Entries categorized as ‘international’
Earlier this week, the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District played host to a free performance of fado, the traditional music of Toronto’s Portuguese community. A three-piece band — featuring a guitar, a Portuguese guitar and an upright bass — accompanied two vocalists, who sang songs of love and loss, and of the joy of making music together. In the darkened Tank House Theater, for an hour, it was impossible not to imagine yourself on a sidewalk cafe in Lisbon.
Fado music is back tonight, with the fado duo “15″ will appear at the Young Centre at 9 p.m. Tickets are free.
Categories: distillery · international · music
This weekend Luminato is providing boatloads of free entertainment. And of course, plenty of photo opportunities. So make sure your camera’s memory card is as empty as your wallet, and head to either the Distillery District or Harbourfront Centre. Here are just a few of the things you’ll catch:
Canadian Idol Eva Avila getting a makeover. Head to the Distillery’s Fermenting Center at about 7 p.m. Friday night. Free makeovers will also be available to the public.
The Grand Masquerade Ball. Mysterious costumes. Mardi Gras beads. Tarot card readings. All at the Harbourfront Centre, starting at 8 p.m. Friday.
New Orleans is back, and it kicks. It would be enough for us to say that swamp-music master Buckwheat Zydeco is appearing at Harbourfront Centre Friday night. You’d say “Buckwheat Zydeco? Where do I get tickets to that?” (You don’t. It’s free.) But we’re feeling good, so we’ll let you know that The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is also going to be there. Put on your dancing pants — bands appear at 8 p.m. and 9:30, respectively.
Don’t forget — if you’re at either the Distillery or the Harbourfront, and you need to get to whichever of those places you’re not, take L’Art Boat — it runs back and forth between the two locations all day.
Categories: distillery · harbourfront · international · music
During the run of Vida! A Celebration of Life, there are, in the lobby of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, a collection of posters and stand-ups advertising Cuban tourism. It’s probably a good thing there wasn’t some sort of sign-up sheet; the lobby would have been substantially more crowded than it actually was.
We’ll say this as directly as we know how: Vida is huge. During the most recent performance by Cuban dance troupe Danza Cuba, the line for tickets stretched down King Street and nearly rounded Simcoe Street. And that was for a Wednesday afternoon show.
The show, about one woman’s relationship to Cuba’s troubled and turbulent bout with the Twentieth Century, stars Omara Portuondo, perhaps best known to Northern audiences for her role as a vocalist in the legendary Buena Vista troupe, featured in the Wim Wenders documentary The Buena Vista Social Club.
Vida’s narrative — a chronological picaresque through Cuba’s history from the 1930s to the present — allows for series of set pieces of escalating beauty and complexity, framed by a birthday party and funeral for its main character. Costume and set changes abound; while the opening dance number features the all-female cast in the festive sun dresses viewers might normally associate with Cuban fashion, the style quickly moves to gauzy and ethereal during Vida’s girlhood introduction to Catholicism (where dancers in white dresses stand piously in cruciform) to sharp-footed and militaristic during revolution in the 1960s.
Anything featuring Portuondo will certainly feature music as prominently as anything else, and Vida! is no exception. Her voice is prominent here, though it’d be a failure not to mention the dancers’ feet, which function musically as much as the trumpet or the conga drum. Occasionally the band stands back and lets the stoming steal the show, a move that never gets old.
The chances are good that viewers will be exhausted by the end; Vida! is as visceral and as involving as any trip to the gym. But like the runner’s high that also results from strenuous exercise, it’ll leave you with a considerable grin.
Vida! A Celebration of Life runs throughout the weekend, with shows every night (and during the day Saturday) through Sunday.
Categories: dance · international · music · vida!
Depending on which part of Queen’s Park you walk in from, you might think the theme of the Muhtadi International Drumming Festival is either Carribean, African, Indian, Malaysian, or something else entirely. Of course, you’ve guessed the punchline by now: It’s all of them. Hence the name.
But if the drums draw you, the food stands keep you there. Head to one stand to buy a styrofoam box full of jerked chicken and rice, then turn around and get a second container, this one full of sweet beignets and fried plantains. If you forget to grab a napkin, you can wipe your hands on the grass as you watch the Bhangra dancers.
Pat Holder and Lenore Chin of The Gourmet Connection have been dishing out corn soup and roti, West Indian bread infused with ground chick peas and curry. It’s Chin’s favorite food. She had two yesterday.
They’ve been cooking all day as they listen alternately to the stage shows and the multiple impromptu drum circles that surround Muhtadi. Holder’s native music is Calypso, but she likes what she hears today.
“You’re really busy, but you still hear the music,” she said. “It’s a lovely way to start the day.”
Categories: food · international · muhtadi · music
