This Week In Art/Culture/Entertainment
By John Swartz
The annual Christmas Prelude is today, December 2. There are 2 concerts the Orillia Concert Band will play. One is at 3:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Centre, the other at 7:30 p.m., same place.
The afternoon gig is a short version for kids of the evening program. Santa is supposed to be there. The band will play highlights from Frozen, which I’m sure will be the hit of the afternoon.
The Twin Lakes Secondary School choir will be joining to sing several tunes and the concert will end with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Sleigh Ride.
In the evening they are adding a couple pieces by Douglas Wagner, the opener and the closer. The Orillia Vocal Ensemble will be joining the OCB for the closer and will also sing some tunes in the first half. As is usual with Christmas concerts many of the titles are actually medleys of several tunes. One however, Troika from Lieutenant Kije, is taken from the movie of the same name and written by Sergey Prokofiev. The scene it’s from is winter and involves a sleigh, so the music is suitably Christmassy without being specifically about Christmas.
There are sing along sections in the program. You can tickets online for either concert here.
All At Once Now
The Orillia Museum of Art and History had events happening on all floors last Thursday night. I started with the launch of Fred Addis’s book, Gallinger: A Life Suspended.
That was on the second floor. Fred had a presentation, with visuals, and read some passages. It was very interesting. Here we all thought Freed was the Leacock guy, meanwhile he’s been president of the Society for International Hockey and written for their Hockey Research Journal and been contributor to the Total Hockey Encyclopedia and the Hockey Hall of Fame Legends, magazine. He certainly wasn’t writing off topic.
Fred got to know Don Gallinger back in the 70s and had a 30 year relationship with him. The story isn’t just about getting caught betting on hockey games, but about what happened afterwards, the downward spiral of a man’s life, as Fred called it. It also is about the effects of the pettiness and chicanery of Clarence Campbell and some of the power brokers in the NHL For example, Scott Young’s sports writing career was sidelined after advocating Gallinger have his ban from hockey lifted, more than a decade after the suspension.
Gallinger was also a major league baseball prospect and three teams wanted him, but the NHL went after him there too, preventing that career. According to Fred, Gallinger, suspended in 1948, finally had the ban lifted in 1970, but the league didn’t bother to tell him. Gallinger found out quite by accident during a job interview.
You can get a copy of the book at Manticore Books.
On the main floor OMAH had an artist’s talk with John Notten, Luci Dilkus and Peter Fyfe. The Carmichael Landscape show has the title Tradition Transformed this year and each made pieces that don’t hang flat on a wall. I missed most of it, but did find out that Peter’s piece, dozens of Hotwheel cars in a transparent case had a meaning I didn’t figure out on my own. It showed the transition form green grass on the top layer of cars, down through to the dirtiest brown/gray at the bottom, the transition of colour as one goes deeper to the earth’s core.
John Notten’s piece is my favourite of the show. It’s a canoe and a ship situated opposite each other on a rotating platform (the water). Two things I found out, it’s about the transition as the primary mode of transportation in Canada from the canoe, to ships as Europeans took over the land, and both the canoe and the ship are carved from the same piece of wood.
Notten’s piece is really about how the takeover of the land changed things.
It’s interesting how an artist can think about and execute the concept with the materials they are working with and illustrate what transition means to them.
On the third floor an exhibition of the work from kids enrolled in the Eco-Art with Parklane Landscapes. It was an 8 week program in which Parklane’s Joanne Mohan taught the science and practicality of planting things, and an artist taught the visualization. The kids each designed their own concept of a natural garden for a section of Veteran’s Park.
ODAC Think Tank
I was prepared to attend ODAC’S visioning workshop last Monday night at Creative Nomad Studios, which would have provide lots to comment on. But as we know it snowed, a lot. Well, maybe not the most we’ve seen, but enough for the first snowfall of the year to make it interesting driving, and dangerous. So it’s been postponed to December 5 at 6 p.m.
The Shorts
- Derick Lehmann’s 90s Video Dance Party returns Dec. 2 at ODAS Park. The last one was successful to the point more people showed up than advance ticket sales foretold. Tickets are $20 online, or $25 at the door. Proceeds will be donated to Orillia toy drives.
- Quayles has Ron Whitman in to play this evening and Couchiching Craft Brewing has Valerie Burns and Dave Chun in.
(Photos by Swartz – SUNonline/Orillia and Images Supplied)
