secretly baptized by a maid. If they want him back, they must convert to Catholicism. In the meantime, the boy will be educated in the Vatican at the feet of Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon). There’s an international outcry, but even as the Church loses political ground with the emergence of an Italian state, the Pope remains adamant: the child has been saved.

Marco Bellocchio (The Traitor, Dormant Beauty and Exterior Night) seizes on this true story to mount a fierce denunciation of antisemitism and the excesses of the Catholic Church, as well as to chronicle a pivotal chapter in Italian history.

Email [email protected] by Sept. 27 for a chance to win two vouchers to see the Jewish Independent-sponsored film Kidnapped at the Vancouver International Film Festival Sept. 28, Oct. 3 or Oct. 6.

Format ImagePosted on September 22, 2023September 21, 2023Author The Editorial BoardCategories TV & FilmTags giveaway, Marco Bellocchio, Vancouver International Film Festival, VIFF
A land of contradictions

A land of contradictions

Sorour Abdollahi’s solo exhibit Intersecting Landscapes is now at Zack Gallery. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Over the years, Iranian-Canadian artist Sorour Abdollahi has participated in several group shows at Zack Gallery, but the current exhibition, Intersecting Landscapes, which opened on Sept. 7, is her first solo show here.

“Sorour is definitely not the first non-Jewish artist with a solo show at the Zack,” said gallery director Hope Forstenzer. For years, the mission of the Zack Gallery, which is in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, has been to showcase Jewish artists and art dedicated to Jewish themes, she said. Non-Jewish artists were not excluded, but they usually appeared in group shows.

“The big difference in the past few years,” said Forstenzer, “has been an expansion of the definition of a Jewish theme to include a wider variety of human universal experiences that reflect on Jewish cultural history and traditions.… Sorour’s work, while not as overtly Jewish as some, addresses the concept of diaspora and its impact on culture and memory. When we made the decision to show her work, it was based on the concept of a cultural nostalgia for home as an inherently Jewish theme. And the response to it, so far, has borne that out – it has had a very strong emotional impact on the community here at the JCC and has already engendered discussion of the Jewish diaspora.”

Abdollahi has been a professional artist all her life. “I’ve always painted, since I was a child,” she told the Independent.

She received her art education in Iran, and her first solo art show happened there in 1987. A successful artist, working in mixed media and acrylics, she regularly exhibited in Iran, participating in multiple group and solo shows in various cities, including Tehran and Isfahan. The only big gap in her exhibiting schedule occurred when she immigrated to Canada. “We came here in 2000,” she said. “We did it for the children.”

Like all immigrants, she struggled with the new language and new culture. “It was several years later, when my children grew older, that I enrolled in Emily Carr [University of Art + Design] part time,” she recalled. “I wanted to become familiar with the local art scene, with the educators and the artists. I wanted to become a part of the local artistic community. And it worked beautifully. My friendships with wonderful Vancouver artists Devora and Sidi Schaffer stem from those days.”

Five years after her immigration, Abdollahi felt immersed enough in the British Columbia art vista to open her own studio and gallery in Yaletown.

“People would pass my gallery on the street, and some would come in,” she said. “They asked questions. I felt that my art connected.”

That connection gave her the courage to join the Eastside Culture Crawl – the biggest visual art festival in Vancouver – 10 years ago.

Abdollahi’s current show at the Zack represents the scope of her art perfectly. It consists of old and new paintings from several different series. A blend of abstract and figurative art, her paintings are airy and bright. Most of them have vague architectural connotations and employ a predominantly blue and green palette reminiscent of spring and rebirth. The abstract forms, sometimes utterly modern, often reveal faint outlines of ruins, shimmering in the mist, in the background.

“I grew up in the land of contradictions, where a traditional way of living juxtaposed a modern, Western lifestyle,” she said. “Those contradictions manifested in the landscape surrounding me, the historical against the contemporary, with layers of change and transformation.”

Immigration to a new country profoundly impacts her imagery.

“In my paintings, I examine the relationship between memories and the external landscape,” she said. “My Iranian background and my Canadian experience have had an enormous influence on my works. They inspired a negotiation between the modern and the ancient, the old and the new, the West and the East. Ancient ruins and Persian architecture play a pivotal role, too. They have enabled me to express the conflict and the negotiation process that often exists between two different cultures or societies. While the ruins speak of a mysterious, pure and mystical past, they also illustrate the corrosive effect of time and modernity, the constant reconfiguration of a country’s landscape, architecture and culture. The dripping paint in many of my pictures also illuminates the process of renewal. The old slides down, while the new grows over it. My paintings attempt to form a bridge between the past and the present.”

Two of the paintings particularly stand out. “The Magical Carpet” is a collage, full of the whimsical patterns, warm hues and bright shapes of a traditional eastern bazaar, with the artist’s customary ruins in the background.

Another painting, “Letters from Beyond”, with its strong punch of red paint, uses fragments of writing that are wholly imaginary. “The language and the letters in that writing don’t belong to any nation,” Abdollahi said. “I created it because I believe that we are all the same people. We should have no borders and no different languages separating us. That’s why I wanted to have a show here, at the Jewish Community Centre. I feel like my art is a link that connects us all.”

Abdollahi’s works can be found in private collections in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Intersecting Landscapes runs until Oct. 12. For more information, visit sorourart.wordpress.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Format ImagePosted on September 22, 2023September 21, 2023Author Olga LivshinCategories Visual ArtsTags exhibits, Hope Forstenzer, landscapes, painting, Sorour Abdollahi, Zak Gallery
Film is a tribute to Burquest

Film is a tribute to Burquest

Zanna Linskaia and Rudy Rozanski were key in making the video Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, which is available on YouTube. (screenshots)

Burquest Jewish Community, which serves people in the eastern suburbs of Vancouver, turns 50 next year. Whether that milestone is marked by a major celebration or not, a recently released video provides a permanent commemoration of the impact the group has had on individuals and Jewish life in the area. The film premièred at an event June 25.

Zanna Linskaia, a former Burquest board member and longtime force of nature in the community, had the idea of making a permanent, easily viewable history of the community and she got the support of the organization’s board. She recruited Rudy Rozanski, Burquest’s then-president, to work with her to get the project done.

They collected archival materials, old photos, newspaper clippings and historical artifacts, and identified people to interview on camera to help tell the story. A valuable find was video footage of Burquest members taken two decades ago by Jelena Fuks and longtime member and past president Dov Lank. They also hired filmmaker Lior Noyman.

Linskaia and Rozanski have several lifetimes of creative achievement between them.

“I was always a huge fan of Zanna,” Rozanski told the Independent. “I had the great honour to arrange a few of her songs and do some performances with her and so I knew she’s a composer, a writer, a poet … probably the most amazing woman I’ve ever known.”

In addition to all that, Linskaia, a journalist by background (she once wrote the Russian-language page in the Jewish Independent’s predecessor, the Jewish Western Bulletin) and a Coquitlam resident for two decades, retired in 2020 as a seniors outreach counselor for Jewish Family Services. Rozanski is a classical pianist and teacher, with a PhD in musicology. He has lived in Coquitlam for 30 years.

Through interviews with a host of longtime members – including two founding originals, Bill Gruenthal and Max Jacobson (who, sadly, died Aug. 18) – the video sets the stage by indicating how remote many suburban Jews felt from the geographic heart of the community half a century ago.

Gruenthal recalled reading the Jerusalem Post on the bus headed for Kootenay Loop those many decades ago and a fellow passenger leaned over to ask if he was “a member of the tribe.” It was Jacobson.

“Max and I have been friends ever since,” Gruenthal says in the film.

A few intrepid people plodded through the old Jewish phone book and called anyone who lived in Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam and surrounding areas. A living room meeting was held in 1974, with a few more than a dozen attendees. A lawyer volunteered to shepherd the nascent group into legal existence and Jacobson became founding president.

A year later, they formed a supplementary school for kids in the community, and Burquest became a gathering place for holidays and simchas. But they were meeting mostly in private homes. They raised some money, with the support of the late Morris J. Wosk, the Diamond Foundation and other philanthropists, and hired an architect to design a purpose-built shul and community centre. But the plan wasn’t feasible and it was decided to buy an existing building instead. Gruenthal’s son-in-law was in the mortgage sector and helped the society purchase a Jehovah’s Witnesses building in Coquitlam that has served ever since as Burquest’s locus for Shabbat and holiday celebrations, classes, kids programs, seniors lunches and a raft of other activities. Visiting rabbis, including Rabbi Yosef Wosk, have led holiday services over the years. Cantor Steve Levin has been Burquest’s spiritual leader for more than two decades.

Current and past members speak in the video about the impact Burquest has had on them and their families.

“Some of the most emotional and connected experiences we had with Judaism were when we were at Burquest,” recalls Shelley Rivkin. Stewart Levitt talks about the number of intermarried families or families with converted members and how they were welcomed.

The film, Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, is available on YouTube. The musical score is an original creation by Rozanski.

“I ended up improvising some of [the music] on the spot as we were editing and we went through the entire film and edited it scene by scene,” he said.

At the wine-and-cheese reception before the première screening, Rozanski performed the entire score, accompanied by Arnold Kobiliansky on violin.

“The music [in the film] gets cut up and only specific parts are used,” said Rozanski, “so we wanted to present the film music almost as a score, so they could hear the entire music as it unfolds … and then they would be able to recognize it in the film.”

The film project, a labour of love, was a major undertaking.

“We are not going to do a second film,” Linskaia said with a laugh.

“We both felt this was really important,” said Rozanski. “I realized immediately what an important gift this was to Burquest and to future generations. It really is our gift and we put our heart into this. We understand nothing is perfect, of course, but we really did our best with it.”

For Linskaia, the film is a tribute to the centrality of the community in her life.

“Burquest became my Jewish home,” she said.

Format ImagePosted on September 1, 2023August 29, 2023Author Pat JohnsonCategories TV & FilmTags Burquest, history, Lior Noyman, Rudy Rozanski, video, Zanna Linskaia

Kalla’s toxic new thriller

“I see how it looks…. Just another teen suicide. Or maybe an accidental OD. Another addict who fooled his parents. No…! I know my Owen…. Never, never, never….”

image - Fit to Die book coverThis is the reaction of Owen’s mother – who happens to be a U.S. senator – to her son’s death in Daniel Kalla’s latest thriller Fit to Die (Simon & Schuster Canada). L.A. detective Cari Garcia initially writes off the reaction as a mother ignorant of her child’s drug use, and bristles against the political pressure to determine the young track star’s cause of death. When she learns he died from ingesting a capsule that contained 2,4-Dinitrophenol, or DNP – used as a fertilizer, pesticide or explosive, but also abused by people to lose weight – she becomes more motivated to solve the mystery, in part because of a tragedy in her own past.

Meanwhile, here in Vancouver, toxicologist Dr. Julie Rees is dealing with a mysterious increase in deaths among bodybuilders, finding out that DNP is the cause. Then, a famous pop star and social media influencer dies in her penthouse, showing the same symptoms. And the co-owner of a wellness centre with locations in Los Angeles and Vancouver dies of a similar overdose. All the cases are connected and the L.A. and Vancouver police and medical personnel have to work together to find out who’s behind the influx of DNP on the market.

Like all of Kalla’s books, Fit To Die is an intriguing read, suspensefully written. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I have his other thrillers – it was somewhat repetitive and the main characters’ backstories didn’t ring as true to me – I still wanted to know whodunnit. I also value having learned about the real-life issue of toxic diet pills and gaining some insight into body dysmorphia and eating disorders. I trust Kalla’s facts, as he is not only a writer, but an emergency room physician and a University of British Columbia clinical associate professor. He was kind enough to answer some questions via email.

JI: There are some Jewish-sounding surnames in the novel. In what ways does your being Jewish enter into your novel writing?

DK: Well, in this case the Hertzberg-Davis Centre is the real forensic lab for the LAPD. So that made it easy. I couldn’t remove the Jewish influence in my writing even if wanted to, which, obviously, I don’t. I’ve written a historical trilogy, The Far Side of the Sky, that is explicitly a Jewish story. In thrillers like Fit to Die, I don’t consciously think about my background or religion, but there is no doubt it influences the writing.

JI: Do you name characters after friends, or sometimes offer naming opportunities for charity auctions or the like?

DK: Haha. I learned early in my writing career to never name a character after a friend. It only ends badly. I’ve never auctioned off a character name for charity, but I would love to. It can be agony finding the right character name. Why not outsource it?

JI:  This is your 10th thriller. How has your writing style and/or process evolved since your first one?

DK: I hope I’ve learned from some of my past mistakes. Paradoxically, it gets easier and harder. Easier in the sense that I’m more confident in my voice and the nuts and bolts of my storytelling. Harder in that I’m more critical of my writing and fear becoming derivative in my stories. But the one thing that keeps me going is my enthusiasm for telling a new story. I think I’m more passionate than ever.

JI: From the several thrillers of yours that I’ve read, your topic choices are timely and coincide with current events. The medical side, you’ve got covered. But what are some of your sources for other aspects? In this book, for example, how the dark web works and even the pop culture aspects, including language, like “partizzle”?

DK: I obviously have a huge advantage with respect to the medical background, but that’s only a part of it. As you point out, this story – about a (real) and deadly diet pill that is marketed online to the most vulnerable and amplified by toxic social media – took some intense research. I had to learn all about body dysmorphia and immerse myself in the TikTok culture, which explains some of the Zoomer slang one of the character uses, like “partizzle.” I was lucky to have a local VPD superintendent help guide me through the logistics of what an investigation into this kind of complex online conspiracy would look like.

JI: Where do you find time to write?

DK: For me, it’s never about the time. I’m lucky to work in the ER, which is shift work, but I think I could find time no matter what my day job was. For me, it’s all about momentum and inspiration. When I have those, I find the time. When I don’t, free time doesn’t help.

JI: What part of your soul does writing feed?

DK: Not to sound overly melodramatic, but it kind of feeds my core. Medicine does, as well, but in a very different sense. I find purpose as a doctor, but I find my passion as a writer. I can imagine retiring one day from medicine, but I can’t imagine not writing.

JI: Can you speak about the process of getting a book from idea to publication?

DK: The challenge of transforming the kernel of an idea into a publishable novel always seems insurmountable from the outset – this book particularly. I wanted to build a compelling mystery and resurrect some characters from a past novel (The Last High) and introduce new ones, all while tackling a highly sensitive yet vitally relevant topic: how the toxic diet culture and social media prey on the most vulnerable. I like to think I met the challenge, but, of course, that’s for each reader to decide.

Posted on September 1, 2023August 29, 2023Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags Daniel Kalla, dieting, eating disorders, fiction

Habonim role pivotal

A recently retired rabbi who was born and raised in Vancouver is offering an insider’s look at life as a congregational leader.

image - A Rabbi’s Journey book coverRabbi Allan Tuffs, who now lives part-time in south Florida and in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, has published A Rabbi’s Journey: Roads Traveled Lessons Learned – Stories from an Unconventional Rabbi’s Career. The 54 bite-sized chapters (coincidentally, he notes, the same number as parshas in the Torah) range from touching and hilarious to insightful and tragic.

Tuffs was born in Vancouver – he’s 10 days older than the state of Israel – and his home life was tough. His mom had a mental illness and his largely absent father had alcoholism. He and his sister would end up in the foster system.

The bookish, thoughtful Allan devoured everything he could read about Israel (among other topics) and, when he was invited to join the Labour-Zionist youth group Habonim, his life changed and everything else is as result of that connection.

“Habonim was kind of like a family to me, it really was,” he told the Independent in a telephone interview from North Carolina. “The people were warm and inviting and I was looking for my place in the Jewish community.”

Being the product of an intermarriage – “My father was not Jewish, my mother was,” he said – made the young Allan feel like an outsider.

“Intermarriage was still somewhat rare in those days,” he said. “I did not have a real religious background. I guess I was spiritual. I was very proud of my Jewish heritage and Habonim was very Jewish, very Israel-oriented, and it had a deep sense of purpose. It was kibbutz-oriented and there was this idea that the Jewish people had a role in the world, to repair the world, so to speak. That appealed to my youthful idealism.

“We had meetings almost weekly,” he added. “Here we were, these young kids.… I don’t really know if we understood what we were talking about, but we studied some of the great early socialist Zionist thinkers.”

In addition to their interest in Israel, social justice causes closer to home also drove the Habonimniks’ activism.

“We were pretty uniformly against the war in Vietnam,” he said. “We were quite disturbed by the racial injustices happening in the United States and also we were involved in fighting for Indigenous peoples’ rights in Canada. There was this sense that we are going to make the world a better place because we are Jews, because we have this ideology, because we are cognizant of the whole history of being a minority, being persecuted.”

In 1969, Tuffs headed to Israel and lived for two years at Kibbutz Menara, almost flush against the Lebanese border (and, coincidentally, now part of Vancouver’s partnership region in Israel). It was during the War of Attrition and the reality of the conflict was intense. Concentric rows of barbed wire were interspersed with landmines and German shepherd dogs patrolled the perimeter of the kibbutz.

While socialism, not Judaism, was the religion of the kibbutzniks, Tuffs notes in his book that a fortuitous meeting in Jerusalem changed the young man’s path again. Working in the holy city to earn a plane ticket home, he encountered an Orthodox rabbi from Seattle, with whom he began studying Budokan karate and Talmud. Among other things, the mix of eastern and western influences would follow Tuffs through his life. He integrates contemplative and meditative practices into his Judaism and practises yoga.

Returning to North America – and Habonim – Tuffs worked as a counselor at the movement’s camps in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.-adjacent Maryland. While in the D.C. suburbs, he started teaching Hebrew at a Conservative synagogue. He was hired for his language skills but the gaping holes in his Jewish knowledge – he never had a bar mitzvah – led his employer to suggest taking a few courses at Baltimore Hebrew College. This was the beginning of “a lifelong love of Jewish learning,” he writes.

Now in his mid-20s, he still wasn’t sure what to do.

“I was scholarly, but I would never be a scholar – too solitary,” he writes. “I was interested in psychology, but the thought of listening to people’s problems five days a week gave me a headache. I’m something of a ‘ham’ but would never be an actor. I’m a do-gooder – hardly a way to make a living.… What profession would allow me to do a little of all these things?”

Turns out the rabbinate fit quite nicely for 40 years. While a child of intermarriage with no early Jewish education might not seem a top candidate for the clergy, fate intervened again. Tuffs’ Hebrew language skills got him a job running a Conservative synagogue youth group in Maryland on the understanding that he would become shomer Shabbat and keep kosher. The job, in fact, put him under the wing of the rabbi and gave him more experience.

“This opportunity amounted to a rabbinic internship,” he writes.

Tuffs spent two years learning the ropes of the rabbinate. He began leading Shabbat services at a local nursing home. In 1977, he entered Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, spending the first year on the Jerusalem campus and four more at the institute’s New York centre.

He experienced “imposter syndrome,” partly because he had only one Jewish parent. But, he concluded, “with such a high frequency of intermarriage these days, who better than a rabbi of mixed parentage to welcome others like himself or herself into the Jewish fold? Suddenly, my rabbinate had renewed significance and purpose.”

In his book, Tuffs reflects the tumultuous and historic times he has lived through. After receiving his ordination, his first convention of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, in 1983, saw the historic decision to recognize patrilineal descent.

Over the next 40 years, as he shares, he navigated synagogue politics – some comedic, some sad, including a corrupt sisterhood president and an authoritarian, bullying board president. He discusses his decision to officiate at same-sex weddings, his activism on behalf of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, and his congregation’s support of orphans in Haiti.

The tragic collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021, hit Tuffs close to home. A young couple whose marriage he had presided at just weeks earlier were killed in the disaster.

The hurricane that devastated parts of Florida and other states in 2005 ravaged his temple. The silver lining was that Tuffs was able to be part of a rebuilding project that made the sanctuary more welcoming, removing the elevated bimah that instilled “an air of un-approachability” for the rabbi and cantor.

Perhaps because he came to the Reform rabbinate with some Conservative movement experience, Tuffs considers himself on the traditional side of Reform. He wears a kippa and dons a tallit when praying, something that was unusual in some American Reform congregations when he started out.

“I embraced the growing trend in the movement toward reintegrating older, discarded ritual practices into religious life,” he writes. “At the same time, I was sold on the Reform idea of personal autonomy in matters of ritual practice.”

He would serve at congregations in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania before spending 25 years at Temple Beth El, in Hollywood, Fla., from which he retired a year ago.

Fate almost brought Tuffs back to Canada before he ever made it to Florida. Desperate to escape the Wisconsin winters, he was invited to consider a position at a synagogue in Ottawa. His mind was made up for him when a congregant enthusiastically offered: “Rabbi, you’ll be able to skate to work on the Rideau Canal four months a year.”

In addition to all else, Tuffs obtained a doctorate in ministry, for which he wrote a dissertation about masculine spirituality, which was published as a book. He was a rabbinic fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem for five years and studied at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.

Reflecting back on his life, Tuffs can’t recall precisely where or how he first connected with Habonim. Everything that came after, though, can be traced back to that early Vancouver connection.

Tuffs’ book is available in ebook format on Amazon, though it is currently not available to order in Canada as a hardcopy.

Posted on September 1, 2023August 29, 2023Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags Allan Tuffs, Judaism, rabbinical life
Zack exhibit celebrates nature

Zack exhibit celebrates nature

Enda Bardell (photo from Enda Bardell)

Creativity manifests itself in people’s lives in different ways and at different times. For Enda Bardell, various forms of art occupied her for decades, while Mike Cohene discovered woodcarving only a few years ago, on his way to retirement. Their double show, Artistry in Wood and Water, opened at the Zack Gallery on July 26.

Bardell told the Independent that she was born in Estonia. In 1944, when she was a young child, her family fled from Estonia, then occupied by the Nazis, to Sweden. Her mother worked at a paper factory there, and Bardell played with paper dolls she made herself. She also drew all the dolls’ colourful outfits. “I gave the dolls away to other girls, to make friends,” she recalled. “My first attempts at fashion design.”

A few years later, the family was forced to move again. The Russian communist government wanted the return of all the Estonians who had escaped the Nazis during the war, and Sweden was going to comply with that demand. But Bardell’s father didn’t want to live in communist Russia, so they became refugees again, this time ending up in Canada.

“In 1951, we came to Winnipeg,” said Bardell. “I went to school there and I desperately wanted to fit in. To belong. To be Canadian. I participated in many school clubs and activities. Entered an art class, too. My teacher praised me and recommended that I send one of my drawings to an interschool art competition. I did. And I won. I knew then that I was an artist.”

Interested in landscapes and abstracts, Bardell painted a lot as a teenager, but, after her high school graduation, she became deeply involved in fabric art. “I sold my batiks at craft fairs and house parties. People liked them, and someone suggested I should open my own store,” she said. “I did. I designed lots of different textile objects: skirts, pillowcases, aprons, etc. I felt that I needed a business course, in addition to my art education, so I took it. My store was very successful.”

But, as soon as the store achieved that success, running it lost its challenges. “I became bored,” said Bardell. “It was time for a change.”

She sold the store and did many other things in her professional life. “I always want to try something new, something I’ve never tried before. At one time or another, I was a lamp designer. I worked in banking. I was a realtor. I designed costumes for the Vancouver movie industry,” she said.

She also traveled a lot. “I have visited 38 countries. I like adventures, like it when I can’t speak the tongue. Then I have to express myself through body language. I have to be creative,” she said.

Art always shimmered on the periphery of her life, a constant creative supplement to her various commercial careers. First, abstract oils and acrylics, and, later, watercolours. Painting eventually metamorphosed into the focus of her existence. In the past two decades, she has participated in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad. In 2008, she even participated in an art show in her native Estonia, the Estonian Art in Exile exhibition at KUMU, the National Museum of Art in Tallinn. KUMU acquired one of her acrylic abstracts for their permanent collection; another of her paintings is in the Tartu Art Museum in Estonia. Her paintings are represented by many local galleries.

The current exhibition at the Zack is the result of a trip Bardell took to Yukon shortly before the COVID pandemic temporarily closed all travel. “My son lives in Yukon,” she said. At his prompting, she applied and was granted residency for one month at Ted Harrison Cabin in 2018. “We hired an RV and traveled there for two weeks,” she said. “Yukon was amazing: mountains, rivers, lakes. The place resonated with me. I took 1,400 photos during our travels. Based on the selection from those photos, I painted 40 watercolour pieces during my stay at the cabin. It was a privilege to stay in that wonderful place, especially because I had met Ted previously.”

Many of Bardell’s paintings in this series involve rivers and lakes. “I like water,” she said. “I have always lived on the water, except for one year in Winnipeg. I swim year-round here, summer and winter. Sometimes, I have seals swimming with me. It feels magical.”

When she submitted her Yukon series to the Zack Gallery, it was accepted, on the condition that it would be a double show, as gallery exhibitions must have a Jewish connection. Bardell’s Jewish connection became Mike Cohene, a local woodcarver. His colourful carved fish complement perfectly Bardell’s watercolours of Yukon’s rivers and lakes.

Unlike Bardell, Cohene didn’t do anything artistic until 2009. “I had a solid clothing business,” he said. “Awhile back, I started thinking about retiring and selling the business.”

photo - Mike Cohene
Mike Cohene (photo by Linda Babins)

In the summer of 2009, Cohene visited Steveston Farmers Market. “They had a booth of the Richmond Carvers Society – I thought their works were outstanding,” he said. “I always whittled but I never considered myself artistic. I started talking to the man in the booth, expressing my admiration. He said anyone could learn to do it. He invited me to come to the club meeting in September. I went.”

Since that day, he has learned a lot about the artistry and the technique of woodcarving. His journey began with woodcarving classes at the society. Later, he took a course at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and enrolled in carving workshops.

“My first carving was a bear cub,” he said. “Then I made a dolphin. Then I started carving fish and birds…. I’ve always been a fisherman, but I never studied fish anatomy before. I caught a fish and tossed it into a bucket. Now, I catch a fish and study it: the fins, the tail, the scales, how the colours change. I look at fish from a new perspective.”

In 2017, Cohene participated in his first two-artist exhibition at the Zack Gallery, with photographer Joanne Emerman. Since then, his art has become even more refined. “I learned more sophisticated techniques and tools,” he said. “I got several residencies in B.C. and Oregon.” Three years ago, he began teaching woodcarving to other Richmond Carvers Society members.

To create his wooden creatures as life-like as possible, Cohene uses various reference materials. “Mostly I use my own photographs,” he said. “When other people photograph wildlife, they give it their own interpretation, but I want to follow my own vision.”

His statues of fish include rocks and corals, all carefully carved and painted in bright, realistic colours. “Sometimes, one statue takes up to 20 coats of paint – different wood parts absorb paint with different intensity,” he explained.

He also uses tree branches as mounting blocks – they are not carved, just sawed off, polished and lacquered. “I only use dead wood for my statues. I often walk along the beach and pick up interesting pieces of driftwood. I’ve never harmed even one living tree,” he said.

Recently, Cohene has started exploring First Nation carving. The motifs attract him, and he has several pieces on display at the gallery, including two decorative oars.

He also creates Judaica – mezuzot, chanukiyot and dreidels – some of which can be seen at the gallery. Cohene has been to Israel 34 times. “Once, I brought 12 kilograms of olive wood with me from Israel, and I make many of my Judaica pieces from the reclaimed Israeli wood,” he said. “Olive wood has such a beautiful texture. And dreidels are fun to make.”

Whatever he works on, Cohene always gives it his all. “For me,” he said, “woodcarving is a form of self-fulfillment.”

Artistry in Wood and Water runs until Sept. 5. To learn more, visit the artists’ websites: endabardell.com and mikecohene.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Format ImagePosted on August 18, 2023August 17, 2023Author Olga LivshinCategories Visual ArtsTags carving, Enda Bardell, environment, Judaica, Mike Cohene, painting, watercolour, Yukon, Zack Gallery
Educating differently

Educating differently

Ada Glustein’s passion for learning and teaching shines through in her self-published memoir Being Different. (photo from Ada Glustein)

Duke’s father would beat him. Tien, a refugee from Cambodia, had witnessed unimaginable violence. Louise was in and out of foster care because her father had drug addictions and her mom was emotionally unstable.

These are just a few of the countless children Ada Glustein encountered in her time as a teacher. Many of her young charges – she taught kindergarten mostly – faced harsh conditions at home and adult-sized problems. She shares her and their experiences with kindness and compassion in her memoir Being Different: From Friday Night Candles to Compassionate Classroom, which she self-published last year. She dedicates the book to her “parents, grandparents and ancestors whose struggles and strengths brought them to Canada, where at last they found their place to call home.” She also writes, “To my children and grandchildren, whose journeys bring the hope for a future of respect, social justice and belonging for all.”

While Glustein was born and raised in Ottawa, her Jewish Orthodox grandparents and parents came from Russia, from an area that became Ukraine. Part 1 of Being Different – Where I Am From: Stories of Home and Community – is about Glustein’s family and her early years. “Though my parents considered themselves to be modern,” she writes, “to me they seemed to live in a world caught between the old and the new.”

From her perspective, her father believed she asked too many questions and her mother fretted too much over her safety. But they came from a different time and place, more traditional and more dangerous. “My family comes from a place where the grass is greener somewhere else. Any place that is not Eastern Europe, not within the Pale of Settlement. Any place to leave behind the pogroms and the poverty, the losses of children who died in childbirth or wasted away from consumption. I do understand the silence,” she writes.

“But I also understand the richness of life’s difficult experiences and their inevitability. To allow those experiences to touch me, even to hurt me, helps me to live a full human life, to live with the reality of how things are.”

Part 1 of Being Different is about Glustein’s efforts to understand her place and who she is within her family. Part 2 – Where Do I Belong? Lessons at School – takes that exploration of identity and differentness into the broader world, where Glustein has to confront Christmas plays, lecherous older men, peer dynamics and a mix of teachers with different approaches, among other life lessons. In Part 3 – Becoming a Teacher: Finding My Way Home – we see how Glustein translates what she has learned into being an educator. And, honestly, if only every teacher could be like Glustein – not because she is perfect, but because she cares, and is continually learning.

Glustein graduated from Ottawa Teachers’ College, completed her bachelor of education at the University of British Columbia and her master of arts at Simon Fraser University. She taught for many years – in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver – and also became a faculty associate and sessional instructor at SFU, where she taught teachers. After she retired, she became a member of two writing groups and has had several of her works published. Being Different won a silver medal for Canada-West Region, non-fiction, in this year’s Independent Publisher Book (“IPPY”) Awards, and deservedly so.

Being Different is charming and heartbreakingly honest, written in short, crisp chapters, giving it a sense of immediacy. It is a call for all of us to be more patient with one another, to keep an open mind and to understand the impact our actions have on other people, especially children. In her openness about her own imperfections and missteps, Glustein is also asking us to be kind to ourselves. A more accepting and inclusive world begins with us, after all.

Being Different will be engaging to any reader – it will foster many a childhood memory – but should be a must-read for anyone interested in becoming an educator. It is available on Amazon.

Format ImagePosted on August 18, 2023August 17, 2023Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags Ada Glustein, Being Different, culture, education, teaching
Treatise on war, peace

Treatise on war, peace

Left to right: Tom Pickett, Advah Soudack, Kate Besworth and Karthik Kadam in Bard on the Beach’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which runs to Aug. 13. (photo by Tim Matheson)

Bard on the Beach rarely presents Shakespeare’s history plays. The last time Vancouver audiences were treated to one of the House of Lancaster trilogies was in 2011. Like Julius Caesar, currently playing on the Mainstage, Henry V is a timely production, based on world events. Unlike Julius Caesar, which is set in modern times, director Lois Anderson has envisioned the setting for Henry V as an indeterminate time in a wartorn future.

In Henry V, there is a device Shakespeare often used – a play within a play. A traveling troupe of nine actors, seeking shelter from a raging storm, suitcases in hand, arrives in an apocalyptic time to present their version of Henry V. Their ultimate message: make love, not war.

When Henry IV died, his 16-year-old son, Prince Hal, ascended to the throne of England. His father had, on his deathbed, made it clear to his son that, to take on the crown responsibilities, he had to give up his profligate lifestyle and his association with the lower-class tavern set, including his mentor Falstaff. Once on the throne, and taking government matters seriously, Henry V is surrounded by ambitious advisors who encourage him to invade France as part of the ongoing Hundred Years War between the two countries. Reluctant at first, the arrival of an emissary at his court with a “gift” of tennis balls (analogous to a slap in the face) from the cocky French Prince, the Dauphin, convinces Henry to go to war.

On the battlefield, Henry comes of age, transitioning from an impressionable youth to a fierce leader of men. Although vastly outnumbered, the English are ultimately successful in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, spurred on by Henry’s rousing now-iconic call to arms: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”

As part of the boy-to-man transition, Henry takes a hard line with his tavern pals, who have also joined the fight for king and country – condemning one to death for stealing a loaf of bread and eschewing the pleas for reconciliation from a dying Falstaff.

The audience is guided through the story by a narrator, the Chorus, who welcomes us to “the show” and provides numerous asides that give context and meaning to what is happening on stage, both in the action and in Henry’s mind (manifested by flashbacks to his carefree days of youth).

All the cast, save for the eponymous lead, play multiple roles and Anderson has chosen to always keep the actors on stage. When not involved in a scene, they sit off to the side. Costume changes take place right in front of the audience. The intimate Douglas Campbell Theatre allows for this up-close-and-personal action.

The women in this production are standouts. Jewish community member Advah Soudack not only acts, doing double-duty portraying Mistress Quickly (one of the tavern denizens) and the emissary Mountjoy, but also has a chance to show off her vocal skills with a haunting solo. Newcomer Marlee Griffiths is simply delightful as the French princess Katharine, especially as she practises English with her maid. Emilie Leclerc is both the narrator and French Queen Isabelle, and makes her Bard debut with a strong performance.

Kate Besworth plays Henry V in a gender reversal. Anderson’s vision encompasses the insecurity and angst of a teenager suddenly placed in charge of a country at war, who must make decisions with far-reaching consequences. Yet that same youth can be painfully shy when it comes to wooing, winning and wedding Princess Katherine (a strategic alliance that helps broker peace between the warring nations). Diminutive Besworth ably portrays these two sides of Henry’s character.

Among the male actors, Billy Marchenski is a tough Exeter; Craig Erickson, Henry IV; Tom Pickett, the King of France; and Karthik Kadam, the Dauphin. Munish Sharma gets to play with the role of portly Falstaff.

However, the real stars in this rendering are the designers. Kudos to all of them, starting with Jewish community member Amir Ofek in charge of the set design. In the program notes, he writes, “Director Lois Anderson and myself reimagined this production as an immersive audience experience that starts from the moment you enter the performance space.” He certainly accomplished this goal. When you step through the front tent flap, you are transported into a futuristic sepia-and-earth-tone world, chairs haphazardly stacked, looking like they are about to fall over (a metaphor for the chaos of the world), and an inner tent made of burlap sacks stitched together (scavenged from various local coffee shops), all atop a cracked, parched dirt floor. You really do feel like you are in a tent in the middle of a battlefield. The chairs are used to represent everything from beds to thrones to canons to barricades to weapons.

Mara Gottler’s costumes reflect the “anytime and no time” design mandate she was given and lend themselves to the quick on-stage changes. She wanted to “convey a visual narrative of war and love,” and accomplishes this with different colour palettes for the French and English courts and the tavern gang. Sophie Tang’s lighting, together with Joelysa Pankanea’s musical score, complete the effect. Original songs for the troupe add a novel layer to the production and choreographer/fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis deserves a mention for the clever battle scenes.

Anderson’s vision is certainly a treatise on the evils – and inevitability – of war, yet still holds out a glimmer of hope for redemption through love.

Henry V runs until Aug. 13. For tickets, visit bardonthebeach.org or call the box office, 604-739-0559.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

Format ImagePosted on July 21, 2023July 20, 2023Author Tova KornfeldCategories Performing ArtsTags Advah Soudack, Bard on the Beach, Shakespeare, social commentary, theatre

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