Renovations announced

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2017, Canada., NAC, Ottawa, remodelled

The National Art Centre in Ottawa which was built in 1967 to mark the Centennial of Canada as a Unified country will be 50 years old in 2017. Did you know that Canada was a country before Germany was one. Yes indeed, a unified German nation was proclaimed in at Versailles Palace in the Gallerie des Glaces by Chancellor Bismarck in 1870, prior to that date there where 380 principalities and Kingdom of German speaking, Catholics and Lutheran.

In 2017 Canada will celebrate 150 years as a unified country and Ottawa will also celebrate its anniversary as Capital of our country.

The Government announced it would proceed with major renovation to the National Arts Centre, a tricky business since the NAC was a commissioned work of architecture and the original building outside appearance cannot be altered. So the architects are adding to the building to give it a new look and a new entrance, instead of being on the Canal it will be on Elgin Street, making it a more inviting venue. http://www.cbc.ca/…/…/ottawa/nac-renovations-start-1.3331711

The old Look of the NAC, very much the brutalist architecture of the 1960’s

The New look 2017 remodelled

The original version of the NAC had large terraces above street level all around, in the 1960’s the architects envisioned that the public would wander those terraces, however no one ever used them, they fell into disrepair and at night they were so dark as to be dangerous. The NAC was also designed with the car in mind, people would arrive by car, no one would walk. The approach to do building are designed to discourage pedestrians, again a mistake,  a lack of vision by the architects and nowadays the building looks dated. It was also known as lacking in washrooms, those designed in 1967 are small and useless for evening when thousands descend on the NAC, better go before you leave the house. Unfortunately the main concert Hall will not be renovated and it needs it badly. Departing Maestro Pinchas Zukerman during an interview upon his departure a few months before the end of the Harper Regime, decried the lack of thought in modernizing the centre, it is fine to have better public access and more washrooms but what about better seating and updated technical equipment in the Concert Hall, he asked. Hopefully this renovations starting in December will address some of the issues but obviously not all.

Faulkner

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As I lay dying, Faulkner, Jefferson, Lafayette, MIssissipi, NAC, Ottawa, Oxford, Play, theatre

William Faulkner (1897-1962)  was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.

Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.

The play we saw last night at the National Arts Centre is an adaptation of Faulkner’s novel As I lay dying. The play is called Take Me Back to Jefferson and is the story of the Bundren Family and of the death of Addie matriarch of the clan and how they must go back to Jefferson, a nine day journey to bury her with her kin despite foul weather, swollen rivers, broken bridges and bad roads.

I did not know what to expect of this play, at times I found it comical despite the tragic events, the Southern accents, actors bare foot and the convoluted logic and existential dialogue. In the end what you have are poor people trapped in their social setting by archaic conventions of the Old South. These poor white folk, dirt farmers perhaps were never rich, they may be intelligent but have little or no formal education, their world is small and centres around their county, the big town of Jefferson (a large village) and their State Mississipi. The play is set between 1890-1910 in Lafayette County, Mississipi, an area Faulkner knew well as he lived all his life in Oxford AKA Jefferson,MISS.

The plays ends not like I would have thought, a bit of a surprise, Anse Bundren, the father figure, is not as simple as he appears and his children find out, going back to Jefferson was not necessarily to bury Addie his wife, there was another reason, a set of new teeth and a new wife, some brothel floosie, he was having an affair with. The play is all about money, the politics of sex and family. The actors 4 sons and one daughter gave strong performances. Because of minimal sets, the actors during the play perform acrobatics to convey the dynamics of dealing with a coffin, a rotting corpse, buzzards, mules, a horse and a swollen river.

We had a great time and I will be looking out for more plays by the Smith-Gilmour Theatre.