Chanson in Quebec
Chanson in Quebec. It is through the oral folk tradition, deriving its essential qualities from European folklore, that the Quebec chanson has carved out its privileged position.
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Create AccountChanson in Quebec. It is through the oral folk tradition, deriving its essential qualities from European folklore, that the Quebec chanson has carved out its privileged position.
Based on an ancient Inuit folktale, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) is the first Inuktitut-language feature film ever made. A critically-acclaimed commercial success, it won numerous awards worldwide, including the Camera d’or for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival and five Genie Awards, including Best Screenplay, Best Direction and Best Motion Picture, as well as the Claude Jutra Award (now the Canadian Screen Award for Best First Feature). It is widely considered one of the best Canadian films ever made, and in 2015 was ranked No. 1 of all time in a poll conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival (see Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time).
Oral history is an account of the past transmitted by word of mouth. It has made important contributions to the ways in which we understand and interpret the past. Today, oral history has become an important field of study. Oral histories are also central to Indigenous cultures, both historical and contemporary. (See also Historical Sources and Indigenous Oral Histories and Primary Sources.)
Communications have played a special role in the North. Terrain, climate and distance made it difficult for northerners to communicate with each other or with southern Canada before the advent of electronic media. In traditional times, Inuit messages were passed through personal contact.
The Thule were an Indigenous people who began to occupy the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland, around 1000 CE. In the winter, the Thule used a house built partially into the ground to keep them warm for long periods of time. One striking feature of this structure was the roof, which was sometimes made of whalebone. (See also Architectural History of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)
Immigration of the Welsh to Canada occurred in cycles corresponding to economic depressions in the homeland in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some moved to Canada via the USA and others via the Welsh community established in the Argentine.
In its first season, under Moore's artistic direction, the festival staged 4 shows and premiered ANNE OF GREEN GABLES the musical, written by Don HARRON, Norman CAMPBELL, and Moore.
With the emergence of the Black Theatre Workshop in the late 1960s, Black theatre began to flourish across Canada, providing dynamic venues for the work of Black playwrights, directors, and actors.
After the Ontario performance, CODCO returned to Newfoundland and, following a run in St John's, toured the province.
Bollywood, a playful word derived from Hollywood and the city of Bombay, refers specifically to the Hindi-language films produced in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, the city known as the heart of the South Asian film industry.
Ararat, Atom Egoyan's movie-within-a-movie, is about the 1915 slaughter of Turkey's Armenian minority, an atrocity that is still officially denied by the Turkish government.
A Dangerous Age (1957), Sidney J. Furie's low-budget tale about young lovers (played by Ben Piazza and Anne Pearson) on the run from an uncaring adult world, remains something of a landmark in English-Canadian feature production.
CentreStage was the resident company at the St Lawrence Centre and was created in 1970 as part of the Toronto Arts Foundation. Headed by Leon Major from 1970 to 1980, it changed its name to Toronto Arts Productions in 1973.
For a long time, there was little awareness of or research into the Acadians’ rich folklore. However, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, pioneers such as Joseph-Thomas LeBlanc and Father Anselme Chiasson began to promote the spread of Acadia’s repertoire of songs and oral traditions. Later, during the 1950s, Luc Lacourcière and his followers at Université Laval’s Archives de folklore gathered substantial collections of tales, legends and songs. Up to the 1990s, extensive research was undertaken throughout Acadia.
Music and song have always been an important part of Acadian culture. Music education has existed in Acadia since the 1860s. School and college choirs have enjoyed great success, and classically trained Acadian musicians have distinguished themselves on the world stage.
Directed by Bernard Émond and released in 2003, 20h17 rue Darling, like Émond’s earlier film La femme qui boit, confronts us with the disastrous effects of alcoholism.
After long and persistent efforts on the part of Indian dancers living in Canada, Indian forms of dance came to be acknowledged as classical art by the arts councils and the Canadian dance audience at large.
The Canadian Women's Press Club (CWPC) was founded in June 1904 in a Canadian Pacific Railway Pullman car, aboard which 16 women (half anglophone, half francophone) travelled to the St. Louis World's Fair. All but one were working journalists who covered the event. The CWPC offered female journalists professional support and development in its mission to “maintain and improve the status of journalism as a profession for women.”
Inuktitut is an Indigenous language in North America spoken in the Canadian Arctic. The 2016 census reported 39,770 speakers, of which 65 per cent lived in Nunavut and 30.8 per cent in Quebec. Inuktitut is part of a larger Inuit language continuum (a series of dialects) stretching from Alaska to Greenland. Inuktitut uses a writing system called syllabics, created originally for the Cree language, which represent combinations of consonants and vowels. The language is also written in the Roman alphabet, and this is the exclusive writing system used in Labrador and parts of Western Nunavut. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language, meaning that words tend to be longer and structurally more complex than their English or French counterparts.
Billy Bishop Goes to War is a musical written by John MacLachlan Gray with Eric Peterson about the exploits of First World War flying ace William Avery "Billy" Bishop. Since its premiere in 1978, the musical has been staged across Canada and in the United States and Europe. It remains one of the most popular Canadian musicals.