Concert looks to help eyes
Motown Meltdown: Singers sound off for Seva Canada restoration program
EYE OPENERS: Kendra Sprinkling produced and sang in the recent 14th-annual Motown Meltdown concert that reportedly raised $40,000 for the eyesight-restoring Seva Canada organization. Twenty-four singers from Alexander (A-Train) Boynton Jr. to Garfield Wilson entertained Commodore Ballroom attendees. Justifying her “next Joan Jett” hype and likely hoping to match fellow Burnaby native Michael Bublé’s climb to fame, ingenue Stephanie Standerwick belted out Aretha Franklin’s Since You Been Gone. That delighted Loverboy singer Mike Reno, who stickhandled her soon-to-launch Stand album. After getting a generation dancing at the Roxy Cabaret, Reno’s 11-year squeeze Cathy St. Germain did it again by singing the Kiki Dee Band’s I Got The Music In Me. NEXT STEP: Many professional dancers hang ’ em up at age 30. But not Ballet British Columbia, which emerged from Pacific Dance Theatre in 1986. Bankrupted in 2008, the company soon refound the footing that artistic director Emily Molnar, executive director Branislav Henselmann and board chair Dr. Kevin Leslie vow to maintain. Last year’s record $540,000 fundraising campaign doubtless inspired the $305,000 already pledged for its repeat. As for BBC’s creative relationship with Arts Umbrella, that academy’s graduate dancer Alex Burton’s view of the future suits both organizations: “If you don’t work, you’re not going to get it. And that’s exactly what being a professional is.”
HIGH STYLE: The Vancouver Fashion Week Jamal Abdourahman founded has come a long way since 2001, when lingerie- clad models spilled from Au Bar on to motorcycle-fringed Seymour Street. The recent running saw global designers and reporters supplement locals as scores of runway shows packed the Chinese Cultural Centre. Some male models’ coifs needed only tiny coconuts to resemble palm trees. Let’s see if they catch on.
CAR CORRAL: Another style-biz veteran, Jason Heard, manages the current 96thannual Vancouver International Auto Show. He founded the Design Vancouver show in 2004, managed it as Interior Design Show West and, with father Phil, owned Vancouver Collectors Car Show Auctions. When the auto show beckoned, car nut Heard — anyone lusting for a Dukes of Hazzard 1969 Dodge Charger R/T warrants that term — successfully applied the bigger-brighter-and-more-options mantra.
FRAMED: Cooking for science-fiction author William
Gibson and having professional circus clowns as parents needn’t necessarily produce a better artist.
But, with collectors snapping up his works, they seem not to have harmed Adad Hannah, whose Concordia University PhD involved studying photo-motion pioneer and acquitted murderer Eadweard Muybridge, whose pre-cinematography works hang beside his at Andy Sylvester’s Equinox gallery.
• FULLY FLEXED: Talk about bending over backwards to please. “I can make my head touch my bum,” said contortionist Kasha Konaka (kashakonaka. com), who modelled for Hannah’s paintings. For her Spider” move, the Kits Secondary grad, painter and sometime circus performer lies chest down, brings her feet over her shoulders to rest before her face, then rotates 360 degrees on them. “But not in this skirt,” she said modestly. PROJECT HUMPTY: Recalling a buyer who dropped and smashed an ostrich egg he’d embellished for a 1994 exhibition, Hannah said: “He managed to glue all the pieces together again.” Without all the king’s horses and men, apparently.
• 1-800-GOT-JOB? The local junk-removal firm Brian Scudamore founded in 1989 has become 300-staff O2E Brands with four separate divisions and a second corporate office in Toronto. An imminent hiring fair should find 60 of 200 new employees expected by year’s end, said Scudamore who will address job hopefuls at the firm’s Great Northern Way headquarters March 31. WAVE RIDER: Blue Mind author Wallace J. Nichols fronted a book- selling event at the Vancouver Aquarium Wednesday, World Water Day. It supported his maxim that “proximity to water can improve performance, increase calm, diminish anxiety and increase professional success.” That latter consequence might encourage high-achieving, untroubled, optimistic locals who own yachts that are often called “holes in the water into which you throw money.” ZOOM ROOM: Having coined and capitalized on the Zoomer name for aging yet affluent baby boomers, Moses Znaimer welcomed them to another 100- exhibitor show here recently. Chatelaine Carmen Ruiz y Laza introduced Abba, Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, Anne Murray and Roy Orbison tribute acts, and Znaimer nailed attendees’ concerns with banners that read Money Zone, Pet Zone, Wellness Zone, Alcohol Sample Zone and Lift Cannabis Lounge. NOW YOU SEE: Printed postcards have long depicted historic paintings. The reverse was hen’s-teeth rare until retired architect Robert Sandilands produced large, often multiple paintings of 12 vintage cards portraying the Burrard Bridge, Marine Building, Prospect Point and other landmarks. They’ll hang until May 31 at Kits Point’s City of Vancouver Archives where Heather Gordon and staff keep our historic city alive and well. ARTSPEAK 101: So-and-so “inserts the narrative of the other by presenting alternative ways of viewing and interpreting the Canadian landscape, ultimately problematizing the ubiquitous images of Canadian identity, creating space for a more polycentric, multicultural history.”