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Roger Waters: The Wall Live
Return of a ballet classic, repeat ?of a quirky flick, and yet another ?brick in the wall. Music // Roger Waters: The Wall Live
As the renowned poet Neil Sedaka once wrote, breaking up is hard to do. Just ask the members of Pink Floyd, who have been feuding on and off for a quarter-century now, ever since principal songwriter and “conceptual leader” Roger Waters left the art-rock band. The breaking point was The Wall, the 1979 opus that for many fans typifies the Pink Floyd sound. But the album was almost entirely a Roger Waters production: his melodies, his lyrics, his life story realized as a high-concept (and high-cost) tour, replete with inflatable animals. Waters and Pink Floyd put out one more album together but then split. The band kept the name and Waters kept the concepts – which with this tour, one hopes, include a certain blow-up pig. Dec. 12, Rogers Arena, ticketmaster.ca
Just as the Christmas shopping season is the make-or-break period for most retailers, a staging of The Nutcracker is the thing to bring many perennially cash-strapped ballet companies into the black each year. Hence the fact that you can, in the Vancouver area, enjoy not one but two professional productions of Tchaikovsky’s seminal work later this month. Ballet BC teams up with Alberta Ballet and the VSO for five shows over four days (Dec. 29 to Jan. 1 at the QE Theatre, ticketmaster.ca), while the Goh Ballet pulls off four shows in three days. The Goh production is particularly noteworthy in that it’s choreographed by local-girl-turned-dance-luminary Anna-Marie Holmes (a former artistic director at Boston Ballet) and features principal dancers from both the National Ballet of Canada and Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. Dec. 16, 18 and 19, The Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, ticketmaster.ca
Popular Unrest, a multi-city installation by Toronto-born artist Melanie Gilligan, is one of the more intriguing works to hit B.C.’s art scene in 2010. The plot reads like a Cronenberg film: a future “much like the present” where “all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit.’” Divided into five episodes, the film – shot in London – has a cast of 12 and will have site-specific elements from Gilligan in each of the four cities in which it’s showing. Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery in London, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff and Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. To Jan. 16, 2011, Presentation House Gallery, presentationhousegall.com