Articles by Janet Smith.

Movie Reviews

Encounters at the End of the World

By Janet Smith
A documentary by Werner Herzog. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 4, at the Ridge Theatre
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Dance

Serge Bennathan comes full circle

By Janet Smith
The French-born choreographer is one of the artists returning, 20 years later, with new commissions for the Dancing on the Edge, a festival that offers a rare opportunity to innovate.
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Dance

Dancing on the Edge festival sees more outdoor works than ever

By Janet Smith
When it comes to performing outside, the magic moments usually make up for the drawbacks. Dancer and choreographer Sylvie Bouchard should know: for the past 14 years, she’s overseen Dusk Dances, an Ontario-based program that brings the art form to parks in the summer—and which has been a popular fixture at our own Dancing on the Edge festival over the years.
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Arts Notes

The Cultch makes a splash for its 35th-anniversary season

By Janet Smith
East Siders passing by Venables and Victoria this morning might have had heart failure seeing a gigantic crane lifting the Cultch's beloved cupola off its roof. But fear not: executive director Heather Redfern reports that, as part of the theatre's huge renovations, the original cupola will go back into its spot--right after workers replace the roof with a new, earthquake-ready steel version.
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Theatre

Cirque du Soleil conjures surreal carnival dreamscape in Corteo

By Janet Smith
Corteo
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Georgia Straight Style

Golf wear gets a funky new swing

By Janet Smith
Your dad’s plaids are getting hip, because the game that made Tiger Woods famous has a funky new swing to it, with fashion plates such Halle Berry and Jessica Alba puttering around on the links.
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Georgia Straight Style

Babydust busts the rules

By Janet Smith
Heather Young injects French chic into her designs for children in a limited collection of playful pieces that are meticulously crafted with her signature pleating, button details, and trims.
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Theatre

Magnetic North creates irresistible pull

By Janet Smith
Drawn to Vancouver’s adventurous, play-hungry scene, the Magnetic North Theatre Festival arrives on June 4, flaunting a program that’s a force in itself.
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Style Watch

At French Connection, colours of summer heat up

By Janet Smith
The season of grey has finally lifted, and that’s not just in terms of Vancouver’s usual cloudy weather. On the fashion front, winter and early spring’s coolly depressing charcoals and silvers are giving way to a summer of happy, retina-searing new colours, and leading the charge is French Connection, whose recent event at its Robson Street flagship store was all about eye candy.
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Movie Reviews

Steel Toes

By Janet Smith
Starring David Strathairn and Andrew Walker. Rated PG. Opens Friday, May 16, at the Cinemark Tinseltown
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Dance

SFU grads get edgy at Pulse

By Janet Smith
From the outset, the trio of pieces on the Dance Centre’s latest Pulse series program seem to have nothing in common. A performer tapes himself into a cardboard box and then rolls around. Dancers push themselves to physical extremes to embody gluttony. And a quartet moves with modern grace to Arvo Pärt’s haunting music.
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Visual Arts

Vancouver Museum revived by Movers and Shapers

By Janet Smith
Movers and Shapers
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Dance

Sisters dance fiery flamenco in Mis Hermanas

By Janet Smith
Mis Hermanas
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Dance

Masterful variations by Marie Chouinard

By Janet Smith
The Montreal choreographer displays her command in strange, daring expressions of joy and curiosity in one of the dance events of the year.
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Concert Reviews

Duran Duran rides new-wave nostalgia trip

By Janet Smith
The former most shaggable men on Planet Earth showed their sense of humour and showmanship was still intact at G.M. Place on Tuesday night.
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Dance

Starry Peter Pan flies high

By Janet Smith
Peter Pan
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Dance

Danza Cuba returns to Canada

By Janet Smith
Banned from the U.S., Danza Cuba is back with pirouettes and swivelling hips in a fiery new show that’s bound to overcome our national bashfulness.
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Dance

Victor Quijada stretches ballet into hip-hop with Elastic Perspective

By Janet Smith
Victor Quijada’s Rubberbandance Group is known for its street-smart mashup of hip-hop and ballet. But rather than cutting and pasting together moves from each style, his renegade company has spent the past six years aiming for perfect fusion. Asking him to separate out the influences in his choreography, Quijada says, is like asking the Los Angeles–born Mexican-American which parts of him are from which culture.
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Theatre

Gale force heads True West

By Janet Smith
Vincent Gale returns to the stage with a vengeance for Sam Shepard’s edgy showdown between brothers
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Music Arts

Anne-Sophie Mutter woos Beethoven in Vancouver

By Janet Smith
In her first local appearance in 19 years, the German-born goddess will join the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to perform the composer’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61.
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Dance

The Tomorrow Collective pulses clubby cool

By Janet Smith
The best thing about the Tomorrow Collective is that its works are rooted squarely in today. Dance can seem rarefied, but this trio of female upstarts is devoted to capturing the here and now. They make dance cool.
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Style Watch

Savvy fashion Kwantlen college grads target cool niche markets

By Janet Smith
The niche-market designs unveiled at the grad show for Kwantlen University College’s latest crop of fashion students said a lot about how the industry is changing.
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Music Arts

Fidelio’s East Berlin tyranny a riot of sound

By Janet Smith
Fidelio
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Dance

Brainstorm breaks down dance history

By Janet Smith
Timber/Timbre
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Movies Features

Michael Pitt’s preppy psycho gets violent in Funny Games

By Janet Smith
Michael Pitt’s chilling preppy in Funny Games doesn’t look like a run-of-the-mill psychopath. With a floppy pageboy haircut, crisp white Bermuda shorts, and starched collar, the New York–based actor is more your average upper-class boy next door, which is entirely deliberate.
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Movie Reviews

Caramel

By Janet Smith
True to its title, Caramel at first seems like it will be cloyingly sweet. But the sticky substance also has a painful side in Lebanese culture: as we see again and again in the salon at the centre of Nadine Labaki’s sumptuous first film, the hot goop is used to rip out unwanted hair on clients’ legs and faces.
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Dance

Joe Ink pays price of beauty

By Janet Smith
Vancouver choreographer Joe Laughlin has made a name for himself by teaching his dance audiences to expect the unexpected. In the dozen years since he founded Joe Ink, the insanely versatile artistic director has featured his performers swinging on giant metal scaffolding, spent years shuttling between here and South Africa to collaborate with the racially integrated troupe Moving Into Dance Mophatong, and delved into high-tech experiments with digital projections.
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Arts Features

Spring Arts picks: Peter Pan, air guitar, and an avant-garde evening of sex toys

By Janet Smith
Critics' Picks
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Dance

Style-makers spring into Vancouver International Dance Festival

By Janet Smith
Find Paradis/Paradise at the Roundhouse, or just let Sarah Williams, Rita Cioffi, Joe Laughlin, and Christopher House inspire you as they transcend styles and twist genres.
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Arts Features

Ballet B.C's John Alleyne reboots the soul with The Four Seasons

By Janet Smith
John Alleyne hadn’t taken a vacation in four years, but that wasn’t the only reason he found himself stuck in a hole of deep emotional darkness last year. Aside from the daily pressures of keeping a major arts organization relevant in a world of funding constraints and attention-challenged audiences, he’d recently lost both of his parents.
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Movie Reviews

Daughters of Wisdom

By Janet Smith
Daughters of Wisdom serves up more of the same but with a new twist. It focuses on a remote monastery for Buddhist nuns on an eastern Tibet plateau called Kala Rongo, an oddity in a place where religious service has long been the domain of men.
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Movie Reviews

The Kite Runner

By Janet Smith
Fortunately for fans of Khaled Hosseini’s book, director Marc Forster keeps the story of Russian-occupied Afghanistan authentic
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Movie Reviews

For the Bible Tells Me So

By Janet Smith
A provocative documentary studies the courageous act of coming out to Christians
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Georgia Straight Style

From cubicles to sipping cocktails

By Janet Smith
When Coco Chanel invented the little black dress more than 80 years ago, life wasn't so complicated. The iconic frock didn't have to travel too many places–a soirée here, a luncheon there, perhaps. The classic style is still going strong, but it has to multitask in these frenzied times, working as well in the office as it does out for evening.
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Movie Reviews

Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking

By Janet Smith
As its title suggests, Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking is like two separate documentaries bundled into one bulky package. One is a biography of the Chinese-American author of The Rape of Nanking (Iris Chang hit the bestseller list with her account of the Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians in 1937-’38 and later committed suicide at age 36). The other is an assemblage of witness accounts and historical footage retracing the long-buried atrocities at Nanking, a place where scholars now believe more people were slaughtered than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined
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Movie Reviews

Dinosaurs Alive!

By Janet Smith
For those well acquainted with the tyrannosaur, triceratops, and other celebs of the Cretaceous world, Dinosaurs Alive! introduces some of the new species being discovered in the Gobi Desert and New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch badlands. Prepare to meet the 36-metre-long seismosaur or the small but nasty predator Coelophysis
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Georgia Straight Living

In a family way

By Janet Smith
How a local design firm pulled off three striking levels of kid-friendly sophistication married with formal flair.
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Movie Reviews

Lust, Caution

By Janet Smith
Directed by Ang Lee. Starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei, and Joan Chen. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, October 12, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas
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Arts Features

Struggles along road to Paris

By Janet Smith
Molly Spotted Elk's groundbreaking journey inpires multidisciplinary performance.
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Dance

Critics' Picks: Dancers spin visions of angst and beauty

By Janet Smith
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Movie Reviews

The Brothers Solomon

By Janet Smith
Starring Will Arnett and Will Forte. Rated 14A.
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Movie Reviews

Zoo

By Janet Smith
A documentary by Robinson Devor. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, August 17 to 23, at the Vancity
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Georgia Straight Style

These babes have style

By Janet Smith
Local designers help put a little panache in your parenting.
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Arts Features

State of the arts

By Brian Lynch and Janet Smith
Three of the cultural community's key players opine on funding, venues, and the Olympics.
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Dance

Dance All-Stars

By Janet Smith
A Chutzpah! Festival presentation. At the Norman Rothstein Theatre on Thursday, February 22. No remaining performances
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Dance

Dance festival delivers diversity

By Janet Smith
VIDF stands for Vancouver International Dance Festival, but the “V” could just as easily stand for variety. Boasting bits of African, Japanese, tap, multimedia, and much more, the 40-day event is easily the most expansive tribute to the form the city sees each calendar year.
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Dance

Solo

By Janet Smith
A Dance Centre, Eponymous, and New Works presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, February 16. No remaining performances
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Dance

Relatively Real

By Janet Smith
A Lingo dancetheater production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Thursday, February 8. No remaining performances
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Georgia Straight Living

The master of disaster

By Janet Smith
TV’s Bryan Baeumler offers tips for overly eager do-it-yourselfers to avoid expensive mistakes.
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Style Watch

East meets west in Shi Studio's brocade jewellery

By Janet Smith
It’s the kind of cultural fusion that could have emerged only from the West Coast. Shi Studio, named for the Cantonese word for “poem”, blends the richness of the dynastic brocades of southern China with the antique skill of stained glass and a hip contemporary style. The design duo behind Shi sets the brightly hued silk under clear glass with a sterling frame.
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