Mi'kmaq art and culture adorns new international arrivals area at airport - CBC

The sheep appeared in Lalanne’s U.S. museum debut 60 years ago.

One Sunday last year, the Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist Roxane Mbanga was relaxing in bed when she received a message that made her sit up. It was about working on an art history project. Growing up in Paris, she had been a regular at Maasai Mara, the now defunct restaurant owned by her father, where Africans in the diaspora, including the artists whom he helped organise exhibitions, convened to eat and chat. Thus the concept of a book, attempting for the first time to comprehensively compile and document key players in Cameroon’s vast visual art history, made obvious sense to her. “It’s a magical reconnaissance, being recognised by my peers and being in the same book as people I look up to,” says the 30-year-old artist. “This idea of creating spaces, as with the book, is incredibly important because it allows us to build from there and leave traces for people that will come after. I really lacked that growing up … spaces like books, podcasts or whatever, where I could really see people that resemble me, that do things similar to me.”The first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale … Koyo Kouoh.

This documentary is a collaboration between Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy, two of film director Robin Hardy’s children (he had seven in all, and was married five times), and it delves into the legacy of both their father and his most enduring work, 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man. The latter still stands today, for all its imperfections and peculiarities, as one of the most unsettling and paradoxically influential British films of all time, despite being a box-office flop on its initial release. This latest work is partly an account of The Wicker Man’s troubled production – a story that’s been told in books and journalism a fair few times already – and its strange reemergence as a cult movie-cum-fetish object, and partly a therapeutic exercise for the brothers themselves, full of raw feeling that’s sometimes painful to watch. However, while the brothers’ willingness to share their pain remains admirable, their film feels hampered by omissions and silences.

A striking example of site-specific theatre, TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral was first performed in 1935 at Canterbury Cathedral. This was the location, in 1170, for its pivotal event: the killing by Henry II’s knights of Archbishop Thomas Becket during a dispute over the powers of church and state. Subsequently, audiences have been more likely to enter a production via a church nave than a theatre aisle. The latest host venue is St John the Divine, opposite the Orange Tree theatre, whose boss, Tom Littler, co-directs with Francesca Ellis. David Suchet’s Becket, in gilded vestments, preaches from the pulpit. Dozens of candles on the altar and lining a marbled walkway between pews (design by Rob Jones, lighting by Peter Mumford) cast shadows on the walls around stained glass windows. The overall classiness of the show is extended by a programme essay by an actual former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, covering Eliot’s concern with whether priests, in 1930s England and Germany, served or resisted politicians. Hard lesson … (from left) David Yelland, Ben Caplan, David Suchet, Nick Sampson and Jyuddah Jaymes.

Dame Judi Dench has long made her feelings clear about Cats, the doomed 2019 adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In an interview the year after release, she said she had so far declined to watch the movie – in which she played wise moggy Old Deuteronomy – and described the orange fur coat she had to wear as looking like “five foxes fucking on my back”. In her forthcoming memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Dench reflects further on her involvement in the movie, which was universally panned and whose director, Tom Hooper, has not made a film since. “Oh God, I can’t bear it,” she writes in the book, “and [Lloyd Webber] had waited so long for it to be made. What a waste of all that goodwill and talent. “I understand the critics were rather hostile to the film. I never saw the final cut so I can’t judge. All I’ll say is nobody sets out to give a poor performance or make a bad film.