As Aquarians, like myself, continue to celebrate on for the next few weeks, I have compiled a few more events to add to your celebrations.
Winter can be a difficult time to get around, however, this lists includes a wide array of events for your enjoyment.
Theatre
Okay, you can stop now
By Shakeil Rollock
Theatre Passe Muraille and b current Co-production
February 4 to 11, 2023
A physical theatre experience that explores how we deal with, manipulate, and come to terms with information, in Okay, you can stop now four performers are invited into a landscape full of newspapers: a tangible form of history. Over time, knowing that history is continual, the weight of the news gets the better of each individual.
Cabaret Noir
Created, directed, and choreography by Mélanie Demers
MAYDAY, dance Immersion and Canadian Stage Co-production
February 9 to 11, 2023
Mélanie Demers is a vanguard and award-winning dancer/choreographer from Montréal. This piece s somewhat inspired by the Parisienne cabaret scene of the 20’s and 30’s as a platform from which to interrogate the idea and embodiment of Blackness. The artists play with clichés, folklore, and prejudices, summoning the words of Frantz Fanon, Nina Simone, Dany Laferrière, and Spike Lee to illustrate that no external authority can define our identities. The show contains text in French, English, Creole, and a hint of Spanish without surtitles.
Are we not drawn onward to new erA
By Ontroerend Goed (Belgium)
Canadian Stage
February 9 to 11, 2023
Palindromic – in title and form – the show presents a visual metaphor for this crucial moment in our future history. This inventive performance is both playful and surprising; hilarious and beautiful.
Firewater Thunderbird Rising
Friday Creeations and Native Earth Performing Arts
February 16-19, 2023
Firewater Thunderbird Rising is the transformative spirit of dance travelling through dimensional realms of existence – ancestors, dreams, blood memory and the land directly connected to Anishinaabek way of living, awakening the healing of the Nation’s future.
The Tragedy of King Lear
Shakespeare BASH’d
February 16-26, 2023
Returning to the stage has necessitated some changes for the small company, foremost a shift in venue. While they’re known for their barroom stagings, in order to keep everyone (cast, crew, and audience) as safe as possible, they have shifted venues to The Theatre Centre’s Incubator, where the audience can remain masked. Nonetheless, the show will bring audiences the accessible, high energy Shakespeare that BASH’d is known for, in a new setting.
On Screen and On Demand
Godland
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason (2022)
Screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox
A Danish priest faces a harsh environment and his own prejudices when he is sent to an isolated Icelandic community, in Hlynur Pálmason’s devastating critique of the colonizer ethos.
NFB’s Focus on Black Filmmakers
This series is a collection of titles from Black filmmakers across Canada. It includes short and feature films, such as Stateless (2020) by Michèle Stephenson, Speakers for the Dead (2000) David Sutherland & Jennifer Holness, The Road Taken (1996) Selwyn Jacob and many others.
NFB studios has made this series others available for free streaming on nfb.ca in February.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Throughout February 2023
WATCH LISTS
Specially-curated collections of fiction and non-fiction films–both classic favourites and little-seen gems to expand on the stories and themes of February’s first-run films.
Watch List: Birds of Feather
This series explores the themes presented in Million Dollar Pigeons, showcasing a curated selection of films celebrating the unique and oft-unpredictable relationships between humans and birds. Films include Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch’s eccentrically postmodern take on the hit-man thriller; The Challenge, a peek inside the exclusive world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs with a passion for amateur falconry; Kes, Ken Loach’s moving tale of a lonely working-class Yorkshire boy, who finds a baby kestrel and decides to raise it; and The Eagle Huntress, in which a 13-year-old girl trains to become the first girl in 12 generations of her family to become an eagle hunter.
Watch List: Black Power on Screen
This series revels in the revolutionary cultural shift of the 1970s, which featured powerful depictions of Black life and experience as told by Black filmmakers. Titles in this series include the Sydney Poitier classic revisionist Western Buck and the Preacher; the African American film masterpiece Killer of Sheep, offering a lyrical portrayal of life in Watts, Los Angeles; and Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation tour-de-force Coffy.
For Viola series returns during Black History Month with a screening of Dear Jackie, preceded by a screening of the short Tawallah Abroad. These films look to explore the evolution and erosion of Black communities in Montreal and Toronto.
Visit hotdocs.ca for screening info, showtimes, and tickets.
OVID.tv Exclusives
A Reckoning in Boston
Directed by James Rutenbeck (2022)
February 9, 2023
When filmmaker James Rutenback went to Dorchester, MA to make what he thought would be a film about adult students attending continuing education classes at a community center, he soon came to realize that the very premise for his film was wrong.
As a white, suburban filmmaker working in a largely African-American, poor and working-class neighborhood, Rutenbeck is awakened to the violence, racism, and gentrification that threaten his subjects’ very place in the city, and realizes that to make a fair and honest film, he would need to face his own complicity in racist structures.
Draw Me Saint-Exupéry
Directed by Andrès Jarach (2017)
February 23, 2023
On the 31st of July 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. With this mystery, a myth was born.
Who was the man whose book The Little Prince was translated into more than 250 languages and dialects? This documentary looks back at different moments of his intense life with an ironic look at the myth. Film archives and his drawings help narrate the story told over the course of a flight.
Museum Exhibits and Events
Uplifted: Art of Crochet
LEGIN KNITS
Bata Show Museum
February 11 or 25, 2023
Learn how to crochet for the first time or refresh your skills with Nigel John. He will be hosting two workshops where he will teach participants techniques to crochet their own shoelaces using a 3-step customization process. This workshop is available for all ages at any level.
Karine Giboulo: Housewarming
Gardiner Museum
Ongoing until May 7, 2023
Enter a world at once familiar and uncanny. Montreal-based artist Karine Giboulo invites visitors into an immersive reimagining of her home. Brought to life by over 500 miniature polymer clay figures, this is no ordinary house. The figures tell stories that unfold inside, or on, household furniture, appliances, and everyday objects.
