Category: Arts & Culture

Azrieli music prizes

The Azrieli Music Project (AMP), established to celebrate, foster and create opportunities for the performance of high-quality new orchestral music on a Jewish theme or subject, is launching two new prizes: the Azrieli Prize in Jewish Music, an international prize for a recently composed or performed work by a living composer, and the Azrieli Commissioning Competition, for a Canadian composer of any age. Each prize is for a new work of Jewish orchestral music and carries a value of $50,000.

The Azrieli Prize in Jewish Music is an international prize, awarded to the living composer of a recently composed and/or performed work of orchestral Jewish music of between 15 and 25 minutes duration. The work must have been written in the last 10 years (after Jan. 1, 2005) and have never been commercially recorded. Composers may be of any age, experience level, nationality, faith, background or affiliation. This prize is limited to Canadian citizens or permanent residents. The deadline for submissions by open nomination is Jan. 1, 2016. A written proposal of the work to be composed, plus two excerpts of three-minutes each from previously completed works (score and recording) must be submitted by March 15, 2015. The deadline for the completed composition will be July 1, 2016.

The AMP is delighted to confirm its partnership with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and maestro Kent Nagano, who will perform the winning works at the Azrieli Music Project Gala Concert at Maison symphonique on Oct. 19, 2016, in Montreal.

Dr. Sharon Azrieli Perez, noted operatic soprano and scholar in Jewish and cantorial music, spearheaded the creation of the new prize. “Music has always played an important role in the development of cultural identities,” she said. “Whether through folk traditions, in liturgical settings or in the concert hall, music reflects history and soul. In creating this extraordinary opportunity for composers of Jewish orchestral music, we hope to sustain music’s vital continuity through the long and rich history of Jewish people and culture. The Azrieli Music Project will become the medium for innovation, creation and risk-taking by today’s most inspired orchestral composers.”

The question “What is Jewish Music?” is at the heart of a constantly evolving cultural dialogue. Taking into account the rich and diverse history of Jewish musical traditions, the AMP defines “Jewish music” as music that incorporates a Jewish thematic or Jewish musical influence. Jewish themes may include biblical, historical, liturgical, secular or folk elements. Defining Jewish music as both deeply rooted in history and tradition and forward-moving and dynamic, the AMP encourages themes and content drawn from contemporary Jewish life and experience. The AMP challenges orchestral composers of all faiths, backgrounds and affiliations to engage creatively and critically with this question in submitting their work.

Joseph Rouleau, one of the world’s foremost operatic basses and honorary president of Jeunesses Musicales Canada, will serve as chair of the AMP advisory council. He said, “It is a tremendous pleasure to help launch this significant new prize, which offers such extraordinary opportunities – for the two composers who will have their work performed by Maestro Nagano and the OSM, and for the public, who will benefit from the creation of two new works of art on the fascinating theme of Jewish music.”

Rouleau is joined on the advisory council by Azrieli Perez, Canadian composer Ana Sokolović, Judge Barbara Seal, CM, and classical music philanthropist David Sela. The AMP jury will be announced at a later date.

For details, score guidelines, deadlines and the online application form, visit azrielifoundation.org/music.

Contribute to Legacies

PK Press is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of Living Legacies: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women. Edited by Liz Pearl – a Toronto-based educator and therapist specializing in psychogeriatrics and the expressive art therapies – the collection includes personal narratives, mini-memoirs and legacy writing from women across the country.

image - Living Legacies Vol. 4 cover
PK Press is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of Living Legacies.

“What Living Legacies clearly indicates is that, in fact, we do not need to open our TV sets or buy glossy magazines to find inspiration. It is truly in our midst and we seem to have forgotten that our most profound life lessons can come from our mothers, sisters, girlfriends, children and, yes, ourselves. Liz has brought new meaning to the word legacy by making it so contemporary and alive. Her notion that we need to celebrate the legacies in our midst is unique; we all need to look around ourselves and rejoice in this wisdom,” writes Ina Fichman, president/producer of Intuitive Pictures Montreal, in the foreword to the fourth volume, which was published last year. One of the contributors to that collection is Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, with a story called “Sacrifice.”

Each volume of Living Legacies is available for purchase at a cost of $20 per copy plus shipping, and there is an order form online (at.yorku.ca/pk/ll-order.htm). PK Press updates are on Facebook, facebook.com/PKPress. For submission guidelines, email Pearl at liz_pearl@sympatico.ca.

Barry Sisters recordings now available

Left to right: Yiddish music icons, Merna and Claire Barry, entertained generations of Jewish Americans with their jazzy versions of Yiddish songs. (photo from rsa.fau.edu)

For more than 40 years, the Bagelman Sisters, later known as the Barry Sisters, were the darlings of Jewish entertainment. Their recordings could be found in almost every Jewish household in the 1950s and ’60s. The younger of the two sisters, Merna, passed away in 1976. The older sister, Claire, died on Nov. 22, 2014, in Hollywood, Fla., at 94.

Who were the Barry Sisters?

On the surface, they were two beautiful girls, dressed in the latest fashion, hair perfectly coiffed, singing with sultry voices that could make your heart leap. But their impact was great.

Born in New York, the two sisters were originally known as the Bagelman Sisters. Many saw them as the Yiddish answer to the popular Andrews Sisters in the 1940s. They combined Jewish folk songs and Yiddish theatre ditties with swing arrangements and perfect harmony. When Clara and Minnie changed their names to Claire and Merna, the Bagelman Sisters became the Barry Sisters. The duo has often been credited with creating Yiddish swing, a music genre that did not exist previously.

The glamorous Barry Sisters were regular guests on Yiddish radio programs like Yiddish Melodies in Swing. They toured with The Ed Sullivan Show to the Soviet Union and performed in Israel in October 1962. The popularity of their catchy and jazzy tunes may have paved the way for the Broadway hit Fiddler on the Roof and the klezmer revival of the late 1970s.

The Judaica Sound Archives at the Recorded Song Archives at Florida Atlantic University has 41 recordings by this dynamic duo of Yiddish music, including: “Abi Gezunt,” “In Meine Oigen Bistie Shain,” “Channah from Havannah,” “Bublitchki,” “Dem Neyem Sher” and many others.

For more Barry Sisters recordings, visit rsa.fau.edu/barry-sisters. Due to copyright concerns, only snippets can be heard on the public website, however, full versions are available to users of the RSA Research Station, rsa.fau.edu.

Niels Falch is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and is currently writing a dissertation on the influence of Jewish music in American popular songs. This article appears courtesy of the Recorded Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University, rsa.fau.edu.

Brodie lands Beckett role

Leanna Brodie plays spinster Ms. Fitt (and the boy Jerry) in Blackbird Theatre’s Canadian première of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall,  at the Cultch until Jan. 24. (photo from Leanna Brodie)

She is an actor, playwright, librettist, feminist, social activist – bilingual on top of all that – and just landed a coveted role in Blackbird Theatre’s Canadian première of Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, running at the Cultch until Jan. 24. Leanna Brodie is one talented person.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, she sat down with the JI to talk shop during a rehearsal break.

Born and raised in rural Ontario, Brodie said, “I am a bit of an odd duck as far as Judaism goes, my father was Jewish but my mother was not. She came from rural Ontario. My upbringing was secular but I have a Jewish soul. My family always communicated through jokes, something that I see as being steeped in Jewish culture. I also see curiosity as part of my Jewish heritage, which is a good thing because you understand thought processes better, which I think I bring to my work.”

She went to drama school at the University of Guelph and was able to support herself as an actor in her first years at the job. As she got older, however, there were fewer roles available and she reconsidered her future. She had never before pictured herself as a playwright. “I was chatting with a bunch of girlfriends one day and we were complaining that there were no acting parts for women in their 30s and 40s. So, I thought, I am not going to sit around, wait by the phone until I get called for a part, I am going to write something for women. I finished my first play in five weeks. Since that time, I have written over 50 roles for women.”

Brodie now has three successful plays and one opera to her credit. Her topics are often motivated by contemporary social issues – homophobia, fundamentalism, the environment, to name a few. In The Book of Esther, she explores some of these issues through the eyes of a young country girl coming to the big city. “I think that play was the most autobiographical for me even though there is a little bit of you in everything you write. Here I was coming from rural Ontario to Toronto and I had a phobia of subways.”

She actually took on one of the roles in The Book of Esther. “That was like an out-of-body experience for me. Once you are in a scene, then it is like any other gig and you do your bit and walk on and off, but, when not in a scene, I could not resist the temptation to be in the wings and listen to the audience reaction to my play.”

As an actor, she has appeared across Canada and, in one of her first jobs in Vancouver – a role in Pi Theatre’s Terminus – she was nominated for a Jessie award.

Her writing is done in her down time from being on stage. “Acting is all-consuming, all your antennae are out for anything that will help your performance, any creative juice. During rehearsal, you are entirely focused. You can act in more than one show at a time but you cannot write at the same time.”

Brodie is on a temporary hiatus from writing as she hones her thespian skills with All That Fall, a bucolic play – a perverse combination of comedy and tragedy – that Beckett wrote for radio audiences. He wanted the words to come “out of the dark,” to be an auditory experience, not a visual one. He resisted attempts to have the play transformed into a stage production (even Sir Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman could not get his permission to produce the play on stage). It was only recently that his estate, at the urging of British director Trevor Nunn, allowed a London production, which played to critical acclaim and ultimately crossed the pond to Broadway. Now, Canadian audiences are in for a treat from this Irish wordsmith.

The story is as follows. A 70ish, garrulous, overweight Mrs. Rooney trudges the Irish country roads to meet her blind husband’s train at the station. On the way, she encounters an assortment of quirky characters who are using various modes of transportation – a cart, a bicycle, an automobile – to go about their daily business. Against this backdrop, they pass the time exchanging droll comments that border on the absurd, reflective of Beckett’s existential angst. The train is late. On the walk back home, as the old couple verbally spar, the audience begins to sense that there is a mystery lurking behind the dialogue.

This is the first Beckett work that has a woman as the main character. That, along with the radio format, drew Brodie to the play. “Beckett is on every actor’s bucket list,” she said. “There are so very few opportunities in his repertoire to land a female role.”

Brodie actually plays two characters: a religious spinster, Miss Fitt, and a young boy, Jerry. “This play is fresh and interesting and full of Irish humor. Usually with Beckett you have those unforgettable stark images, like two trashcans or a dead tree. Here, the dynamics are different. There is more lushness than in any [other] Beckett play because of the demands of radio, and there is more of a sense of a real place. You get the impression that Beckett sees the traditional Irish life dying around him and he uses very black humor to protect himself from this perceived dark abyss.”

She added, “Unlike Beckett’s iconic Waiting for Godot, where they say nothing happens twice, in All That Fall, something is always happening and what the person, the protagonist, is waiting for actually appears.”

“Part of the allure of the format is the fact that the audience becomes the collaborator with you and creates the world, it becomes a cooperative venture between the actors and the audience.”

Brodie has the radio bug in her blood. Her father had a morning show called Breakfast with Brodie and was a voice artist. She has worked in radio drama for the CBC. “I was wistful about losing the radio show format in Canada and was atoning for the fact that I feel like I killed radio drama in this country, as one show I worked on, The Seeds of Our Destruction, was the last stand-alone radio show CBC aired. So, I really wanted to do this show to sort of redeem myself. Part of the allure of the format is the fact that the audience becomes the collaborator with you and creates the world, it becomes a cooperative venture between the actors and the audience.”

About why Vancouver audiences should see this play, Brodie said, “Beckett is arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century and this play is done from an aspect never seen or heard before and who knows if we will ever have this chance again. Also, you get to see an extremely talented professional cast [William Samples, Lee Van Paassen, Adam Henderson and Gerard Plunkett], who get it right.”

This writer had the good fortune to sit in on the first read-through of the play. Director Duncan Fraser put the five actors through their paces, scripts in hand at separate microphones on the stage. The actors also are responsible for all of the sound effects, the rattling wind, a bothersome wasp, the opening and closing of doors, the crunching of feet on gravelly roads, the whistle of the train. Just watching the props used to create the noises was an experience. However, the real experience is being immersed in this lost world of radio drama where for 75 uninterrupted minutes you can let your imagination soar.

For tickets, visit thecultch.com or call 604-251-1363.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

Interpreting time and place

Derek Gillingham at the opening of New Work from the Road. (photo from Derek Gillingham)

Derek Gillingham’s solo show New Work from the Road at the Zack Gallery looks like a travelogue, where the artist’s moments and memories have been captured by a paint brush. The show consists of his abstract paintings of the last few years. “Abstract painting is much more challenging than figurative,” Gillingham said recently in an interview with the Independent. “Such a painting is its own world. I can’t refer to an object, an image when I paint. But shapes and colors fascinate me.”

He explained that his latest artistic trend emerged with the drawings he made in California a few years ago. “Because of my job for the movie industry, I was constantly on the move, never staying in one place for long. I couldn’t paint as I did before – like landscapes of British Columbia. I couldn’t get familiar with any area. No recognizable landmarks. So I went with what I heard and saw: not objects, but colors and music, the sounds of cars and subway tickets, candy wrappers and moss-covered walls. I’d walk from work along a street and see posters, hear songs teenagers play on their phones.

I’d come home and sketch. I made piles of sketches, just scribbles, swirls and smudges, shapes and colors.”

His California sketches gave birth to paintings that reflected the green and gold and warmth of the Pacific coast. There is always the ocean and profusion of greenery. Colors interact and morph into each other, nurturing the whole. Although there is no sense of location, the artist’s inner meditations manifest through the looking glass of his perception.

When he then moved to London, England, his creative tune changed, echoing his surroundings.

“London was cooler and harder. It’s a very energetic, brash, intense city. California is a much softer place. London is also much more urban. Even music is different.”

His sketches changed, too, and the paintings from London don’t have the flowing quality of his California pictures. No bubbles or waves. The canvases sport sharper angles and longer bands. The shapes are leaner, less lush, and the lines dart across the images at full speed, like the rhythms of hard rock.

“I would pass a restaurant on a street, see its red sign and think: I should remember this color. Then I would come home and slash such a red on the painting. My paintings are not chaos. There is balance and order there.”

One of his London paintings resembles a bunch of seaweed. “We were in a Japanese restaurant,” he recalled. “I looked at seaweed, its vivid color. It was so beautiful. I kept the colors and shapes in my head for this painting.”

Another London painting has an unusual name: “Two Women at the St. Paul Colony.” Gillingham explained its etymology. “We were in London during the Occupy movement. There was a camp of those people beside St. Paul’s Cathedral. One day, my wife went there to take some photos, just as I was finishing this painting. Then I checked the internet and learned that one of our friends, another woman, went there at the same time. The painting is not political, but the title seemed appropriate.”

Gillingham said he doesn’t consider his art to be political. “I don’t want to push any agenda. I have opinions, like everyone else, but I don’t transfer them into my paintings. Art shouldn’t be divisive. When I paint, I don’t set up to make someone believe or tell him what to think. It’s more about esthetics. If a piece of my art is going to hang in someone’s home, it’s going to affect people, and I’d rather it inspired something positive.”

His London period produced several large and beautiful paintings, upbeat and positive; as soon as he moved back to Canada, to Montreal, his art changed again.

“I never look back at a location, never revisit. A new place inspires a new theme, a new atmosphere. It always reflects the place.”

In Montreal, he and his wife lived in a small, furnished apartment, with no extra space and, unlike the London paintings (he had a studio in London), the Montreal series consists of very small multimedia pieces.

“Montreal is frenetic, everything is going on,” he said. “The city really has strong street art. There are posters everywhere, posters on top of posters, going back for years. Sometimes someone would try to remove them, and the slice would be a couple fingers deep, revealing layers of letters and colors and zig-zaggy forms. I fell in love with these accidental images. I wanted to incorporate them into my art. I started cutting off the slabs of posters and painted on top.”

His Montreal collages are angular and aggressive, despite their small size. The colors and shapes vibrate and overlap, fighting with each other for space domination.

Only two paintings of the show belong to Vancouver, but Gillingham has only been back in this city for a few months. A Vancouver series is still in development.

New Work from the Road opened on Jan. 8 and will continue until Feb. 8. To learn more, visit derekgillingham.net.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

E-books for deaf kids

A person – as opposed to an avatar – signs American Sign Language in the eMotion Stories app.

It is hard to beat the pleasure of sitting down with your children or grandchildren and reading them a bedtime story, whether that story is a classic like Goldilocks, a Yiddish folktale or even a book written by someone you know. This simple pleasure was not even an option until recently for families with deaf kids, as Israeli American, Eyal Rosenthal, 34, discovered.

While visiting family in New York, Rosenthal had a chance to read a bedtime story to his nephew before heading out to visit with a friend over coffee. Rosenthal told his friend about his nephew, and she told him about her niece, who was born deaf.

“I asked her how she reads to her niece,” said Rosenthal. “She said, ‘We don’t…. We can go to Barnes and Noble across the street and you can find some books with baby sign language or whatever, but you won’t find any actual story to read to a deaf child.’”

Learning of this inspired Rosenthal to look for a solution. “Being an Israeli, we tend to think we can solve everything,” he noted. And, in this case, he could – he created an app called eMotion Stories.

Coming from a high-tech background and being an investor/developer of apps, Rosenthal initially mulled over the idea of creating an avatar to sign the books for eMotion Stories, but found that it was much simpler and less costly to have a live person do it.

“It’s the placement of a sign, the body language within that,” said Rosenthal. “To try to get an avatar to do that is incredibly difficult and costly, and probably something that’s 10 years down the road.”

The other problem Rosenthal encountered was that sign language varies from country to country. “It’s not a universal language,” he said. “Each country, each region, actually develops on its own.”

While Rosenthal was able to overcome most obstacles by himself, there were two that stumped him – the sign language itself, as noted, and the development work of the videos. “One of the good things about being in Israel, especially in Tel Aviv, is there are developers everywhere,” he said.

Rosenthal found Go UFO, a company that was just getting started at that time. On connecting with the Go UFO team, Rosenthal said, “It was like two minds meeting. The moment they heard the idea, they were like, we love this, we love your passion for it, we want to help you create it.”

Choosing the stories to feature was the next challenge. Rosenthal decided to start with the Brothers Grimm.

Since the whole concept began with Rosenthal wanting to enable his friend to share a story with her niece, he opted to do the stories in American Sign Language (ASL). And, to find a signer for the e-books, he went to New York Deaf Theatre. As for the illustrations, a Go UFO team member’s father was an illustrator, and he offered to have some of his friends help out (making it possible for Rosenthal to afford the illustrations).

“It was interesting convincing people to help when you don’t have the money to pay them what they want and you have to successfully convince them to do it anyway,” said Rosenthal. “That took some learning.”

As of now, five e-stories have been created for the iPad. When downloading the free app, the e-book of The Ugly Duckling is included. Each additional story is $4.59. The stories available are The Ugly Duckling and Goldilocks and the Three Bears so far, with Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs coming soon.

Rosenthal would like to produce five more books.

“The classic stories are ones that a parent can relate to because he/she read that story as a child and they can read it to their child,” he said. “One of the unfortunate facts I uncovered in the research is that the level of comprehension for deaf children is several levels below that of [hearing] children. This is a gap that widens through the years. One thing I was hoping was, at least, to be able to bridge that gap. When you’re 6 years old and you’re one year behind, it’s not the same as when you’re in high school and you’re … behind.”

One of the goals Rosenthal has for this coming year is to create a version in another language, one similar to ASL, the simplest example of which would be Canadian Sign Language.

“The guys at Go UFO are trying to create more of a platform where any country can simply add its sign language videos or an individual can add videos to a particular story and modify the text, since the illustrations already exist, to make it more broad,” said Rosenthal.

So far, the app has been downloaded 3,000 times.

“I’ve gotten emails from parents saying that they love it and when are more stories going to come out,” said Rosenthal. “Some were asking when an android version would come out.”

Rosenthal would like to create an android version, but that will require more funding, which he hopes to raise with a Kickstarter or Indigogo campaign.

Many people have been helping move the project along, such as members of the Israeli Society for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing. Rosenthal has also been recently approached by a deaf Israeli actor who asked Rosenthal to let him know when things proceed on the Israeli front because he would like to help.

Rosenthal said that without the Go UFO programmers eMotion Stories would never have come to fruition. “I’m incredibly indebted to those guys,” he said.

For more information about the app, visit emotionstories.com.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Music is the poetry of life

Local jazz musician Ayelet Rose Gottlieb happily juggles music and babies. “You have to have music, right? Music is life. It’s a necessity. And you have to have kids.” Gottlieb just released her fourth album, Roadsides, and her adorable six-month-old twins, a boy and a girl, don’t slow her down one bit.

photo - Ayelet Rose Gottlieb plays songs from her new album Jan. 16
Ayelet Rose Gottlieb plays songs from her new album Jan. 16. (photo from Ayelet Rose Gottlieb)

The music for all the songs on Roadsides was written by Gottlieb, with lyrics from work by various Israeli and Palestinian poets. “This project accumulated for a long time,” she told the Independent. “There’s lots of pain in Israel now, and nationalism is growing. It’s hard for me. Israel is my country. My mother’s family has lived there for 20 generations. All that time, there was a cultural interchange between Palestinians and Jews. It’s almost gone now.”

She feels that Israel today is missing a bridge between cultures, the connection that was flourishing even in her grandfather’s days. “People of all backgrounds love this land. I believe that it is possible to elevate beyond the hurts of the past decades. We should try to restart the intercultural conversation. The poets I chose for the songs on this album represent such diversity: Israeli and Palestinian, young and old, male and female, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. In a way, my album is a political statement, that of humanity. We can all coexist in Israel and the more we learn about each other, the more we talk, the better people we are.”

She recalled being a student in Jerusalem at a high school for the arts. “I started writing songs and performing when I was 17. For 10 years, I performed with Arnie Lawrence, the famous American jazz saxophone player. He lived in Israel in the last years of his life, and he became my teacher of jazz. He shaped my thinking. We often performed with Palestinian musicians, both in Israel and Palestine. Music is an international language. With music, you can communicate with anyone. But it was easier then – there was no wall.”

Some of the songs on Roadsides are light and quirky, while others are poignant, driven by emotions. All of them are in Hebrew, either originals or translations from Arabic. “When I compose songs, the text should trigger something inside me,” she explained of her approach. “It doesn’t have to be poetry. It could be a piece of prose, as long as it says something important. The quality of the text is paramount.”

Occasionally, she uses her own lyrics, though not often. She has songs set to passages of artist Wassily Kandinsky’s book on art and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech. Kandinsky, in particular, fascinated her as a subject, as she used to paint as well as compose. “I don’t do it anymore,” she confessed. “But I hear colors. Certain colors resonate with certain notes. It’s a personal interpretation, of course, when you set music to painting or paint to the music.”

Gottlieb’s songs are multifaceted, flowing around their listeners in audio waves, implying pictures and palettes, even if one doesn’t understand the Hebrew. No surprise then that she has fans all over North America. But her heart belongs to Israel, she said. “I fly to Israel a couple times each year, to perform and to connect with my family.” She also records in a New York studio, as a solo performer and as part of the quartet Mycale.

Musical collaborations increase her audience but also broaden her expressive facilities and add to her musical toolbox. She recorded one of the songs on Roadsides as a duet with Israeli pop star Alon Olearchik. Others, she wrote with particular musicians in mind.

Gottlieb also teaches composition, vocals and improvisation. In Israel, she taught at colleges. Here, she gives private lessons and workshops. “I enjoy working with children and adults, but I prefer adults, mature people who know what they want…. I learn a lot when I teach. Sometimes, I would explain a point to my students, and it would clarify the concept for me too. Students often surprise me. They do something unexpected, and I’d see a new perspective, realize a new way of doing things.”

Moving every few years has also helped to keep her creativity fresh. “We lived in New Zealand for a while, in New York and in the U.K.,” she explained. “Compared with New York, where there are many different cultures, Vancouver has a smaller music scene, fewer people to play for, fewer opportunities and venues. I’m still looking for my language here. Resonating with the place and the community is important, but it’s an interesting exploration and a wonderful place to raise babies.”

As for any parent, her children are an integral part of her life, and she plans to incorporate her music into their upbringing. “I dream of having house concerts at our place when the kids are a bit older. They should be exposed to music and art early. Art is playful. To be an artist, you have to keep some of the child in you alive.”

Gottlieb’s Roadsides CD release is Jan. 16 at the China Cloud on Main Street. To learn more, visit ayeletrose.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Look up to art

Sharon Tenenbaum’s work can be seen on billboards above highways in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. (photo by Sharon Tenenbaum)

Sharon Tenenbaum discovered her love of photography in 2006 on a trip to South East Asia. In 2014, only eight years later, she is a nationally recognized photographer. From Dec. 15 to Jan. 15, four of her photographs will be displayed on billboards along Canadian highways and bridges as part of Paint the City (paintthecity.org), an international initiative to promote arts in unexpected places.

Tenenbaum talked to the Independent about her transformation from an engineer dissatisfied with her career to a successful artist.

“Last year, I participated in a RAW Artists (rawartists.org) competition,” she said, explaining how her images found their way to the billboards. “RAW is an art organization supporting artists in the first 10 years of their career. I became a finalist, together with another artist. Then, the organizer called me and said she nominated us for the Paint the City project. I didn’t even know about them.”

According to Tenenbaum, Paint the City selected the winner through social media. They stipulated that the one who got more “Likes” on Facebook and Twitter would win. “I had to recruit all my friends and even my family in Israel, and my family and friends in turn incited everyone they knew to login and vote for me. I won. I guess I have more friends,” she joked.

In reality, it was a long road from her first travel photos to her sophisticated billboard images displayed on the highways of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

“At first, many people discouraged me. They would say: ‘She discovered a camera, so what?’ But I can’t see myself doing anything else. I didn’t care what anyone said. I have confidence in myself.”

photo - Sharon Tenenbaum: “A color photo doesn’t have to be as good as black and white."
Sharon Tenenbaum: “A color photo doesn’t have to be as good as black and white.” (photo from Sharon Tenenbaum)

In the beginning, what she did was photojournalism, documenting everyday life, she said. “In Asia, I took photos of buildings and people, but when I returned to Vancouver, I couldn’t photograph people here. It requires legal permissions, so I started photographing architecture, rediscovering Vancouver. I wasn’t just documenting anymore; it was my interpretation of what I saw.”

Out of her engineering background sprouted her passion for photographing things constructed by human beings. “I have a talent to see how elements of the whole work in harmony, how shapes and lines come together. I like modern architecture with its clean lines. The approach is artistic. The image has to speak to the heart.”

Her stark black and white images that won their places on billboards speak to people’s hearts. They show the artist’s unerring sense of light and shadows, her flair for the dramatic. Her quest for visual tension resulted in her unique series of bridges, all of them spectacular black and white instants in time and space. Some of them are Vancouver bridges, others she took during her travels.

“When you travel,” she explained, “you see everything with new eyes. It’s harder to achieve at home. I traveled a lot at first. Now I only travel to specific locations. If I want to photograph a certain bridge, I research it, then go there to take pictures.”

Most of her photographs are black and white. “When you use color in a photo, it steals the show,” she said. “A color photo doesn’t have to be as good as black and white. Sometimes, if you take color out of the image, it has no merit otherwise. Black and white photos are more challenging. The image must stand on its own. In many cases, color feels like cheating. I use color in my photos only when it’s essential, when color is what it’s all about. Color is an emotion. When I need to convey that emotion, I leave the colors intact. The same image seems to tell different stories when it’s in color or in black and white.”

Recently, she turned to a new technique, new stories infused with color. She started painting on top of her photographs. She applied this development not to the man-made structures but to something created by nature: trees.

“I started with one image of a tree, a photo from Portugal. There is a maple tree outside my window; it’s gorgeous in the fall. It inspired me. I wanted to convey such beauty with my image too, so I painted on top. Then I participated in Culture Crawl, and this painting was very successful. I started doing more.”

Like every artist, she strives to evolve, constantly finding fresh dimensions in her art. “I want to keep changing. I don’t want to have one style associated with me. Every artist needs to grow. After awhile, you get bored with the old stuff. Look at Picasso. He had five distinctive stages, each one unrecognizable from the others. Same with me. I have to keep reinventing myself.”

She also helps others reinvent themselves: she teaches, offering workshops in photo skills, as well as creativity. “I love teaching, love sharing what I know. Sometimes, when I teach, it clarifies the concept for me as well. I teach people how to be artists. Creativity has different phases. I teach my students how to get into each one, how to recognize and be receptive to new ideas. But then, each idea needs a follow up, lots of hard work. That’s also part of creativity.”

For more on her work, visit sharontenenbaum.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Providing an all-access pass

Elka Yarlowe is president and CEO of Access to Music Foundation. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Elka Yarlowe’s love affair with music started when she was very young. “I always listened to music or sang,” she remembered. “When I was four or five, I had my tonsils taken out in a hospital. My mom told me I was a very brave girl and asked me what I wanted as a reward. I said I wanted a piano.”

She got her piano, and her childhood in New York was steeped in notes and melodies. Her mother took her to see musical shows. Her relatives sang in a Yiddish theatre. She studied piano with a private teacher and participated in a school choir. “I was lucky. We had an exceptional musical program in my public school. In Grade 8, I knew I wanted to pursue music professionally,” she told the Independent.

She fulfilled her childhood dream and had a decades-long, successful career as an opera singer. Now, she wants to give an equal opportunity to local children, so they also can pursue a musical career if they choose. As president and chief executive officer of Access to Music Foundation, Yarlowe does what she can to make opportunities available to as many children as possible.

Since 2006, she has been a board member of the Music B.C. Industry Association. “In 2007, the Vancouver School Board made the first of many subsequent budget cuts to music programs,” she said. “In response, we started a charity and funded a music program in one Vancouver school. It wasn’t enough. More cuts followed in 2009. In 2010, I decided to leave the board and concentrate on the charity for music only. We called it Music B.C. Charitable Foundation. Last year, we changed the name to Access to Music.”

Currently, Access to Music funds programs in 20 provincial public schools and three aboriginal schools. “Our main goal is to fund instrument purchases for schools,” said Yarlowe. “Most instruments in the school system are over 20 years old, not fit for proper learning. If you start a hockey team at a school, you can’t have the children play hockey in 25-year-old skates. The same goes for musical instruments.”

According to Yarlowe, music education is a necessity: “Statistics show that children who play a musical instrument usually score 25 percent higher in any other discipline than children who don’t. Music is integral to our understanding of math and science. Any child in a school orchestra gets a fundamental sense of communication and cooperation, discipline and self-respect. Music develops both left and right sides of the brain. It is both science and art.”

Yarlowe lamented the fact that in this province, music programs often get cut first. “Last April, the school board wanted to cut all elementary school music programs. We fought that decision and won. The cut was postponed for one more year. We have a new battle ahead of us,” she said.

She explained that schools in the least economically advantaged areas of the province are affected most by these cuts. “Wealthier schools will continue to fund music through the parents’ efforts. That will create a disparity between poor and rich; deepen the divide. That’s why we fund the poor schools. We’re trying to level the playing field for all schoolchildren, to give all students equal access to musical education. Music is a catalyst for personal and social change. It’s part of organic education. Everyone needs it.”

Access to Music also offers mentorship programs, scholarships and intensive music clinics, and works with LGBTQ, at-risk and street-involved youth. “We offered our songwriting program to kids who face multiple barriers,” she said. “Some of them struggle with addiction. Others were victims of abuse or ran away from home. Many told me that music keeps them together, away from crime or suicide…. One gay boy wrote on his Facebook that participating in our song competition changed his life. Another street kid entered the Capilano jazz program, even though he still lives on the street. We try to provide barrier-free access to music for as many as we can. Today, about 8,000 children benefit from our programs. In the last several years, we purchased instruments for over $100,000. The need in this province is great.”

Many local organizations support the foundation with monetary donations or time, including Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Next April, 100 music students from Surrey and Burnaby will have “a day of play” with the VSO. “All day long, the kids will have intensive sessions with the VSO musicians,” Yarlowe explained. “Then they will meet Maestro [Bramwell] Tovey. And, in the evening, they will have a treat – they will see a live show at the Orpheum. For many of them, it will be their first live classical music performance and the first visit to the Orpheum. When I was at school, our music teacher arranged for us to go to the Lincoln Centre once a year for a music show or an opera. We want to give such an opportunity to [more] local students. We want to be able to reproduce the event with the VSO every year, and maybe have similar events in Victoria, Okanagan [and] Prince George.”

Passionate about the foundation, Yarlowe insisted, “Music is not a frill or icing on a cake. It’s a necessity. Everyone who ever played an instrument or sang a song enjoyed it. Everyone has a personal connection to his music, no matter if it’s classical, rock or jazz. If you put an instrument into someone’s hands, chances are high those hands would never pick up a gun.”

The recent city initiative Keys to the Streets, which encountered an enthusiastic response in the majority of Vancouverites, disappointed her. “I went crazy when I learned about it. I know it’s good to give anyone a chance to play on the street, but to think of all these pianos [potentially] ruined in the rain. I’d put them in schools around the province instead. For the cost of just moving those pianos to and from locations, I could probably buy 20 clarinets for 20 school orchestras.”

One of her duties as foundation president is asking for money. “People spend lots of dollars so their kids could learn hockey. Why not to learn music? There is a much better chance that a child could make music his profession, make a living from it than from hockey. Much lower chance of injuries or concussions, too.”

Access to Music has become Yarlowe’s personal crusade, her tikkun olam. “There is a proverb: ‘You’re not required to finish the work but you’re not allowed to turn your back on it.’ That’s my guideline. I have three great passions in my life: my family, my faith and my music. I may not be able to fund all the schools for all the music programs they need, but it doesn’t give me, any of us, permission to stop the efforts. I feel like all my life was a build up for my work with the foundation.”

To learn more about the foundation, visit accesstomusic.ca.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Exodus reinvents Moses saga

Moses (Christian Bale) and Nun (Ben Kingsley) star in Exodus. (photo from exodusgodsandkings.com/#)

Moses, as best I recall from Hebrew school and The Ten Commandments, was a reluctant prophet with a speech impediment who was ultimately persuaded by the unspeakable, unceasing suffering of his people – and God’s fearsome support – to confront Pharaoh and lead the Hebrews out of slavery.

My, how (biblical) times have changed. The much-anticipated Hollywood epic Exodus: Gods and Kings reinvents the saga of a people’s miraculous liberation as one rugged individualist’s journey of self-discovery, identity and profound purpose.

The fundamental matter of spirituality, which might be defined in this context as the courage and power of faith, comes up in conversation a few times but not in ways that impact the movie-goer’s experience. Your post-film repartee is more likely to centre on the curious and disconcerting form in which God (or is it an angel acting as his emissary?) appears.

Exodus: Gods and Kings, which opened everywhere Dec. 12, is a sun-blistered chunk of glowering, male-centric mythmaking. Aside from its oddly anti-climactic ending – recognizing that it’s a tough call how many desert miles and years to continue the tale after the Red Sea – this is a well-paced, continuously engaging piece of mainstream entertainment with the requisite amount of impressive visual effects (in 3D). Just don’t go expecting to be awed, or to have a religious encounter.

Title cards inform us at the outset that the year is 1300 BCE and the Hebrews have been slaves in Egypt for four centuries. However, “God has not forgotten them.”

Omitting the standard baby, basket and bullrushes, director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Steven Zailian (Schindler’s List) introduce Moses (Christian Bale) as a general and Ramses II (Joel Edgerton) as his best friend since childhood and heir to Pharaoh’s throne.

Exodus immediately launches into a full-scale, screen-filling battle scene – a preemptive attack that might be construed as a comment on the Iraq War – in which the seed of Ramses II’s paranoia and jealousy of Moses is planted. This section is designed to excite male viewers but also to inoculate them against the ensuing hours of banter, revelation, wilderness wandering and domesticity before the warrior hero returns to Egypt to blow things up real good. (You think I’m kidding, but Exodus boasts fiery explosions like any other self-respecting, would-be action movie.)

Even if he was raised as a prince of Egypt, the portrayal of Moses as self-confident and militarily adept takes some getting used to. It does explain, however, his disbelief when the gutsy Jewish elder Nun (Ben Kingsley) informs him that he was a lowly Hebrew infant smuggled upriver toward the Pharaoh’s palace.

The biblical story is quite familiar to us, of course, even if creative licence is employed via verbal flashbacks and narrative compression. Consequently, Exodus is most intriguing from a Jewish perspective for the ways it alternately evokes and evades the dominant events in the modern Jewish world – the Holocaust and Israel (its founding, existence and current relationship vis-a-vis the Palestinians).

The 20th-century genocide of Jews is alluded to in myriad ways, from the burning of the corpses of slaves to the Egyptians lined up to insult the Hebrews as they leave. (The Exodus is presented as complying with Ramses II’s order to get out, so it is a deportation.)

An earlier sequence, in which Ramses’ soldiers knock down doors and brutalize Hebrew families in an effort to find (and kill) Moses, inevitably, recalls the Nazis.

When The Ten Commandments opened in 1956, the Holocaust was so recent, and raw, that it didn’t need to be referenced. The horrific genocide did inform the movie, however, in that the general public needed no help rooting unequivocally for the Hebrews’ freedom.

Another key factor was the new state of Israel’s status as a universal symbol of hope and rebirth. That image no longer holds sway, and the filmmakers acknowledge the contemporary perception that the oppressed have become oppressors.

While Moses and Joshua strategize how to cross the Red Sea, and Ramses’ chariots thunder in pursuit, they take a moment to ponder the Hebrews’ eventual return to Canaan. Now numbering 400,000, Moses points out, “We would be seen as invaders.”

This is an unexpected acknowledgement of power, one that Arab audiences (in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Egypt, where Exodus: Gods and Kings opens Dec. 25 or shortly thereafter) will welcome. Evangelical Christians in the United States, another large target market, will have the opposite response, presumably.

Jews, of course, will interpret and respond to the film from yet another perspective. The Torah does lend itself to various readings, after all. So does this robust movie, even if it is unlikely to inspire study groups.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.