Culture Vulture: Blue Met, Cock-Pit and The Betweeners

Is it just me, or did a handful of big-name celebs bogart all the space allotted to arts coverage in this city over the past week? Let’s recap the wall-to-wall news assault: Robert Lepage is at the helm of Cirque du Soleil’s latest acrobatic extravaganza. Xavier Dolan scored big with a Cannes selection for his second feature. Michael Bublé crooned his way to victory during yet another predictable Juno Awards. Add to that news of Pammy Anderson’s tax “woes” and an array of OMG celeb sightings – Jake Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst and Kellan Lutz – in Old Montreal. Yes, dear Twihards, THAT Kellan Lutz. I think it’s about time we got down to the nitty-gritty of indie art happenings around town. Here are a few choice cuts that you’d be stark raving mad to pass up. Scroll down to find your suggested art binge for the week of April 21 to 27.  

 

Must-see of the week: Blue Met
We’re constantly spoon-fed information via streams of 140-character tweets, single paragraph blog entries and news bites formatted for the leisure of our smartphones. But that doesn’t mean that novels are soon-to-be relics of a bygone era. For those on the lookout for literary insights, the biggest and brightest annual celebration of all things book-related – the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival – kicks off tonight when local lit hero Dany Laferrière receives the Blue Met International Literary Grand Prix.

This year’s theme, “Reading the World”, is jam-packed with events that’ll unleash the bookworm in us all. There’s the popular Translation Slam series, during which the oft neglected art of translation is brought to the fore with two different translators taking a stab at adapting French and English poems. The Writers in Peril series, which gives the mic to authors who are continually censored or threatened, will welcome Carolin Emcke, a war crimes reporter for the weekly German mag Der Spiegel, and U.S. author James Frey. Remember the A Million Little Pieces debacle? Oprah is still patting herself on the back about that one. If you want to confront the man who pulled at your heartstrings and then brutally screamed “psych!” at you through your tv set, you ought to get in line for this.  
bluemetropolis.org

 

Cock-Pit
On the dance front, Vancouver-based chreographer Wen Wei Wang revisits his sexual awakening as a wee one in China with Cock Pit, an hour-long production for five dancers that is dark, dimly lit and full of rising phalluses. The dancers’ childhood innocence is (gasp!) forever tainted when they begin to explore their burgeoning urges and physical transformations – depicted by way of  egg-like toys that hatch into feathers protruding from the dancers’ waists. Adding erotica to exposed feathers is dancer Alison Denham, who appears in various guises throughout the play as the men’s unattainable object of desire and fantasy.
Agora de la danse (840, Cherrier Est) | agoradanse.com

 

The Betweeners and Scandalishious
Finally, on the exhibit front, the Skol Gallery champions the still-in-its-infancy minefield of Web 2.0 and how people navigate its myriad channels to create virtual selves.  Self-described “cultural hacker” and MIT grad student Ian Wojtowicz presents The Betweeners, a series of large-scale portraits of some seriously tapped-in and well-connected Montrealers who work the room … on MySpace. Wojtowicz delves into the little-known "network theory" to find, in his words, “a small group of highly-connected but obscure Montrealers […] the independent friends of popular people […] an elite who, taken cumulatively, have a close communication link with the entire city.”

Also on view at the gallery, New York performance artist/YouTube fame whore Ann Hirsch unveils Scandalishious, a multipronged video installation that looks back on her very own YouTube “performances” as a young student named Caroline, aka Scandalishious. Her Valley Girl character, who irksomely peppers her teen speak with a truckload of “like, you know” inanities, also blurs the boundaries of real and virtual – artist and character – while questioning the sustainability of relationships that are pure online fantasy and voyeurism. Hirsch believes that "I am watched, therefore I am." Would you agree? Have we learned nothing from the Big Brother, Survivor, Real World and Occupation Double puppets and their disillusionment with the fame game once the lights go down and they’re left with tattered dreams of second-rate glory? Happy art binging!
372, Sainte-Catherine W, #314 | skol.ca