Eric Volmers spotlights our rising local stars
In a year of disruption, cancellations and uncertainty, these local entertainers sparkled
While it's unlikely 2020 will be remembered for anything other than the world grinding to a COVID-19 halt, there were plenty of shining stars in the world of arts and entertainment whose work stood out. These Calgarians and Calgary expats didn't let a little thing like a pandemic slow them down. In some cases, they responded to it directly with innovation and defiance. So here are some Albertans whose art helped make a terrible year seem a little more bearable.
PRANEET AKILLA, ACTOR
Mumbai-born, Calgary-raised actor Praneet Akilla started 2020 with a high-profile role on the Netflix series October Faction. The horror-comedy was filmed in Toronto and Cambridge, Ont., in 2019, but debuted in late January. October Faction marked his big break in front of the camera. For a show that involves werewolves, vampires, witches and warlocks, Akilla's role of high school alpha male Phillip may seem relatively tame, but the actor found depth in a character who proved to be much more than your average high school bully.
J O C E LY N A L I C E , SINGER-SONGWRITER
Jocelyn Alice had an eventful 2019. She left her major record label, released an indie-pop record and returned home to Calgary after spending years in Los Angeles and Nashville. But 2020 also proved to be a monumental year for the artist. In April, Alice appeared on NBC'S reality-tv series Songland, which found the Calgarian competing with three other songwriters. She performed and pitched her song How Could You Not Know? to guest artist H.E.R. after being matched with A-list producer Shane Mcanally to give it a new spin. In the end, she didn't win but did get her song in front of a large American audience.
JENNA ANDREWS,
MUSIC EXECUTIVE, PRODUCER AND MENTOR
A one-time up-and-coming pop starlet signed to Island/def Jam, Jenna Andrews has been slowly moving behind the scenes for the past few years as a producer, songwriter and A&R rep. In May, the E.P. Scarlett High School grad's mentorship to a handful of young singers was certainly bearing fruit. One of her proteges, 20-year-old expat Lennon Stella, was celebrating the release of her hit album, Three. Two. One. Miley Cyrus's little sister Noah had a platinum hit with July, a remix that Andrews co-wrote. Meanwhile, 20-year-old New Zealand artist BENEE found massive viral success on Tik-tok and Spotify with Supalonely, another song that Andrews co-wrote.
TA M A R A B E AT T Y, VOCAL COACH
Tamara Beatty is another performer who has found success behind the scenes. The Calgary-based vocal coach has worked on the down-low with high-profile clients who looked to her for help rehabilitating their voices. But she also had stints coaching contestants on reality TV. That includes a 13-season run on The Voice and, in 2020, participating in FOX'S runaway hit The Masked Singer.
KIANA WU, ACTOR
A Taiwanese-canadian who was born and raised in Calgary, Kiana Wu has had a busy year despite the pandemic. She was a member of the young company that created Theatre Calgary's online production of Romeo and Juliet and performed as Dorothy in Alberta Theatre Projects' workshop of playwright Andrew Scanlon's new adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Wu also featured in Vertigo and Lunchbox theatres' radio version of It's a Wonderful Life. Although she began her studies in Calgary, Wu spent three years at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York where she authored an essay on Asian actors in television and stage. She is currently active behind the scenes with such local companies as Downstage Theatre, Inside Our Theatre, Swallow-a-bicycle and Verb Theatre.
BRITTNEY CANDA, CHOREOGRAPHER, DANCER, FILMMAKER
Not many people can say they bested Beyonce in 2020. But a video for Montreal-based singer Sheenah Ko's Wrap Me Up took home the award for best choreography at this year's U.K. Music Video Awards, beating out high-profile fare by Beyonce, among others. It was quite the coup for Calgary expat Brittney Canda, a longtime collaborator with Ko. She choreographed, co-directed and danced in the video, shot on a shoestring budget in the basement of a Montreal church. Due to COVID-19, the awards were held online and Canda actually accepted the win in the living room of her parents' Calgary home.
SIOBHAN COONEY/SPENCER STREICHERT,
FILMMAKERS AND CO-FOUNDERS OF THE QUARANTINE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
The COVID-19 pandemic brought out the creativity in plenty of artists. But among the first out of the gate in mid-march were Siobhan Cooney and Spencer Streichert, actors and filmmakers who issued a challenge to fellow auteurs around the world to use their downtime creatively. They received an astonishing 600 submissions from 54 countries and eventually launched the festival online. So far, there have been editions of the festival, the latest took place at the Globe Cinema at the end of October.
CRAIG DILOUIE, AUTHOR
Writer Craig Dilouie's 2008 thriller The Thin White Line imagined what would happen if a novel influenza-type pandemic took hold in Canada. So the writer has a track record of writing frighteningly prophetic fiction based on imaginative but realistic what-if scenarios. Our War officially came out in 2019, but Dilouie's unsettling tale of America's descent into civil war thanks to a Trump-like president's stubborn refusal to admit defeat seemed all-too prescient in 2020. Last month, the Calgary-based author also released The Children of Red Peak, a horror story about the former members of a cult trying to piece together how they survived the group's last days as children.
L I N D S AY ELL, SINGER-SONGWRITER
One of Calgary's most successful country music expats, Lindsay Ell had an emotional year that found her releasing a brilliant new record and confronting past trauma. In early July, Ell gave an exclusive interview to People Magazine revealing that she had been raped at the age of 13 and 21 by different men, which made headlines around the world. She also announced the formation of #Makeyoumovement under the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee to support at-risk youth and survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault. She released Heart Theory a month later, a concept album chronicling the seven stages of grief.
ANNA DALGLEISH, ACTOR
A graduate of Rosebud Performance Art Theatre, Dalgleish was featured in such Rosebud plays as The Cariboo Magi, The Amish Project, Bright Star and Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol. Since relocating to Calgary in 2018, Dalgleish starred as Susan in Alberta Theatre Projects' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as Miranda in the Shakespeare Company's The Tempest, and was scheduled to star as Wendy Darling in ATP'S version of Peter Pan and as Rhonda in Fire Exit Theatre's This Random World before they were halted by the pandemic. Dalgleish played Juliet opposite her real-life partner Zach Running Coyote in Theatre Calgary's online version of Romeo and Juliet.
KIESZA, SINGER-SONGWRITER
Calgary-born performer Kiesza released her long-awaited sophomore album in 2020, a full six years after bursting onto the scene with her 2014 Juno-winning, platinum-selling debut, Sound of A Woman. Crave was a perfect summertime treat, an uplifting and highly danceable pop album. It's all the more triumphant giving the figurative and literal darkness the singer emerged from. Crave marked the cautious return to the spotlight for Kiesza, whose career was derailed in 2017 when she suffered a traumatic brain injury after a car accident in her adopted home of Toronto. She endured a two-year road to recovery, much of it spent not knowing if she would ever perform again. She also left Island Records and released Crave independently on her own Zebra Spirit Tribe imprint.
PHILLIP LEWITSKI, ACTOR
When Phillip Lewitski was growing up in northwest Calgary,
he was curious about his Mohawk ancestry even if he rarely had an opportunity to explore it. That all changed a few years ago when the actor, who is of mixed French, Ukrainian and Mohawk background, looked to his maternal grandmother for help discovering his Indigenous heritage. This personal journey shared similarities with his character on the CBC Gem sci-fi teen show, Utopia Falls. The high-concept series, described by Entertainment Weekly as “America's Got Talent meets The Hunger Games,” takes place in a near-future where Earth has been left in ruins and teenagers compete as dancers, singers and musicians. Played by Lewitski, Apollo is a musician who discovers his own heritage through drumming.
TAT E M C R A E , SINGER-SONGWRITER, DANCER
Calgary's Tate Mcrae made this same list back in 2016, when the then 13-year-old placed third on American reality-tv series So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation. Who would have guessed that she would find even more success as a teen music star four years later? Mcrae, who turned 17 this July, was forced to spend much of 2020 holed up at her Calgary home due to COVID-19, but it didn't stop her career from barrelling ahead full speed. In January, she released her debut EP, All The Things I Never Said, for RCA Records and embarked on her first headlining tour, selling out shows in Toronto, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam and London. In April, she released the single You Broke Me First, a moody bedroom-pop ballad that was accompanied by a
video the teen shot with her phone on a rooftop in downtown Calgary. She released more singles over the summer and MTV gave her a big boost by making her their July “MTV Push” artist. In October, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel. In August, she worked with Youtube to host a concert livestream from her backyard. In November, she performed You Broke Me First on MTV'S European Music Awards.
N E W L AW, BAND
Made up of brothers Cayd, Tylan and Dayne Greiner, this Calgary trio landed a spot on America's Got Talent, which aired in June. While the band was eliminated in the audition round, they did perform an original song for judges Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, Sofia Vergara and Simon Cowell.
R A N DA L L O K I TA , ARTIST,
FILMMAKER
Calgary expat Randall Okita broke new ground this year as a filmmaker with The Book of Distance, a National Film Board virtual-reality production that chronicles the experiences of Okita's grandfather. The story focuses on Yonenzo Okita's life in Canada, including his internment by the Canadian government in the 1940s. The story is powerful enough on its own but made even more so by the state-of-the-art, virtual-reality storytelling that literally immerses viewers into the action.
D AV I D O U LT O N , TA L K- S H O W H O S T
David Oulton was another artist who didn't want his time spent in self-isolation to go to waste. The actor ended up hosting Face to
Face with David, a low-budget talk show shot at his Calgary home. It featured Oulton engaging in lowkey online chats with various entertainers and business leaders, including Queer Eye's Carson Kressley and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. It was snatched up by Amazon Prime Video in the U.S and the U.K. and picked up for a second season.
ROZETTE, SINGER
Singer and vocal teacher Rozette became one of the more unusual COVID-19 success stories after deciding to sing away the pandemic blues with a series of parody songs she launched on Facebook and other social media channels. Quarantunes received thousands of views and found Rozette riffing on self-isolation with new pandemic-related lyrics applied to popular songs such as Dolly Parton's Jolene (which became Vaccine) and Lady Gaga's Poker Face (which morphed into Poker Virus.)
TA N K S TA N D I N G B U F F A L O , ARTIST AND FILMMAKER
Artist Tank Standing Buffalo drew on his talents as an artist and a painful past to create the six-minute animated film RKLSS. The film chronicles his imprisonment in Ontario when he was only 15. Part-anishinaabe, the artist grew up in Chatham, Ont., as the oldest of eight children. He eventually moved to Calgary and parlayed his love of graffiti and comic books into filmmaking. RKLSS was created after he received a scholarship for the Quickdraw Animation Society. It premiered this September at the Toronto International Film Festival and also screened
last month at Quickdraw's Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival.
JAE STERLING,
VISUAL ARTIST, HIP-HOP PERFORMER
One of the city's leading voices in hip-hop, Jamaican-born artist Jae Sterling also hosted his first art exhibit in 2020. The colourful and politically charged Riding Horses with White Men opened at the nvrlnd art gallery this summer. He also drew praise, and more than a little controversy, as the artist selected to create a mural to reflect the Black Lives Matter movement in Calgary. His piece, titled The Guide and Protector, was painted on an apartment building in Chinatown and was inspired by the story of John Ware, a legendary Alberta rancher.
SYKAMORE, SINGER-SONGWRITER
Even by 2020 standards, Carseland native Sykamore had a strange year. After spending two years in Nashville, the singer-songwriter made her debut at the Bluebird Cafe, an iconic Music City club that has kick-started many country music careers over the years. It was on March 4, one day before a deadly tornado swept through Tennessee. She was left without electricity for a few days but made her debut anyway. A few weeks later, COVID-19 shut down Nashville and the rest of the world. Regardless, the artist decided to soldier on. She released a new EP called California King in April, her debut for newly formed Music Knox Records, which was founded by Nashville powerhouse producer Michael Knox.