volume....

Photo by Andy Stefansson. The dome of BC Place, Vancouver, May 12, 2017

The sound rolls out, billowing like a sail.

It has a fullness I have never heard. An expansiveness I have never felt.

It fills up the vast emptiness. It reaches up to the dome.

(Volume as a measure of sound; volume as a measure of space.)

The singer refers to the stadium as the “concrete temple.”*

_____________________________________________________________________


Why do we create immense spaces for our gods?

So they can be big. So we can be small.

So we can know that emptiness is just fullness with nothing in it;
holding space for the immanent.




* The singer quoted was Bono. (CTV News. May 13, 2017) The event was a concert by U2. It is not my intention in any way to equate either of the above (or any other celebrity) with god. But the "temple" comment sent me in the direction of the overscaled architecture we have created for our gods. I was always told that the huge cathedrals of Europe (and elsewhere) were built for the glory of god. Now I am thinking they were built just as much for the smallness and the vulnerability of humans.

tragedy worn lightly....

Photo by Ariel Tarpey.

The other night I took my 14-year-old daughter to see Hamlet at Vancouver's Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. On our way there, I gave her a quick verbal plot summary. "Oh, like The Lion King?" she asked. Yes. Very much so.

I saw my first Hamlet when I was 12, with my mom and the girl who was then and remains to this day my best friend. It was a contemporary rock musical version of the play, then called Kronborg: 1582. (Later called Rockabye Hamlet.) It was campy, and larger than life, and what I remember most clearly about it is the set, and the scene in which Ophelia went mad. "A flower for you, a flower for you...."

It was young and contemporary and fun; and happily, so is this summer's version of Hamlet in Vancouver. Although spoken in the original Elizabethan English, the sets, props, costumes and technologies are up-to-the-minute. And it works. The energy, the physicality, and the passion of the acting carry the considerable weight of this aged tragedy hurtling into the now, and wear it lightly. 

Jonathon Young is brilliant as Hamlet, but sometimes it is Naomi Wright who really owns the stage. In the role of a servant she generates real tears for the dead Ophelia, wiping her reddened and running nose. 

I wonder what my girl will remember of this Hamlet, when she takes her children to their first version of it?

Scenes from the 2013 production of Hamlet,
by Vancouver's Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival.

vancouver, city of glass....

Vancouver Convention Centre reflecting the Five Sails and a cruise ship;
containing the world.

Vancouver Convention Centre reflecting the Five Sails and a cruise ship.

Olympic Flame Cauldron from the 2010 Olympics: four massive icicles
made of glass and steel. Vancouver's Coal Harbour.

Vancouver Convention Centre reflecting the Five Sails and a cruise ship;
containing the world.

All photos by Wendy Stefansson,  June 30, 2013.

Bill Reid ~ Raven and the First Men

Bill Reid. Raven and the First Men. Cedar. 1980

“The great flood, which had covered the earth for so long, had at last receded and the sand at Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, lay dry. Raven walked along the sand, eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound to break the monotony. A flash of white caught his eye, and there, right at his feet, half buried in the sand, was a gigantic clamshell. He looked more closely and saw that the shell was full of little creatures cowering in terror in his enormous shadow. He leaned his great head close and, with his smooth trickster’s tongue, coaxed and cajoled and coerced them to come out and play in his wonderful new shiny world. These little dwellers were the original Haida, the first humans.”   Bill Reid


Bill Reid. Raven and the First Men. Cedar. 1980

Bill Reid. Raven and the First Men. Cedar. 1980