The Banff Centre: Communications

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review – January 29, 2004.  
Quantum Theatre artistic director Karla Boos is tackling Kafka’s Chimp, a decidedly nontraditional opera by Welsh composer John Metcalf and British librettist Mark Morris that debuted at Canada’s Banff Centre for the Arts in 1996. Heading the cast will be two performers from the original Canadian production — bass baritone Michael Douglas Jones, who will play the Director, and Welsh baritone Richard Morris, who will perform as Red Peter.

The Globe and Mail – January 21, 2004 – Page R2.   “Biographer, poet and journalist Rosemary Sullivan has been named chair of the Banff Centre’s program in creative non-fiction and cultural journalism…”

The Globe and Mail – January 17, 2004 (Page D16).  

Wayne Grady reviews Joan Skogan’s Mary of Canada: The Virgin Mary in Canadian Culture, Spirituality, History and Geography, published by the Banff Centre Press. (The Globe has also reprinted the first chapter of the book.)

Skogan writes about Mary of Canada not as someone who has found something, but as a constant searcher; her prose is a probe, not a lance…. She is a hunter-gatherer of information, which she then enshrines in wisdom…. Mary of Canada is like that throughout: full of tender acts of mercy, gleanings from a millennium of history and brilliant flashes of insight, which taken together add up to sacred meaning.

Telus – January 16, 2004.  

Tomson Highway’s latest play, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, is premiering at the Sagebrush Theatre in Kamloops. Lisa Ravensbergen plays Annabelle Okanagan.

“It’s been an adventure,” she says, sitting backstage at the Pavilion Theatre during a photo call for the play. “It’s been evolving. We started with a workshop in Banff last February.”

Edmonton Journal – January 14, 2004.  
After a decade living in Banff, singer-songwriter Lori Reid recently moved to Calgary with a recording that has found much favour with both music fans and the media there.

Producing a solo concert at the Banff Centre, which she dubbed the New Mother Nature Show, proved to be another pivotal experience for Reid in terms of artistic growth. “Putting that show together at the centre allowed me to meet and be inspired by many of the artists who were in residency there.” One of those new associates was recording engineer John Sorenson who had returned to Canada after spending a number of years working in Los Angeles studios with such heavyweights as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. For Reid it was a Rocky Mountain high when she began cutting her original songs at the Banff Centre’s recording studio with Sorenson.

Indiana Star Press – January 13, 2004  

Marie Ebbing, who was an audio associate at The Banff Centre in 2001/02, worked for two months as a music editor on the film The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. (Thanks to Lachlan for the tip.)

She began working while still a student, spending summers as a music engineer at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, later working in Alberta, Canada, at the Banff Centre for the Arts, among other places. The contacts she made there led to her position with the third installment of Peter Jackson’s trilogy.

Salt Lake Tribune – January 4, 2004.   Shauna Rolston doesn’t remember life before the cello….

Variety via Yahoo – January 4, 2004.   The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa: A Gregorio Rocha/Archivia production in association with Universidad de Guadalajara, UPA and the Banff Center. Produced by Rocha. Executive producers, Sara Diamond, Hector Mendoza.

In 1914, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa was signed to N.Y.-based Mutual Film Co., agreeing to play himself in a quasi-factual feature, The Life of Pancho Villa, long since lost. It’s the fate of the original film itself that obsesses Gregorio Rocha as he chases its elusive trail around the globe….. But pic is compromised by Rocha’s overbearing insistence on placing himself center-stage as a soul-searching sleuth. Some of this content fascinates — but helmer’s endless voiceover natterings and constant on-camera presence strike a very indulgent note. Tech aspects are OK.