HEART PROBLEMS AT PLANNED VENUE
Hope seems to be fading for a proposed multidisciplinary arts centre at 639 Commercial Drive, a building that was most recently the home of the Raja Theatre. For months, local arts organizer Jhayne Holmes has been using her formidable on-line networking skills in an attempt to rustle up the roughly $500,000 needed to buy the historic theatre in order to turn it into Heart of the World, a venue for everything from dance performances and live music to film screenings and visual-art exhibitions.

Holmes told the Straight she has managed to raise that daunting figure through pledges from donors and investors, but not in time to meet the January 15 deadline stipulated in the contract she signed with the building’s owners. As a result, the Heart of the World proposal has dipped into a legal morass in which Holmes faces the possibility of forfeiting the $48,000 deposit she put down on the Raja in mid December.

“We tried to get an extension,” she said, noting that the price demanded for that extra time was well beyond her means. “So the first contract is over with, and I’m hoping to find a proxy—someone else to try and deal with it, because they [the owners] won’t deal with me again.”¦We’re hoping to still get it, but we have to find someone who’s willing to step in for us and do it.”

> Brian Lynch

EXECUTIVE ACTION
Two of Vancouver’s central cultural institutions recently signed new contracts with top-level personnel. Last week, the Vancouver Art Gallery revealed that it had asked director Kathleen Bartels to spend another five years at its helm, a position she took back in 2001. The VAG’s enthusiasm for Bartels’s work is hardly surprising, given that her first five years in charge coincided with a doubling in membership and annual revenue, as well as a massive leap in the gallery’s endowment, from $200,000 to $5.7 million.

This news came on the heels of an announcement that the Alliance for Arts and Culture has appointed Andrew Wilhelm-Boyes as its new executive director, a spot left vacant when long-time executive director Heather Redfern departed in early January to take up the same title at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The most recent item on Wilhelm-Boyes’s résumé is his time as national director of the Creative City Network of Canada, a country-wide organization of municipal arts, culture, and heritage staff. He starts his new job at the end of February.

> Brian Lynch

VAG PHOTO COLLECTION HAS DEPTH IN FIELD
Another of the VAG’s developments under Kathleen Bartels has been the growth of its photography collection, which has become one of the richest in Canada. Nearly three-quarters of the art acquired by the gallery last year—162 out of a total of 221 works—was photo-based, including pieces by internationally recognized Canadian artists such as Vancouver’s own Stan Douglas and Toronto’s Edward Burtynsky, as well as images by Lois Conner, Cindy Sherman, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. Many of these came as gifts from collectors in Toronto, which suggests the collection has gained the critical mass to draw the attention of donors from elsewhere.

“The gallery is no longer seen as regional,” said Christos Dikeakos, chair of the VAG’s acquisition committee and himself a central figure in Vancouver’s widely influential community of photo artists. “It’s actually seen as an important national gallery as well.”

Much of the ballast was provided by the collections of Allison and Alan Schwartz and of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft—acquired by the gallery in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Each of these massive infusions of photo-based art “made us really stand out”, Dikeakos said. “I think the fruits are being borne now, with other collectors also wanting to give to us and add to that legacy.”

> Brian Lynch

HISTORY OF MUSICAL THEATRE REWRITTEN
Author, composer, and former Vancouverite Mel Atkey thinks the “infamous Canadian inferiority complex” is among the main reasons why our country has failed to recognize its own achievements in the field of musical theatre.

Atkey, a onetime Georgia Straight theatre critic and now a creator of musicals living in London, England, argues that composers in the genre typically “study the work that goes before them, and invariably what they do is study the great Broadway shows. I want to point out the fact that there is a Canadian heritage to look at, too.”

Thus he wrote Broadway North: The Dream of a Canadian Musical Theatre (Natural Heritage, $29.95), a recently published history describing everything from early attempts to establish indigenous brands of musical theatre to the international success of homegrown works like Anne of Green Gables and Billy Bishop Goes to War .

“What I’m really trying to do is put to bed the whole idea that musicals are necessarily an American creation, because they’re not,” Atkey argues. “The Americans made it their own, but they’re not the only ones that can write them, and they certainly don’t own it outright.”

With recent Canadian-created hits like The Drowsy Chaperone , winner of five Tony awards last year, Atkey’s point seems especially current.

> Brian Lynch