I fell in love with this set of vintage-inspired dessert plates from Anthropologie and at only $18 a pop, they add a much needed eclectic flair to my otherwise white dinnerware set. Imagine serving up bite-sized macarons to unveil a lime green Praying Mantis. It feels like a natural selection.
Much like the mesmerizing figures that inhabit the world of ballet, the beauty of the art form attracts us but the unknown allure what goes on backstage forever holds our intrigue. It’s this vast and often dark history that Canadian arts writer Deirdre Kelly delves into and brings to the surface in her latest book, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection.
The dance critic and ELLE Canada contributor signed copies at the book launch this weekend at Yorkville’s Teatro Verde, while her nine-year-old daughter Isadora – the image of a tiny dancer complete with pink tutu – snapped pictures the whole time we were there Sunday afternoon. Here, Kelly chats about the salacious underbelly of this world, dispels common misconceptions about the ballerina, and affirms why Hollywood, much like the rest of us, is fascinated by this dark and beautiful world.
What’s the energy here been like this weekend?
“My first customer was a former soloist with the National Ballet of Canada. And she came from far afield and bought two copies, one for herself and the other former principal dancer, Gizella Witkowsky. And this was hugely gratifying for me because I wrote this book for and because of the dancers. So I’m really gratified to be getting the support of the dancers.”
What are some common misconceptions about this world that you hope the book brings to light?
“I think very few people know that behind the scenes this delicate being that we usually associate with the ballet actually has a very troubled and troubling life and lifestyle and has had many obstacles to leap over throughout her history, going all the way back to the 17th century. So I think people are really intrigued by the fact that I’ve ripped the veil from the myth of the ballerina so to speak.”
Read on to find out what shocked this dance critic most about the world of ballet!
Friday Night Live@ROM! Image courtesy of the ROM.
PARTY
Status: Last call
What: Friday Night Live @ the ROM
When: Friday June 22 from 6 to 11 p.m, the last of a 10-week series.
Where: You guessed it: the ROM. Pop-up bars stationed in galleries throughout the museum serving cocktails and fare from Fidel Gastro’s (oh, those sloppy Joses!)
Buzzworthy notes: Belgian goodies from WaffleBar starting at $5; live DJ and a performance by Down With Webster’s Diggy; a $9 cover charge, plus a chance to upgrade ticket to see the new feature exhibition, Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana, presented by Raymond James Ltd., which opens the next day.
BEAUTY
Status: One night only.
What: Beauty Night’s Scent Bar Party
When: Thursday June 21, 201 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM.
Where: Lord’s Shoes on 2932 South Granville Street, Vancouver
Buzzworthy notes: Create your own signature “purefume” or cologne from over 40 pure essential oils at Smell This! Aromatherapy’s mobile scent bar at Lord’s Shoes. Feel-good bonus? 50 per cent of the $25 ticket goes toward the Beauty Night Society, which helps to build self-esteem in women and youth living in poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Click here for theatre and fashion events happening this week!
Author Kamal Al-Solaylee. Photography courtesy of Peter Bregg.
Toronto writer Kamal Al-Solaylee, a Yemeni expatriate, twice removed, is proof that you can never really go home again. And again. “It never feels like a holiday or a joy to be back in the Middle East. It’s a duty,” says Al-Solaylee, an ELLE Canada contributor who recently published his memoir, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, which traces his journey out of the Middle East and into his own Western mecca.
A former Globe and Mail theatre critic and current undergraduate director at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, Al-Solaylee writes about the tension with growing up watching his once-secular family embrace the values of the rising Islamic influence, as well as his guilt as a dalo’o omo (his mother’s spoiled child) – he’s the baby of 11 kids, after all – with breaking his mother’s heart when he eventually escaped to England for a better life.
Now living that life, Al-Solaylee, my much-loved former prof, speaks about his constant worry over his family in the Middle East, especially during recent violent outbreaks amidst Arab Spring protests, and why academia and Olivia Newton-John pop music—two prominent aspects of his Toronto life—saved him.
What’s the significance of the title, Intolerable?
“I wanted a title that’s one word…but I chose the word intolerable deliberately because something that is intolerable can become tolerable, whereas something that’s tragic does not become the opposite of tragic. Intolerable has hope in it somewhere—it’s intolerable now but it may not be intolerable in the long term. It’s the circumstances that almost make life intolerable, but that may change. With any luck, it will change.”
Click through to hear Kamal Al-Solaylee on the Arab Spring and Barbra Streisand!
Brother-sister duo Jordin and Tamara Mimran (of the Mimran family fashion dynasty) at a preppy-beach themed party.
With their summer collections in stores (and the Fall/Winter 2012-13 runway shows behind them), Canadian designers are taking some much-needed beach recovery time and bringing along their favourite summer reads and playlists to help then unwind. We caught up with a few of our favourite homegrown designers behind some of Canada’s hottest labels to find out what fashionable books and summer tunes—would you expect any less?— they’ll be relaxing with under the sun this season.
MOON, designers Tamara and Jordin Mimran
Based in: Toronto
Summer read: Tamara, The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E L James
Beach playlist: Tamara and Jordin:
1. Dragonette, “Let it go.”
2. Ellie Goulding, “Lights.”
3. Calvin Harris, “Feel so Close.”
4. Young Galaxy, “We Have Everything.”
5. Vacationer, “Good As New.”
6. M83, “Mightlight City.”
7. Recloose, “Can it Be.”
Read on for more beach reads and summer tracks from Canadian designers…
Film still from Pretty Thing. Directed by Matthew De Filippis and Elisia Mirabelli.
The Monday night finale of RUFF—the 15th annual Ryerson University film fest— was a vast, awe-inspiring glimpse of what’s to come in Canadian cinema. The three-day fest, held at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, showcased 25 shorts by the graduating film class of the School of Image Arts.
What happens when unbounded creativity meets hard work and a stage to showcase it all, these films are proof that this batch of talented emerging filmmakers is undoubtedly one to watch. Here’s a roundup of the films that premiered on day three of the festival, which ran from June 2-4 this year.
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me
A young girl faces a terrifying mix of pre-pubescent injustice—think mean girls, menstruation—while her grandfather, a charming appearance by a little-known Canadian actor named Gordon Pinsent, tries to comfort and embolden her with a humour and grace that could save the world. The beauty of this short is in the tiny but skewering ironies—like how a confused pug can make everything better without even trying. Dir. Stephen Dunn.
Frontier
A visually stunning portrait of colonial life, this short traces the banality of simpler times when a few moments of human weakness attempt to disrupt the monotony. Moving with a swift and subtle grace, the film follows a young woman, played with startling conviction by Linzee Barclay, who seeks comfort in her priest, whose own doubts threaten to crumble the devout faith upon which their tangled lives are built. Dir. Jessica Adams.
Click through for more RUFF film picks!
Deborah Hay as Beatrice and Ben Carlson as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Courtesy of Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
There’s truth to the testy, inflamed love that defines one of Shakespeare’s wittiest couples—Beatrice and Benedick in the bard’s beloved rom-com Much Ado About Nothing. Just ask the real-life married couple, Canadian actors Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay, who star as feuding lovers in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival production, which opened its 60th anniversary season Monday night.
“We bicker in a different way,” says Hay, laughing, about the onstage pair’s “merry war” of wits. “We’re not using our jobs as a form of therapy!”
Set in steamy Brazil at the turn of the 20th century—a believable stretch from the likewise hot-blooded Sicilians Shakespeare originally created— the sparring mates are tricked into falling for one another in fatefully Shakespearean fashion. Read the rest of this entry
About Face director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders between models Beverly Johnson (left) and Cheryl Tiegs (right)
Her Sports Illustrated covers and editorial spreads flash across the screen and it’s as if supermodel Paulina Porizkova is finally seeing what the rest of the world has been looking at for the decades that she’s been a star in the fashion and beauty biz. “I should have been naked all the time!” Porizkova, now 47, tells the camera, blue eyes wide and rapturous.
Porizkova’s epiphany comes courtesy of About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now, a documentary screening this week as part of Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. The doc’s director is Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the famed American photographer, who displays his adeptness at teasing out aha! moments about aging gracefully from some of the world’s most iconic faces.
And it turns out they have a lot to say. The doc’s subjects—from Carmen Dell’Orefice and China Machado to Beverly Johnson and Christy Turlington— are fiercely critical and hyper-aware of the modelling world and their fleeting place in it.
Krystin Pellerin and Gregory Prest in You Can’t Take It With You, courtesy of Soulpepper Theatre Company.
“What is this strange feeling that I’m feeling?” says Canadian actor Gregory Prest, who’s trying to describe the foreign emotion that’s washed over him lately during rehearsals for Soulpepper Theatre Company’s production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. Then it hits him. “Oh, love!” he blurts out, laughing.
It’s not that Prest— a National Theatre School grad who hails from Pictou, Nova Scotia—is incapable of displaying emotion. In fact, he’s as affable and charming in person as he is tortured and conflicted on stage—well at least going by the menacing and dark roles he’s taken up in recent Soulpepper productions. “I never get to play this sort of thing, somebody other than a tortured or dying young artist,” he tells me one morning in the lobby of the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto’s Distillery District. “It’s wonderful.” Read the rest of this entry
Penelope Cruz, Paris, 2003.
Ellen von Unwerth, the rock star of fashion photography, is glancing around the Izzy Gallery in Yorkville, where life-sized photographs of her iconic shots cover the walls. She’s struggling to select her favourite snap. “They all have something I love in them,” she muses after a moment of hesitation. Then she points to a photograph of Italian actress Monica Bellucci, stripped down to a matching leopard-printed bra and panties. “This shot is from the first photo shoot I ever did with [Monica],” von Unwerth recalls with the sentimental attachment of a proud mother. “And she was actually just changing in the motor home. It was really its own moment. I’ve shot her so many times since but those pictures are still my favourite.”
That’s because von Unwerth— named one of TIME’s top 100 all-time fashion icons—prefers to capture “stolen moments” rather than posed portraits. For the first time since von Unwerth shot to fame in the ‘80s, the self-taught German photog is displaying a retrospective of her work in Toronto. A selection of the frisky, bombshell icons von Unwerth has snapped over the years, Caught! is a decadent visual walkthrough of old-school female glamour.
Rouilly le Bas, 2002.
A von Unwerth signature
The thing about a von Unwerth photo is that it’s instantly recognizable. Take the iconic Claudia Schiffer Guess campaign from 1989, a prime example of von Unwerth’s trademark moody, eroticized aesthetic—a gorgeous woman teasing the camera with a mix of innocence and cheeky come-hither sensuality. “I always go for glamorous,” says von Unwerth, a vision herself in a gold sequined blazer and side-swept, piecey blond bun. “I don’t like the girl-next-door look.”
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