An exciting final flight into aviation history

Anyone who was living in Canada from the 1960s to the 1980s, especially those of us on Vancouver Island, will have seen a Mars water bomber. A lucky few will have witnessed one of these flying behemoths skimming over a lake or the sea, scooping up thousands of gallons of water to disgorge over a forest fire.

“Before the Mars, nobody had seen four acres of water at one time come out of an airplane to extinguish a fire. Seven thousand, two hundred gallons in one drop. Nothing else can do that,” says Wayne Coulson, CFO of Coulson Aviation.

Coulson Aviation, a leading aerial firefighting operation based in Port Alberni, B.C. owned two of the last Mars Martin bombers in existence. The Hawaii Mars and the Philippine Mars are now preserved on the sites of two aviation museums. How they got there is a dramatic tale told in the documentary Fire Guardians: Final Flight, soon to be airing as a three-episode series on Crave TV.

After the Coulsons agreed to send the Hawaii water bomber to the British Columbia Aviation Museum outside Victoria and the Philippine Mars to the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona, the question became how to get these 80-year-old, propeller-driven flying tankers to their final resting places. Overland was not an option; no highway could accommodate the bombers’ 200-foot wingspan. They would have to fly.

 Enter filmmaker Gary Lang. As writer and director he teamed up with producer Ian Kerr to make Fire Guardians.  It was a logistically complex production, taking two years and encompassing 100 shooting days, and involving teams of cinematographers and editors. The result of their labour is a film that is beautifully shot, packed with action and amazing characters, making an unforgettable piece of aviation history.

So how to get the aerial tankers airborne? Only a few flight engineers and pilots have the know-how to get these planes flying again and most were retired. The Coulsons knew where to find them.

The first to fly was the big red Hawaii Mars, which had been dormant for eight years. “You have to know that this is 1930s technology,” says one of the flight engineers, as we watch Mike Johnson, Dave Millman and Mario Di Rocco at work. Aviation maintenance engineer Al Jack notes that the components in these four-propeller engines are 80 years old. You can’t just order new parts. Besides the engines, the engineers and mechanics would have to deal with the fuselage, held together with millions of rivets, which – no surprise — can give rise to disastrous leaks.

After much tinkering and with a little help from apprentice mechanic Tazman Higgins who crawled into small spaces and climbed the heights of the plane, Hawaii Mars is declared flight-worthy. The next step was to get her into Sproat Lake beside the Coulson base. Manoeuvring the plane, about the height of a four-storey building, makes for good footage. We see the Mars bellyflop into the lake. Then we hear the four engines, sounding like hundreds of cars revving up, propel the beast across the water.

Retired pilot Peter Killin and first officer Rick Mathews settled into the Hawaii cockpit as if it was only yesterday they’d flown a Mars into a fire. The trip to the BC Aviation Museum near Victoria’s airport would be only a couple of hours, but a lot could go wrong. And indeed, before long one of the four engines is ailing. The cameras capture a discussion in the cockpit among pilots and engineers about whether they try to fly on three engines or tow her back to land for more repairs.  They go back.

Finally on August 4, 2024, escorted by a group of the RCAF’s Snowbirds, Hawaii Mars made the flight over forested mountains to dock near the museum. It was a real occasion easily observable from Victoria as the big old Mars landed in Patricia Bay to welcoming cheers from bystanders on the dock.

The second delivery, that of the Philippines Mars, was a bigger challenge. The flying distance to Tucson is 1,425 miles and the big black Philippines Mars needed much work. What’s more, winter was approaching and the weather was an additional peril. The pilots and engineers had to wear multiple layers of clothing because there’s no heating on a Mars bomber. (Is there even a toilet, one wondered.)

Snow was on the ground at the Coulson site, as the crews readied the Philippine Mars for the flight. The first attempted flight was aborted when a leak was found and an engine failed. In near-zero temperatures, the maintenance crew manage to switch the failing engine with one of the Hawaii’s and replace the failing rivets in the fuselage. There is obvious tension but nothing is said on screen about the possibility of a crash, which makes the calm demeanour of the pilots and the flight engineers even more remarkable.  

On February 10, 2025, six months later than planned, Philippines Mars takes to the air.  Thanks to some excellent drone camera work we get to see her gliding over the Golden Gate bridge for the stop in San Francisco. (A Mars requires 5,000 gallons of fuel and burns about 1200 gallons an hour.) By now the men, mostly in their 60s and 70s, who have leant their expertise to this venture are screen heroes. And because of them, the Philippines Mars achieves immortality at the Pima Air and Space Museum.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1125853542/d2a402edb4?share=copy

Photos: Courtesy Coulson Aviation

Dancing like your life depended on it

“It’s not a spectacle,” says Noam Gagnon. “It’s an encounter . . . Intense. Unflinchingly human.” He is speaking of being, the nearly hour-long piece that he and violinist Stefan Smulovitz will perform at Vancouver’s KW Production Studios, from March 11 to 14.

Anyone who witnessed the birth of being, the opener for last June’s Dancing on the Edge festival, will know that Gagnon is not exaggerating. The two performers, along with lighting designer James Proudfoot, have put in months of rehearsals to develop the show. It is now even more ferocious and affecting, very much an immersion in the turbulence of our world today, on a geopolitical and a personal level.

“Being is not easy,” the dancer notes. “To even find the bandwidth to cope with the world we live in. It’s hard to stay put, to stay within your sense of self. Growth comes when there’s change and change requires effort.” He and Smulovitz have been working together for a couple of decades and have developed a highly intuitive way of responding to each other in the creative process and in performance.

Wearing only a loose pair of torn jeans, Gagnon mounts a white box not much bigger than a shower stall on its side and begins to explore the edge of his space — think of a large tiger in a cage — in slow fashion. To the side, Smulovitz plays his five-string electric violin, manipulating the sound, all of it live, through his electronic switches. The dance progresses through stages of solitude, anger, fear and tenderness as Smulovitz, continuing to play his violin, joins Gagnon on the small platform.

An audience in such an intimate space cannot help but be moved, in what Gagnon says is “not an easy piece. We are really in your face.”

 Even after decades of performing, including work with Holy Body Tattoo in the late 1990s and now with his own company, Vision Impure, to perform from such an exposed position, he says, is difficult. He’s not the body-builder type, even though very ripped. “I’m in a place of vulnerability when I take my shirt off.” The body doesn’t lie, he says, and such nakedness reveals the distress inside in the very movement of muscles. But he hopes people will see  in being an expression of human resilience in the face of universal malaise.

For Smulovitz, whose composing has included live soundtracks for films, the most important aspect of performance is staying in the present. “You have to trust in that presence, that authenticity. When we come from a place of power, we can show what that power can be between two people.”

being

Created and performed by Noam Gagnon and Stefan Smulovitz with lighting by James Proudfoot.

At KW Production Studios, 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver from March 11 to 14, 2026. Tickets, $25 to $40, available from https://www.showpass.com/being-noam-gagnon-and-stefan-smulovitz/

The National Ballet offers a dream of dance heaven and a descent into hell with Suite en Blanc and Flight Pattern

From the sublime symmetry and purity of Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc to the palpable despair and Stygian gloom representing the plight of refugees in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, the superb dancers of the National Ballet of Canada leave an audience — stunned into silence — with plenty to ponder.

Serge Lifar (1905­1986), a native of Ukraine, served as ballet master of the Paris Opera Ballet between 1930 and 1944. He made it his mission revive the company’s flagging spirit and make it an exemplar of the French style of classical ballet, reinterpreted for the modern era.  Suite en Blanc, which premiered in Zurich on June 19,1943is modernist to the core. In its stripped-down form, the eight-scene work occupies the same pantheon as say, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (1942), or Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos), first performed 1944. At the peak of human sacrifice in World War II, a European audience might well have found solace in such an expression of pure, harmonious dance arrangements.

As the curtain comes up, 36 men and women, costumed entirely in white, are frozen in place, like statues in a sculpture garden. Once animated they perform eight scenes – tricky variations involving kaleidoscopic combinations and re-combinations in multiples of two, four, eight and twelve. The suite belongs to the classical canon, several of the movements being of a kind trotted out for ballet competitions.  A march of ballerinas dancing down facing staircases, for instance, recalls the oft-performed “Kingdom of the Shades” ramp scene from Marius Petipa’s 1877 ballet, La Bayadère.

The focus on pure form and elegant lines could easily turn into a sterile exercise, but in this case, principal dancers Agnes Su, Koto Ishihara, Genevieve Penn Nabity, Beckanne Sisk and second soloist Isabella Kinch showed a joie de vivre beyond technical prowess. As for the men, Peng-Fei Jiang, Naoya Ebe and Chase O’Connell gave assured performances that literally rose above the rather routine score, Édouard Lalo’s Suite from Namouna. Their leaps and bounds achieved a ballon that had them soaring above the stage.

From the elevated sphere of Suite en Blanc, we descend in the second half of the program to the reality on Earth for the world’s refugees and migrants in Flight Pattern. The Royal Ballet premiered the 30-minute dance in 2017 and now the National Ballet is presenting the North American premiere.

As of 2026, 136 million people worldwide are in camps or on the march, forcibly displaced or stateless. They are here represented here by 36 dancers in long slate-grey overcoats, entering in a cluster stage left, legs heavy, heads bowed, moving in unison like a dying beast, to the slow, mournful first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. From the orchestra pit comes the upwelling voice of Measha Brueggergosman-Lee like a long sob, the song based on a 15th-century Polish religious lament. It is Mother Mary, singing to Jesus on the cross, asking how she should mourn him. On stage, First Soloist Hannah Galway sits, her long coat cradled in her arms, making the image of her dying infant. Slowly, the other dancers gather up their coats and pile them up around her: one child’s death is a collective loss.

Jay Gower Taylor’s excellent set and Tom Visser’s lighting design drive the production. As dancers with raised arms escape through a narrow passage to dance in a merciful snowfall the flight from danger becomes a flight toward freedom. Taylor’s black wall closes like a curtain coming down and in front of it Hannah Galway and Sisphesihle November perform a muscular pas de deux that is an ode to human persistence in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

Who speaks for the hundreds of millions of downtrodden, oppressed, displaced and outright murdered families? Artists like Crystal Pite, whose way of coping becomes an eloquent acknowledgement of suffering and a glimpse of redemption.  

Video clip of Suite en Blanc : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3xZYg55Uyo&list=TLGGTK0B5E7tJaEwMjAzMjAyNg&t=8s

Flight Pattern: https://national.ballet.ca/productions/2526/flight-pattern/

Flight Pattern / Suite en Blanc

Choreography by Crystal Pite and Serge Lifar

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until March 6, 2026

Photos: (top) Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Suite en Blanc by Karolina Kuras; (below) Artists of the Ballet in Flight Pattern by Ted Belton

Rogers v. Rogers: a Canadian satire

Even without the stellar creative team behind Rogers v. Rogers, Crow’s Theatre might have guessed they had a hit on their hands, for one simple fact. There is nary a Canadian who uses a telephone or cellphone, logs onto the internet or watches TV who isn’t mad at the way we are served, more like screwed, by our telecommunications corporations.

In adapting Alexandra Posadski’s book, Rogers v. Rogers: The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire for the stage, playwright Michael Healey chose as narrator and protagonist Matthew Boswell, then Canada’s Commissioner of Competition, to tell the story of the feud over control of the company Ted Rogers built.

The battle culminated in a merger of Rogers and Shaw Communications that everyone, especially Boswell, was sure would not be allowed under the Competition Act. It was. At the same time Ted’s son Edward Rogers finally seized control of Rogers Communications.

Director Chris Abraham found in Tom Rooney the actor who could pull off a one-man performance involving many characters, male and female, the actor switching roles more rapidly as the 95-minute satire proceeds.

Rogers v Rogers delivers lots of laughs, lots of pathos and lots of information, such that the viewer’s attention never wavers. None of this would have been possible without an extraordinary production design involving set, sound and lighting, and innovative use of video, both recorded and live. How fitting that the nasty story of Rogers Communications is brought to us through the very media the corporation was built on.

Rooney in rolled up shirtsleeves opens the play as Boswell, with a simple statement and a big red image on the screen: “The four-dollar tomato.” Say no more.

Boswell comes forward to ask the audience who might be familiar with the 1985 Canadian Competition Act. Only one hand goes up. He then offers a rapid-fire history of the competition laws, the competition tribunal and the government’s failure to stop massive corporate concentration in Canada. Without the use of the big screen hanging over the action, we might not have caught essential facts such as Canada’s ranking of 33 in a list of 34 countries in their ability to protect the consumer by ensuring competition among businesses.  

Enter Edward Rogers, as Rooney dons jacket and tie. The benighted only son of Ted Rogers, he is overweight, abused by his father as weak and ruled out as heir to the family firm. Rooney also adeptly takes on the characters of Edward’s sisters Melissa, Melinda and Martha and their ruthless mother Loretta, Ted Rogers’ widow.

Rogers v. Rogers is fiction, but scenes such as Edward as a young man pouring water over all the pie servings at a formal dinner so he won’t be tempted to eat them, have a ring of truth.

Family squabbles where big money is at stake is an old story. Alcohol and other addictions usually play a part. Siblings sue each other or their parents, and so on. But the Rogers family feud involved a very public corporate play-by-play. Board meetings break down with expressions of personal vendettas. But Edward turns out to be a match for his father’s manipulative ways, enough to seize control without the board’s assent.  

In Healy’s creation Matthew Boswell emerges as character who is no faceless bureaucrat, but a kind of tragic hero. I’m one of the thousands of disgruntled customers who paid the price that came with Rogers’ takeover of Shaw and for whom Rogers v. Rogers brings real catharsis.

The show is officially sold out to the end of its run on January 17, but you can add your name to the waiting list on the Crow’s website or try your luck at the Sunday matinee, which is pay-what-you-can.

Rogers v. Rogers

By Michael Healey

Until January 17, 2026 at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto

Supplied photo of Tom Rooney in Rogers v. Rogers

Vera Frenkel brings us a sparkling, thought-provoking video installation

It would be a mistake to try to sum up As If by Chance, Vera Frenkel’s newly completed two-channel video and print installation. But an entry point to this multivalent, moving – in both senses – picture could be in the notion that there are many ways of telling a story.

In most traditions a story is linear. We speak of a story arc, a climax, a resolution, a beginning, a middle and an end. Indeed video – remember tape? – is a linear medium. But poetry, music, painting and dance tell us that a story can be multilayered, circular, non-chronological and open-ended.

The title As If by Chance, says a note about the work, alludes to “an inter-generational card game, evidence of which was found by the police after a Toronto art centre was closed by the City.”  The complex video work began with a film shoot Frenkel organized in which seven elders, all older than 70 and seven children, all 10 or younger, were paired, seated at a glass table and given paints, brushes and markers.  Colourful cards were displayed, which the participants turned over to reveal words – boat, or sky, house or flower — that were prompts for the creation of art works. Naturally, conversations between young and old ensued.

As in previous works of hers, Vera acts as narrator, lending her even-toned statements to a voiceover that is convincingly objective. But she also provokes with statements such as, “I’m telling the story from the end again. That’s what happens when there are so many beginnings.”

The narrative has at least three strands. One story line is mostly descriptive, the voiceover explaining how the children “painted their dreams” and the elders were “mapping their memories.” There’s also the underlying saga of the art centre promised by the City as a place for working artists to call their own. Through political jockeying and outright lying, the artists are cheated out of the space, the property instead turned over to a laundromat.

And then there’s the story of Natasha, the narrator’s landlady. Natasha has evicted the narrator who lived in an upstairs apartment, possibly to make way for the art centre, which is Natasha’s project. Except for her love of Russian poetry and a possible connection Russian interference in our elections – art centres serving as covers for espionage – we know nothing about Natasha.

She has gone missing; we get no clues as to how and why. The narrator refers to the disappearance from time to time, but the implication is that some mysteries are never solved. For the viewer, the mention of Natasha’s absence heightens the immediacy of the exchanges between the elders and the youngsters.

Adding yet another dimension to the composition is William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The title is superimposed on the scene of the card game early on in the video. At random intervals, Blake’s illustrated, hand-printed poem “The Tyger” floats into view. A five-year-old girl, who surely can’t be familiar with Blake, is drawing a tiger, meticulously painting in the stripes and sharing the task with her twin sister. Their innocence is expressed in this spontaneous artmaking. Blake’s metaphysics included a “higher innocence,” a recovered innocence, now informed by experience.  The artists among the elders could be an example of this higher or “organized” innocence that allows for self-expression without self-consciousness.

As If by Chance proceeds through a flow of moving and still images, written and spoken words. Sometimes the images, black and white in one stream, richly coloured in another, overlap each other. Digital prints of stills extracted from the videos, hang on the walls of the Charles Street Video premises, where Frenkel and her co-editor Konrad Skręta have been toiling for many months to make As If by Chance.  

The viewer is a necessary participant, not just passively watching, but interpreting the flow of juxtaposed words and images to complete the artistic process. We observe an elder drawing a spiral and associate it with the hand of a child drawing a circle. A simple statement, such as “the present, as usual, is invisible,” offers another insight. Of course: we see the past and the future in pictures, not so the present.    

After 30 minutes, the video comes to an end, but then comes Part 2, a rearranging of the video elements as if the author were telling the story from another perspective.

As If by Chance is surprising, absorbing, spiked with subtle wit, and a little bit challenging. As the credits roll after another 30 minutes, this viewer’s immediate reaction was, “I’ve got to see this again.”

As If by Chance

By Vera Frenkel

Screening November 26, 12 pm to 4 pm; November 27, 6 pm to 8 pm; November 29, 12 pm to 4 pm.

Charles Street Video, 76 Geary Avenue, Toronto

25 years . . . and counting

Older and Reckless? At its inception, the name of the show for dancers and choreographers (initially over 40) had a whimsical air, implying “nothing left to lose.” Over time, the showcase for senior dance artists, established in 2000 by Claudia Moore when she led Moonhorse Dance Theatre, has become an occasion for artists more than 45 years of age to advance their craft, take new risks and mentor younger dancers and choreographers.

At first, says Allison Cummings, Moonhorse artistic director since 2022, Older and Reckless “was a more casual, small series where they had three shows a year at the Dancemakers studio. In 2016, Claudia felt our seasoned artists need a bigger stage and so it was pared down to one show a year at Harbourfront Centre.”

So the Older and Reckless show celebrating 25 years of the event, with three performances November 21 to 22 at the Fleck Harbourfront Centre stage, is kind of a big deal. Since the very first show, in which Robert Desrosiers performed a solo, Older and Reckless has been a platform for a long line of dancers and choreographers, from Karen and Allen Kaeja, to José Navas, to Peter Chin, Denise Fujiwara, Learie McNicolls … the list goes on. For the 25th anniversary, Moonhorse is assembling an eight-minute video drawing on archival footage to show the range of work presented. (Among my personal favourites is a performance by Elizabeth Langley in which she presented herself as the child of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.)

“I’ve changed the word ‘senior,’ to ‘lifelong.’ I think it’s more appropriate,” says Cummings, who curates each Older and Reckless through a combination of performers reaching out to her and calling on artists to present existing or new work. She makes every effort to ensure that all the people involved in putting on the show, which typically features three 20-minute works, are also in the 45-plus category.

The 2025 show includes an intriguing pairing – Montreal dancers Marc Boivin and Louise Bédard – in a duet, Handmade, exploring what it means to be older and (possibly more) reckless. Carol Anderson first presented Elsinore/night hours, a solo for Julia Sasso, in 1999. Sasso will reprise the work for this show.

Dancer/choreographer William Yong, who began his career in ballet, has joined up with Sonia Rodriguez, former principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, to present the solo de corazón (from the heart). Collaboration with Rodriguez, who retired from the National Ballet in 2022, began with a conversation.

“I discovered such richness in her life story,” says Yong. “I felt that, at this moment in her career, a solo for someone like Sonia — a true ballet legend — needed to come from something deeply personal, something from her heart. We spoke about everything: her journey to Canada, her extraordinary career, her family, and motherhood.” What he gleaned from became the basis for a dance that Yong says is “simple, direct and full of feeling.” 

Year-round, Moonhorse sponsors workshops and dance classes for people over 45 and interdisciplinary exchange programs by and for older dance artists.

More than a decade ago, Moonhorse began a community performance project that was, says Cummings, “a way to get people from our audiences who were not dancers into a creative process and on stage.” This year Jenn Goodwin has created a six-minute piece for 26 dance enthusiasts.

“We have people who come back every single year. It’s an opportunity for them to really experience from the inside what they love so much to watch,” adds Cummings.

Like the trained professionals, these untrained dancers are driven by a lifelong passion: “I want to dance.” 

Older & Reckless
November 21 at 8pm
November 22 at 2pm and 8pm, 2025
Fleck Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto

Procession is a triumph

Just blocks away from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were playing in top form in the final game of the World Series on Saturday night, the National Ballet of Canada offered up an equally thrilling performance with the world premiere of Procession.

Created on the company by choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Procession brings 32 dancers, a cellist and a soprano to the stage for a show that reinvents the story ballet in an extraordinary piece of theatre.

Both professional and life partners, Smith and Schraiber developed their craft as members of The Batsheva Dance Company under the leadership of Ohad Naharin. They are among the most sought-after creators in contemporary ballet and in commissioning this full-length work from them, NBoC artistic director Hope Muir was betting on a collaboration that would take the company to a new level of artistry.

And so it has. Procession will knock your socks off.

The curtains come up on an empty stage that is soon inhabited by a stately procession of dancers in evening dress, each costume designed by Dana Osborne unique to the individual wearing it. The music is mainly baroque – Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau – arranged by Coleman Itzkoff in six movements for each of the two acts. Itzkoff also performs, joining the dancers on stage and playing cello in ways you’ve never seen it played before.

The music provides a strong framework within which the dance can move in unexpected directions, just as the elegant formal wear is loosened or removed as the dancers burst forth with a passion that upsets our expectations of sombre rituals. As does the presence of on stage of mezzo-soprano Rachel Wilson who at one point appears with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other.

Procession is all about the possibilities of imagining a world on stage, a journey on which anything might happen. Traditional forms are evoked, from the Jewish wedding dance, the hora, to the procession of ballerinas down a ramp in “La Bayadère,” to bits reminiscent of the dancey musical Grease.

Formality is juxtaposed against everyday actions as the dancers break out into trios or solos or pas de deux, then coalesce in grand ensemble moments.

By turns complex, witty, moving and demanding, Procession is like life itself. Not always easy to process, but profound. A kind of Canterbury Tales in dance.

Procession

Choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schreiber

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto until November 8, 2025

Photo of Hannah Galway and Christopher Gerty by Bruce Zinger

Pat Ferns: trailblazing Canadian television producer

Pat Ferns’ The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada is a revealing, five-decade account of Ferns’ significant contribution to film, television and documentary production. Among the revelations:  if you want to make it in television production in Canada, you’d best be able to think on your feet and improvise. And even then, the odds are against any Canadian making a fortune producing films or miniseries for broadcast in Canada and abroad.

Ferns’ story is one of sheer resourcefulness, putting together co-productions wherever he could find a broadcaster or a source of funding. Along the way he was a lobbyist for more effective government support for independent tv and film producers and a champion for the Canadian broadcasting of Canadian productions. Official statistics show that in 2023, the independent production sector delivered $12.2 billion in annual production volume, generating $14.1 billion in GDP, “supporting nearly a quarter of a million jobs.” 

The memoir foregrounds the life and activities of a passionate Canadian creator against a backdrop of disappointment with the way the CBC, Canadian commercial networks, and cultural institutions such as the National Film Board have failed the independent production companies that blossomed from the ‘70s to the ‘90s. Production houses such as Nielsen Ferns, Ferns’ own Primedia, Nelvana, Rhombus Media and Alliance Atlantis (now Lionsgate) now are either defunct or have changed direction, their works seldom picked up by Canadian broadcasters.  

Ferns, born in Winnipeg in 1945 to Harry and Maureen Ferns, spent his childhood and adolescence in Birmingham, England. “We were thrown out of Canada, basically,” says the now (nearly) retired producer. In 1949 Harry’s teaching post at Royal Roads Military College in Victoria suddenly dried up after someone dug up his Marxist leanings and accused him of being a Communist.

The happy result of this exile was that Pat (short for Paterson), only four when the family landed in the UK, got into an especially good grammar school in Birmingham and went on to earn a BA from Cambridge University and his Master’s from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. It was at Cambridge that Ferns got the acting and producing bug.

Following graduation and now engaged to Jenny, his childhood sweetheart, Ferns made plans to return to Canada. He got the address of the CBC and wrote to a staff producer named Dick Nielsen.

“He was thinking he was getting the big weekend current affairs show and he was looking for a director of research,” Ferns writes. “He liked my handwriting and he remembered letters my father had written to The Globe and Mail. So, on the basis of that, I was hired.”

Early on, the callow director of research was sent out on a shoot in Red Lake, Northern Ontario with producer Don Cumming. They were documenting life in a mining town for a segment of a show inspired by Richard Rohmer’s idea to develop a mid-Canada corridor, to facilitate more extraction of natural resources. Cumming got into a confrontation with some drunken youths and ended up in hospital. “That left me with the duties of the producer, who in those days was in effect the director, writer and interviewer,” as Ferns tells it. “Somehow, I pulled it off.” Relying on a good cameraman, the new hire made himself look as if he knew what he was doing.

The left-leaning Nielsen soon realized he wasn’t destined for promotion at the Mother Corp. “We plotted to leave and form an independent production company,” says Ferns. Nielsen-Ferns was born in 1972. Their first production was a six-part series on Christian faith called A Third Testament, written and presented by British author and Christian convert Malcom Muggeridge, introducing six men in search of God, from Augustine of Hippo to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The series was aired in French and English on the CBC/Radio Canada in 1974-75 and was acquired for international distribution by Time-Life Films.

From its launch in 1972, Nielsen-Ferns Ltd was a trailblazer and its productions were a cut above the daily fare of network television. In1976, when Torstar bought the company, they continued to cover the waterfront of Canadian culture with such titles as The Newcomers/Les Arrivants, the impressive Cities series, a collaboration with John McGreevy Productions in which presenters such as Peter Ustinov and Glenn Gould toured their home cities, and  Portraits of Power, profiling leaders such as Mao Zedong and post-war German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. As well, Nielsen-Ferns created a platform for British naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell, with two series, The Stationary Ark and Ark on the Move.  The Wars, an adaptation of Timothy Findley’s novel about a Canadian in World War I, was a Nielsen-Ferns International feature film directed by then Stratford Festival’s AD Robin Phillips, in collaboration with the National Film Board. Released in March 1983, it was lovingly restored forty years on and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022.

Torstar retained rights to the Nielsen-Ferns brand, so in 1981, Ferns established Primedia Productions Ltd., whose remarkable output includes feature adaptations of Canadian plays Billy Bishop Goes to War (John Gray), Waiting for the Parade (John Murrell) and Stage on Screen (8 Canadian plays). Primedia’s specialty was TV movies and mini-series such as such as Heaven on Earth, Going Home, Glory Enough for All Passion and Paradise, Young Catherine and many more.

From the very start, Ferns had assumed a key role as lobbyist for independent television producers, having become in 1978 the president of the Canadian Film and Television Association. He helped shape the terms of federal government support for independent producers. He voiced an opinion that has only magnified in recent years that the CBC needs to step up to partner with independents. CFTA made an intervention when the national network’s license came up for renewal at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, producing a document entitled Make or Buy: The Case for Independence.

“I argued,” says Ferns, “that the CBC had a publisher function, but no publisher puts all his authors on staff. You need creative competition to get the best stuff on air. At that CRTC hearing, I proposed that in addition to its government-supplied operating funds and capital funds, it needed a third envelope for independent production. We’d planted a seed. Ultimately it was the concept on which Telefilm Canada’s Broadcast Fund was launched.” Telefilm later morphed into the Canada Media Fund.

As Ferns wrote in a recent op-ed for The Toronto Star, the CBC needs to review its business model. “Governments appoint CBC presidents as if it’s a big organization that needs to be managed. Wrong. CBC is a creative organization that needs to be led.” Instead of appointing civil servants, lawyers or even engineers with no media or journalistic background, the Mother Corp, Ferns believes, should be led by a creator and program maker, such as Mark Thompson (with whom Ferns once co-produced) who went on to become Director General of the BBC, and subsequently CEO at both the New York Times and now CNN.

“What [the CBC] needs to do is rethink who they are and who they’re serving. In British Columbia, the Knowledge Network is frequently outrating the CBC in the province and they have a miniscule budget, but they’ve got a mix of the best of the world. And they have the public donating to the service as Knowledge Partners.”

What if the CBC were to partner with national organizations such as the National Ballet of Canada, the National Arts Centre, The Canadian Opera Company? Ferns muses. “I mean these companies cannot tour to Whitehorse or Yellowknife, but the CBC could televise their shows and virtually tour them.” After all, one might add, the Broadcasting Act stipulates that the CBC’s mandate includes a need to reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences and “contribute to a shared national consciousness and identity.”

Ferns’ third act, as a chairman of the board of the Banff Television Festival and subsequently CEO, made further opportunities for independent producers in a public pitch session where creators got to present their projects to broadcasters from around the globe. This innovation spread around the world taking Ferns to five continents and finally to China for GZDOC and the China International Conference of Science and Education Producers. These days he hosts the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum in Taiwan. He says, “I have been leading a pitch session in Taiwan for the last 16 years. It’s become a huge success. Ninety percent of the projects pitched have been produced, a stunning achievement”.

 Accolades, including membership in the Order of Canada, The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal and numerous film awards, have not been wanting, but Pat Ferns is not ready to down tools for good. As president of Ferns Productions, based outside Victoria in Shirley BC, he has since 2004 been producing notable documentary miniseries and docudramas, including Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Darwin’s Brave New World, Listening to Orcas and 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus.

The 80-year old Ferns shows two projects in development in on fernsproductions.ca. The closest to getting realized is Trade Routes, a three-part documentary series presented by Scottish-based geographer Vanessa Collingridge, to be helmed by Pat’s son Andrew Ferns.

“It all began with an ancient map. I wanted to make a show about trade, because it’s the geopolitical issue of our time, and tell the story through the history of cartography. I thought I had half the money in China, but now that its economy is suffering, that’s in doubt. I can raise a third of the money in Canada, and perhaps another third with Arte in France and Germany.”

“It will be my last hurrah.”

The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada, by Pat Ferns, Sutherland House. $34.95 hardcover

Photos courtesy of Pat Ferns: Richard Nielsen and Pat Ferns; Ferns at the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum in Taiwan. Cover of the Sutherland House book

Victoria dancer Patricia Sparks and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet at 85

Patricia Sparks’ long career in ballet culminated with her recruitment into the Winnipeg Ballet and a command performance for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in October 1951.

She was 20, and no neophyte. The Victoria native, now Pat Taylor, began dance lessons at age six. At 94, she still resides in Oak Bay, near the beach, keeps fit with tai chi and has total recall of her ballet training and performance. It all began with her mother’s friend and Pat’s godmother, Wynne Shaw, whose Victoria dance studio ran from 1941 to 1983.

“Wynne made up her own dances,” Pat recalls. “She wasn’t a dancer at all. Couldn’t demonstrate anything. But she was a phenomenal teacher.”  

It was through Miss Shaw that a 20-year-old Patricia Sparks was invited to join the Winnipeg Ballet. Shaw knew Gweneth Lloyd, co-founder of the company that earned its royal charter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is this year marking its 85th anniversary.

Lloyd, an English ballet teacher and choreographer, arrived in Winnipeg with Betty Farrally, a former student of hers, in 1938. In 1939 they founded the Winnipeg Ballet, the oldest, continuously operating ballet company in North America. At the time when Sparks joined the company, Farrally was the ballet mistress.

In 1951, Pat Sparks, as she became known, Victor Duret and Beverley Ivings, all of Victoria, were among seven new dancers invited to join – in their case without auditioning — the Winnipeg Ballet. Another Victoria dancer, Bill McGrath, was already a member of the company. Sparks, Duret and Ivings were photographed for the Victoria Times, looking elegant with their suitcases, just before boarding a bus for Winnipeg.

“We got back there at the beginning of September,” says Pat, as if it was yesterday. “Our first performance was in front of Princess Elizabeth [a year before her coronation] and Prince Philip. It was the first thing we rehearsed for.”  After the show we were all introduced to them.”

The program consisted of Visages, Finishing School and The Wise Virgins, all choreographed by Lloyd, and Ballet Premier, created by Arnold Spohr. All 17 dancers performed for the royal couple. Jean Stoneham, who had danced with the Ottawa Ballet, was the star of the show. Pat recalls princess Elizabeth as stunningly beautiful. “They watched the first half of the program. After the show we were all introduced to them.”

For a still young and impressionable Pat Sparks, artistic director Arnold Spohr was a welcoming and encouraging figure. “He was a very kind man. On Christmas Eve, we out-of-towners were invited to his family home. It was the first time I had ever seen a Christmas tree with candles.” Spohr, whose heritage was German, “was a very tall man as were his brothers, all of them policemen.”

Among the dancers Pat met at the Winnipeg ballet was Hungarian-born Eva von Gencsy, who would later go on to co-found Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal.  “She was quite a character. I became really good friends with Eva and she would stay with me when in Victoria.”

Dancing professionally with a company on a shoestring budget was something of a challenge. “The costumes were already made. You either fitted into them or you didn’t. There was no money for adjustments.” And, for a young dancer from Victoria, dancing and touring in a harsh Canadian winter was an adventure of another kind.

“The first thing I did was buy a winter coat, a fur. In January 1952, we toured to Calgary. We took the train. I remember on the walk to the hotel. It was 60-below [Fahrenheit] with the windchill. We were billeted on the top floor of a house with a lovely lady. There were no cooking facilities, so we got a hotplate.”

Pat Sparks danced with RWB for two seasons, 1951 and 1952, but continued to perform after returning to Victoria, notably with Theatre Under the Stars, the musical theatre company that puts on shows to this day in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. “It was really fun,” she says. “We would rehearse all day in English Bay. Mostly, the old chestnuts.  Chu Chin Chow. The Merry Widow [as cancan girls] . . . waltzy kind of things, where we danced with the men.” One time, in a departure from routine, TUTS staged Brigadoon.

Once married to John Olsen, owner of The Strathcona Hotel, and later to Trevor Taylor, Pat is single and remains a participant in Victoria’s active dance scene. In 2016, she, along with some other volunteers and University of Victoria MA candidate Elizabeth Bassett and initiated the Dance Victoria Archives, an important record of professional dance on Vancouver Island. The archives document dancers such as Anna Marie Holmes and Patricia Sparks and renowned Victoria-born choreographer Crystal Pite.

The ballerina in Pat Sparks Taylor has not disappeared. She keeps moving and she keeps informed about the dance world. And she makes for fascinating conversation for anyone interested in Canadian ballet history.

Photos: Beverly Ivings, Kay Bird, Eva von Gencsy, Pat Sparks, Sheilagh Henderson and Viola Busday in Rondel 1951; Pat Sparks in costume for Finishing School; Pat Sparks Taylor at home.

Credits: Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet Archives; Susan Walker

Dancing on the Edge keeps it fresh

 

Arguably, Noam Gagnon has been dancing on the edge ever since he started classes at Concordia University, where he had thought he might major in psychology. The Quebec-born dancer, choreographer and pilates instructor has no fear of risk: safe is not in his vocabulary except as a synonym for boring.  

Gagnon will be the opening show at the 37th Dancing on the Edge festival, June 12 to 21 at the Firehall Arts Centre and SFU Woodward’s in Vancouver. The longest running dance festival in Canada will this year feature 17 companies, making up an eclectic but intriguing program of the kind artistic producer and DOTE co-founder Donna Spencer has perfected over the years.

As anyone familiar with Holy Body Tattoo, the company formed by Gagnon, Dana Gingras and musician Jean-Yves Theriault in 1993 will know, edginess has long been a hallmark of Gagnon’s work in dance. It’s true, he says of Holy Body shows such as our brief eternity: “We left it on the floor. Physically, emotionally, in every way, we gave it our all.”

being is the title of the piece Gagnon is bringing to the festival. “I think everyone is going to be surprised. It took a turn,” he says of this solo, created in collaboration with musician Stefan Smulovitz and first performed two years ago.

The solo, he explains, was a driven by a physical language and emotional language that emerged in the creative process. This version, Gagnon says, “is more based on the maturity I have gained . . . Now there’s a different emotionality that goes with my being.”

Recognizing the honour in being chosen to open the festival, Gagnon had to ask himself whether he was delivering what the festival audience would expect with him. So he kept working and re-working, with lots of input from Smulovitz, who join Gagnon on stage, because, he says, “at the end of the day, I’m a showman.”

Newton Moraes, a Toronto performer and artistic director of the 25-year-old company, Newton Moraes Dance Theatre, performs in the second half on the opening mixed program with Gagnon (which repeats later in the festival). He’s a first-timer with Dancing on the Edge. Moraes, a native of Porto Alegre, Brazil, also started out with a different idea of what he career he might pursue before dance found him, especially after he moved to Canada.

Moraes is thrilled to have been programmed into this festival. “It means so much to be part of this incredible platform that celebrates powerful and innovative dance.” He’ll be performing a new solo called Dance Is Not My Hobby. A woman who was once a close friend challenged him one day by suggesting that dance was simply a hobby for Moraes. It’s not. “Dance is a vital expression of my identity. At 62 years old, as an LGBTQ man, I’m committed to continuing my performances.” His choreography has drawn on a “rich tapestry of influences,” including African Brazilian spirituality and many artists he admires. The solos, pays homage to some of those artists and to the late Robert Shirley, the partner who brought Moraes to Canada.

Donna Spencer is much admired by dancers and choreographers familiar with the festival. One of them is Serge Bennathan, the French-born dancer, choreographer, artistic director, painter and poet. A Vancouverite for a good part of the year, Bennathan says, “Ah oui. Dancing on the Edge holds a very special place in my heart.” Spencer invited him to perform in the first festival in 1988 when he’d only been in Vancouver for a few months. Dancing on the Edge, says Bennathan, introduced him to the West Coast dance community and has been a launching pad for many a dance artist.

Dance festivals in Canada have had a hard time staying alive. According to Spencer, who founded the festival with Esther Rausenberg and since the early 1990s has held the title of artistic producer, DOTE’s longevity is a function of “the need for its existence.” The festival has had to operate on a small budget so they have to keep overhead and administrative costs to a minimum to give as much of their funds as possible to the artists. “We believe in the artists and strive to raise their profile with every festival.”

One of the aims of Dancing on the Edge is to represent as much of Canada as possible. Jenn Edwards, performing The Centre of Time on June 18 and 19, has been based in Labrador since 2019. She grew up in Burnaby, BC, and came to dance and choreography from figure skating. Edwards spent some formative years of her career in Berlin and Vienna, so she too has absorbed influences from far and wide.

The Centre of Time, developed during a couple of residencies, is a world premiere. The piece came out of Edwards’s meditations on time as perceived through the moving body.  An important element of the piece is a film created by Brad Dillon that screens on a backdrop. “It was shot on a frozen lake — the temperature was minus 30 that day — using a video camera and a drone. I really like the otherworldly effect of that.” Dillon’s camera also captured the shadows cast by the dancers — Edwards and three others — to produce an effect where the dancers and their shadows are interacting.

Be sure to consult the full festival line-up at www.dancingontheedge.org  or if you want to be surprised and delighted, just turn up and see what you can see.

Dancing on the Edge

June 12 to 21

Firehall Arts Centre, SFU Woodward’s, Vancouver BC

www.dancingontheedge.org

Photos, courtesy of the artists, clockwise: Newton Moraes/Dance Is Not My Hobby; Jenn Edwards/The Centre of Time; Noam Gagnon/being