The safety dance
In photos
Kharkiv's underground ballet revival gives Ukrainians a break from war
Reporting and photography by Marko Djurica
Kharkiv
Reuters
Ballerina Olena Shliahina has grown used to the underground venue at the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre in Kharkiv, where dancers and the audience are safer from Russian missiles. 'When we started performing here, I felt very happy because we finally went out to our audience,' she says.
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Globe and Mail
8 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
The safety dance
In photos Kharkiv's underground ballet revival gives Ukrainians a break from war Reporting and photography by Marko Djurica Kharkiv Reuters Ballerina Olena Shliahina has grown used to the underground venue at the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre in Kharkiv, where dancers and the audience are safer from Russian missiles. 'When we started performing here, I felt very happy because we finally went out to our audience,' she says. to view this content.
CBC
10 hours ago
- CBC
He left the Moscow symphony in protest. Now he's helping a small B.C. town take centre stage
Arthur Arnold faced a big decision in February of 2022. He was the music director of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra when war broke out. "I was flabbergasted that Putin invaded, that he invaded Ukraine," he says. "I came to the conclusion I just I cannot live with myself if I don't take a stand." So he asked the orchestra if he could speak out. They said no; it would put them all in danger. "That left me with only one thing and that was to resign and with that to make a protest." Arnold stepped down, a decision he says he's never regretted. In fact, he says it's given him more time for his work in what might seem like an unlikely location: Powell River, B.C. An isolated city of 13,000 people on the west coast, it takes two ferries to get there from Vancouver. The town used to be centred around its big pulp and paper mill. But now that it's closed down, residents hope that arts and culture — and people like Arthur Arnold — could be its future. Arnold first visited Powell River in 2000 to guest conduct at the Kathaumixw International Choral Festival. He enjoyed it so much he started coming back each year. But he fell in love with more than just the city and its surroundings, the ocean and mountains. It's also where he met his future wife, Kim Stokes, solidifying his connection to Powell River. He had been travelling between Moscow, Powell River and his home country of The Netherlands for years by the time the war broke out. Arnold says leaving his job in Moscow gave him the time he needed to focus on an event he started in 2012 while living in Powell River part time — the Pacific Region International Summer Music Association (PRISMA). It's a two-week classical music festival held every year at the end of June. Students from around the world are chosen to attend, where they learn and perform alongside guest artists from major orchestras. Thousands attend the final performance held outside on the beach. That's where the Tla'amin First Nation have performed traditional songs backed up by a full orchestra. Drew Blaney, Tla'amin culture and heritage manager who also sings and composes the traditional music, says he appreciates how Arnold involves him in the planning process. "It's not some token thing that we're being there to do a land acknowledgement, or we're just there to check a box of 'we invited the natives here.'" 'It just calmed the entire room' But start asking around in Powell River and it becomes clear that Arnold's influence on the town goes far beyond the festival. "It's like having Wayne Gretzky leading your minor hockey program," quips the town's mayor, Ron Woznow. Arnold has shown up to play his cello at particularly heated town council meetings. "It just calmed the entire room," recalls councillor George Doubt. "I found it spiritually uplifting for him to do that." He also remembers finding Arnold playing his cello at the clinic when he went to get his first vaccination during the height of COVID. "I think it makes everybody think about how they fit into the society and what they can do to make life better, which is what I see Arthur trying to do." Coping with the mill closure Doubt says he hopes Arnold's work will help fill another void in Powell River — an economic one left by the closing of the town's major employer, the pulp and paper mill. It officially shut down in 2023, laying off hundreds of people. But at its height, 4,000 people worked there. Negotiations are underway for another industry to move into the site, but in the meantime, the mayor says the city is operating with $7 million less in tax revenue. "There is some hope that the more cultural events we get going, the more people know about them, the more we'll bring that industry, the cultural industry, here to take over the forest industry," said Doubt. Part of that cultural industry could centre around another project of Arnold's. He was looking for a new office for PRISMA when he stumbled across an empty space in an historic building overlooking the mill and the ocean. He secured government funding, and now construction is underway to turn it into a performance hall with office space and storage for community arts groups. Arthur is quick to acknowledge that the history of Powell River is what makes a project like this even possible. "I think we stand on the shoulders from generations before us," he said. "It's not something that you can just start." In addition to the rich cultural heritage of the Tla'amin First Nation, the region's connection to the arts go back to the early 1900s, when the Powell River Company was formed to build Western Canada's first pulp and paper mill. The company was starting the town and mill from scratch so they could plan everything, right down to the type of workers they wanted in the community. "Originally, there was a vision that culture was extremely important, so both sports and arts, mostly music, was very important right from the very beginnings of this community," says Rob Southcott, a city councillor who was born and raised in Powell River. The company was following an urban planning approach called the Garden City Concept, which prized, among other things, a sense of community. To that end, the company hired people to work at the mill who were also musical. Arthur Arnold says that's part of the reason there's so much music in Powell River today. "That seed has been planted and it spread and the music trees grew, and here we are." All musicians needed For Nancy Hollmann, Arnold's impact has been personal. When she moved to Powell River in 1966 to teach arts and music in school, she quickly got involved in the arts community, leading choirs and playing piano wherever she was needed. But at 89, Hollmann is long retired. Her foray back into the music scene happened after she attended one of the first concerts of a new amateur symphony that Arnold had been supporting. "I noticed that they didn't have a bassoon. And I just, silly me, I mentioned to somebody, 'oh, I played bassoon 40 years ago, but I haven't played it since,'" recalls Hollmann. Word reached Arnold and he asked if she'd take it up again if they found her an instrument. "And I said, 'I'm 80 years old. I probably would die if I tried to blow a bassoon. And he said 'but what a wonderful way to go.' And that's why I borrowed a bassoon from the school district because I'm relearning it." Today she's proud to say she's the oldest person in the symphony. His work in Powell River may seem humble compared to leading the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. But Arnold says, in many ways, it's the same work he's always tried to do. "Community building is something really beautiful," he says. "Music is the perfect vehicle to do that. We understand music deep inside. To connect people through music is one of the most beautiful things that I can think of, and I feel very privileged to be able to do that." The setting just makes it all the more meaningful, he says.
Winnipeg Free Press
13-06-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Must-reads for Dad
This Father's Day, skip the grilling cookbooks, the corny bathroom joke books and cookie-cutter sports bios, and get dad a something new to read that he can really sink his teeth into. The Free Press arts and life team have pulled together a list of books practically any dad will find compelling. From life on the road in a rock band to a fraught father-son story of addiction to the shifting landscape of geopolitics, a fiction writer's first novel in decades and beyond, any father on your list will find something they'll enjoy. By Jeff Tweedy (Dutton, $28) Jeff Tweedy had a dad, is a dad and makes, with his band Wilco, the kind of music sometimes described as Dad Rock, so Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) — also a deeply dad sentiment— has many dad bonafides. It's also a laugh-out-loud funny and revealing memoir by a guy who has had to fight a lot of demons to become (in this writer's opinion) one of America's best living songwriters. Obviously, there are a lot of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco stories in here, but one doesn't need to be a Wilco fan to enjoy this book; Tweedy's storytelling abilities transcend format. He writes affectingly about his father who worked on the railroad — yes, 'all the live-long day' — and his sons, who also make music. But it's the stories from his childhood growing up in Belleville, Ill., that will stay with you; no spoilers, but an anecdote about Bruce Springsteen is worth the price of admission alone. Buy on — Jen Zoratti By Tim Marshall (Scribner, $26) Tomes on geopolitics aren't usually high on my reading list, but this page-turner by Tim Marshall deserves to be on everyone's bookshelf, not just your dad's. Marshall, previously a journalist at Sky News and the BBC, explains clearly and concisely how the 'land on which we live has always shaped us' — delving into the wars, the power, politics and social development determined by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas of our landscape. Originally published in 2015, the completely revised edition has been updated to reflect the global changes of the last 10 years and includes new material exploring the growth of China's military and strategic power, Moscow's alliances with authoritarian states and the Russia-Ukraine war, and America's pivot to the Pacific. It's a riveting book that tackles traditionally complex subjects with aplomb. Witten in highly accessible language with nothing dumbed down, this is very much a must-read. Buy on — AV Kitching By Ron Carlson (Penguin Canada, $30) This grim and gorgeous novel by American short-story author Ron Carlson is probably the most overtly 'manly' book I've ever read, but it's also startlingly tender. It follows three men working on a summer construction project, building a stunt ramp to launch a motorcycle over a canyon in Idaho. All three are dealing with painful pasts, and Carlson carefully delineates the struggle of how each one defines manhood in the face of tough work, toxic masculinity and tragedy. Arthur Key, the sort-of protagonist, is a taciturn man with no children, but he becomes a father figure to his co-worker Ronnie, a juvenile delinquent looking to straighten out. Arthur doesn't talk about his feelings; his love is expressed by teaching, passing his knowledge of how things are made on to his protegé. Carlson delves into the mechanics of carpentry and building in a way that's incredibly detailed, and yet somehow sounds like a poem, not a user manual. The writer has an unparalleled sense of place, delivering the reader to a remote location of wild beauty, but the hint of impending doom that looms over the summer does not go unanswered, and even the most macho-dude dad may find he has a little something in his eye by the book's end. Buy on — Jill Wilson For the Love of a Son: A Memoir of Addiction, Loss, and Hope MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Scott Oake's moving memoir, For the Love of a Son, describes the devastating loss of his son, Bruce, who struggled with addiction. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Scott Oake's moving memoir, For the Love of a Son, describes the devastating loss of his son, Bruce, who struggled with addiction. By Scott Oake (Simon & Schuster, $27) After decades covering the Olympics, and as part of the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast team, Winnipeg's Scott Oake could have penned a rollicking memoir about highlights both in front of and away from the cameras. Heck, he still could. Instead, in his memoir Oake (with Michael Hingston) takes readers through some of his darkest days as he reminisces about his son Bruce, whose struggles with drug use led to his death at age 25 in 2011. (Oake also recalls the loss of his wife Anne, who died in 2021.) For the Love of a Son is Oake's candid and moving recollection of Bruce's highs and lows that will tug on the heartstrings of even the chilliest of dads. Oake's trademark wit and sly humour so often on display while covering sports also permeate the book's heavy subject matter, providing some levity. The silver lining of everything Oake has endured is the creation of the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre in 2021 and the forthcoming Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre. Proceeds from sales of For the Love of a Son benefit the Bruce and Anne Oake Memorial Foundation. Buy on — Ben Sigurdson With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy By Jake MacDonald (Greystone, $23) The late Winnipeg author Jake MacDonald spent a lifetime documenting and poeticizing a way of life that can feel as timeworn as the lodges and cottages he explores. An arguably conservative way of life — where free time's absorbed by hunting, fishing and gallivanting through secluded, if not exclusive, wilderness milieus, mostly with other men. While Manitoba's Hemingway found perhaps his most captive audience in the cottage crowd, his gentle humour, natural wonder and breezy but vivid prose made his work popular with Canadian literary reviewers and high school librarians alike. MacDonald wrote both fiction — his kid-friendly Juliana and the Medicine Fish is probably his best-known novel — and literary non-fiction, which is to say mythopoetic odes to his world and friends. With the Boys is the second type: a collection of vignettes about old drinking buddies, tossing barbs back and forth like rusty lures while they commune over the crap of life, amid (as the book jacket puts it romantically) 'crack-of-dawn motel breakfasts (and) starlit stakeouts in the bulrushes.' MacDonald died right before the pandemic, and as this writer's father also ages out of this outdoorsy boomer culture, one wonders wistfully whether its best aspects are disappearing too. Buy on — Conrad Sweatman Ben SigurdsonLiterary editor, drinks writer Ben Sigurdson edits the Free Press books section, and also writes about wine, beer and spirits. Read full biography Jill WilsonArts & Life editor Jill Wilson started working at the Free Press in 2003 as a copy editor for the entertainment section. Read full biography AV KitchingReporter AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press. Read full biography Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and feature writer, working in the Arts & Life department. Read full biography Conrad SweatmanReporter Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
