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In 2011, Canadian born Laura Byspalko and India native Sirish Rao created the Indian Summer Festival as an extension of their personal explorations of Canadian and Indian culture. I sat down with the couple to talk about this great 10 day event.
“It started personally in terms of exchanging each other’s cultures. There couldn’t be a place more opposite than India and Vancouver, so both of us had a lot of ‘whys’ about everything and trying to engage with the place, trying to find out the history; what’s the social history, political history, what’s cultural production like, and we thought, ‘hey, there isn’t anything in Vancouver that’s really like that,’” says Rao.
The Indian Summer Festival boasts a diverse lineup of events (free and ticketed) that allow Vancouverites to engage with the different aspects of Indian culture with a Canadian flair. Byspalko and Rao were exploring the idea of creating a festival and ended up pushing it through in a very short amount of time, with 2011 being the year of Vancouver’s 125th birthday, the opening of SFU Woodwards campus, and the year of “India in Canada.” From this happenstance lineup of perfect timing, the Indian Summer Festival was born and was the first festival to take place in the still young SFU Woodwards building.
The grounding point of this festival is to “challenge some basic stereotypes,” says Byspalko, and to allow for people of all different cultures and backgrounds to break down barriers and create conversations about things that may be a little outside their comfort zone. Byspalko and Rao want their festival goers to walk away feeling inspired and enlightened by things they may not have had a chance to experience in their day-to-day lives.
The couple agrees that Vancouver, although diverse in its population, is quite segregated within different neighborhoods, communities and cultures; they are hoping to break some of these boundaries.
From the Festival’s start on July 4 to its finish on the 13, there are numerous expositions of varying art forms taking place: from free hip-hop yoga to a culinary tour of South Asia with Vikram Vij — who compares flavours in food to musical notes — to the finishing act, The Lit and Sound Cabaret.
A perfect ending to this cultural festival, the Lit and Sound Cabaret is the coming together of Canadian and Indian artists in the form of music, spoken word and visual art. The Cabaret, taking place on July 13, boasts a line-up of performers both veteran and new to the performance scene, and allows for the artists to collaborate and take inspiration from one another.
Unlike all the other events that will be happening in and around the Woodwards building, the Lit and Sound Cabaret will be on Granville Island in Performance Works, which really opens up more exploration of different areas of Vancouver.
No matter what art form you are interested in, or if you are just looking for a free or cheap way to entertain yourself this summer, be sure to check out the Indian Summer Festival happening at SFU Woodwards, Victory Square Park, and Granville Island up until July 13.
For the sake of fairness, let’s spot Pixar the unasked-for existence of Monsters University in the wake of two projects that both suffered from the studio’s inevitable bastardization at the hands of Disney. For though the original film did not have the emotional depth or profundity of its three Pixar predecessors, Monsters, Inc. remains the richest, most original world that the animation studio has devised for one of their films.
That world’s premise remains more or less the same in University: in the world of monsters, electricity is generated by producing doors to the human world, sneaking into children’s bedrooms at night, and frightening them to produce “scare power.” The resolutely un-scary bookworm Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and cocky James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) both aim for a career in the Monsters Incorporated Scarer Team, and so in this prequel they attend a university “scare program.”
The new setting of this prequel — unlike its predecessor — is more interested in transmuting the rules of its world into the cliches of our own than in logically developing them for the sake of its own story. Mike and Sully meet for the first time, and at first, they are enemies. When they are removed from the scare program, Mike enters the two of them — along with a tiny fraternity of dorky misfits — into the University Scare Games, where victory will see them reinstated in the program.
The plot that follows — Mike and Sully learn to work as a team, and the misfit underdogs make surprising waves in the competition — is satisfyingly accomplished and has its fair share of laughs, but it’s hard to shake its formula and lack of a real emotional core.
None of the leads’ personal hangups (Sullivan’s family name, Mike’s fundamentally unscary appearance) is ever given personal weight or clear development , and so when in the final act they’re made the crux of plot points, there’s no genuine emotional connection. The character arcs (and the entire cast of secondary characters) feel as though they’ve been constructed around the plot instead of organically integrated into it.
My impression of the film was not so nearly as negative as it may seem, but one can only go so far in commending fair and polished storytelling, which Monsters University certainly is: it’s an incredible leap forward in environmental lighting, and each story beat leads smoothly into the next.
It has virtually no moments of out and out failure (save for a denouement that awkwardly flubs the bridge between University and Inc). But there’s a distinct lack of the risk-taking that used to be Pixar’s MO. Monsters University avoids missteps, but that’s not so hard when you’re taking baby steps instead of monster leaps.
