There's The Wire, But Where Are The Birds? | The paintings of Larisa Sembaliuk-Cheladyn provide a colourful backdrop to Dance Me..., part of the Leonard Cohen International Festival

Leonard Cohen: Danceable?

All right: now that we’ve decided Leonard Cohen really is worth all the fuss (see above article), we can get down to business and talk about the Leonard Cohen International Festival itself. Of particular interest to Arts News readers will be Dance Me..., a multimedia dance performance featuring Victoria School students and alumni as well as paintings and video by Larisa Sembaliuk-Cheladyn; as well as On the Other Side... (those Cohen fans sure do love their ellipses!), an ambitious audio-visual feast of sound, light, and Cohen tunes by Edmonton “new media” artist Gary James Joynes.

Advantage: Playwrights

You wouldn’t know it from the unbelievably drab cover—get with the 21st century already, Playwrights Canada Press!—but The Alberta Advantage is actually worth getting excited about. This hefty new 600-page anthology of 10 notable plays by Alberta authors finds room not just for crowd-pleasing comedies by David Belke (The Red King’s Dream) and Stewart Lemoine (The Exquisite Hour), but also more challenging, experimental work by Sharon Pollock (Kabloona Talk) and Eugene Stickland (Excavations). And in a pinch, the damn thing is heavy enough to pound some last-minute nails into your set.

This Just In From The AFA...

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts announced last week that they are using the influx of funding from Alberta’s cultural policy to expand their grant programs. As Leonard Cohen would say, hallellujah. Of particular note is the creation of a new $93,000 pool of cash for individual project grants in the area of “Aboriginal Traditional Arts Projects”—a boon to Aboriginal artists working in traditional cultural arts media designed to be passed from one generation to the next. The deadline for that particular grant is September 15; application forms and complete info are available at www.affta.ab.ca.