The Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing

Here is the video of the event.

THE COLLABORATORS

Norman Armour is the co-founder and Artistic and Executive director of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. His career includes producer, director, actor and producer, covering a range of creative interests. You can catch him on the odd rerun of X Files, as well as films such as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote. He recently directed the premiere of Pauline, an opera by Tobin Stokes and Margaret Atwood on the life and art of Métis poet Pauline Johnson.

Hank Bull is a Canadian multidisciplinary contemporary artist, curator, organizer and arts administrator. He was an early member of Vancouver’s Western Front Society. Bull’s work has been included in  numerous exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Dokumenta and Ars Electronica. In 1999, with Zheng Shengtian and Stephanie Holmquist, Bull co-founded Centre A, a Vancouver public art gallery focusing on Asian and Asian-diasporic perspectives.

Charles Campbell edited the Georgia Straight weekly for 11 years, and helped to establish the venerable alternative newspaper as an influential and respected voice in the Vancouver media. As The Vancouver Sun’s entertainment editor, he increased the section’s readership by more than 30 percent in two years. As an editor and writer he has been closely involved in work that has won more than 60 awards. In 2000, he was honoured with a Southam Fellowship by the University of Toronto’s Massey College.

Nicola Cavendish is one of Canada’s best-loved actors. Born in England and raised in B.C., she began her acting career in the mid-1970s. Her theatre roles have included cross-Canada tours starring in Shirley Valentine and For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. She won a Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for the 1991 film The Grocer’s Wife and a Gemini Award nomination for the 1998 film The Sleep Room. Her other film roles include Suddenly Naked, Air Bud, It and My American Cousin. Television roles include Men in Trees, The L Word, Highlander: The Series, The X-Files, Street Legal and Red Serge.

Fred Cawsey is a veteran Vancouver TV newsman and documentary producer. He was a host, producer and reporter at CHQM, CBC Vancouver  and BCTV Vancouver, and created documentaries including Doctor, Doctor, Legal Wise and Frontiers of Discovery, as well as films such as The Land is the Culture and Live Well With Diabetes. He is currently president of Front Runner Productions, a film and documentary company.

Robert Chaplin, R.C.A, creator of the pin and limited edition book presented to the winner of this award, is a Vancouver-based artist and publisher. His practice includes carving gemstones, making sculptures, drawing pictures, writing stories and publishing books. He holds the Guinness World Record for publishing the world’s smallest book, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, created in association with nano-scientists at Simon Fraser University and written by Malcolm Chaplin. It is 69 x 97 micrometres square.

Jeff Corness is a Vancouver-based composer, music teacher and creative collaborator. His interests are multidisciplinary and over the past three decades he has collaborated with many Vancouver creators in music, dance and theatre.

Noam Gagnon has helped push Canadian dance into the forefront of the international stage. For 16 years Noam was the Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer of The Holy Body Tattoo. Now the Artistic Director of Vision Impure, which he founded in 2006, Noam continues to reshape the dance landscape with his intimate and powerful works. Noam is regularly commissioned by dance artists and companies to create works, and has collaborated with such celebrated artists as Nigel Charnock, Daniel Léveillé, The Tiger Lillies, Steven Gilmore and William Morrison. He is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.

Christopher Gaze, O.B.C., is the Founding Artistic Director of Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. He hosts the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s ever popular Tea and Trumpets series and has hosted their annual traditional Christmas concerts for 25 years. Christopher plays a leading role in British Columbia as an advocate for the arts in general, and his passionate dedication to Bard on the Beach has fuelled its growth into one of the largest professional theatre companies in Canada, drawing more than 1.5 million patrons since its inception in 1990.

Scott McIntyre, C.M., is a founding partner and recently retired Publisher and Chairman of Douglas & McIntyre Publishers which during his tenure published some 2,000 Canadian books. For over 40 years Scott has been actively involved in government relations and industry association work in the cultural industries, both provincially and federally. He has served on many cultural boards, both in Canada and internationally, was President of the Vancouver Institute for 2016, and is the new President of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation. He was Max’s principal publisher.

Susan Mertens, a Cambridge-educated specialist in the philosophy of art, wrote arts criticism and commentary for The Vancouver Sun, CBC radio and TV, and national and international magazines. She and Max, her partner for more than four decades, were for a time rival critics on the two Vancouver dailies. They also team-taught critical writing in Canada and Europe. Susan’s career was foreshortened by serious illness in the late 1980s and she has since been forced to live, in her own words, the life of “a contemplative.” Max has always credited her as the author of some of his best ideas.

Crystal Pite is “one of the finest dance-makers on the world stage” (The Guardian), and “arguably the most ambitious, exhilarating and sought-after contemporary choreographer at work today, full-stop” (The Telegraph). Her Vancouver-based company, Kidd Pivot, is in the midst of a three-continent tour with the award-winning Betroffenheit, which she created with Jonathon Young, of the Electric Company. She is briefly home after recent personal triumphs with the Royal Ballet in London, where she was the first female choreographer in 18 years to be commissioned to create a new work, and the Paris Opera Ballet.

Linda Lee Thomas has been principal pianist of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra since 1972. She was also Artistic Director of Masterpiece Music, the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s hugely successful chamber music series, for 17 years. Her passion is the music and dance of Argentina, the tango. The story is told of a young lady who was so moved by Linda Lee’s performance of Invierno Porteño that she burst into sobs. Inspired by Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Invierno Porteño (Winter in Buenos Aires) is the second of Astor Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires). The work has become so popular that classical orchestras program The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires alongside those of Vivaldi.

Wen Wei Wang began dancing at an early age in China, where he was born and raised. In 1991 he came to Canada and joined the Judith Marcuse Dance Company after which he danced with Ballet British Columbia for seven years. Since 2003, he has served as Artistic Director of Wen Wei Dance, which has toured Canada five times as well as performing in China. He has also choreographed for the Alberta Ballet, Ballet Jorgen, Dancers Dancing, North West Dance Projects in Portland and for Vancouver Opera’s production of Nixon in China. His work is infused with power, grace and a distinctive trans-cultural sensibility. He has received the Clifford E. Lee Choreographic Award, as well as Rio Tinto Alcan and Isadora Awards for Choreography.