Category: Arts

Concordia alumna and collage artist Amanda Durepos explores concepts behind the word ‘please’

It can be a solicitation, an appeal, a request or satisfaction. The word itself is a dichotomy between pleasure and pain. We’re taught from a young age to say “please,” but the politesse has taken on new connotations and is now utilized and interpreted in a multitude of ways. Amanda Durepos—a collage artist and Concordia alumna who graduated with a BFA—has drawn inspiration from this loaded letter arrangement and her exhibition is on display until April 23.

It is being exhibited at Ymuno, which is a gallery space that was recently opened by Ben Williamson and his girlfriend Madeline Richards in Studio 530 of the Belgo Building. To set out to observe PLEASE and step in off the bustling street of Ste. Catherine is to enter into a building that is crawling with creativity and artistic potential. Making your way through the Belgo Building’s halls is an experience in itself, where you can peer into studio spaces littered with products of artistic endeavours and projects of passion.

Studio 530 is simple, small and, behind one of the gallery walls, serves as a loft-style studio as well. PLEASE marks their first display as a gallery, and Durepos’ simplistic and enticing collage work proves an excellent channel to ignite their space’s personality.

PLEASE begins with the display of a collection of poems and short essays contributed by friends of the artist, all revolving around and delving into the concepts of the word ‘please.’ This facilitates the intellectual marination of the concepts attached to the word in question before the consumption of Durepos’ work. The diversified literary approach to what the word represents contextualizes her interpretations of it.

Her choices of imagery explore the very diverse facets of what the word can entail. Her interpretations range from sexual pleasure to desperate pleas or the dynamic of appeals within a relationship. However, Durepos said she prioritizes aesthetics and pleasing visual arrangements first and only projects narratives onto her pieces after.

Durepos gravitates towards a vintage, black-and-white aesthetic in her collected cutouts, and harnesses diverse tactics such as the rough ripping of material and clean cut strokes. Her style often involves the removal of facial elements, making the word “please” jump out of the piece because of the composition rather than a facial expression or entreaty.

It’s an exhibition that will ignite a desire in you to tear up old magazines in a passionate frenzy, eagerly collecting the ingredients of a visual composition and searching for the pieces of a potential creation.

Words or phrases from the publications or advertisements she has collected these images from are sometimes still visible, only adding to the concept that random and banal pieces of the world around us can come together to create beautiful art and work together to portray a message. Collage work has a distinct beauty rooted in the fact that its aesthetic is made up of pieces of other works’ simplicities, pieces of a whole marrying the details of another. This exhibition is the result of Durepos utilizing this medium for over 10 years now. “I love the physicality of paper and the colour palettes of old photographs. I think there’s something romantic about ephemera and discarded materials and magazines,” said Durepos.

PLEASE is on display in Studio 530 of the Belgo Building (372 Ste. Catherine W.) until April 23.

Midnight Special incorporates ‘80s nostalgia into a tight and suspenseful ride

Even before the first image appears, you know you’re in for a good ride. Voices of news anchors are heard sharing the news of a boy’s kidnapping. The man shown on a T.V. screen to be the abductor is standing in a barricaded motel room, while an accomplice, noticeably armed, looks outside. A small human form, sitting under an illuminated bedsheet, is revealed to be a young boy in swimming goggles reading a Superman comic book with a flashlight. All three leave in an aging ‘70s car, racing through an empty highway. The music intensifies. The driver cuts off the car’s lights, putting on night-vision goggles, and the vehicle dissolves into the night. Now you’re left staring at an essentially black screen, and you couldn’t feel any more ecstatic.

That is one of the coolest and most gripping opening scenes I’ve seen in a long time. A film usually builds to a high, but Midnight Special starts with one, and maintains it almost all the way through. An original, genre-defying mixture of the old, the new and the eternal, Jeff Nichols’ fourth film confirms the American director as one of this decade’s most exceptional new talents.

Grounded in a strong sense of authenticity, and featuring constant reminders of its setting in the Deep South, the movie feels real in a way that most action-based movies don’t. You’re used to seeing guns and shooting, often for entertainment, but here when you see a gun, you know blood might be shed, and there’s not a single character that you’d want to lose. The film is upfront about its sci-fi influences—if you squint, you can almost see the spectres of ‘80s Steven Spielberg and James Cameron—and also shares its basic plotline and distinctly American themes with Stephen King’s novel Firestarter, but it could hardly be confused with anyone else’s work.

Like Nichols’ masterful Take Shelter, it stars Michael Shannon as a father trying to protect his family when confronted with a supernatural occurrence. The supernatural here comes in the form of his own son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a boy of seemingly unlimited capabilities who can bring down a space satellite and draws information from an invisible parallel dimension. These powers catch the attention of both the U.S. government and the leader of a religious cult known as the Ranch, which leads the father, Roy, and his childhood friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) to kidnap the boy from the cult and aid him in accomplishing his mysterious destiny.

The film takes place mostly at night, daylight being dangerous to the boy’s well-being, which helps justify the title. Adam Stone, the cinematographer and Nichols’ regular collaborator, made no use of artificial lighting even in scenes that could have required it, which made light a recurring visual theme: when there is some, it is usually to denote fantasy or mystery, such as in the strong rays of light that the boy radiates through his eyes, or the appearance of the room in which he is at one point taken by the F.B.I. This light also signifies a certain hope amidst the darkness that surrounds the characters, and a strong positivity that can be taken away from the film: despite its genre influences, it is remarkable for arguably having no antagonist, and delivering a story that is fundamentally about its characters and the emotions of a father who fears losing his son, but is resolved to let him determine his own path.

Midnight Special starts with no exposition, throwing you right in the middle of the action, and feeds you information by little pieces, which forces you to watch carefully and connect the dots. Dialogue is sparse and the tone understated, with wonderfully economical filmmaking that keeps you on the edge even when little is happening, while telling you no more than you need to know at any given point. If you can overlook some of the less convincing later developments, and even if you can’t, there is much to appreciate and admire on this unusual journey. Like young Alton, you can immediately tell that you’re in good hands.

Release date: April 1, 2016

Directed by: Jeff Nichols

Starring: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Jaeden Lieberher

Stars: 4

111 minutes

L’orangeraie is an adaptation of Larry Tremblay’s 2013 novel dealing with terrorism

Amed and Aziz are twins. Their grandmother Shahina thought nothing could tear her “two drops of water in the desert” apart, but war did.

The theatrical adaptation of Quebec writer Larry Tremblay’s prize-winning novel L’orangeraie (2013) is a topical tale that sheds light on the vices of a conflict whose first target is youth.

After a bomb decimates their grandparents’ house in an unnamed village, the two brothers experience the fate of a nation at war somewhere in the Middle East. The twins’ father Zahed will have to make an inconceivable choice between his sons and decide which one should become a martyr to avenge their grandparents’ death. Three men in a Jeep: that’s all it took to turn the slice of heaven where their grandfather Mounir once grew oranges into the holy land of sacrifices.

Directed by Claude Poissant, the artistic director of Théâtre Denise-Pelletier, and adapted by Tremblay himself, the play remains close to the original text. The famous writer, who is also a playwright, at first hesitated on whether L’orangeraie should be a novel or a play, as he revealed in an interview for Théâtre Denise-Pelletier’s Cahier d’hiver. This uncertainty helps explain the theatrical dimension of the book’s structure and the successful adaptation that followed.

The author extracted fragments from about 20 scenes from the book, which is divided in three main parts: Amed, Aziz and Sony. After fleeing his country to become an actor in America, the surviving son obtains a role in a school play. The twin remembers his lost brother by impersonating Sony, a child forced to give a soldier a reason not to kill him. Resilience and war’s abolition of borders between children and adults are at the heart of an exchange between the surviving teenager and his professor Mikaël.

This mise en abyme ending is a reference to another one of Tremblay’s plays, War Cantata (2009). One aspect in which the play differs from the book is the use of voice-over in the first part, as the play begins with Shahina’s voice introducing her own death, whereas an external narrator prevailed in the written piece. However, the narration fades out during the second part of the play, set in America, where the dialogue is omnipresent.

“The characters are outlines of the currents of thought and history of the world, they are only inventions of the actors on stage, that’s what guided us to stay in the narrative mode at first and abandon this restraint in the American part,” said Poissant.

The pared-down scenery and modest costumes remind us of the impact such powerful dialogue can have on the illogical nature of war and its human-scale ramifications. Gabriel Cloutier Tremblay and Sebastien Tessier, who respectively played Amed and Aziz, bring to life an incarnation of juvenile disillusion. The director’s choice to use white actors as the two brothers, and only two actors originating from outside Quebec overall, meets the vision he had of the play, as he explained in an interview with La Presse. In making a clear distinction between theatre and reality, Poissant said he didn’t focus on the actors’ ethnicities but rather on who he thought would best suit the roles.

Poissant’s selection of settings resonates with the uncluttered but thunderous style of Larry Tremblay. “Being simple is complex. I’ve often reminded all [the artists] that they should hold back on emotion … so you could hear the lyricism but also the real issues of the characters and the insidious manipulation within the human spirit,” said Poissant. Devoid of any judgment, Tremblay’s unapologetic and poetic contemplation of terrorism breaks a taboo by finding the right words to paint one of the 21st century’s main horrors.

 

L’orangeraie runs at Théâtre Denise-Pelletier from March 23 until April 16. Tickets are $31.20 for people under 30.

Substances looks to translate experiences caused by psychoactive drugs into art

Twenty abstract spray paintings each representing a different psychoactive substance hang loosely by thin chains on the walls of a 19th-century building known as the Montreal Arts Centre. The scientific names and molecular structures of every drug imaginable—from caffeine to codeine—are featured as part of an exhibition called Substances.

Daniel Plante is the mastermind behind the exhibition, which he began brainstorming in October 2015. One month later, he delved deep into research and started reading tirelessly about these existing psychoactive substances, how they are made and the different ways in which they affect people.

“I read many recollections of people who have used certain substances and mixed it in with my own experiences,” said Plante.

The interrelation of science, art, emotion and experience is made clear in Plante’s works through his use of a multitude of colours, patterns and lines. At the centre of every painting is the biochemical makeup of the substance it portrays. Spray painted on top of these molecular sketches is a mishmash of colours representing Plante’s own interpretation of the substance in question.

Each painting was done with non-acidic spray paint on a 160 gsm—grams per square metre—paper. Plante applied upward-going drips to emphasize the stimulating effects of some substances and downward-going ones to emphasize the depressing effects of others, such as alcohol. Masking and stamping methods were also used to demonstrate the schematics of organic chemistry.

The colours and emotions poured into the paintings vary, considering that they differ from substance to substance. The painting that depicts cocaine, for instance, is black with short staccato lines of fluorescent red resembling open cuts on skin. To many it gives off a very melancholic and angry vibe. This, however, is Plante’s interpretation of someone else’s experience of the substance. At the other end of the spectrum, the rainbow-like appeal of his LSD portrayal, stamped with white blotches of paint coming across as spotlights, brings a sense of whimsy and nonchalance to the exhibition.

“Reality just is and you experience it in one way or another,” said Plante while discussing the experiences that these many substances have produced for him.

Plante hopes to make onlookers realize that we are all fundamentally biochemical beings who have different perceptions of the objects and people we see in front of us. According to him, most of our experiences are highly influenced by psychoactive substances. Coffee is a common example of a substance people use as a stimulant to go about their everyday lives without feeling fatigued.

“People complimented me and said it was beautiful,” said Plante. “Beauty is good but it’s only one aspect of the exhibition. Meaning is another aspect and when beauty and meaning go hand in hand that’s when I’ve accomplished something.”

Plante’s love of spray painting began after he graduated from ÉTS in mechanical engineering and would use copies of his brother’s CV to spray paint on.

He now develops products and is a co-founder of Artrasta, an annual live painting event that was first held in October 2015.

 

Don’t worry, you still have time to see Substances—the exhibition runs until April 8 at the Montreal Arts Centre.

 

We talked to this Concordia alumna about 2013’s Gabrielle

Gabrielle is a 2013 coming-of-age story by Quebec filmmaker and Concordia alumna Louise Archambault (Familia). It details the life of Gabrielle (Gabrielle Marion-Rivard), a 22-year-old woman with Williams Syndrome, as she participates in a choir of mentally challenged adults and enters a romantic relationship with one of her choir-mates. The film explores Gabrielle’s desire for independence, freedom and love with authenticity and care. We spoke with the director about what inspired her and how using non-professional actors helped add to the film’s realism.

The Concordian: How did you come up with the concept for this film?

Louise Archambault: I wanted to talk about happiness. I was inspired by [an intellectually disabled] woman I would see in my neighbourhood at the public pool. She always had someone accompany her; she never wanted to put on her swimming cap, but she was always singing and making these very happy sounds. She looked so relaxed and happy, but some people were uneasy with that. I wanted to talk about outcasts, people who were not in the mainstream, and their access to happiness and freedom. I wanted to talk about their independence and autonomy, and I wanted to show people to be, without judgement, open to differences.

C: The characters seem the happiest when they’re singing. What made you decide to incorporate music into the film?

L.A.: Since the beginning of time, humans have always gotten together to sing—it’s something that links us together physically and psychologically. Half of the script takes place in India. I was inspired by the organization Young Musicians of the World. It’s a school for deprived children, and they sing every day.

C: It’s not often that we see a character’s sexual desire explored in a film, let alone a character with mental disabilities. How did you approach it and why did you decide to include it in the film?

L.A.: Because it’s a real subject. Everybody has the right to happiness. When I met the people who inspired the film and the characters, it was very obvious to me that they have the right to love and be loved. Some people don’t want to see [intellectually disabled] people explore their sexuality—they think maybe they don’t know how, or they will be abused, or they will get pregnant and then what? These are [valid] questions, but they don’t realize they have a right to experience those things too.

C: The movie felt so realistic at times. I felt like I was watching a documentary. How did you achieve this level of authenticity?

L.A.: I observed a lot. Laurent [played by Benoit Gouin] was inspired by a real person who is in charge of a home similar to the one the characters live in—he’s gay, he’s involved with [the characters], he makes changes in their lives and gives them opportunities to be independent and autonomous.

The choir was not a real choir, but the members were [intellectually disabled] people who were chosen because they had talent. For example, [choir member Anthony Dolbec] takes singing classes with Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, and I observed them. When he sings and dances, his emotions come out and we feel it. I thought it was so beautiful. He chose the song [sung in the film] “Ordinaire” by Robert Charlebois. I have known that song forever, but when he sang it it took on a whole new [meaning] and I had to include it in the film.

C: Lastly, do you have any upcoming projects we can look forward to?

L.A.: I have a few scripts that still need to be financed, but I have been working on a lot of T.V. series with Radio Canada in the last few years … Coming up, I have Trop, which is a dramatic comedy. I fell in love with the subject, because it talks about mental illness. It’s about a 28-year-old woman with bipolar disorder. It’s a very moving subject but there are comedic situations and the character’s flaws are treated without judgement. It’s a delicate subject but it talks about what is considered to be taboo.”
Gabrielle will be screened by the Department of Theological Studies at the EV building, room 1.605, on April 8 at 5:30 p.m. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Louise Archambault.

The Phi Centre hosted an evening of film portraits on April 1 featuring Pelicula Films and Oz Yilmaz

Art is everywhere. Well, the final artworks are. But what about the work process behind it? With the launch of its project Portragram at the Phi Centre, Montreal-based production company Pelicula Films decided to shed light on a whole lot of emerging visual artists—featured were Stephen Scofield, Peter Krausz, François Morelli, Pelicula Films CEO Oz Yilmaz, Karim Jabbari, Adeline Benhammouda, Pamela Vergara, Gabor Szilasi and Yassin Narcy Al Salman.

Freshly founded in 2015, Pelicula Films has a goal to produce creative images and, according to the company’s website, go beyond the industry standards in terms of films, commercials and documentaries.

On April 1, Pelicula Films teamed up with the Vues d’Afrique international film festival for its Portrait Premiere event, the first part of which featured Portragram. The second part showcased six short films from the 2016 edition of the Rallye Expos, an annual collection of artistic installations on African and Creole countries. The 32nd edition of the Vues d’Afrique festival will run from April 17 to April 24 at the Cinémathèque Québécoise de Montréal.

Portragram celebrates the stories behind several artists with a selection of nine cinematic portraits running five minutes each, all directed by Walid Kafi.

Five minutes is short, yet the aesthetically pleasing mini-portraits presented by Pelicula Films are successful at completely immersing the viewer into the intimate world of the creator and the place where the magic happens. The Romanian-Canadian painter Peter Krausz is one of the artists featured in the portraits. The birth of the painter and his art happens against a transcendent backdrop of classical music.

From the craft to the artwork, the relationship between Krausz and his warm colour landscapes comes alive. Krausz hopes this documentary of his work will be presented in as many places as possible. He didn’t find it challenging to open the doors of his studio. “For me it has been quite easy [to work with director Walid Kafi], since I’ve been teaching at UdeM for years,” Krausz asserted on letting people get into his artistic universe. “We owe this to others, to artists.”

In Portragram, the artist suddenly becomes the subject of the art itself. This will to build a bridge between the art and the artist, as explained by Kafi, is part of a broader project of 50 portraits to be completed in 2017. Behind Pelicula Films’ selection lies a purpose: none of these artists’ works have been shown at a film festival, which led Yilmaz, who works in photography, and director Walid Kafi to help talented photographers, painters, a sculptor, a mosaicist, a woodworker, a performance artist and a musician from the Quebec art scene express themselves. “It is beyond our obligation as citizens to support something that is unique and be proud of those artists that represent us,” Yilmaz said in a question-answer session with the audience after the screening. His solo black-and-white photography exhibition, displayed on site, came as a foretaste of the event.

“Art built cultures,” Yilmaz said to close the event, reminding of Pelicula Film’s initial objective. “We are doing this for the next generation, so young people can come forward as artists.”
For more info on Pelicula Films, visit pelicula.ca

Previously exhibited at the MainLine Theater, Nepal & India documented a 10-week journey across both countries

In Nepal & India, photographers David Dworkind and Matthew Hood transport the viewer to India and Nepal through vivid pictures that act as windows, peeking into two distinct and culturally rich countries. Their works present a wide spectrum of different tableaus, from a blanket of stars lighting up a silent and dark hillside to a wide-eyed little girl, fascinated by the camera lens pointing at her.

Dworkind and Hood’s exhibition, which was presented at the MainLine Theater from March 30 to April 3, featured over two dozen photographs captured during their 10-week trek and marked the anniversary of the start of their trip in April 2015.

“We hoped people would get a sense of the diversity of people and landscapes that are found in both of these countries, as well as a feeling of the daily life seen through a collection of candid moments,” said Hood.

The photos on display were split between intimate, striking portraits of people and sweeping countrysides. Both genres gave the audience a sense of Nepalese and Indian life and culture, as well as the natural and urban geography of both countries. Mountains jut over clouds, contrasting with deep valleys and ridges. A woman in an orange sari, bathed in misty morning light, balances on a railroad track stretching as far as the eye can see. The composition of each piece offers a visually pleasing mix of vivid colours, contrast and intriguing depth of field that grabs and pulls the eye in to analyze each piece, learning a little bit more about Nepal and India in the process.

Reminiscing about the trip, Dworkind noted how in India “all senses are at 110 per cent.” The sights, sounds and bustling activity happening everywhere at once gave ample opportunity to capture snapshots of daily life.

“Life happens in the street. Everywhere you look is picturesque,” said Dworkind.

In addition to bringing a small taste of Nepal and India back home, Hood and Dworkind donated 10 per cent of the proceeds from print sales to Nepal Communitere, a non-profit organization that was founded in response to the devastating 7.8M earthquake that struck on April 25, 2015. Their approach focuses on providing the resources and tools required to empower local communities to take active roles in the renewal of their own community. They give the means and resources needed to spearhead innovative solutions and become self-reliant. Having been in Nepal during the earthquake last year, Hood and Dworking were able to feel the ground shake despite being 400 km away from the epicenter.

The strongest pieces in the exhibition are the various portraits that are displayed, featuring women, men and children of all ages and backgrounds. Some look straight into the camera through to the viewer, while others were caught in the middle of an act or gesture, such as throwing a fishing net into water or taking a morning dip in the Ganges River. The works in Nepal & India are reminiscent of a World Press exhibition, with each piece telling the story of a location or individual through photography.

The exhibition ended on April 3rd, but many of the photos can be viewed at hoodvisuals.com/nepal-india

Batman v Superman is neither fish nor fowl, but hey, it’s better than Man of Steel

It has been genuinely exciting to see the superhero genre come together in the 21st century as a force to be reckoned with. From the pioneering beginnings of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films to Christopher Nolan’s monumental Batman trilogy and the now-ubiquitous Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s become obvious that a new genre has emerged. In a way, it’s even more than a genre—it’s about establishing an American popular mythology, on the basis of the Greek tradition. The Romans, after all, renamed the Greek gods and retold some of their myths in an adapted form. The U.S.—a modern Roman empire if there is one—has done the same, while celebrating the myth as entertainment instead of theology.

Zack Snyder, whose own Watchmen was a visionary take on the superhero genre, deserves some credit for embracing that ideal with zeal and operatic gravitas, but let’s face it—his attempt to set the foundation for a DC Cinematic Universe has been maddeningly uneven. If Snyder’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel, was frustrating for its flavourless look and interminable fight scenes, the follow-up—Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—provokes pity rather than disappointment. It’s sad and even somewhat remarkable to see a film so eager to please, so willing to improve itself and address its flaws, but so lamentably incapable of capturing even a fraction of the greatness Nolan once brought to the franchise.

For better or worse, after four years of absence, Batman is back. There was a massive fan outcry—including a petition—against Ben Affleck being cast as the character, but he turned out to be one of the film’s stronger attributes. This Batman is obsessive, unhinged and bear-like, determined to stop Superman after witnessing the damage done to the city of Metropolis in the previous chapter of the series. This should have the viewer on his side—after all, the disproportionate and nearly irresponsible destruction was one of the key complaints against the first film—and it does, especially when Henry Cavill’s Superman is absurdly bland in comparison. Acting or personality, you say? Give him a break, he put on a ton more muscle than last time.

The many characters that spice up the storyline all have killer music themes written for them, but too little screen time to make an impression—Wonder Woman feels intercut into the film rather than an organic part of it, and even Batman and Superman struggle to comprehend what she’s doing there—except, of course, for Lex Luthor, played by Jesse Eisenberg, of all people. Eisenberg is truly cringeworthy, single-handedly derailing even the scenes that do otherwise achieve a certain harmony, at least on paper. Playing a sort of cocaine-fueled Mark Zuckerberg after a lengthy stay at Arkham Asylum, he squeezes out the jokes and the quirks with so much self-restraint that he never feels crazy, just annoying, so very annoying that you don’t know if you want to knock out him or yourself to bring the trainwreck to an end.

The fight between the two icons is psychological at first during a surprisingly decent first hour of exposition. Despite the film’s title, the conflict is mostly upstaged by the subtle—and not so subtle—references meant to establish the future of the series under the Justice League, a DC equivalent to The Avengers. What this inevitably leads to is a storyteller who is so focused on what’s ahead that he fails to engage in the story he is telling at present. This approach is the exact opposite of Nolan’s, who made each of his own films as if it were to be the last.

In fact, it’s important to mention Nolan—who has been an executive producer on Snyder’s last two films—to understand what went wrong with the DC Cinematic Universe. Instead of completely breaking away from his aesthetic and thematic style, which would have been the sanest thing to do, Snyder attempted to emulate it, compromising his own trademark vision in the process. Even though Snyder has now reunited with his usual cinematographer, Larry Fong, Batman v Superman only hints at what it could have been had it fully embraced its comic-book roots instead of settling on unsubstantial grittiness and illiterate psychology. For all its extraterrestrial wars and CGI-happy fight scenes, this series has been much too down-to-earth. Traumatised by the successful realism of Nolan’s trilogy, the DC universe is left in an ongoing identity crisis.

 

Release date: March 25, 2016

Directed by: Zack Snyder

Starring: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg

Stars: 3

151 minutes

Multidisciplinary artist Dulcinea Langfelder brings you a collection of her nighttime endeavours

In modern times, it has been shown that dreams are connected to the unconscious, varying from normal, ordinary sensations and emotions to overly surreal and bizarre images and ideas. Dreams can be of different natures: frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, sexual. They are generally outside the control of the dreamer and their content or purpose is not definitively understood. We usually struggle to make sense of these images and experiences. Many have tried to explore their meaning and symbolism, having agreed on anything except that we all dream and need to dream.

Like many of us, Dulcinea Langfelder, an internationally acclaimed and award-winning multidisciplinary artist, had always been curious about this subject. Wanting to create a piece about dreams, Langfelder immersed herself in scientific and philosophical research about dreams, both old and new. Recalling that she had kept track of her dreams on a recorder, she listened to every single one of her old recordings, trying to find inspiration for her new piece. “I kind of gave up on trying, within the show, to teach people why we dream,” said Langfelder. “What really became very clear to me is that we dream in order to keep our sanity. It really helps us to deal with life’s challenges. I also discovered why we forget most of our dreams, and the answer’s so simple: if we remembered all of them, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish lived experiences from dreamed ones. We dream a lot, we have, like, 10 dreams a night. If they were all registered in our memory as experiences, we’d go crazy. The important thing is that we dream in metaphor. We metaphorize everything,” she said.

Thus, Pillow Talk: An Essay on Dreaming, a collection of Langfelder’s dreams, was created. Pillow Talk, which had its world premiere at Centaur Theatre on March 29, isn’t a traditional play. It is a multidisciplinary piece where the work is split between text, choreography, music and video projections. It creates a surreal and puzzling non-linear journey that is just as hilarious as it is sweetly melancholic. Langfelder’s recordings became the narrative voice the audience hears during the piece, featuring sighs, sounds, commentary and laughter as she shares a collage of her dreams. Pillow Talk celebrates fundamental creativity, capturing emotions, feelings and all the intimacy of human struggle and unconscious yearnings.

“Vincent [the lighting and projection designer] and I listened to over a hundred dreams and we found three categories, all having to do with human instinct,” said Langfelder. “First there’s survival, which is mostly all those anxiety dreams, the most frequent being when we’re in public, we’re naked, we have to do our work and we’re totally unprepared. The second category is procreation: desire, love and so on. And then the third one, which was a revelation to me, are those dreams that have to do with spiritual instincts.”

It made sense to Langfelder that all the searching and questioning that every one does about their place in the cosmos was all human instinct—whether they’re religious or not. “Many of my dreams are what I can only call spiritual dreams, these beautiful short and sweet dreams where I’m just running backwards in fields of flowers, or where I’m a grain of sand in the cosmos,” she said.

A huge screen behind her, her nightgown, robe and body capture projections that she and her talented team of technicians have perfectly animated and synchronized. Projectors are aimed at a scale model of the stage on which she can easily move her body as a chess piece in order to achieve the desired illusion. In this fashion, when a two-dimensional Barack Obama embraces her during the performance, his arms wrap around her back with surprising realism.

“I have a series of dreams in the show I call ‘Obama Erotica,’ five dreams where I’m infatuated with Barack Obama. Nothing provocative, but they’re really delicious,” she said. In the dream she calls “Obama Five,” she explains, “I run into Obama, and I think ‘Oh my God! There’s Obama! Should I tell him about my dreams? Should I tell him that I have this series that I call Obama … And I can’t say the word. ‘Ero … Eroti’ … And finally I decide to tell him that I’m creating this piece about dreams, and that he’s in it.”

Watching Langfelder glide around the stage, reciting absurd, yet poetic dreams, the audience can really get a feeling of a human being struggling with life.

 

Pillow Talk: An Essay on Dreaming is playing at Centaur Theatre from March 29 to April 24. Tickets are $28 for students, call 514-288-3161 or visit centaurtheatre.com.

Cinema Politica’s last screening of the season explores the harmful aspects of global tourism

From director Pegi Veil, Gringo Trails is an alternative and passionate look at the effects of global tourism on remote locations. The documentary is part of a fervent crusade to halt the mass stampede of tourists by exposing the cultural, economic and environmental repercussions they can lead to.

Veil’s film highlights the seemingly innocent backpacker culture and should be mandatory to watch for anyone who’s thought about a soul-searching, finding-myself and off-the-beaten-path visit to exotic destinations.

If you’re one of the people who search for unconquered territory, the road less travelled and untarnished authenticity, you won’t find it. And if you do, you probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.

The itinerary follows tourists’ adventures from South American forests to African villages to Asian spiritual centres. Veil interviews fellow travelers, travel writers, regional officials and indigenous people.

“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints”—this quote, by Chief Seattle, opens the documentary. But the footprints seem to be the problem.

Chief Seattle himself was a prominent indigenous figure, known for pursuing a path of accommodation to white settlers. Most notably, he argued in favour of ecological responsibility and respect of Native Americans. The city of Seattle, Washington was named after him.

In the Amazonian rain forest, Gringo Trails argues that animals have permanently migrated and adapted their life to accommodate the influx of people stomping through their homes. Some animals will not reproduce due to trauma. If this continues for several generations, the animal would become extinct, affecting the entire ecosystem.

Featuring interviews with several young backpackers who pride themselves on seeking out adventurous, low-cost travel, the film takes aim at their subtle arrogance.

Also included are comments by numerous native guides, who point out that tourists need more education about the places they visit. Veil contrasts this type of traveler to those of the country of Bhutan. Open to tourists since 1974, it adopted a “high value, low impact” policy geared to affluent travelers who pay USD$250 a day and are threatened with expulsion if they don’t adhere to the country’s traditions. This attracts a certain rare and elite class of traveler.

While some examples are extreme, the film shares stories of villages that now thrive on community-based tourism that is managed, contained and allows people to learn about new cultures and traditions.

How tourism affects destinations is multi-layered. Whatever the situation, the director agrees that it is the responsibility of all travelers to realize it is a privilege to visit a new country and not a right.

Despite its sad and cringe-inducing portraits—like the hordes of drunk backpackers passed out in their own vomit on a small Thai beach—Gringo Trails is ultimately hopeful. The basic goal in all these locations is finding a way to balance the host country’s financial needs with the inevitable disturbance to the environment by visitors.

With so few films devoted to this topic, Gringo Trails offers a refreshing counterbalance to the Hollywood view of exotic people and places—think Eat, Pray, Love. Tourism will always exist so long as a desire to see the world does; therefore it is up to the traveler to think of the footprints they leave behind on their journey.

See Gringo Trails on Monday April 11 at 7 p.m. in room H-110 on Concordia University’s downtown campus. It will be the last documentary presented by Cinema Politica this season.

Peter Walken doesn’t just walk the walk—he walks the talk

Take a stroll along a serene nature trail. Feel the gentle breeze on your cheek, hear the mosquitoes buzz around your head. Inhale and savour the splendid scents of wildflowers, grass, growth and thawing droppings. Let yourself be transported to this magical place, without setting foot outside.

Montreal-based artist Peter Walken from the Aris Pollof Stride Foundation will be launching his mind-bending and perception-stretching, fully immersive virtual reality installation this summer.

“I am interested in how people take walks. I like walks, they calm me,” said Walken, who spent three years painstakingly collecting only the best sound and video with his iPhone 3S, his camera of choice. “Because I like walks so much, I wanted to bring the best walk ever to the people of Montreal. Because walks are great.”

Walken’s installation, called A Walk, looks like a simple public toilet haphazardly spray-painted black from the outside. But once you step in, wonderful technological abilities will transport you to a relaxing paradise. The installation does this through effective use of the newest developments in immersive technologies. It is nature, without the hassle of being nature.

Once you enter the installation, you have but a few simple steps between you and the start of your journey. First, you are strapped into a Virtuix Omni, an active virtual reality platform, so you can control where you walk on your walk. A step in real life is a step taken in your virtual walk. After you are strapped in, all that you need to do is put on the virtual reality headset provided and match it to your exact eye strength, in order to best observe the delicate shapes of leaves and twigs around you. Once that is complete, you set the sound to your preferred levels and set the fan to how much airflow you want to experience, with levels ranging from ‘gentle breeze’ to ‘caressing wind’ and ‘my eyes are stinging.’

And then, you go. Each user is allowed up to five minutes of walking time in order to let everyone have a turn, which costs $9.99 plus tax.

Walken took extreme measures in order to make the walk as close to reality as possible. He even included plastic twigs that slap you across the face and synthetic flies to buzz around your head and land on your arms to simulate a lived experience.

“I realized while on a walk that not many people had ever really enjoyed a walk in nature. So I really wanted to make the walk as real as possible,” said Walken. “These state-of-the-art immersive technologies will create the closest thing to walking in reality that there is.”

A Walk will be exposed from June 25 to August 18. The installation will travel across different areas in Montreal, in order to allow the most people to try the installation. Walken has already identified 10 parks and green spaces where he wants his installation to appear, in order to give residents a “real-world” experience of being in a park.

Full details and schedule of Walken’s amazing travelling installation will be released on April 1.

The award-winning romance fantasy is a perplexing experience

If you had to choose an animal to be turned into, a lobster would be a fine choice—they live up to a hundred years and remain fertile far into their old age. That’s what David’s (Colin Farrell) reasoning is, anyways. Of course, he forgets that a lobster’s life is likely to be cut short by a gourmet’s appetite for seafood, but that’s part of the joke. The Lobster, which is full of such sarcasm, is a stunningly bleak and bizarre dark comedy from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. It seems to be the work of a man deeply hurt by love or offended by the way it is regulated by society, and desperate to get his revenge, even if in cinematic form.

The title is not metaphorical—David may actually get turned into a lobster. The world seems to have regressed into a near-fascist system in which single people are no longer tolerated. All single people must be transported into a hotel in which they are given a set number of days to find a suitable life partner, or—and this is where the fantasy element of the story comes into play—be transformed into an animal of their choice.

Life in the hotel is conditioned by a number of entirely absurd rules, the most notable of which is that lovers must share a common trait—if one suffers from nosebleed, so must the other, if one is a sadist, then the other one must be the same. That makes little sense, as a sadist-masochist couple would logically be better suited for each other, but there you have it.

If these single people refuse to comply, they become Loners, hiding in the woods from collective hunts led by inhabitants of the hotel. Life among the Loners is equally hard—they entirely reject coupledom, and so their rules are based on abstinence. Any kind of intimate contact is forbidden, and people who kiss shall have their lips removed. It is then predictable but sadly ironic that David shall fall in love with one of their own.

Remarkably, actors succeed in explaining the specifics of this world with a straight face, but then again, that’s the only mode of acting you’ll see here. Obviously a stylistic choice to amplify the dogmatic nature of this environment, it soon backfires, reducing the film to a one-note exercise in facile cynicism. Most regrettable is the waste of an impressive cast that includes John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux. Farrell himself as the leading man is not permitted to display emotion, performing mostly by way of his mustache. You might wonder what the mood was like on the set, and the number of rules by which it was itself regulated.

In portraying different forms of torture on screen, a film must be careful not to become torturous to the viewer, which this one, just like the director’s previous drama Dogtooth, ultimately becomes. Violence, more often suggested than shown, here feels like a cheap psychological tactic to assert the film’s self-importance, which makes for an only episodically amusing experience. While The Lobster may have been meant to be perplexing, the film is hardly any more tolerable for it. As repetitive as the main theme’s music cues that endlessly punctuate the action, it bludgeons its point with the skill of a hardened bureaucrat. Obnoxious social norms can, and perhaps should, be attacked, but is it really true that you can only fight fire with fire?

 

Release date: March 25, 2016

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

Starring: Colin Farrell, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Rachel Weisz

Stars: 3

118 minutes