The Killing Game at the Phoenix

by | Feb 13, 2025 | Theatre, Undergraduate

The latest mainstage production at our Phoenix Theatre is Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist comedy The Killing Game. Directed by Theatre professor Conrad Alexandrowicz, from a translation by Helen Gary Bishop, The Killing Game transcends the ordinary by offering a surreal, captivating play that immerses audiences in the tale of a town facing a deadly plague. As the body count rises, accusations fly, tensions rise, and the line between reality and absurdity is blurred. Death spares no one, regardless of wealth, age, innocence, or guilt, turning the community into a chaotic mix of paranoia, hypocrisy and opportunism.

“Over the course of working on this piece, I realized that it could be about a different kind of crisis,” Alexandrowicz said in this interview with the local Nexus newspaper. “It’s not really about a deadly epidemic, it’s a satire on people’s folly, bad behaviour, criminality. It could be something else that [Ionesco] had chosen to reveal all these things. It presents a very dim view of humanity, indeed.”

Despite its dark subject matter, The Killing Game — one of Ionesco’s last plays — is filled with humour and reveals how social connections can become fragile when confronted with an existential threat. With razor-sharp wit and keen satire, Ionesco skillfully allows the audience to engage while maintaining a sense of detachment through laughter. (“The human drama is as absurd as it is painful,” Ionesco observed.)

“The absurdists were very much about the way the comic and the tragic are intertwined, it’s not an either/or proposition,” continues Alexandrowicz. “We laugh at things that are horrible sometimes, and I’ve really tried to go as far as I could with that idea. Of course we laugh at all this ridiculous activity and nonsense and insane beliefs that people hold. It makes people dropping dead mostly hilarious, and I’m really pushing the comedic aspect of this because I think that’s what [Ionesco] intends us to experience.”

 

The Killing Game cast (photo: Dean Kalyan)

Fearing a cast and creative team of over 25 students, The Killing Game offers a memorable commentary on the absurdity of society in the face of an uncontrollable crisis.

The Killing Game runs February 13–22 at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre. Tickets start at $18. 

Music professor has world premiere at Invictus Games

by | Feb 10, 2025 | Faculty, Research, School of Music

When over 550 wounded warriors walk and wheel into the closing ceremonies of Vancouver’s Invictus Games, they’ll be entering to the celebratory sounds of a triumphant new fanfare, specially composed for the event by UVic School of Music professor Steven Capaldo. His “Invictus Fanfare” will be performed live at the Rogers Arena on Sunday, February 16, by frequent UVic Music collaborators, the Royal Navy’s Naden Band of Maritime Forces Pacific.

An international multi-sport event first held in 2014 for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women (both serving and veterans), The Invictus Games were co-founded by Prince Harry, who will be in attendance.

With Invictus participants coming from 25 different countries, Capaldo is the ideal composer for this piece: a new Canadian who received his citizenship in 2023, he served in the Australian military and has composed “celebration music” for national events before.

“The producers loved the fact that this piece was new, fresh and Canadian,” he says. “It doesn’t sound like a staid, old 1800s fanfare: it has a modern feel and a modern flare.”

Media interest

Listen to Steven Capaldo talk about his “Invictus Fanfare” in this interview with CBC Radio’s On The Island from February 11. He also appeared in this CHEK News story, and has forthcoming interviews with the Times Colonist newspaper and CBC Radio’s North By Northwest show. 

A respectful celebration

Set to a tempo suitable for wheelchairs and assisted walking, Capaldo was surprised at how quickly he was able to compose the three-minute fanfare.

“I thought about my own experiences in the military, the philosophy of the Games and how it should be a celebration but also respectful of the athletes’ particular journeys,” he says. “I also knew it needed a moment of introspection to acknowledge their sacrifice: the reason they’re at these games is because they’ve had an injury through war, through their service. I wanted to pay respect to that.”

A specialist in conducting, composing and arranging for wind ensembles, Capaldo regularly leads the UVic Wind Symphony; his own compositions have been performed by groups in Australia, Canada, Japan and the USA.

Capaldo says his fanfare was an instant hit when presented to organizers and is now in consideration as the official theme for future Invictus Games processionals. And given Rogers Arena’s 20,000-seat capacity plus the worldwide television broadcast of the closing ceremonies — which also features performances by the Barenaked Ladies, rapper Jelly Roll and blues duo The War & Treaty — this will definitely be the largest audience for any of his pieces.

Capaldo and the UVic Wind Symphony will also perform with the Naden Band on April 4, 2025, at UVic’s Farquhar Auditorium.

Orion Lectures: Luis Jacob Assistant Professor University of Toronto “Activating the Museum”

by | Feb 10, 2025 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Luis Jacob 


Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

“Activating the Museum”

12:30 pm Wednesday, February 26
Room 103, UVic’s Fine Arts Building

Free & open to all 

Presented by UVic’s Department of Art History and Visual Studies.

For more information, please email arthistory@uvic.ca

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts is pleased to present Luis Jacob, Visiting Artist. All are welcome to attend this free event.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

 Luis Jacob is a Peruvian-born, Toronto-based artist and curator whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing and invites a collision of meanings. Since his participation as an exhibiting artist in Documenta12 in 2007, he has achieved an international reputation, with shows at the Taipei Biennial, Rotterdam’s Witte de With, the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Spain’s Centro Párraga, Vienna’s Generali Foundation and New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, as well as numerous private galleries. 

In 2009 Luis Jacob exhibited a series of large scale canvases — They Sleep with One Eye Open, nos. 1-7 — that appear to watch gallery visitors with an intense gaze. “7 Pictures of Nothing Repeated Four Times, in Gratitude” was staged at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, in Mönchengladbach, Germany and addressed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) presence/absence in the history of the museum. 

Rothko is a widely celebrated modernist, but what is less well known is his pedagogical activism, and the fact that, politically, he aligned himself with anarchism. They Sleep… attempts to reanimate the spirit of Rothko’s canonical paintings, which are now so ‘familiar’ that many are almost unable to see these artworks with fresh eyes. Join Jacob as he discusses how his paintings represent an opportunity to reconnect with Rothko and dialog once again with his radicality. 

Free and open to the public | Find more at www.events.uvic.ca

For more information on this lecture, please email visualarts@uvic.ca

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca

Orion Lectures: Anosh Irani Author, playwright “Building Character in Fiction”

by | Feb 1, 2025 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts, Writing

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Anosh Irani 

Author, Playwright

“Building Character in Fiction”

2:30 pm Friday , February 7
Room 103, UVic’s Fine Arts Building

Free & open to all 

Presented by UVic’s Department of Writing.

For more information, please email writing@uvic.ca

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts is pleased to present Anosh Irani, Visiting Artist. All are welcome to attend this free event.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

 Anosh Irani was born and brought up in Bombay before moving to Vancouver in 1998, where he teaches creative writing at SFU’s World Literature Program. He has published four critically acclaimed and bestselling novels: The Cripple and His Talismans (2004), The Song of Kahunsha (2006), Dahanu Road (2010) and The Parcel (2016). The Parcel was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail, National Post, CBC, The Walrus and Quill & Quire. His work has been translated into 11 languages, his short stories have appeared in Granta and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his nonfiction has been published in the New York Times. 

His 2006 play Bombay Black won five Dora Awards (including for Outstanding New Play) and his anthology The Bombay Plays: The Matka King & Bombay Black was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Drama. The Matka King received a Jessie Award nomination (Outstanding Original Script), as did his 2018 play, The Men in White — which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Drama. 

His latest play, Behind the Moon, is running at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre from Feb 4 to March 2. 

Free and open to the public | Find more at www.events.uvic.ca

For more information on this lecture, please email visualarts@uvic.ca

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca