The Shape I Gave You
Presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Knopf Canada, and NOW Magazine.
Join us as author Martha Baillie celebrates the publication of her new novel The Shape I Gave You (Knopf Canada). The musical trio Lightstone, Katz & Quarrington will perform jazz, singer Theo Heras will perform songs accompanied by Cindy Fairbank on piano, artist Vid Ingelevics will display his a sculpture from his Alltagsgeschichten project, artist Colm MacCool will display three of his Retread sculptures, and Martha Baillie will sit down for an on-stage interview with Pages Books & Magazines proprietor Marc Glassman.
The Shape I Gave You (Knopf Canada) - The night before she leaves to give a recital in another city, Ulrike Huguenot, a young pianist, arrives at her Berlin apartment to find an unexpected and unwelcome letter. It is from Beatrice Mann, a Canadian sculptor, a friend of her father, Gustave, and also, Ulrike believes, his lover. What could this woman possibly have to say to her? And why now, seven years after her father's death? "I am writing to you because my daughter has died," begins Beatrice's extraordinary letter of confession. Her only child, Ines, has been killed at the age of eighteen, and Beatrice has closed herself in her Toronto studio. Unable to speak openly with her grieving husband, Isaac, she turns to Ulrike, a young woman she barely knows. While Beatrice retells and possibly reshapes the past, Isaac sets out on a journey of his own. As Ulrike reads about Beatrice's life and Gustave's role in it, she reluctantly revisits the world of her own memories and starts to see her present in a different light. In The Shape I Gave You, acclaimed novelist and poet Martha Baillie explores the complex relationships between parents and children, men and women, to create a novel of spare elegance that gives piercing insight into the nature of confession and how we choose who to ask for absolution.
Martha Baillie was born in Toronto. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as Descant, Prairie Fire and the Antigonish Review. Her first novel, My Sister Esther, was published by Turnstone Press in 1995. Her second, Madame Balashovskaya's Apartment, was published by Turnstone Press in 1999 and then published in Germany and Hungary. After stints in Edinburgh, Paris and Asia, Baillie returned to Toronto where she lives with her family.
Jonno Lightstone (clarinet, flute, saxophone) is a performer in many musical styles, including klezmer, jazz, reggae, ska, salsa, flamenco, and classical. He is regarded as one of Toronto's leading klezmer clarinetists. As leader of Hu Tsa Tsa, a klezmer band with a chamber music aesthetic, specializing in bringing to light lesser-known gems of the klezmer repertoire, he recently produced an outstanding CD, Well Tempered Klezmorim. He is also the leader of The Yiddish Swingtet, a band that is exploring the links between klezmer music and hot swing. Lightstone has performed with the touring Broadway show, Evita in Baltimore and Costa Mesa, The Decadent Berlin Review at The Distillery Jazz Festival, Seder with the Seder Collective, and Klezmer For Kids with Orchestra Toronto. He has also performed at Ashkenaz: A Festival of New Yiddish Culture, The National Arts Centre in Ottawa and at other major venues. A much sought after teacher, Lightstone takes pleasure in directing the energies of some of Toronto's next generation jazz and klezmer musicians.
Brian Katz (piano, guitar) is an internationally acclaimed Canadian guitarist, pianist, composer, improviser and music educator. Katz draws on jazz, classical and various world music traditions to form his personal sound. Well-known as a soloist, Katz also collaborates widely. Stage partners have included grammy nominee Jane Bunnett, oboist Paul Mcandless of the group Oregon, Yiddish diva, Theresa Tova, and world music virtuoso, Ernie Tollar (they form KATZTOLLAR). His latest CD, Collected Stories, features him in duet with sparkling klezmer clarinettist Martin van de Ven. Katz is also a Dalcroze Eurhythmics teacher - a method of music education that examines the intrinsic relationships between music and movement - and is currently on faculty at the University of Toronto where he teaches music education, and at York University, where he teaches improvisation and klezmer music.
Tony Quarrington (guitar, mandolin, vocals) is a thirty-year veteran of the Toronto music scene. Active in many styles of music, he has played with folk icon Willie P. Bennett, and with rock original Joe Hall as a member of the Climax Jazz Band and the Cowboy Junkies. Quarrington has performed with Klezmer, Hawaiian, Blues, and Polka bands and has appeared on about 100 recordings, mainly on his primary instruments, but also on keyboards, lap steel, dobro, and banjo. Over the last decade, he has specialized in his own original jazz performance and compositions, and has released three jazz albums, One Bright Morning, Deep River and Group of Seven Suite. His collaborators have included such jazz luminaries as Jane Bunnett, Pat LaBarbera, Neil Swainson, Kirk MacDonald, Jane Siberry, and Bernie Senensky. As a record producer, he has overseen some 40 albums for other artists, winning a Juno in 1998 for Willie P. Bennett's Heartstrings.
Theo Heras is an author and singer living in Toronto.
Cindy Fairbank is a performer, composer, educator and recording artist currently playing keyboards with one of Toronto's busiest R&B bands, Soular.
Colm MacCool has exhibited in many Toronto galleries as well as at the Viridian Gallery in New York City, the MacLaren Art Center in Barrie, and the McLaughlin in Oshawa. He was voted Toronto's Best Sculptor in Now Magazine's Readers Poll (2000) and was nominated for the Art Direction Award at the Yorkton Film Festival in 1998 for his work on The Cellar, produced by "Incriminating Pictures". His exhibitions Black Toys and Salvation garnered notable critical and curatorial acclaim. A graduate from the B.F.A. programme at York University, MacCool lives in Prince Edward County with his wife Cindy and son Jack.
Retreads: In the throes of the re-use art movement, Colm MacCool has both subscribed to and subverted the paradigm. He uses natural materials - predominantly wood from stumps, fallen trees and telephone poles - to create sculptures that resemble mass produced, prefabricated objects and machines. With "Retreads", MacCool played with image and perception, creating what look like enormous ruptured tires out of salvaged tree trunks. These highly finished sculptures are purposely subversive, referencing environmental issues, commodification and industrial consumption.
Vid Ingelevics is a Canadian artist, writer and independent curator who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His artwork and curatorial projects have been exhibited in Canada, the US, and Europe while his writing on contemporary photography has been published in a wide variety of Canadian and international publications.
Produced in 1998, this piece--a transparent filing cabinet--is a revised version of a fully functional one that was part of Ingelevics' installation project "Alltagsgeschichten (some histories of everyday life)" that looked at the situation of postwar displaced persons, including the artist's own family. Ingelevics spent many hours in archives searching for information on the displaced persons camps of post war Europe. He was interested in creating a transparent filing cabinet for the paradoxical reason that he felt it's transparency would make it more visible. His reference here was to the archive and the invisibility of the constraints and structures surrounding and defining the information that an archive contains. It is just as easy to hide information in an archive as it is to unearth it.
