Arts

Beat Awfuls PAWS (Youth Kulture/Cocoa Beach Tapes) 3.5/5 Richmond (by way of Lexington and Boston) lo-fi rock trio Beat Awfuls intrigue and provoke on their fourth album, PAWS. With song titles like “Interstate Skeletons” and “Ego Death Kult,” it’s clear that PAWS was intended to be edgy. The album conveys a cherry-flavoured apathy for life […]

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Sunday Art Lecture series is back for its ninth year, this time out featuring Katherine Young’s As if Autumn Leaves: Age in Asian and Western Art. A professor emeritus at McGill University and associate fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, […]

Hidden Letters is a documentary directed by Violet du Feng that shares the personal stories of countless women living in traditional villages in China who had few rights and were shown even less respect. For women in traditional China, aggressive subjugation and abuse is common and accepted, even to this day. The film focuses on […]

Pacific Opera Victoria founding artistic director Timothy Vernon is giving audiences a look into the work of Greek comedic poet Aristophanes with the opera The Birds. Aristophanes was a satirist, using his work to comment on the society of his day. “What he was writing wasn’t necessarily through-line plots as [it was] satires, making fun […]

dEUS How to Replace It ([PIAS] Recordings) 3.5/5 Coming off of a 10-year hiatus, Belgian art-rock band dEUS have re-entered the music scene with their eighth album, How to Replace It. There are influences from alternative, pop, and electronic rock through the album. The first single, “Must Have Been New,” as well as cuts like […]

The era directly following World War II was one of revitalization and invention, a sort of cultural and artistic renaissance where people tried to move past the trauma of war by emphasizing family, community, and prosperity. This was the birth of the “modern” era, and its naive idealism and unbridled invention put a stamp on […]

The Phoenix Theatre is known for producing progressive work, and Vinegar Tom is no exception to this tradition. Written in 1976 by Caryl Churchill, and directed by MFA candidate Francis Matheu, Vinegar Tom revolves around mother and daughter Joan and Alice, who are accused by an angry neighbour of practicing witchcraft. “The play is about […]

Local director Zelda Dean is getting ready to launch her new play, The Year My Mother Came Back; the play and the Alice Eve Cohen novel it’s based on is strongly inspired by Cohen’s turmoil-filled relationship with her mother. “I just love this play, I think I related to it. It’s just such a brave […]