Frida Kahlo’s paintings are a blaze of colour, embedded in indigenous Mexican culture, and depicting a world quite apart from her life of chronic physical pain. In Kahlo’s iconic self-portraits, she eyeballs her audience with total honesty, exposing her broken and mangled body, the result of a crippling accident, and effectively subverting the male gaze.
At the January premiere of Unikkaaqtuat at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, we were welcomed by the NAC’s Indigenous Theatre artistic director Kevin Loring. He pointed out that we could expect to be puzzled: “Confusion is part of any cultural exchange, so please embrace it.” Embracing this ambitious collaboration between Igloolik’s social circus collective Artcirq, Quebec’s
By Rachel Silver Maddock Music is pumping at the Vancouver café where we sit, surrounded by exposed red brick and industrial-cut wooden benches and tables. Belinda McGuire gently holds a cappuccino with two fingers. Her lightly freckled face has that post-rehearsal glow, and her eyes light up as she makes a sudden realization: “In a