Director's Message

Re-orient in 2008 Festival Accès Asie celebrates Asian Heritage Month.

Festival Accès Asie is about to "Re-Orient" you in 2008. Marking our 13th anniversary, Festival Accès Asie celebrates May as the Asian Heritage Month from Thursday May 1st to Saturday May 24th with fifty local and national artists with origins from nine Asian countries in nine venues and ten activities.

"Re-Orient" is about turning your head around and re-creating your impressions about what you think is Asian culture. "Re-Orient"is about re-examining, and refreshing your perspectives about Asia from different stand points and from a new angle. "Re-Orient" is an eclectic feast for the senses that features innovative works traveling in the realms from the ancient to the modern and from the sacred to the profane. The program forces you to re-invigorate your impressions of what is Asian, what is dance, what is tradition and what is profane. "Re-Orient" takes you on a visceral voyage between a Taiwanese flautist, Vietnamese dancer and paintings inspired by traditions from Persia."Re-Orient" shocks the senses with Korean shamanistic rituals interpreted by modern dance and a Bollywood dance that challenges tradition.

Opening the Festival will be a 5 à 7 gathering to kickoff the month of May as Asian Heritage month. Senator Vivienne Poy will open the ceremonies speaking on behalf of efforts across Canada from ten cities celebrating Asian Heritage month. A week of performances continues with "Éclats Nocturnes", featuring six Montreal artists in an interdisciplinary fusion of dance, music, visual arts and media arts in a multi-media setting, where a series of Persian-inspired paintings serve as the inspiration to create moods, memories, sounds, images, and movements.

In the second week, two dancers, Montreal's Geneviève La and Victoria, B.C.'s Jung-Ah Chung harmonizes modern dance with traditional aesthetics and with Jung-Ah Chung's work, she adds to the modern, Korean-based dance motions, and shamanism. Following these performances will be a group exhibition "Trois pinceaux d'Orient" by three first-generation, emergent Asian Canadian painters with themes around femininity, ancestry and dreams.

The third week continues with an extraordinary examination of Western values towards Persian culture titled as « Reframing & Interactive Translocation » by Fariba Samsami. This exhibition will force you to regard and to re-orientate your position of what and how you see. For example, one element of this exhibition is an interactive photo session with the public. As a public, you are invited to sit in a position placing your head in a specific position. A photo is taken and in one minute, a photo is created of you wearing a hijab. This exhibition re-frames you in an outlandish, experiential, fun and challenging process.

A cyberspace experience occurs on a Saturday afternoon in our 10th annual "Moments", live from 2 cities and featuring Montreal's bamboo flautist Shuni Tsou & Ziya Tabassian with Ottawa dancer Natasha Bahkt. The film screenings features ex-CBC radio personality, Tetsuro Shigematsu’s first film "Yellow Fellas" which is already an award winner as 2nd Prize at California’s Peoria Film Festival. A mockumentary about an angry Asian man who recruits a small army of like-minded Asians in order to defeat "The White Man.", you will smile, roar and nervously question your laughter. A discussion will follow to respond to questions and issues that will arise from this quirky docu-fiction. A trilogy called "Passions latines" of Chinese restaurants around the world by Cheuk Kwan will be screened in French only and is about Peru, Argentina and Brazil. These three untold tales of the families behind the restaurants includes miraculous escapes from China during the revolution, swimming across the China seas and dancing the tango in Argentina.

A dance workshop with Roger Sinha and Natasha Bahkt will explore the rigors of Indian sacred dance rhythms to new possibilities and creative expressions of modernity with a week of performances to follow at the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels). A second workshop on Indian and Bollywood dance awaits you with international choreographer, dancer and yoga instructor, Hemalayaa Behl. The Bollywood workshop leads to the grand finale, Bollywood Party and other perfumes from India-Take 4 (The Garden of Love), an evening of delightful sights and a re-created environment of India’s riches.An evening in two main parts with a show, and a party, inspired from the colours, vibrations, images, music and popular cinema of India.

See you there!

Janet Lumb
Artistic Director