Our writers recall the city’s standout arts experiences in 2006

The arts-writing world often deals in big chunks: multiple-painting exhibits, weeklong festivals, two-hour productions. So when the Straight’s cultural critics looked back at 2006, we wanted to remember the kind of small, transcendent moments that made us go “Wow.”

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (A Bard on the Beach production in Vanier Park on July 15) When Colleen Wheeler’s red-haired, aqua-gowned Titania swept around and caught her first glimpse of Scott Bellis’s donkey-headed Bottom, sound designers Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani magnified the moment with a sudden burst of song: Etta James singing “At Last (My Love Comes Along)”. That explosion of absurdity and deep feeling was the single most perfect expression of director Dean Paul Gibson’s insanely romantic interpretation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was also a measure of the artistic maturity of Bard on the Beach. > Colin Thomas

HEIDI KRUTZEN AND LORNA McGHEE (A Music on Main presentation at the Jazz Cellar on November 7) Sipping a pinot gris and munching on a spinach-and-goat-cheese salad while Witold Lutoslawski’s Three Fragments filled the air with flute and harp notes, along with the clattering of cutlery, proved to be an unbeatable mix. When artistic director David Pay launched his Music on Main series with a mission to showcase classical and new music in casual settings, even he acknowledged that a small, underground jazz club might be pushing it. Any anxieties were quickly quelled when the room soon became packed to capacity. > Jessica Werb

FAUST (A Vancouver Opera production at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on April 22) In the most exciting VO show in years, director Nic Muni’s visually stunning Faust was a feast of surreal sensory delights. One minute the title character was smearing his name in blood over his lab walls; the next, Peter Volpe’s menacing Mephistopheles was letting loose with his bone-rattling bass and flashing his eerie yellow eyes. But it was the piece’s climax that blew the audience away, first with the chorus materializing suddenly in the upper levels of the Q.E., and then with Marguerite crying out for her soul on a stripped stage lit as blinding-white as the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey. > Janet Smith

CITY:SKINNED (A Sirenscrossing production, as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival, starting at the Firehall Arts Centre on July 15) Wearing neon-green wigs, five dancers led viewers on a trek through the Downtown Eastside and beyond, stopping for solos and duets in various nooks, alleys, bars, and shop windows along the way. The biggest surprise was when viewers found themselves aboard a school bus that took them from the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden to Stanley Park, where the artists closed the piece by leaning against and sliding down a towering, majestic cedar. City:skinned not only showed site-specific dance at its most inventive but gave Vancouverites a fresh glimpse of the place they call home. > Gail Johnson

UNBOUND (A CanDance and Dancing on the Edge coproduction at the Norman Rothstein Theatre on July 6) Seeing choreographer Wen Wei Wang’s bare-skinned ultravixens stagger and slink around in the fetishistic slippers once used for foot-binding was one of the more striking sights this year. The grotesque, ornate footwear flashed in the light as limbs twisted and tangled, creating couplings that were as sexually charged as they were disturbing. > JS

URINETOWN (A Firehall Arts Centre production at the Firehall on January 15) In simultaneously satirizing and celebrating musical theatre, Urine ­town, the song fest about pee, releases a flood of pure glee. The show demands that its performers revel in the pleasure of showing off. Never was that pleasure more keenly felt than when Jay Brazeau, who played Caldwell B. Cladwell, sang “Mr. Cladwell”, a song in his own praise. Brazeau practically levitated with delight. > CT

RIEN NE VA PLUS (The NOW Orchestra at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on November 24) Saxophonist and composer John Oswald’s Rien Ne Va Plus, commissioned by NOW Orchestra artistic director Coat Cooke, was a wonderfully random dive into the jazz past. Using a turntable modified to serve as a roulette wheel, conductor Diane Labrosse generated samples of such icons as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, while the NOW musicians held up coloured cards to bet on the red or the black; the winners got to play. John Korsrud recognized a snippet of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and responded with a pitch-perfect imitation of the Dark Magus himself. > Alexander Varty

AT HOME WITH DICK AND JANE (The Electric Company production, as part of Hive, at 304 Dunlevy Avenue on November 10) Your head’s inside a cameralike box and you sit on a chair that’s fixed to a track. An unseen force propels you through ?live scenes showing the relationship between a playwright named Dick and a filmmaker named Jane—zooming you in for close-ups and jerking you away for edits. At Home was part of Hive, an evening ?of pieces that was the most exciting night Vancouver theatre has seen in decades. The best moments came at the bar, after the show, when you got to share your excitement with other theatregoers. > CT

SQUEEZEFEST (Various artists at Rime from March 10 to 12) Both a grand hoot and a comprehensive survey, this accordion-themed festival proved that the humble squeezebox is as expressive an instrument as any other. New York City’s Guy Klucevsek, who headlined all three nights, drew largely on his often-ruminative The Well-Tampered Accordion and dazzled the capacity crowd with his virtuosity. > AV

STONE: DRIFT (An Aeriosa production at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on September 20) Using mountain-climbing gear to attach themselves to ropes that descended from the ceiling, three dancers literally took dance to a whole new level. The performers spiderwalked up and down the theatre’s back wall, dangled from lines many metres above the floor, and swooshed over our heads, spiralling in and out of mid-air somersaults. > GJ

SAFETY GEAR FOR SMALL ANIMALS/BILL BURNS, DIRECTOR (At the Evergreen Cultural Centre on January 15) In this travelling exhibition and ongoing conceptual project by Toronto artist Bill Burns, a display case of tiny objects delivered a huge political punch. Among the artifacts on view in the gallery were eensy-weensy gloves, visors, dust masks, and goggles. Developed as “prototypes” for imagined use by small birds, rodents, and reptiles, they compelled us to think about our increasingly toxic environment and the Earth’s long list of endangered species. Through cuteness, Burns confronts our sincerity in the animal-rights department and alerts us to our real relationship with the natural world. > ROBIN LAURENCE

PETITE MORT (A Ballet British Columbia production at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on February 16) In Jirí­ Kylián’s surreal ode to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday, the corps of female dancers suddenly shoved off the stiff, hoop-skirted black ballgowns they were wearing, leaving the dresses, on wheels, to roll around the stage like headless performers. It was a real coup for artistic director John Alleyne to bring in the piece by the head of renowned Nederlands Dans Theater and an exciting taste of theatrical Euro-style avant-garde. > JS

NANCY NISBET: EXCHANGE (Outside the Richmond Art Gallery on May 1) During the launch of her six-month public-art project to navigate an 18-wheeler freight truck and trailer, loaded with her personal effects, around North America, artist Nancy Nisbet traded her stuff for ours. The highlight for me was simply exchanging an antique Christmas card for her little satin folder. Riffing on the notion of “free trade”, the artist gave up her house, tagged all its contents—from furniture to cotton socks—with low-range radio-frequency ID chips and set out to exchange them through one-on-one encounters from Kamloops to Cuernavaca. > RL