contributed all its earnings to the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton speaks volumes about the city’s creative types and their collective altruism.
Which brings us to A Christmas Peril, taking place Friday, Dec. 15 at Aria’s Bistro (10332-81 Avenue), where five unique acts will band together to muster support for Edmonton’s Food Bank. For this event, which starts at 9 p.m., the door admission is being waived in favor of donations of a non-perishable consumable item for the association.
A Christmas Peril, a titular take on the Dickens Yuletide classic, was created to heighten the awareness of the urgent call to feed thousands of needy families this time of year. To that end, experimental trio S’sE Sessions, Celtic duo The Ancient Jammers (a tandem of internationally-recognized Chapman stick player Dale Ladouceur and harpist Bev Fowler), folk singer and social activist Paula Kirman, soundscape designer James Parrott and electronic trash duo Dem Dezzies have come together to help Edmonton’s Food Bank and its ongoing campaign to provide sustenance to the city’s disenfranchised.
“A lot of what I've been doing this year prior was playing just for the sake of playing,” says Parrott, who rarely plays live, but has assembled a catalog of more than 200 of his original works on his Bandcamp page. “Obviously this is significantly different, given the worthy cause that I'm glad to be helping out with.”
Despite claims that Alberta’s energy-based economy — shaken in 2014 when OPEC decided to flood the international oil market to drive down the commodity price — is showing signs of recovery, you’d never know it, given the sobering statistics provided by Edmonton’s Food Bank.
It’s a sobering irony that sometimes escapes common sense, but one that charity graciously accepts when received. When it comes to answering the calls for assistance, whether they’re for disaster relief in Puerto Rico or the gathering of bare essentials for survivors of the 2015 Fort McMurray inferno, the folks most likely to respond in kind happen to be those who are on the verge of wanting that same kind of help themselves.
It’s a circumstance most evident among the city’s cultural community. Theatre and dance communities, whose very survival depend on the shrinking purses of public funding, seem to have no trouble donating their services for a worthy case. The same is true of the local music scene, where performers usually play with no guarantee of a payday, instead relying on the coffers of anyone who passes through the gate, however few they may be. That an October gig held at the Sewing Machine Factory