Eye on the prize

Last week, many of our national art movers and shakers were gathered together to hear which artist would walk away with the $50,000 Sobey Art Prize at a reception at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The room was so full, it was impossible to even catch a glimpse of anything but other people’s backs, but luckily the hors d’oeuvres and drinks were flowing freely.

Cape Dorset, Nunavut, artist Annie Pootoogook won this year’s award with her pencil drawings depicting day-to-day life in the Arctic. Her technical style may be naïve, but her subject matter is not. Granddaughter of famous graphic artist Pitseolak Ashoona, Pootoogook veers away from the classic Inuit art images inspired by spiritual beliefs and living off of the land. Instead she shows us the Inuit’s contemporary reality: a world where frozen foods, porn, violence, television and scraping hides all co-exist.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the free exhibition yet, I highly recommend it. There is strong work by Quebec City’s BGL (make sure you find the hidden doorway), spectacular portraits by Vancouver’s Steven Shearer, conceptual garden schematics by Janice Kerbel and a painterly fistfight traverses Maritimer Matthew Reichertz’s canvases. The Sobey exhibition runs until Jan. 7, 2007, info: 285-1600. —Christine Redfern

Good breaks

Just months before the Montreal world-premiere of its IMPORT / EXPORT, Belgian company Les Ballets C. de la B. became plagued with injuries. A set piece fell on one of the dancers and left her concussed, one suffered back problems and another had knee surgery for which doctors predicted a week recovery, but it took six. Instead of throwing his hands up in frustration, choreographer Koen Augustijnen decided to encourage his dancer to dance with crutches, which gave unexpected results. “You can do things with what you have,” he says. “Limitations are sometimes an advantage.” In this theatrical work, the cast of six dancer-acrobats explore what it’s like to feel helpless in a personal and global sense.

Augustijnen, of Belgian company Les Ballets C. de la B., continues his collaboration with composer Guy Van Nueten and countertenor Steve Dugardin, who wanders about the stage singing French Baroque songs accompanied by the Kirke String

Quartet. Catch it at the Cinquième Salle at Place des Arts at 8 p.m. nightly until Nov. 18, $18–$28, info: (514) 842-2112. —Marites Carino

Poetic petting zoo

One Montreal spoken word artist who’s taken it to a whole other level, Catherine Kidd’s performances unfold our world like an origami puzzle. With Bipolar Bear, a book/DVD package, she refracts the quirks of our own species through zoologically oriented examinations of special critters like meercats, human fish and the queen of the mushrooms. The visual element includes live performance footage, a slideshow documenting various globe-trotting tours and video montages by Taien Ng-Chan.

“We’re exploring more and more how to use the video element,” Kidd explains. “The overall theme is representations of animals, where the sense of context is sort of skewed. There’s a lot from the Singapore zoo, and Taien’s found some incredible footage of a polar bear in the Central Park zoo.” Kidd performs her Best Bits tonight at 10 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 18, at 11 p.m. at the MainLine Theatre (3997 St-Laurent), $17. —Vincent Tinguely

Borrowed dreams

Though it fell out of use some time ago, “songe-creux” is an old French term used to describe a person trapped in a sad life, left with nothing but their empty dreams. It’s also the inspiration behind up-and-coming local choreographer Christophe Garcia’s latest, Les songe-creux.

“I wanted to explore the imaginary worlds of these characters—to find out how these dreams would manifest themselves in everyday life despite the weight of their reality,” he explains. “What would they say if someone was listening?”

Inspired by playwright Michel Tremblay’s Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal and French author Paul Fournel’s Les Grosses Rèveuses, Garcia’s piece reflects the dual nationality and cultural references of choreographer and company. A born-and-bred Frenchman now established here, Garcia founded the first-ever Franco-Canadian dance company, la [Parenthese], with one foot in Marseille and the other here in Montreal. Catch his intricate work Nov. 16–17, 8 p.m., at la Maison de la Culture du Plateau Mont-Royal (456 Mont-Royal E.), (514) 872-2266. —Hanako Hoshimi-Caines

Is it Art?

EXCREMENT ADVENTURE: While the Montreal Insectarium has been hosting bug-tasting sessions for years, the Miami Zoo is raising the bar when it comes to putting the far-out in foul, by putting the cool in stool. The zoo is currently hosting the travelling exhibition, The Scoop on Poop, which explores the science of scat in more ways than you could shake a log at. Visitors can smell flowers that smell like shit in order to attract flies for pollination, race dung beetles, watch videos of hippos marking their territory with their droppings, marvel at the average 540 pounds of poop produced daily by the zoo’s resident Asian elephant Dahlip, and munch on curiously-shaped chocolate-covered candies passed around by staff. For more info, visit www.miamimetrozoo.com, or go to Miami.

ArtsHole

DRAG ZONE: Montreal cult cabaret darlings 2boys.tv, aka Gigi & Pipi, unleash their latest transmedia video-theatre piece Zona Pellucida Nov. 22–23 at le Monument National (1182 St-Laurent). They describe this zone as a “delicate cocoon where dark magnetic spells and erotic interior fancy mingle within an enriched sensory spectacle, a membrane of dreams.” Two shows per night, 7 and 9 p.m., (514) 871-2224. • SHE’S COMING UNDONE: Kalmunity regular Meena Murugesan unwinds Unravelled, her Indian dance-theatre performance featuring live music and words, at the Centre Gésu (1202 Bleury), this Sunday, Nov. 19, 8 p.m. sharp, $13.50, (514) 861-4036.

ARTISTAT: Number of stands at this year’s Salon du livre de Montreal, the 29th edition of the annual book-stravaganza running at Place Bonaventure from Nov. 16–20, www.salondulivredemontreal.com: 875

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