Annabel Soutar's play 2000 Questions puts stock market investing on trial.
Next Thursday, August 12th I will be participating in a round table discussion at the Institut du Nouveau Monde’s 2nd edition of its Festival de l’Expression Citoyenne (FEC). Along with two other panelists (fromWapikoni Mobile and Jeunes musiciens du monde) I will debate the merits of using art to engage in social dialogue. The round table is free, open to the public and promises to provoke an inspiring conversation about how to trigger potent democratic dialogue through image-making, storytelling and music. What do you say?
Thursday, August 12th at 7:30pm
The John Molson School of Business, Concordia University
Room MB 1.210 1455 de Maisonneuve West
In his recent op-ed, published today in the Montreal Gazette about the BP oil spill, New York Times editorialist David Brooks argues that the current global political struggle today is between ‘democratic capitalism’ and ’state capitalism’. Democratic capitalism, Brooks explains, allows private companies to exploit and manage important resources like oil with the state playing a marginal, regulatory role. State capitalism (like that practiced in China, Venezuela, Iran, etc…) keeps wealth creation firmly in the control of governement and directs it according to the political needs of the State. Why is this discussion of democratic versus state capitalism important and how is it relevant to Quebec?
Last Wednesday June 9th, a truck belonging to Yves Mercure, the President of the construction wing of the Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ) was torched in what looks to be an indirect arson attack on the union leader:
Police involved in Operation Hammer, the special squad investigating corruption and collusion in Quebec’s construction industry, have been called in to take a look at the incident.
With everything going on around former Liberal Justice Minister, Marc Bellemare and his allegations against Charest, it really looks like a can of worms has been opened on the political stage in Quebec. And it’s really getting muddy.
You may remember a story that many of us pointed to as great success when it came out in the media a few months ago. Claude Robinson, creator of “Robinson Curiosité”, had won a lawsuit in the Quebec Superior Court against CINAR (and other big children tv corporations such as France Animation, Ravensburger, RTV Family Entertainment) for the plagiarizing of his work. For more information on this, check out this article in Le Devoir. While this story is really inspiring,
The Gazette has a brief editorial about the long delays and controversial detours taken en route to one day building two new teaching hospitals in Montreal, one to be run by McGill University and the other by Université de Montréal. The editorial concludes that impatient Montrealers really don’t care in the end how they’re built; these hospitals should have opened their doors by now. Read More »
It’s odd perhaps for a live theatre company to count its online results. The traditional means of reporting our results would be tracking attendance at our plays (which we do as well, of course)! Nevertheless, we cannot get attendance without getting the word out about our documentary theatre productions, and the cheapest way for us to get the word out is via the Web. Read More »
Taking a slight breather here before returning to the preparations for our trip to Quebec City. This is probably the biggest stage for Porte Parole so far, although we won’t actually be performing at La Bourse RIDEAU. What we’ll be doing instead is slightly more business-oriented but nevertheless equally as important as anything we do in the theatre. Read More »
There is a constant pressure on arts companies or individual artists to stay current with all the tools of communications. Nowadays, having a website is pretty much a necessity; no one would take anyone seriously who didn’t have one. To say “I don’t have a website” is like saying “I don’t have a telephone.” Read More »
For years before I enlisted in the Porte Parole cause, I had been fascinated by infrastructure problems and city planning, so the combination of political intrigue and real-life drama behind Sexy béton seemed to me like an inspired way to engage people in issues of immediate importance. As the project reaches, not an end, but rather an intermission, I’d like to think about what it all means (to me). Read More »
