Kwantlen Bhangra Club making a name for itself

The Kwantlen Bhangra club has been practicing and competing since April 2009, yet it is only now getting some attention.

“It takes time to build up a name. We wanted to make sure we were at a level that would attract some more attention,” said Karamvir Saini, co-founder of the club.

After competing in several competitions last year, the club has grown to include a co-ed group as well as a male group.

Saini started the club in April 2009, because he felt that there was a large number of Punjabi students at Kwantlen and he found that a lot of them were going to SFU to join its bhangra club. He thought that if he started a club here, the students could stay at Kwantlen and be a part of the club at the same time.

All of the members get together and choreograph themselves. The team agrees that the club gives them a group of friends that have similar interests and some of the same goals.

Bhangra’s competitive season is just finishing, so the club is currently working on what they will be competing with next year when the season starts up again in early spring.

And, while the season has ended here, there are still a couple of competition in the United States. Kwantlen’s team is waiting for the event to send out programs, so they can sign up and possibly travel to compete.

“We are always looking for more members, and we encourage anyone that is interested in joining to contact us,” said Saini. The club is currently practicing three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights.

Video: Langley campus dances in the Year of the Tiger

In honour of the Lunar New Year the Langley Community Services Society hosted a multi-cultural performance at Langley campus on Feb. 6.

Tai Chi Fan, Tango, Korean drums and Chinese Folk dance are just some of the many dances performed to welcome in the Year of the Tiger.

Abby Wiseman and Kristi Jut captured the event on video.

Langley KSA director takes to the stage

While her weekdays are filled with homework and studying, Jennifer Campbell’s weekends consist of slapstick comedy, merry songs and the eternal struggle of good versus evil.

Such is the life of an actor.

Campbell, the KSA director for Langley campus, has had a love of acting since Grade 1, and is currently rehearsing for a production of Robin Hood.

The familiar tale is of the cunning Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, thus foiling the plots of the wicked Sherrif of Nottingham and winning the hand of fair Maid Marian.

The play is in pantomime form, which, contrary to popular belief, includes quite a bit of talking and even singing.

“It’s very loud. There’s a whole lot of audience participation,” said Campbell.

She explained that pantomime, or “panto” as it is commonly known, is a specific style of theatre with several reoccurring elements.

A woman always plays the lead male role in a panto, and the play also features dames: men dressed up as women.

“It’s supposed to be like an asexual character, so the dame can make fun of both sexes and it doesn’t matter,” she said.

For Campbell, who is a part of the chorus and plays the girlfriend of Little John, the panto was an opportunity to get back into something she loves.

“I feel more like myself and more confident on stage than I do anywhere else,” she said.

The constant rehearsing since September has created a close group, which Campbell appreciates.

“I think it’s just being onstage and being a part of a family,” she said. “My very first day I was greeted with a hug.”

Robin Hood runs from Dec. 17 to Jan. 3 at the Surrey Arts Centre and tickets are $24.95 for adults, $19.95 for students and seniors and $12.95 for children under 12.

Choir offers more than just Christmas spirit

Snow hasn’t fallen on Metro Vancouver yet this winter, but it won’t be long from now if Gail Suderman has her way with the season.

For the last nine years, Suderman, the director of voice and choral studies at Kwantlen’s Langley campus, has spent most of her time teaching Kwantlen students to sing classical music.

But in her spare time, she indulges in her love of more contemporary music, helming the Good Noise Vancouver Gospel Choir, one of only four community choirs devoted to singing gospel music in Vancouver.

Every year, Suderman and the choir perform Christmas carols and pop music favorites at the Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver for two nights before Christmas to get people in the spirit of the holidays.

She recalls that the choir ended last year’s show just as Vancouver’s picturesque white Christmas began.

“The memories that particularly stick in our mind are when snow is involved,”said Suderman. “The last night [last year] right as people were walking out, the snow started falling. It just added to that Christmas energy, that spirit of it.”

The concerts usually end up selling out every year and are wildly popular with Vancouverites looking for a unique musical experience around the holiday, said Suderman.

This year, the choir will perform its Glory of Christmas concerts for two sold-out nights on Dec. 11 and Dec. 12 at the cathedral. There will be another performance during the afternoon of Dec. 13 at the Frasierview Church in Richmond.

Suderman, a classically trained singer, and her colleague Marcus Mosely, started the Good Noise Choir in 2004 out of a mutual love for the energy and celebratory spirit of gospel. After doing some workshops with people in the community and being inundated with requests to keep going, she held auditions and did the first Christmas concert at the Christ Church Cathedral that December.

“It took off just like wildfire, in terms of people being excited about it and people coming out to concerts,”said Suderman.

Since its debut, the choir has grown from 42 to 75 members and includes people of all ages and walks of life. Some people come from as far as Abbotsford to train with the choir throughout the year. Members have to audition to join the choir, but the choir is non-denominational, which makes it open to anyone in the Lower Mainland who wants to sing.

“It’s a bit of a microcosm of what real life is like,” said Suderman. “It’s a great example of this diverse group of people coming together, creating this sort of unified sound through the singing. It has a really good energy.”

When not performing Christmas carols, the choir performs at events such as the Vancouver Folk Festival and has its own concert series that runs throughout the year at Christ Cathedral Church. Years of hard work paid off recently, said Suderman, when the group got a chance to perform for superstar record producer David Foster, who produces albums for the likes of Celine Dione and Michael Buble.

Suderman admits that the Good Noise choir enjoys popularity in the Lower Mainland, but that there isn’t as much of a culture around gospel music in Vancouver as there as there is in the United States, where the music has ethnic and cultural roots in African-American culture.

Vancouver is home to more classical and church-based choirs, but only a few popular music, or contemporary music choirs, the category that she feels Good Noise belongs to, said Suderman.

“It’s not that we feel isolated in terms of the choir itself,”said Suderman. “We are a little bit unique. I wouldn’t say that people are surprised that there are gospel choirs in Vancouver area. Because it’s unique, people take an interest in it. People say. ‘Ah, this is kind of different, let’s check it out.’”

This year, Suderman has invited three Lower Mainland music industry mainstays to join the choir for the holiday rejoicing. Kate Hammett-Vaughn, Karin Plato and Jennifer Scott, known as the Jazz Divas, will join the choir onstage to celebrate the holiday spirit.

Gospel is a music of celebration, which makes the Christmas holidays the perfect time for the Good Noise choir to rile up audiences and help Canadians shake off their reputation for being subdued at concerts.

“They love it,” Suderman said of the audience that shows up for the Christmas concerts. “It’s different than if you went to a classical concert, where you would sit quietly and be polite. For these [Christmas concerts], clapping along, singing along, it’s all part of it. It’s audience participation and people love, love that aspect.”

Profile: Still life with end times

Nostradamus still makes the front page of the Weekly World News now and then, but an apocalyptic event has yet to arrive to end life on earth.

That hasn’t stopped Robert Gelineau from revealing what the possible end of modern society might look like some day.

A painting and drawing instructor in Kwantlen’s fine arts department for over 10 years, Vancouver resident Gelineau spends his spare time creating scenes from a potential post-apocalyptic world on canvasses in his Gastown studio.

Inspired by classical still life painting and the shock value of horror films, Gelineau works diligently to develop detailed scenes of natural disaster that depict the end of human society and our contemporary world.

Chronicle photographer Justin Langille visited Gelineau in his studio to discuss the ideas behind his work and the problems involved in teaching painting to students in era when the lure of technology has pulled the study of art into a state of disarray.

Kwantlen all dressed up for Halloween

The annual Halloween costume contest, a project of Kwantlen’s Design & Communications division, took over the rotunda of the Richmond campus three days before Halloween officially hit, filling the space with explorers in canoes, Pantone swatches, debonair blondes and a litre or two of fake blood.

We have two looks at the proceedings: a video by Abby Wiseman and a slideshow by Kyle Vinoly.

Warrior Boyz comes home

It wasn’t a traditional homecoming, but the community of Surrey still welcomed it with open arms.

On Nov. 3, nearly 200 people gathered in the conference centre at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Surrey campus for an evening screening and panel discussion of Warrior Boyz, a documentary about the affect that gang culture has had on Metro Vancouver’s South-Asian-Canadian community.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, to show this film here in Surrey, at Kwantlen,” director Baljit Sangra proudly told the crowd. “Much of this was filmed right across the street from here at Princess Margaret [High School].”

Moments later, the lights were dimmed and those in attendance were drawn into an intimate look at one of the Lower Mainland’s most notorious social epidemics, one that has claimed the lives of over 100 Indo-Canadian youth.

The forum, organized by faculty members of Kwantlen’s criminology department, offered students and residents of the community a chance to see Sangra’s take on the violence that has plagued the youth of Surrey.

Created in partnership with Canwest Global and the National Film Board of Canada, Sangra’s film follows the lives of Tanvir and Vicky, two young Punjabi teens who struggle to stay in school and on good terms with their family while spending their spare time embroiled in crime and gang fighting.

Through their stories, Sangra shows that alienation, unprecedented peer pressure and a desire for the status glamorized by depictions of gang life in pop culture have led many Indo-Canadian youth to chase empowerment through drug and violence-fuelled criminal lifestyles.

In an interview, Sangra said she decided to make the film when she realized that violence wasn’t letting up in Metro Vancouver’s large yet close-knit South-Asian community.

“It’s an issue that’s impacted me personally,” said Sangra. “I know people who have fallen into [gang culture] from the neighborhood; friends of friends, friends of cousins, that sort of thing. Even my parents are going to funerals of their friends who have lost a grandchild to gang violence.”

Sangra sought to understand what she saw as an overwhelming contradiction: youth from good families living in seeming suburban comfort who were becoming foot soldiers and chiefs for gangs involved in Metro Vancouver’s drug trade. With this in mind, she began talking to people in the community.

Sangra said that building enough trust with her subjects to the point of being able to film them during vulnerable moments was the most difficult process of filming the documentary. The South-Asian community, she said, has a tendency to denial, and often prefers not to open up about sensitive social issues.

However, her persistence and dedication to the story paid off. Eventually, she gained an understanding of what was behind the headlines.

“For a lot of kids, it’s more about acceptance and belonging than money, “ said Sangra.

“I believe that all kids want to fit and also stand out in some way. And I think for some of the kids who are perhaps not the best student or athlete but come from a pretty solid family, that option of hanging out with the wrong crew or getting into trouble is pretty easy to fall into. Peer group pressure is huge.”

Since debuting the film last spring and screening it at festivals across North America, Sangra has learned that teachers in schools and communities all across Canada have been showing it to students to show them the dangers involved in gangs as opposed to the glamour that they see on TV.

At the end of the screening, Sangra sat down with a panel of key players to discuss the factors that have led to the development of deadly gang culture in Metro Vancouver and the ways that communities can prevent youth from getting involved in the future.

The opinions of the panel members were diverse and informed by careers spent dealing with gangs from many perspectives. The panel, composed of law enforcement officials and educators, also included gang-member-turned-social-activist Jagdeep Singh Mangat, a former drug dealer and gang member who eventually left his life of crime to pursue education and community activism.

If there was one thing that the delegation agreed on, it was Mangat’s declaration that if people in Surrey and Metro Vancouver want to reduce youth gang involvement and the violence that results from it, they need to get involved in the problem.

“Don’t leave it to somebody else. You guys can seize initiative and do it yourself. Each and every single one of you can be an example to a lot of these young people. When we put our collective effort together, then it’s us that’s providing the support for people that might be falling through the cracks.”

Selections from the Panel

(Photos by Katie Lawrence, Audio by Justin Langille)

[audio:http://www.kwantlenchronicle.ca/audio/sangra.mp3]

Sangra discusses her hopes for the film

[audio:http://www.kwantlenchronicle.ca/audio/dawson.mp3]
Dawson addresses the legal roadblocks that are preventing her prosecution team from moving forward in the Surrey Six trials

[audio:http://www.kwantlenchronicle.ca/audio/mangat.mp3]
Mangat talks about the consumer culture roots of youth gang involvement

[audio:http://www.kwantlenchronicle.ca/audio/prahst.mp3]

Prahst addresses the attractions and trapping of the gang ruled drug trade

Audio slideshow: Kwantlen’s band of brass

The auditorium of Kwantlen’s Langley campus was filled with rich and lively sound of the schools’ brass ensemble yesterday afternoon. The group, comprised of students from the music program, will be preforming mid-week until the second week of December.

Tom Shorthouse, the jazz and brass ensemble instructor,  expects three or four more shows this semester but is hoping the group will be able to preform six or seven shows in the spring semester.

“Getting going in September, no matter how experienced the group, just takes a little bit of time to get the wheels churning,” said  Shorthouse. “By the time we hit January, Febuary things are really moving along.”

Kwantlen’s Genocide Film Series club aims to educate

Kwantlen’s Genocide Film Series club, an initiative of psychology professor Rajiv Jhangiani, hosts films on genocide twice a week in the Surrey Campus conference rooms.

The Oct. 28 showing of “The Killing Fields,” a Roland Joffe film about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from the mid-to-late ‘70s, drew only two students.

(The film, a drama depicting the horror of the genocide, followed the stories of real-life journalists Sydney Schanberg  of the New York Times and Cambodian Dith Pran. Pran wound up in the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and the film follows his experience through torture, oppression and slavery until his eventual escape from Cambodia.)

Robin Elson, a student of Jhangiani’s Psychology of Genocide class, Robin Elson was there to oversee the film.

“There are usually about 25 per cent more students here than this,” joked Elson.

A reason that not many people show up could be that students, other than the students in Psychology of Genocide, don’t know about it. “Other than that, I imagine that it’s a scheduling issue,” said Elson.

“Rajiv made the club for use of the facilities […] it’s for [the class] to give a historical context and knowledge of the events [of genocide].” They then discuss the films in class, though attending the films isn’t mandatory.

Though the club is aimed at students in Jhangiani’s class, anyone is welcome to attend, including non-Kwantlen students. There is a different film shown each week, on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for the rest of the fall semester. According to Elson, some films are helpful while others are not.

“Some of the movies are changed to be more palatable,” he said, explaining that the changes often show inaccuracies to. “World War Two [often] gets butchered.”

But Elson says showing the films is overall positive. “It’s with the aims of educating people,” he said “and to make [these events] stop.”

The following films will be shown at the Surrey campus, all beginning at 7 p.m.

• Defiance: Nov.3 (Rm. D328) and Nov. 4 (G1205C Conference Centre C)
• The Devil Came of Horseback: Nov. 10 (Rm. D328)
• The Reader: Nov. 17 and 18 (Rm. D328)
• Schindler’s List: Nov, 24 (G1205A Conference Centre A) and Nov. 25 (G1205C Conference Centre C)
• Ararat: Dec. 1 (Rm. D328) and Dec. 2 (G1205A Conference Centre A)
• Darfur Now: Dec. 8 and 9 (G1205A Conference Centre A)

GDMA grads swap cupcakes for beer

The Graphic Design for Marketing program is once again raising funds for the 2010 GDMA grad show, and this time beer is on the menu.

The GDMA will host a Pub Night at Hudson’s Landing Pub on Southwest Marine Drive on Friday, Nov. 13.

Tickets are $15, and include admission, a burger and a beer.

Vanessa Klassen, chair of the GDMA grad class, hopes to raise $1,000 at the pub night, as well as host a good night out for Kwantlen students.

“It gives people a social opportunity, a chance to mingle and chat,” said Klassen.

GDMA grads have been busy selling everything from cupcakes to T-shirts and graphic agendas this year. They also hosted the fourth annual Halloween costume contest, which took place on Oct. 29 at the Richmond campus.

Proceeds from their fund-raising will go towards a week-long exhibition at Kwantlen that will showcase the grads’ work. They will also be throwing a party in Vancouver where the design industry professsionals will get a chance to see the work of the Kwantlen students.

The GDMA grads are planning for another pub night on Dec. 10 at Ceili’s Irish Pub in downtown Vancouver.

For more information about the GDMA pub night check out their blog.

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