Every year the Arts and Cultures district of UBC hosts their Baccalaureate concert at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. This year is no different, with the Class of 2016: On Stage! event taking place on May 25 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.
As the event is now under the UBC 100 Centennial celebrations, the concert will differ from previous years in terms of scale and offerings. The invitations have been opened up not only for performers from the usual Music and Opera offerings, but also other faculties in the Arts and Culture district such as poetry and theatre.
Attendees who go should expect the usual offerings of music and opera, with the addition of two monologues from theatre students, three different excerpts read by authors from the creative writing faculty, performance art pieces (sometimes comprised of the performers themselves), and two presentations from the film department. The performers at this event will be composed of top students, hand-picked by each of the different faculties.
Keltie Forsyth, the director of the event and a graduating Masters of Fine Arts in Directing student, believes that the performance will be extremely interesting for students not just from the Arts and Cultures district, but from all other faculties as well.
“When we picture what a science student does or [what] an engineering student does, we should have a really strong sense of what that might be. Whereas I don’t know if everybody has an idea of what comes out of an academic program of four-year study for a theatre student [or a] musician. So partly, I think it’ll be interesting for the general student body to see what other [students from the fine art faculties] are doing. And it’ll also be really fun [as] we have incredible graduates from all these programs.”
Forsyth also believes that the Opera performer will impress the audience.
"Philipe [Castagner], who is the gentleman who will be performing opera for us, [has performed] for the Metropolitan Opera and the Vancouver Opera. He’s a professional opera singer who’s come back to complete his degree and he’s graduating this year, but he’s been a professional for some time, and so this is a chance to see a real professional working opera singer do what they do, and that’s always amazing to see live. And a lot of us haven’t had a chance to see that.”
The evening will begin promptly at 7:30 p.m. in the Chan Centre, with a jazz septet from the UBC School of Music performing a special piece celebrating 100 years of popular song at UBC. The piece will include “tunes selected from each decade of the last 100 years woven together and arranged by Fred Stride to celebrate UBC’s landmark anniversary”.
More information on the event can be found at the Chan Centre event page, at http://chancentre.com/events/class-2016-stage/, or at the Facebook event page, at https://www.facebook.com/events/1088851534512002/.