The Banff Centre: Communications

The Globe and Mail: singer Melissa Stylianou, whose trio played a weekly Friday evening slot at a Toronto club for five years, has moved to New York where she began an intense eight-month, self-directed program studying improvisation, composition, repertoire and vocal technique.

Stylianou’s sojourn in the Big Apple is a giant step in a creative transition that began in 2003 when she first attended the Banff International Workshops for Jazz and Creative Music (she was also an artist-in-residence there in 2004) and was the only singer among 60 or so musicians…. “Banff was the beginning of me really working at music,” she explains. “Until then I was content with being an intuitive musician.”

Toronto Star: “Diamond, 51, came to OCAD after 10 years at the Banff Centre in Alberta, where she was director of research and artistic director of the Banff New Media Institute. The New York-born, Vancouver-educated artist arrived in Toronto with a growing reputation as a video-maker…. She was a well-connected intellectual with a particular interest in new media. ‘Visionary’ is the way OCAD board chairman Colin Graham described her.”

Canadian Art: Walter Phillips Gallery director Anthony Kiendl discusses the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art exhibition and residency at the Banff Centre. “Art provides a tenable counter-narrative to corporate empire, and while we are perhaps still defining what that might be, it is certainly an empire of an entirely different order.”

National Post: [bjm_danse] — the company formerly known as Ballet jazz de Montréal — is currently touring Crystal, a program comprised entirely of works by the “formidably talented and inventive Vancouverite Crystal Pite… the youngest winner ever [in 1995] of the Banff Centre’s prestigious Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award.”