Culture: Moulin Rouge, The Project and Kanata

Moulin Rouge
It is the world’s most famous 
cabaret, the birthplace of the cancan and a font of creativity for more than 100 years. Located in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, Moulin Rouge has hosted concerts by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, and was the inspiration for Academy Award-nominated films by John Huston (1952) and Baz Luhrmann (2001). This original production from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (celebrating its 70th year as a company) is a similarly inspired tale, choreographed by Jorden Morris and featuring works from a number of composers, including Debussy (with a pas de deux set to “Clair de Lune”), Ravel, Offenbach and Massenet. Nov. 19 to 22, Vancouver Centre for Performing Arts, centreinvancouver.com


The Project
Aaron Bushkowsky is a local playwright with a reputation for thought-provoking works, whether concerning how family members respond to the mental deterioration of a loved one (Strangers Among Us), the imagined relationship between three Elizabethan dramatists (Dead Reckoning) or Vancouver’s pronounced obsession with real estate (Soulless). With this new work, The Project, Bushkowsky focuses his critical lens on the film business. Take four egotistical auteurs “making a difference” with a film on starvation in Africa, add in a revolutionary military takeover and some big-business Christian fundamentalism, and you’ve got a surefire recipe for dark and delicious comedy. Nov. 5 to 15, Performance Works at Granville Island, solocollective.ca


Kanata
Welshman David Thompson, who sailed into modern-day Churchill, Manitoba, in late 1784 at the age of 15, has been called the “greatest land geographer who ever lived.” He mapped some 3.9 million square kilometres of North America, established the Columbia fur trade and set up trading posts throughout B.C. In his new book, Kanata, Toronto writer Don Gillmor uses Thompson’s little-explored personal life as the springboard for a sprawling multigenerational work of fiction that follows the lives of Thompson’s illegitimate son and his descendants through millennia. Penguin Group (Canada), Nov. 10, penguin.ca