On July 21, the opening night of the Dixie Chicks’ 2006 tour, dubbed Accidents and Accusations, Natalie Maines asked the Detroit crowd how much of it was seeing the pop-country trio for the first time. Nearly half of the 11,000-person crowd raised its hands. If Maines were to ask the same question next week at […]
Tara Thorne
Posted inArts + Music
Throw it to Toronto
As we reported last week, Ann Verrall’s The Wait will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the lone Halifax short in the fest. Now Mahone Bay’s Camelia Frieberg, along with co-producer Kelly Bray and co-writer Garfield Lindsay Miller, will form Team Nova Scotia—Frieberg’s directorial debut, A Stone’s Throw, is the only local […]
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The Wait is on
As titles are rolled out slowly for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—the much-delayed star-studded Oscar bait All the King’s Men (with Sean Penn, Kate Winslet and Patricia Clarkson) and Cannes fave Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, are among the first batch—a local name has just been […]
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The short circuit
Since all you local filmmakers are already madly finishing up your late entries to the Atlantic Film Festival, you might as well burn yourself an extra copy: the Manhattan Short Film Festival will hit NSCAD on September 22 and 23, and it’s looking for entries. Now in its ninth year, the festival spans cities, provinces, […]
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The Johnson boy
This news dropped just as we were going to print last Wednesday—oh, the trials of living a weekly existence—and though our kudos are late, the sentiment remains the same. Congratulations to Halifax painter Jonathan Johnson, named a semi-finalist last week in the RBC Painting Competition. The lone Haligonian is up against a wave of Montreal […]
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Think Linklater
For a generation-defining film, Slacker is a bit of a bore. The meandering, aimless, over-philosophizing tone of the film doesn’t resonate now as it would have in 1991, when Richard Linklater’s debut feature—with its endless characters, car crash and Madonna’s pilfered pap smear—quietly revolutionized independent filmmaking, for better (structural risk-taking) and worse (unknown writer-director as […]
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The plays are the things
Summer theatre begins in earnest this holiday weekend, with the more travel-intensive shows opening slowly over the next few weeks to save you some gas money. Ship’s Company’s The Mystery of Maddy Heisler is already up and running in Parrsboro. Featuring Matthew A’Court, Michael Chiasson, Julia Williams and Frank MacKay, this Daniel Lillford play is […]
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Smith for President
A couple months after Paul Greenhalgh jumped ship for OCAD, NSCAD University has named its new president. David B. Smith is an alumnus of NSCAD and MIT and has been a faculty member at the University of San Diego since 1997. He is currently the chair of the school’s art department, and Special Assistant to […]
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In the Fringes
The 16th annual Atlantic Fringe Festival drops on August 31 of this year. (No word on what the celebratory delicacy will be.) If you’re thinking that you can’t endure the craziness of this broad event, look to Tony-winner The Drowsy Chaperone for inspiration—it started in the Toronto Fringe. Urinetown? New York Fringe. Start small and […]
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Animating in LA
Local animator Heather Harkins (The Eight Husbands of Zsa Zsa Gabor, Duncan’s Cove) has got her summer vacation all lined up—she’ll be wiping the stardust out of her eyes for the entire month of August as artist-in-residence at the Echo Park Film Centre in beautiful Hollywood, California! Or, more accurately, east Los Angeles. Harkins accompanied […]
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The shape of things
A handful of dancers from across the country calling themselves SINS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) will present Oceanids, among other pieces, this weekend at DANSpace. The piece has multi-disciplinary roots: after seeing a Rothko painting, composer Mark Duggan wrote “Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea,” which is the source of the dance piece. […]
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Feel the Noise in Wolfville
We reported a couple weeks back on the welcome resurrection of Wolfville’s Atlantic Theatre Festival, a summer destination event that was shuttered two years ago for financial reasons. The company announced its season this week, and it’s gonna be a truncated—but hilarious—one. Beloved comic romp Noises Off will open July 21 and run through to […]