Lights in THE DARK
Our arts writers look back at stories that mattered most to them in 2021. Despite the year's challenges, optimism and progress are the binding threads
JFL FESTIVAL SHOWED US HOW TO LAUGH AGAIN
Give the Just for Laughs festival points for creativity — not only related to chuckles.
With our city of festivals still pretty much on hold for much of this year, JFL managed, as promised, to stage its 39th edition in hybrid fashion, with an intriguing combo of live and digital events — albeit in an abbreviated lineup — from July 26 to 31.
Most of the comedians generally booked at the fest hail from outside of the country, but given that travel restrictions prevented international talent from coming here on short notice in July, JFL did the next best thing: it brought the event to New York and Los Angeles, where there were live spectacles like the Nasty Show, Just for Laughs Live in N.Y., Just for Laughs Live in L.A., LOL'S Comedy Gold Minds with Kevin Hart, the Alternative Show and The Ladies Room with Jazzy.
And in line with public health regulations, JFL was able to stage live concerts in Montreal at long last, both indoors and outdoors. Club Soda hosted Comedy Night in Canada and Just for Laughs Live in Montreal. The fest was thus able to showcase one of its strongest representations of local stalwarts in years, including Joey Elias, Heidi Foss, Sylvain Larocque, Rodney Ramsey, Derek Seguin, Chantal Desjardins and Tranna Wintour.
And for those squeamish about attending live events, JFL offered most shows taking place in Montreal, New York and L.A. for free online.
As much as comedy-starved fans may have been delighted with the return of the fest, participating wits — addled by the pandemic for over a year — were even more thrilled to get back on stage to perform and schmooze with their standup cronies again.
As veteran U.S. comic Alonzo Bodden, who did a fest gig in L.A., put it at the time: “How bad have the last 16 months been?” Pause. “It was so bad that the murder hornets came and we didn't even give a damn.”
— Bill Brownstein
CAROLINE MONNET'S ART KNEW NO BOUNDARIES
The hits just kept on coming for Caroline Monnet in 2021.
In April, the Algonquin-québécoise visual artist's solo exhibition Ninga Mìnèh opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Therein, she used a colourful array of building materials — including polystyrene foam insulation, gypsum board, bags of sand, plumbing pipes and tubing — to address the housing crisis on First Nations reserves.
Ninga Mìnèh means “the promise” in Anishinaabemowin, a reference to the federal government's broken commitments to Canada's Indigenous communities.
Despite the serious subject matter, the 18 works teemed with lightness and life.
“I don't want to just remain in darkness,” said Monnet, who in 2020 was a co-recipient of the prestigious Sobey Art Award and winner of the Prix Pierre-ayot, given by the city of Montreal and the Association des galeries d'art contemporain.
“For me, it's important to break away from cycles of victimization,” she noted, “and start building for a better future.”
Monnet is one of the co-founders of Daphne, Montreal's first Indigenous artist-run centre, along with fellow Montreal-based Indigenous artists Skawennati, Nadia Myre and Hannah Claus.
The cosy gallery space on St-hubert Street opened its doors in May with the first solo exhibition of Huron-wendat visual artist and jeweller Teharihulen Michel Savard.
If that weren't enough, Monnet is also a filmmaker. In October, her debut feature Bootlegger opened the 50th Festival du nouveau cinéma. It's an affecting drama about who controls access to alcohol on a fictional Indigenous reserve, starring Devery Jacobs and Pascale Bussières. The script, written by Monnet and Daniel Watchorn, won the Cinéfondation bursary for best screenplay at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
“Each medium is a way for me to express a topic that is important to me,” said Monnet, who has no plans to slow down her prolific creative output.
— T'cha Dunlevy
IMPROVED INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION IN THEATRE
The appointment of Jimmy Blais as artistic director of Geordie Theatre in September was a significant moment for both Montreal theatre and First Nations representation in the arts.
A member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Blais is the first Indigenous artist to head up one of the major anglo theatre companies in Montreal. (Geordie Theatre, established by Elsa Bolam in 1980, is widely acknowledged as the third-biggest anglo company in the city, after the Segal and the Centaur.)
Blais, familiar to television viewers as construction worker-turned-cashier Watio in the comedy-drama Mohawk Girls, told the Montreal Gazette in September that he hoped the company would “be able to reconnect with a lot of the Indigenous community in Quebec that Geordie had a previous relationship with … earlier in Elsa's tenure.”
Blais's appointment has come at a time when more and more Indigenous artists are claiming the limelight in Montreal.
At the Centaur alone, there was Émilie Monnet's solo piece Okinum, which played in the Brave New Looks slot in September and the launch of an artist residency by Ange Loft and the Talking Treaties Tiohtià:ke Collective. One of the participants of that residency, Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo, recently won the prestigious Prix interprète de la danse at the Prix de la Danse de Montréal.
Elsewhere, francophone theatres La Licorne and Théâtre Denise-pelletier played host to First Nations companies — Ondinnok and Menuentakuan respectively — while Festival Transamériques featured more Indigenous performances than ever. (Granted, this was largely because travel restrictions necessitated content from within Canada rather than from abroad.)
Obviously there's still a long way to go, but these and other developments do argue that all those land acknowledgment statements, delivered pre-performance in many Montreal theatres, are more than just empty words. — Jim Burke
FILM PUT SPOTLIGHT BACK ON PIONEERING BAND FANNY
If Fanny are back in the news, and they are, it's almost entirely thanks to Montreal filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart's inspirational documentary about the pioneering American all-female rock band. Fanny: The Right to Rock had its world première in the spring at the prestigious Hot Docs festival in Toronto, where it won the Rogers Audience Choice Award, and it's been touring the globe on the fest circuit ever since.
It will have its Canadian streaming première on Crave beginning Jan. 17 and was recently acquired by New York-based distributor Film Movement, with the company set to launch the documentary in U.S. theatres sometime in 2022.
The film tells the story of the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label, looking back on their heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they released five albums and toured with bands like Chicago and Slade. It also follows the band members as they reunite in recent years to try to introduce a new generation to their music.
For Hart, it's not just about getting her movie seen. It's also part of her personal campaign to finally have Fanny get its rightful place in rock history. She feels it's time for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to give the band its due.
“The film has been a slow-burner of a success, just like Fanny's musical career,” said Hart. “But slow burns still burn, just like a fast burn. The band really feel that the film has raised their profile and it's only going to continue. To me, it's just the beginning. There's a lot more momentum to come.”
— Brendan Kelly
RARE DOUBLE WIN FOR DOCTOR'S VITAL BOOK
The sheer callousness of it is hard to comprehend: for decades, Indigenous children being airlifted from remote northern communities in Quebec for medical treatment were denied parental escorts. Samir Shaheen-hussain, a pediatric emergency physician at the Montreal Children's Hospital, was part of a successful campaign to end that practice in 2018. Treating some of those airlifted children and witnessing their hardship firsthand had already spurred him to take his activism further still.
The result, published by Mcgill-queen's University Press in 2020, was Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada, an invaluable contribution to the gradual and ongoing collective reckoning with the systemic racism that blights Canada's history. Among many key words in that loaded title is “confronting”: Shaheen-hussain doesn't spare his readers any of the unpleasant details.
What makes all of this a story for the year that's soon to end is what happened in November, when the judges of the 2021 QWF Literary Awards saw fit to reward Fighting for a Hand to Hold in two categories: it won both the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction.
The double victory was a rare feat all the more notable for a work from the world of academic publishing, whose efforts are too often confined to a specialist niche in the marketplace.
“Essential” is a word perhaps over-employed when we talk about books, but Shaheen-hussain's is nothing less. — Ian Mcgillis