When Maestro Timothy Vernon raises his baton at the School of Music’s 50th Anniversary Gala concert on December 2, it won’t simply be in recognition of the Honorary Doctor of Music he received at spring convocation. Instead, his performance with the UVic Chorus and Orchestra can be seen as the culmination of five decades of academic expansion, faculty excellence, alumni achievement and dedicated community outreach by the School itself.
Christopher Butterfield
“I heard a funny story when I was in Berlin,” says School of Music director Christopher Butterfield. “People were talking about where the interesting musical centres are on the west coast of North America and somebody said, ‘Well, there’s Los Angeles . . . and Victoria.’”
An alumnus himself, Butterfield began his studies back in 1971 at what was then simply the music department. “It was very small,” he recalls. “We had three classrooms in the MacLaurin A-wing and all of our concerts were held in the David Lam, as the Farquhar Auditorium wasn’t built until 1978.”
The Wind Quintet in 1977
Music courses were first offered back in 1964 as part of UVic’s fledgling arts & humanities department, before evolving into the division of music in 1967 and earning full department status in 1969. But it wasn’t until the construction of the purpose-built MacLaurin B Wing—complete with the 220-seat Phillip T. Young Recital Hall—that the School was formally established in 1979.
Since then, the School of Music has continued to expand, adding new faculty (including Butterfield himself in 1993), new programs (such as jazz in 1990), permanent artists-in-residence (the Lafayette String Quartet in 1991) and prestigious designations, like being Canada’s only All-Steinway School (2008) and offering the country’s only Music & Computer Science degree (2011) and Masters in String Quartet (2016).
Join the School of Music in celebrating their 50th anniversary at their reunion weekend, running Friday-Sunday, Dec 1-3 at UVic. Events include an A Day in the Life at the School of Music Open House (noon-5pm Dec 1), Reunion Social & Dinner (5:30-11pm Dec 1), Music in Motion Workshop with Music professor Adam Con (11am-noon Dec 2), a Campus Tour for returning alumni & guests (12:45-2pm Dec 2), a special alumni concert From 1917 in 2017 with Kerry DuWors, violin, and Stephen Runge, piano, (2:30pm Dec 2), a fun participatory singalong with the Victoria Beer Choir lead by Adam Con at UVic’s Felicita’s Pub (4-7pm Dec 2), the UVic Chorus & Orchestra Gala Concert (8pm Saturday Dec 2), a Farewell Brunch (10am-noon Dec 3), and an Open Mic on stage at the Phillip T Young Recital Hall (11am-1pm Dec 3).
While focus and demand have changed and grown, Butterfield says one essential aspect remains the same. “You have to give people the confidence to think like artists. There’s no manual . . . they need to find their own voice and interests, find out what sustains and feeds them. The payoff comes when you see them making lives for themselves as artists.”
Mark Reid receiving his “Teacher of the Year” Juno Award from Shania Twain in 2013 (Photo: AEG Live)
“Bringing Timothy in is a way of recognizing our commitment to the community, as well his honorary degree,” says Butterfield of the concert, which will also feature faculty pianist Arthur Rowe and trumpeter Merrie Klazek as soloists. “We wanted to make him part of this experience by having him choose the music and work with our students.”
Indeed, Butterfield feels it’s this connection between city, faculty and creative practice that sets the School of Music apart. “We’re never going to be the place for everybody, but the people who do come here soon realize we’re punching way above our weight.”
The UVic Chorus & Orchestra Gala Concert featuring guest conductor Timothy Vernon runs 8-10 p.m. Saturday, December 2, in the University Centre’s Farquhar Auditorium. Tickets are $10-$25 and are available at the UVic Ticket Centre, online or by phone at 250-721-8480. Can’t make the show? You can always tune in on the School of Music’s Listen! Live page.
The reviews are in for Phoenix Theatre’s mainstage production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, and audiences are enjoying its “visual delights and thought-provoking observations,” as local arts writer Janis La Couvée writes in this review, which also highlighted the work of director and Theatre professor Conrad Alexandrowicz and his design team.
The Madwoman of Chaillot (all photos by David Lowes)
Describing the production as “a meta-theatrical spectacle of tremendous proportions, serving up visual delights and thought-provoking observations that will leave the audience questioning their role in the scheme of things,” La Couvée notes that “once again, Victoria is fortunate to have a theatre department where foundational work of this scale can be staged.”
You can also now hear this online recording of the opening week lecture by Alexandrowicz, in which he talks about the background of the Madwoman as Jean Giraudoux’s response to the Nazi occupation of France.
In the Times Colonist review, Sarah Petrescu felt “the large cast of colourful characters and absurd plot are a rare malleable clay for interesting staging and direction,” and noted how “Alexandrowicz specializes in physical theatre and makes excellent use of movement . . . a table of bad men plots to destroy the city out of greed, rolling on chairs as they choreograph their scheme.”
Petrescu also highlighted the work of cast member Chase Hiebert, a Phoenix graduate and current writing student, as well as the set by Theatre professor and alumnus Patrick Du Wors as “a fantastic version of a café in Paris, built with massive black and white illustrated backdrops.”
This review from the Showbill Victoria online arts mag felt Madwoman still “proves its relevance almost 75 years after being written. “The play is loaded with enticing wit and is brought to ‘justice’ by the studious cast, who don’t stumble through impressive vocal projection and fluid movement across the stage – so well-rehearsed that it’s not all that noticeable that some actors catch chairs being tossed to them by the crew until you realize an extra seat had appeared,” writes Shayli Robinson. “Being performed in 2017, though – especially in Victoria – it is a great allusion to the energy and oil projects proposed to pass through our province that are oft-viewed as evil and disastrous, particularly by our elderly, quirky, and whimsical fellow citizens . . . . The Madwoman of Chaillot is an entertaining, thoughtful show that will leave you seriously pondering the persecution of evil and the fate of British Columbia.”
This Monday Magazine review also singled out the work of Du Wors and graduate student costume designer Michelle Ning Lo, as well as undergraduate cast members Sarah Jean Valiquette and Nicholas Guerreiro, noting the “productions at UVic are . . . extremely professional and well-executed. One always has to admire the skill with which the drama department manages the challenging plays they choose.”
Writing for UVic’s student newspaper The Martlet, Jakelene Plan felt that “the theatrical design to come out of the Phoenix Theatre is often the most innovative and engaging work I’ve seen. It continually pushes the boundaries of what I expect and what I think is achievable, and the work done by Patrick Du Wors on set, Michelle Ning Lo on costumes, and Matthew Wilkerson on lighting design exceeds all my expectations.” Plan noted that “their unified vision of a colourful, cheerful Paris becoming infected by greed (represented by grey scale) is cohesive and complementary. …colour is an easy and striking way to draw attention to themes, but it’s the creative application that raises the technique from commonplace to spectacular.”
Over at Camosun College’s Nexus student newspaper, Leslie Do felt, “The Madwoman of Chaillot [was] a great performance . . . the action was perfect . . . . [and it] registers on a deeply human level.” She was also “especially impressed by the outstanding performance by Nicholas Guerreiro . . . his voice, his attitude, and his acting were absolutely incredible,” and concluded that director Alexandrowicz “brings a great performance to the audience with this play . . . [which is] definitely worth two hours of your attention.”
The Madwoman of Chaillot runs at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre, 8pm Monday – Thursday until November 25, with 2pm Saturday matinees. Tickets range from $15 – $26 and can be booked by phone at 250-721-8000, or in person at the Phoenix Box Office. Recommended for ages 13+.
While university may be the logical choice for many high school students, not everyone finds their path right after graduation: many opt to spend some time working or traveling before deciding on a specific field of study.
Recent Visual Arts grad Brandon Poole was principal photographer for “The Tom Thomson Centennial Swim” project in Ontario’s Algonquin Park in 2017 (photo: Paul Walde)
Brandon Poole made just such a choice, spending his 20s as a carpenter and electrician, hitchhiking across Canada, living on a sailboat; and the classes he did take (philosophy, photo journalism) didn’t lead to any specific path. It wasn’t until he decided to shoot a series of photos in downtown Vancouver’s back alleys that he had his academic epiphany.
“I was trying to find a way of resolving my myriad of skill sets without leaving anything behind,” says the 31-year-old Poole, graduating this month with a BFA in Visual Arts. “I like working with my hands, and I need an output that’s not just about writing and concept; it needs to be combined into a more overarching mode of work. Art school solved all those problems.”
Accelerating through his degree in just three years, Poole put his time in the visual arts department to good use. More than just taking classes, he also applied for (and received) BC Arts Council funding, took on a variety of workstudy positions at UVic — including darkroom technician, faculty studio assistant and lab assistant in the Studios for Integrated Media — launched his first solo gallery exhibit, The Principle of Original Horizontality, at the local Fifty Fifty Arts Collective (which he described as “kind of a mad science project,” in this Monday Magazine interview), was the undergrad representative on a faculty hiring panel, and was nominated for Vancouver’s inaugural Phillip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize in 2016.
He also spent a good part of this past summer working with department chair Paul Walde on his latest site-specific intermedia project, The Tom Thomson Centennial Swim. Poole traveled to Ontario’s Algonquin Park where he put his camera skills to work as the primary videographer documenting Walde’s complex project, as well as handling logistics and equipment purchases.
Poole and his Fifty Fifty exhibit (photo: Monday Magazine)
“All of these opportunities provided me with a well-rounded understanding of what’s possible in an academic situation for arts-based work, as well as the outside opportunities that exist,” he says. “It’s simply more skills to bring to the table for whatever I choose to do next.”
As for what is next, Poole says the next logical step is pursuing an MFA back east. “I draw a lot of strategies from journalism, from photography, from the building industry and architecture — and the outputs of those are videos, photographs, sculptures, and drawings, all of which get tied together in a specific space. The works aren’t enough on their own; the space is always highly considered.”
For a guy who never would have described himself as an artist before attending UVic, Poole has indeed found his path. “I really think the undergraduate program here is fantastic,” he says. “It’s especially useful for encouraging the cohesion of skills and interests.”
Art is often quite prescient. Be it science fiction or political satire, a tasty analogy or handy metaphor can be a welcome tool for many artists in an effort to comment on current happenings. But what happens when, 70 years later, a far-fetched idea becomes closer to reality than the original event?
French playwright Jean Giraudoux wrote La Folle de Chaillot during WWII when Paris was under siege by Nazi forces. Unable to address the political situation directly, he used metaphor as a way to protest the violent incursion of his beloved city; unfortunately, Giraudoux was in ill health when he wrote the play and did not live to see either its premiere or success after the war.
It was understood by audiences at the time that the evil and corrupt businessmen who were trying to profit from supposed oil underneath Paris — as portrayed in The Madwoman of Chaillot, which opens November 9 at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre — were stand-ins for the Nazis, whose occupation of the City of Light and much of France caused humiliation, hardship, and tragedy for the French Resistance, French-born Jewish people and those who had fled to France prior to the outbreak of war.
Giraudoux offers us a protagonist to work against these representatives of evil: Countess Aurelia, an eccentric holdover from a less cynical time. When she learns that her cherished neighbourhood of Chaillot is in peril because of the businessmen’s plans, she bands together with a rag-tag group of artists, vagabonds and dreamers to fight back. Fast-track to 2017, when oil pipelines are being driven through our communities jeopardizing wildlife and our environment, and suddenly Giraudoux’s artistic metaphors no longer seem like a far-fetched threat.
Conrad Alexandrowicz
Department of Theatre professor and Madwoman director Conrad Alexandrowicz remains fascinated by how this play’s context has become so literal for today’s audiences.
“We live in the era of climate crisis — something even Giraudoux may not have been able to even imagine,” he says. “With the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion set to begin, we are forced to take the figures of evil in the play — bent on profit-making regardless of the costs — at their face value; for us their status as metaphor has disappeared.”
An essayist and dramatist who wrote 15 plays, Giraudoux also served France as a diplomat, government official, and a soldier in World War I. His writings often tempered tragic themes with rueful comedy, using allusive prose, allegory, fantasy, and political and psychological perceptions. The 1947 English translation of Madwoman by Maurice Valency holds to this day, and the play has seen a resurgence of interest in the last few years.
The set of Madwoman of Chaillot (photo: David Lowes)
The sets in the current Phoenix production — designed by recent Theatre professor and alumnus Patrick Du Wors — allude to the nostalgic café-lined streets of Paris, even though they are only flat, massive representations of 19th century engravings.
Costumes, designed by MFA student Michelle Ning Lo, have WWII-era references for the businessmen, and vibrant and flamboyant Edwardian-era frills for the “madwomen.” Lighting design by fourth-year student Matthew Wilkerson captures the streets of Chaillot and helps heighten the moments of comedic absurdity, as does the sound design by third-year student Logan Swain, featuring classic Parisian music that is slightly off-kilter.
Michelle Ning Lo’s costume designs
“The designers and I have taken a meta-theatrical approach to the production, eschewing realism completely for a play that operates in the realm of the fantastic, in the genre of post-modern performance as much as in comedy,” says Alexandrowicz.
Indeed, anyone who has seen past Phoenix productions by Alexandrowicz — including 2015’s Lion in the Streets and 2012’s Good Person of Setzuan — will recall his dynamic blend of imagery, movement and text.
Keep your eyes open for intentional elements of creative anachronism that will help to make comparisons to 2017 even more apparent.
—with files by Adrienne Holierhoek
The Madwoman of Chaillot runs at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre, 8pm Monday – Thursday from November 9 – 25, with 2pm Saturday matinees. Tickets range from $15 – $26 and can be booked by phone at 250-721-8000, or in person at the Phoenix Box Office. Recommended for ages 13+.
Sometimes the most inspiring work occurs while students are still enrolled in university. Consider MFA Connect, an inter-institutional visual arts exhibit that literally connects UVic Visual Arts MFA candidates with fellow graduate students at UBC Okanagan.
Works by Conner Charlesworth & Crystal Przybille
Organized by second-year UVic MFA candidate Marina DiMaio, MFA Connect runs November 6-10 in UVic’s Audain Gallery in the Visual Arts building; the first part of the exhibit ran October 10-20 in the FINA Gallery at UBC Okanagan’s campus in Kelowna.
“MFA Connect is like a conference for visual arts,” says DiMaio. “Other departments make these kind of ‘connections’ all the time, but when we get together we share a visual language. This is about challenging each other’s research, getting our research out into the world, creating our own opportunities, establishing communities, and continuing the larger conversation of the place of the visual arts in an academic institution.”
As emerging artists and creative researchers, it’s essential for MFA candidates to connect with both local and international art centers, and to encounter and share visual methodologies. With that in mind, MFA Connect aims to deepen and challenge graduate student practices, as well as equip the larger academic communities with new records of interdisciplinary understanding.
David Michael Peters helps install the exhibit at UVic
“The academic community we are temporarily placed in while being in an MFA is perhaps the most valuable part of being here,” she says. “We have an immediate network of support, of individuals striving towards similar goals with a common passion for creative research.”
The first in what’s hoped to be a series of MFA art exchanges, MFA Connect will showcase the work of six UVic MFAs — Conner Charlesworth, Leah McInnis, David Michael Peters, Evelyn Sorochan-Ruland, Xristia Trutiak, and Di Maio herself — and five UBCO MFAs: Steven Thomas Davies, Jessica Dennis, Joe Fowler, Crystal Przybille and Meg Yamamoto.
“Conceptually, we are all working in very different ways,” DiMaio explains. “You will find some similarities in the general tendencies of each program toward materiality, craft, and the handmade — the show is filled with objects pointing toward a physical human experience — but this show ultimately finds its affinities in the ongoing conversation of visual art as a form of research.”
Xristia Trutiak
Pieces on display will tackle concepts ranging from discussions of labour and conversations with the history of art to investigations into process and material politics, explorations of internal and external gender identity, studies of soundscapes and perceptual experience, the mapping of place and possessions, and an examination of Indigenous rights and truths.
“We’re only in our MFAs for two years,” DiMaio concludes. “That goes by fast and we need to make the most of our time here and take advantage of all the opportunities that are available to us.”
MFA Connect runs 10am-4pm Monday-Friday, November 6-10 in the Visual Arts Building’s Audain Gallery, with a closing reception beginning at 4:30pm on Thursday, November 9
Join the School of Music in celebrating their 50th anniversary at their reunion weekend, running Friday-Sunday, Dec 1-3 at UVic. Events include an A Day in the Life at the School of Music Open House (noon-5pm Dec 1), Reunion Social & Dinner (5:30-11pm Dec 1), Music in Motion Workshop with Music professor Adam Con (11am-noon Dec 2), a Campus Tour for returning alumni & guests (12:45-2pm Dec 2), a special alumni concert From 1917 in 2017 with Kerry DuWors, violin, and Stephen Runge, piano, (2:30pm Dec 2), a fun participatory singalong with the Victoria Beer Choir lead by Adam Con at UVic’s Felicita’s Pub (4-7pm Dec 2), the UVic Chorus & Orchestra Gala Concert (8pm Saturday Dec 2), a Farewell Brunch (10am-noon Dec 3), and an Open Mic on stage at the Phillip T Young Recital Hall (11am-1pm Dec 3).
This review from the Showbill Victoria
Writing for UVic’s student newspaper 
French playwright Jean Giraudoux wrote La Folle de Chaillot during WWII when Paris was under siege by Nazi forces. Unable to address the political situation directly, he used metaphor as a way to protest the violent incursion of his beloved city; unfortunately, Giraudoux was in ill health when he wrote the play and did not live to see either its premiere or success after the war.
