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While we had a better idea of what we were contending with in 2021, it was still weighed down by unprecedented challenges. But great achievements often rise from adversity and looking back on the year that was, this has proven true in Edmonton’s arts community.
Individuals have been breaking ground and making waves, some fresh faces and other weathered veterans, like Orville Havana — celebrating 25 years with his Tuff House Records , he upped his game by getting into the business of health foods and supplements for a healthier year ahead.
Destinations deserve to be recognized this year, from time-tested institutions to ingenious new spaces carved out of necessity, like The Backyard in the heart of Downtown. This open-air, dog-friendly, chain-linked space, complete with fake turf, beanbag boards and retro lawn chairs, had a stage with a spectrum of shows from local singer-songwriters to a wild electro set from Moontricks one hot night in July — let’s hope this wasn’t a one-year deal.
Finally, the things that arose from these strange times have been gifts, many of which we can hold on to, like the evolving mural map from the Old Strathcona Business Association — walks are great, colourful and artistic treasures to find along the way are even better.
The Journal’s arts writers have taken the time to serve up and share their favourite people, places and things of 2021 — let’s dig in.
Raising the community bar while reducing debt
While some people understandably hunkered down and awaited the end of the pandemic, Kirsta Franke was forging ahead.
Founder of the Wild Heart Collective and the 124 Grand Market, Franke just seems to be built that way. In the last 10 years she’s been involved in a number of diverse neighbourhood projects, such as Nuit Blanche Edmonton, The Winter Shake-Up Festival and the first All is Bright on 124 Street. It might have been tempting to sit out a global health crisis, but Franke is well aware that what she does affects more people than just herself and her crew.
“You need to support people during the hardest times,” Franke says from Fort Edmonton Park, where she’s helping with the teardown from last weekend’s Christmas Market. “When you walk away from something like this you see how many people benefit, and how many great experiences you provide to patrons or local brands that you’re working with. It’s so worth it when you step back and see how many people are given a positive experience.”
A lot of work has gone into those positive experiences. Franke and her crew have had to change on the fly with new rules and regulations at her 124 Grand Market, and quickly adapt to an indoor scenario when she was given the OK to put a Christmas Market into the old Army & Navy store on Whyte Avenue last year. This year she repeated it, extending it further with a spinoff market at Fort Edmonton Park.
“Last year was our 10th anniversary at the 124 Street Market,” she marvels. “The first day we opened we had 18 vendors and we sold out of everything. Last year we ran over 75 outdoor markets in various locations — it’s been quite the ride. I somehow stumbled my way into this from working at a restaurant and loving the local farmers and entrepreneurs I met, putting on events and starting a farmers market. Who knew it would get this far?”
Chicago, New York … Edmonton Food Hall
In tough times, it’s wise to band together.
So goes the thinking behind 5th Street Food Hall which opened last October at 105 Street and 104 Avenue. The brainchild of JustCook Kitchens, the hall is essentially an upscale food court for four local restaurateurs with diverse menus: Levi Biddlecombe and Robert Wick with Backstairs Burger, Gregory Sweeney and his Southeast Asian themed HOM, Neil Royale’s plant-based Seitan’s, and Kelly Burns’ Three Foodies. Patrons can dine in, take out or choose delivery using an app available from the website.
It’s a handy venue for chefs with new ideas but limited budgets to work with, as the hall provides everything necessary to do the work. In cities like Chicago and New York they’ve taken off, with accompanying bars, butcheries, even live entertainment adding to the allure. Edmonton’s 5th Street Food Hall is just starting off, but word is there are interesting plans for the future, including a few pop-ups.
Inner city concert series raises spirits and awareness
Singer-songwriter AV, a.k.a. Ann Vriend, may not have come from a DIY hardcore punk background, but her reaction to the pandemic would be familiar to anyone who listens to Minor Threat or SNFU.
Rather than stewing over the loss of her usual European touring plans, Vriend opted to turn the front yard of her McCauley home into a gig space, giving concerts nearly every Sunday afternoon when the weather cooperates. She never charges for the shows, which often feature friends and neighbours, instead setting out CDs for people to buy if they choose. Her passionate defence of the inner city neighbourhood she calls home is such that when a few boxes of her new album were stolen off her porch, a few area kids tipped her off to where she could find them.
— Tom Murray
A beloved stage veteran bows into retirement
Once upon a pandemic, Coralie Cairns was dancing, alone, in the rehearsal hall at the Varscona Theatre when a thought came to mind: Hey, this is fun. Maybe I should do this more often.
A desire to explore life outside of theatre was part of the reason Cairns, 65, decided to retire from her full-time job as general manager of Shadow Theatre at the end of 2021.
Cairns will continue to act on Edmonton stages — where she has performed in some 100 roles since she entered the profession in the early 1990s. The vocation has taught her so much.
Playing a physicist in Arun Lakra’s Sequence introduced her to Fibonacci numbers . (“It’s mathematical magic.”) Conor McPherson’s The Weir revealed what it was like to lose a child. (“I don’t have children, but going on that journey really stayed with me.”) Playing Alice in Michele Riml’s Sexy Laundry was “just so much fun.”
Cairns will do some administrative work for a couple of Edmonton theatres, but the jam-packed days of yore are over.
“I have to admit there is a part of me that’s a little afraid of what’s out there, what’s next. It’s going to be a big year, but I’m excited for it.”
Grindstone Theatre proved a collective heartbeat for the arts
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway; COVID-19 was hard on the arts. And here’s another fact that bears repeating: the pandemic prompted a healthy evolution for some theatres and artists in Edmonton.
One stellar example is Grindstone Comedy Theatre , which ended 2021 with a smash musical comedy on its hands (and on its books). Artistic director Byron Martin expects that ticket sales of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer will reach 11,000 by the end of its January run.
“We just kept the pilot light on this whole time so as soon as we were allowed to do things, we were ready to go,” said Martin, noting that having 500 episodes of the improvised musical comedy, The 11 O’clock Number, under its belt helped the troupe produce their latest hit.
The theatre had other successes in 2021, including the Grindstone Comedy Festival (which tripled in size from its 2019 iteration) and Mural Massive (which saw murals painted inside and outside of the theatre in 2020 and 2021).
“We like to think about theatre in a broader sense. What is a live experience that we can give people that doesn’t have to be a scripted play? I see a lot of theatre moving in that way,” says Martin.
Handmade pasta virtually from ltaly
When local actor, dancer and choreographer Gianna Vacirca’s career in theatre was put on a COVID-19 pause, she turned to cooking to make money and connect with her Italian heritage.
Even as theatre gigs ramp up again — she appeared in The Citadel’s Bears in October and reworked the choreography for this month’s presentation of A Christmas Carol — Vacirca’s pasta company bell’uovo continues to provide considerable satisfaction and a way to share knowledge about pasta culture.
“What I’m after is not just to sell pasta, but to open people’s minds to the history of the food and the people who made it hundreds of years before us,” said Vacirca.
The resourceful University of Alberta fine arts graduate (due to appear in Jane Eyre this spring at the Citadel) is still churning out custom orders from her downtown apartment. Working with natural dyes from beets, kale and paprika, she creates eye-popping designs and posts her creations on Instagram ( bell_uovo ). Every month, Vacirca creates a pasta list that delves into the history of pasta.
December’s list highlights Sardinia and features a hand-pinched ravioli shaped like a wheat sheaf called culurgiones.
“Sardinia is an island of wheat and sheep and they make pasta without eggs,” said Vacirca. “When ‘supply chain’ is in everyone’s vocabulary, and also when we’re in an environmental crisis, using less to make food is important to me.”
Starlite’s owner steps up as advocate
Feels a tad unfair to single out any venue owner for gold-star recognition during the past year. The pandemic’s been, and still is, anxiety-inducing for many in the hospitality industry — just ask any server how frequently they get hissy or dawdling nonsense when asking for QR codes.
But even early on in the great disruption, The Starlite Room ’s Tyson Boyd refused to hibernate, bringing us the mind-rescuing Starlite Sessions virtual concert series that seriously made me cry with joy sometimes.
This year, Boyd worked even harder on getting things back to the near normal of table service and live shows we now enjoy with negligible sacrifice as customers.
Boyd’s hustle included his involvement in the Value Alberta Venues campaign , which declared a state of emergency for performance spaces this spring.
It’s easy to forget the fear of lunatic pushback, but you can hear it in Tyson’s voice saying in the summer that Starlite would require proof of vaccination when (and if) they reopened as a live venue.
“I’m not happy about this,” he sighed. “However, I do see this as our only solution.”
In September, amid country-high cases and ICU numbers as the provincial government still clung to a ridiculous oath they wouldn’t create “vaccine passports,” Boyd took a public stand with Evolution Wonderlounge co-owner Rob Browatzke and NDP MLAs Nicole Goering and David Shephard — not to mention a dozen mayors in a group letter — pleading for provincial mandates so he wouldn’t have to keep cancelling shows. Boyd also took public issue the then-10 p.m. curfew, which he noted were just sparking pre-drunk house parties.
The proof-of-vaccine QR codes we’re now legally required to show in the province finally did away with all that. But it won’t be forgotten who fought hard for such basic vaccine — and leadership — accountability.
Thanks, Tyson. And a massive thank you to all the servers who ask us for proof of vax/negative test every day.
Crullers to rule them all
It’s no secret that a reliable cup of coffee in a familiar spot can do wonders for the psyche.
For me this summer, instant relief was easily found in the tiny, solo ritual of occupying a little metal patio table outside Rosewood Foods on Rice Howard Way with a latte and, seriously, one or two of the best crullers in town — varieties include matcha, mango-lemon, honey-pistachio, cinnamon sugar spice, honey lemon rose and, my standby, raspberry cardamom.
Former Lock Stock chef Jesse Gado and his wife Angela Chau-Gado opened Rosewood at 10150 100 St. perfectly timed for the very first pandemic lockdown. But during the ups and downs of curbside service, limited capacity and now full service, they built one of the most reliably delicious café-restaurants in the city, and notably without a full-capacity downtown business crowd, but teachers conventions and recent World Cup-qualifying soccer tournaments made for some extremely busy weeks this year.
Always super friendly — Jesse’s sister Celina Gado even rescued my camera after I left it there once — the staff cooks up and serves a menu that has not one single dud on it, including a crispy radish cake served with oyster sauce and sriracha; the lip-smacking katsu chicken sandwich; and the creamy verde rice. Every Saturday without fail, though, it’s the rotating-ingredient breakfast rice with an egg on top that pulls us in, mixed with a killer indie playlist on the stereo and, currently, the simple and beautiful Tracy White abstracts on the walls.
Perfection!
Punk painted into history
Triple qualifying as a simultaneous “person, place and thing” in our 2021 “notable noun” roundup is the inspiring, photo-realistic Mr. Chi Pig mural , which went up in June on the side of The Buckingham (10439 82 Ave.), two storeys tall and 30 metres long.
This vibrant, multi-era portrait was painted by Layla Folkmann and Lacey Jane Wilburn (with an assist from Sherwood Park artist Hannah McMillan) just in time for the first anniversary of the death of legendary scamp and punk icon Chi Pig — lead singer of SNFU, the Wongs and SlaveCo.
By the time of the official July 10 unveiling concert at the Buck, selfies with the emerging tribute to the singer and visual artist had spilled all over social media — thus began a wider remembrance and understanding of this openly-gay, second-youngest of 12 children from the north side, exactly as hoped.
Born Ken Chinn, Mr. Chi Pig often had an uphill climb, dealing with schizophrenia and addiction, but he would often connect with new friends and give out little gifts of his art in the bars — some of his illustrations and distinct lettering are incorporated into the sprawling mural.
Best thing about it, though, is that it’s a permanent celebration of art through one of the wildest artists this city’s ever seen.
We got him back, just a little, in 2021.
Source: EdmontonJournal
