Highlights highlights

Good vibrations and strange mutations
at the 10th Montreal Highlights Festival

POST-COASTAL BLISS: Pacifika

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Paris, France is often referred to—among many other, um, colourful descriptions—as the City of Lights. So it’s both a genuine doffing of the cap and perhaps also a backhanded challenge that Paris in particular is being fêted this year by the Montreal Highlights Festival, the annual deep-winter cornucopia of food, fun, performance and lights—lotsa lights—thrown by Spectra (the Jazz Fest folks) and Hydro-Québec (providers of mucho juice).

The Highlights fest also chugs the bubbly for its 10th anniversary this time around, and they deserve kudos, given the impressive spread of music, dance, art, fine feasting and general good times they’ve lined up.

Already up and running is the Paris/Design en mutation exhibit at UQÀM’s Centre de Design, at 1440 Sanguinet. (Keep the word “mutation” in mind, by the way, we’ll get back to that.) This expo, ongoing since mid-January until March 1, showcases the work of almost a dozen individuals or collectives who’ve had a major impact on the directions that the aesthetics of daily life have taken in Paris in recent years. Expect a classy collision of sleek, streamlined geometry and organic fecundity.

The festival’s shows begin tonight, Feb. 19 and a good place to start is the other side of the continent, or at least at Metropolis’s Savoy room with Pacifika, the Vancouver-based trio of Peruvian singer Silvana Kane, who brings some flamenco flair to proceedings, guitarist Adam Popowitz and Caribbean-inclined bassist Toby Peters. Their mellow and elegant blend of global flavours, jazz chops, pop savvy and tropical warmth is well suited to keeping the subzero blues at bay.

Neat feats and Sapphic traffic

The annual Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain de Paris, the world’s premiere gathering of acrobats and aerialists, jugglers and jesters, ships over a vast array of international talent (no, they’re not all being packed into a shitty little Renault) for a cavalcade of contortions and clowning, every night through to Feb. 28—except Monday, Feb 23—at 7:30 p.m. nightly (8 p.m. on Saturdays) at la Tohu, 2345 Jarry E.

You can reserve that Monday, Feb. 23, for an evening with locals Constantinople at Place des Arts’ Salle Pierre-Mercure, at 8 p.m. The ensemble—brothers Kiya and Ziya Tabassian on setar and percussion, respectively, with viola player Pierre-Yves Martel, are joined by edgy clarinettist Lori Freedman and special guest Savina Yannatou, a renowned Greek singer, for a performance entitled La nuit aux 1000 oreilles. It’s an exploration and celebration of the sixth-century B.C. Greek poet Sappho, of the island of Lesbos. Yup, that one, and yes, lady-on-lady lust is a recurrent theme in her work, but there’s so much more to it than just hot antiquarian action.

Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà, along with narrator Albert Millaire, unveil material from their new CD, Gargantua et autre plaisirs. Renaissance writer François Rabelais’s playful, fantastical parables, rich in ribaldry and roguish philosophizin’, were the inspiration for these works by neoclassical composer Jean Françaix, whose copious compositions across the spectrum of forms were marked by wit, whimsy and a charitable sense of pleasure and charm at odds with the often crepuscular and opaque efforts of so many of his contemporaries. Violinist Dubeau and her cohort can be counted on to do the material justice on Tuesday, Feb. 24 at Place des Arts’ Théâtre Maisonneuve at 8 p.m.

As the festival gradually wraps up, there’s the two return presentations of Mutantès, the impressive hybrid—or shall we say mutation?—of theatre, dance, design and superior-grade pop music masterminded by the excellent Pierre Lapointe. This thing was a huge hit at this past summer’s FrancoFolies. Find out why, at Place des Arts’s Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 27–28.

Oh, and keep in mind that Feb. 28, a Saturday, is when the festival’s truest gem, the phantasmagorical Nuit Blanche, turns the town upside down and inside out. No point in even trying to list all the amazing things—art shows, performances, activities—occurring throughout the downtown core right through till morning, but just know that most of ’em are free. The only question, really, is what won’t you do?

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