Latest news with #Zambian-born
Ottawa Citizen
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Ottawa Citizen
National Arts Centre reveals diverse lineup for 2025-26 season
Article content There is always something new and creative to discover at the National Arts Centre, whether it's an edgy modern-dance show or a surprising take on an orchestral classic. Article content With four stages under its hexagonal roof and a skilled team of specialized artistic programmers in charge of six different genres of performing arts, the NAC's schedule gets filled with gems well in advance. Article content Article content The 2025-26 calendar is no exception. Between September 2025 and spring of 2026, dozens of concerts, theatrical productions and dance events will be shoehorned into the building, including no fewer than nine world premieres. One show calls for a skateboard ramp at centre stage, while another is described as a Macbeth-meets-biker mashup. Article content Article content The season will also mark a farewell for maestro Alexander Shelley, who has been leading the NAC Orchestra for more than a decade — and whose two young sons were born in Ottawa. Shelley has designed a final season that will include a big opera production of Puccini's Tosca, an all-Canadian edition of the Great Performers series, a seasonal presentation of Handel with an all-Canadian cast of vocalists, four world premieres and more. Article content The first, scheduled for January 2026, is co-produced by Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre and written by Natasha Mumba, a graduate of Ottawa's Canterbury arts high school and now based in Toronto. Entitled Copperbelt, it's the story of a Zambian-born woman who's made a life for herself in Toronto, but is compelled to return to her homeland when her estranged father falls ill. Article content Article content Article content The second Aquino-directed world premiere is cicadas, created by David Yee and Chris Thornborrow. Commissioned by the NAC, it's an eco-thriller set in Toronto in 2035. Article content Article content The English theatre season also features a family play described as a live theatrical cinema experience starring Canadian DJ Kid Koala, who performs live on piano and turntables every night of the Dec. 3-13 run. The tale of a small-town mosquito trying to make it big in music also uses puppeteers, miniature sets, a string trio and cameras to tell its story. Article content Another six shows will be presented by the Indigenous theatre department under the artistic leadership of Kevin Loring. They range from the inter-tribal collaboration that drives Nigamon Tunai to the world premiere of Tomson Highway's latest, Rose, to an allegorical circus piece from New Zealand, Te Tangi a Te Tūī.
Chicago Tribune
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' review: A family funeral digs up a history of hidden trauma
Wherever it takes place, whoever's life has ended, a funeral is a kind of collective memory bank. No two memories of the deceased, spoken or unspoken, work the same way. But a person's life, and its ripple effects, have a way of lingering. Delicate but fierce, 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' is the second feature from the Zambian-born, Welsh-raised writer-director Rungano Nyoni. As both participant and observer, like its protagonist, the film contends with many shades of anguish, in a story about an extended Zambian family mourning the death of a man known to all as Uncle Fred. In a steady, enveloping rhythm, with disarming slivers of sly humor, Nyoni asks a question without a pat answer: Can a dishonorable corpse be honored by those in attendance, if most of the mourners deny or wave away certain shared memories, like smoke from a dying fire? Driving home alone from a costume party, still in her Missy Elliott mask and headgear from the '90s hit 'The Rain,' Shula sees something at the roadside before we, the audience, see it as well. It is the body of her Uncle Fred. Shula (played by Susan Chardy) responds by not responding. She's either in stoic shock or the throes of something more inward. Along the same stretch of Zambian road stumbles Shula's cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), seemingly worlds apart from Shula in her boisterous, presently drunken state. These two women serve as our entryway to the eventual marathon of a ceremonial family gathering. Shula joins the other women (always and only women) in the funeral preparations, the cooking, the serving, the ingrained, subservient nods. There's another cultural factor at work here. As the mourning rituals get underway, and Fred's relatives fill the humble house and yard, Shula and her cousins find themselves receding as adults and reverting, subtly, to their younger, compliant selves in that universal way of grown children re-entering the orbit of family. Clearly Shula has much on her mind. 'Guinea Fowl' is about how she finds the courage to talk about how Uncle Fred sexually abused her when she was a child, and with whom she feels safe in that spilled secret. She was not the only one. How many knew what was happening? Uncle Fred also left behind a much younger widow and several children; Shula's extended clan holds the widow (Norah Mwansa) responsible for her wastrel husband's ignoble death, not far from a brothel he frequented. Much of the film deals with how Fred's modest estate will be settled, and parceled out — and whether his hungry family will get anything, in the end, to make up for what the widow owes Fred's blood relatives in this circumstance. 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,' which shrewdly delays its title's meaning until the last possible minute, proceeds from ritualistic detail to detail, as part of the natural flow of things. Some of the mourners enter the house of mourning walking on their knees, singing a song about how death 'comes crawling' and the bereaved should do likewise. As the chicken on the grill outside sizzles away in the evening, there's a scene where Shula, looking for a missing relative, keeps getting interrupted by male mourners placing their dinner orders. The movie's subtle dramatics (too subtle for some, maybe, but whatever) create an ecosystem for our own exploration. Director Nyoni's 2017 debut feature, 'I Am Not a Witch,' announced a significant talent already formed, and driven by what keeps women confined, and by what cultural traditions of repression. Her cinematographer on that film and this one, David Gallego, has a supple eye for both indoor and outdoor shadows and light, and expressively emotional color. 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' takes its time and maintains a tight lid on Shula's emotions, not because it's a setup for some sort of explosion (though that comes, in its way) but because it's the authentic choice for a tamped-down psyche in search of a release valve. Nyoni is not into screeds or simple messaging. This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage. And it's a 2025 highlight. 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) Running time: 1:39 How to watch: Premieres Fri. March 14 at Music Box Theatre, AMC River East and Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville
