Fleetwood Mac's music featured in tribute concert
Northern Ontario Watch
YES Theatre is back with another outdoor summer concert with the music of Fleetwood Mac at The Refettorio in downtown Sudbury.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CTV News
8 minutes ago
- CTV News
Toronto's vibrant Pride parade to cap off weekend of celebrations, marches
Iranian-Canadian solo dance artist Artin Avaznia performs at Toronto's 2024 Pride festival. Avaznia is an Ottawa-born Iranian Canadian and is performing at Toronto Pride for the second year in a row this weekend. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout - Nautica Simone, (Mandatory Credit)
CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
Improv show about relationship keeps performers on their toes as they tour the Maritimes
Alex Rioux is keeping a secret from Jean-Michel Cliche and neither of them know what it is. They have been dancing around the subject for a while onstage, discussing the challenges of their domestic lives. Finally, Rioux tells Cliche the truth: They steal cheese from Loblaws. The secret doesn't come from Rioux; it comes from the audience. 'Before the show, our stage manager asks the crowd what the secret is in the form of an 'I am' question,' Cliche said. 'There's a projection that comes up with the secret. Everything after is completely improvised.' Cliche and Rioux are the stars of TILT, a show that explores a relationship between two characters with the novel twist being that every performance features a new secret pulled from the audience. 'The show begins as a scripted piece,' Cliche said. 'The first half of the show is a journey through their relationship. Clearly something is not being communicated between the two of them. It's very grounded. At a certain point Alex's character musters up the courage to share the secret.' Cliche is the associate artistic director of Solo Chicken Productions, a New Brunswick-based theatre company that is taking TILT on tour through the Maritimes this summer. 'The name TILT appeared before the story did,' he said. 'I was reading about Coen Brothers' movies and how they have this concept called the tilt. For me that was the crux of the show. We wanted a moment where everything got turned on its head. 'We thought it captured the energy of the show. We want audiences to feel that tilt with us.' TILT show TILT is going on tour in the Maritimes this summer. (Source: Andrew Finlay) Cliche discovered improvisation in high school when, in his words, his teacher dragged him to a class one day. 'I hadn't found my thing yet and it really connected with me,' he said. 'It's a really collaborative environment. You have to be so in tune with each other.' Cliche studied theatre in university and coached an improv team at his old high school, continuing to develop his craft. 'There's a lot more training and skill that goes into it than people can imagine,' he said. 'I describe it as more like a sport. You have to run your drills. When you get to a game, you don't know how those skills will come into play, but you always fall back on them. You're thinking about your ability to connect to your fellow performers.' Through his work, Cliche met and started to work with Rioux through Hot Garbage Players, building a natural rapport through countless performances. Cliche said TILT came about in the wake of Rioux's show 'Fruit Machine,' which explored the history of the LGBTQ+ purge from Canadian military, RCMP and civil service in the 1960s. 'Alex created this beautiful, really complex piece about the LGBT purge,' Cliche said. 'We were touring that play and once we were finished that tour, we were kind of thinking what's next? Let's jam something out. 'It was an artistic challenge to go, 'We want to make something smaller scale but just as effective and polished as previous works.' I always had an idea of a show that started scripted and became improv. It was an artistic challenge for ourselves that sounded exciting.' Jean-Michel Cliche Jean-Michel Cliche is pictured. (Source: Andrew Finlay) Cliche said audiences have cooked up some truly odd secrets for the second half of the show. 'You get thrown this ridiculous curve balls,' he said. 'Really strange, wild twists like, 'I'm doing secret deals behind the Payless Shoes depot.' 'It's been cool to play the same characters in these different iterations but finding heart is at the core of all of it. We both gravitate towards the heart of these characters. They feel like real people to us.' TILT will kick off its summer tour at Memorial Hall in Fredericton on July 24 and 25. Other shows include: DANSpace at Halifax Fringe Festival from Aug. 27 to Sept. 7 Marshlight Theatre in Sackville, N.B., on Sept. 19 and 20 BMO Theatre in Saint John on Sept. 24 For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
CBC
3 hours ago
- CBC
Indigenous-led projects are landing hits and winning awards. How are they making inroads?
Cody Lightning is far from alone. First of all, the Edmonton-based creator is surrounded by fellow community members on the set of Smudge the Blades, his upcoming film about hockey, growing up and Indigenous identity. But he's also part of a wave of new Indigenous talent — a raft of creators crafting a host of projects that, Lightning said, is unlike anything he's seen in his 30 years in the industry. "Throughout my adolescent years and teenage years, it was roles that I auditioned for, that were presented to me. And I adapted to that — to someone else's story," he said. "There was, like, one project per year that everyone knew about — everyone was trying to be on those projects. And now we're making our own." Alongside his upcoming film, there are projects running the gamut — from Reservation Dogs, the series about four Indigenous teenagers in Oklahoma that aired for three seasons on FX, to Rutherford Falls, the Michael Greyeyes-starring comedy written by Indigenous comedian Jana Schmieding. And then there are this year's Canadian Screen Awards-nominated titles North of North, Don't Even and Bones of Crows. Those projects are paired with Indigenous talent stepping in front of the camera, from Season 4 of True Detective, to Indigenous stars in series Dark Winds, American Primeval and Alaska Daily. Perhaps most notable is Lily Gladstone, who became the first Indigenous woman to be nominated for a best actress Academy Award — and the first to win a Golden Globe — for her turn in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. As to why we're seeing the swell now, Indigenous filmmaker and actor Jennifer Podemski said there are multiple reasons. The first could be historically laid groundwork. As Podemski has spoken about in the past, Indigenous-led productions often included mentorship programs, designed to train up-and-coming Indigenous creators to be ready to launch their own careers. That, she said, has paired with a shifted lens from decision-makers. Specifically, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, studios changed how they looked for talent. WATCH | Filmmaker and actor Jennifer Podemski on Indigenous resilience: Filmmaker/Actor Jennifer Podemski on Indigenous resilience 7 months ago Duration 1:46 Filmmaker and veteran actor Jennifer Podemski sat down with Tom Power to discuss her new series, Little Bird, how the story resonates with her own family history and making a production company that tells Indigenous stories with authenticity. "When people are casting for movies, they're more inclined to question ... 'Am I on the right side of history here, or am I perpetuating harmful narratives?'" Podemski said of the shift following Floyd's murder. "People became a little bit more aware of the steps that they were taking, and that's why we were seeing more Indigenous people on screen, maybe, where we wouldn't otherwise have seen them." Centralized source of funding As for the shift behind the camera and north of the border, Podemski credits that more to executive changes — specifically to the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO), which was created in 2017-18. While it began as an advocacy group, in 2021, the ISO began receiving federal funding earmarked for distribution to any Indigenous-led production headed to the screen. Kristy Assu, its director of funding programs, said that outreach has been furthered now that the ISO receives permanent government funding — including about $65 million to be distributed over the next five years. And starting this year, the ISO will administer the Canadian Media Fund's Indigenous Program, which allocates roughly $10 million annually to Indigenous-led productions. That sets up the ISO as a centralized source of funding for Indigenous creators in Canada, which has never happened before, Assu said. As a filmmaker herself, she said the change helps to break down systemic obstacles in the industry: While the Canadian Media Fund's Indigenous Program existed previously, there was "very little to access" — even more so for emerging, unestablished filmmakers, she said. "I think that's why we're seeing this huge surge in [Indigenous] filmmakers," Assu said. "Because there's access to funding now, there's support. People can make a living on being a creative in this industry." As well, with Indigenous people allocating the funding themselves, rather than through an intermediary organization, a more central issue emerges: narrative sovereignty. The term refers to a group able to choose how it's represented — and in a larger sense determine how it's perceived by society at large. That has been an especially entrenched issue in this country; the very concept and word "documentary" was first coined by National Film Board of Canada founder John Grierson in his review of American filmmaker Robert Flaherty's 1926 movie Moana. Both that film and his earlier Inuit-focused Nanook of the North — widely considered to be the first commercially successful documentary — used Indigenous people as their subjects. Particularly in Nanook, Flaherty's work has come under increasing scrutiny for staged scenes and general inaccuracies, with its widespread success continuing to reinforce romanticized and stereotypical aspects of a people who were unable to establish their own identity through film. 'Cost of carelessness' "Because of filmmakers like Flaherty, we've seen the damage wrought by policies built on visual misrepresentation, salvage ethnography, and the lines of ownership that become purposefully blurred by others extracting our own images," Indigenous filmmaker Adam Piron wrote for the International Documentary Association about Nanook. "For Indigenous artists, there's an added weight to engaging with the moving image because we know the cost of carelessness." An entrenched and inaccurate depiction of Indigenous people and their stories, Lightning said, led to decades of period pieces he described as "leathers and feathers" — productions that utilized pop culture ideas of various Indigenous groups, while barring those people from input into how their stories should actually be told. At the same time, there has been consistent pushback, such as Toronto-born Indigenous actor D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who starred in Reservation Dogs, attending the 2024 Emmy Awards with a red handprint on his face. The makeup was intended to bring attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women, and, according to the organization Native Hope, "the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis." Lightning said that rebellious streak has only increased in recent years. "I want our younger generations in this industry to push boundaries, make people feel a little uncomfortable at times," he said. "That's good. I'm looking forward to that. Those are the filmmakers I wanna see." And while territorial sovereignty — the ability to decide on laws within proscribed borders — is a topic often touched on for Indigenous people in Canada, Podemski said the right and ability to control how, and which, stories are told about them is also of huge importance. As an example, she told the story of how just the day before, a passport agent made an offhand complaint about her getting "stuff for free" after seeing her Indigenous status card — a discriminatory response that a 2022 study by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs found 99 per cent of Indigenous respondents had experienced. The team behind North of North on making TV magic in the Canadian Arctic 5 months ago Duration 2:49 Actor Anna Lambe and the co-creators of the new CBC co-production North of North talk to the CBC's Eli Glasner about how the Iqaluit community came together to bring the heartwarming comedy to life. Podemski said she spent the next 20 minutes speaking about that stereotype to the agent, who said apologetically that she simply hadn't heard the historical context before. "Afterwards I thought, 'You know what? This is why I do what I do,'" Podemski said. "Because if we take up space on the screen, and if we help people to understand a little bit more about who we are in our own communities and in our own experiences, then maybe they won't write us off as easily as they do."
