Culture of Montreal
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As a North American city, Montreal shares many of the cultural features characteristic of the other metropolis on the continent, including representations in all traditional manifestation of high culture, a long-lasting tradition of jazz and rock music, and tentative experimentation in visual arts, theater, music, and dance. Yet, being at the confluence of the French and the English traditions, Montreal has developed a unique and distinguished cultural face in the world. Another distinctive characteristic of Montreal culture life is to be found in the animation of its downtown, particularly during summer, prompted by cultural and social events, or festivals.
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[edit] Place des Arts
The cultural heart of classical art and the epicenter of many summer festivals, the Place des Arts is a complex of different concert and theater halls surrounding a large open-spaced square in downtown. Classical dances, operas, plays, and music performance from troops around the world and from Montreal's very own are scheduled in these halls on a daily basis. The Musée d'art contemporain is also located at Place des Arts, and some of the most important theater troupes and musical concert scenes are found nearby.
[edit] Festivals
See Festivals and parades in Montreal
The plaza on Place des Arts is the home of the most important events during several musical festivals, including the Montreal International Jazz Festival and Montreal Francofolies, a festival of French-speaking song artists. During the seven to ten days that last each of the two festivals, shows are held in a wide variety of venues, from relatively small clubs to the large halls of Place des Arts. Some of the outdoor shows are held on cordoned-off streets while others are on terraced parks.
The most popular festival, in terms of attendance, is the Just for Laughs festival. A comedy festival held in both languages, it features comedians, humorists, and stand-ups from all over the world. The Montreal Fireworks Festival also attracts a lot of attention. On the evenings of competition, tens of thousands of people watch the fireworks for free on their roofs or from locations nearby the competition. Annual family-oriented events promoting health and cycling are also organized in the streets of Montreal. Parades are also popular in Montreal downtown.
Montreal is also famous as the birthplace of the Infringement Festival, a reaction to the perceived corporatization of the Montreal Fringe Festival. The Infringement has since spread to many other cities in North America and Europe.
[edit] Dance and performing arts
Performing at Place des Arts is the city’s chief ballet company Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. In contemporary dance, Montreal has been a leader, particularly in the 80s. Internationally recognized avant-garde dance troupes such as La La La Human Steps, O Vertigo, and the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault have toured the world and worked with international popular artists during videos and concerts. The intelligent and seemless integration of multi-disciplinary arts into the choreography of these troupes helped pave the way for the popularity of the Cirque du Soleil, a multi-million dollar empire based on a mixture of modern circus and performing acts. The agora de la danse is a studio where contemporary dancers most often perform.
[edit] Classical Music
The Place des Arts also harbors the headquarters of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (MSO) that perform in its halls regularly. The MSO is one of the top performance troupes in North America, most remembered for the quality performance of the repertoire of Maurice Ravel. Since 2006, the MSO has a new conductor, the American Kent Nagano. Two other Montreal popular musical troupes are L'Orchestre métropolitain, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and I Musici de Montréal a chamber orchestra founded and conducted by Yuli Turovsky. I Musici de Montréal are considered among the greatest interpreters of the works of George Frideric Handel. Also performing home at Place des Arts is The Opéra de Montréal, the most prestigious opera company in Montreal. One Montreal radio station is entirely devoted to classical music.
[edit] Montreal music scene
Given that Montreal is mostly French-speaking, most popular local bands and singers have sung in French. In the past, the most popular local artists succeeded in filling arenas (Beau Dommage, Offenbach, Cowboys Fringants) or even the Olympic Stadium (eg. Diane Dufresne), a feat usually reserved to a few international rock stars. Special events, such as the musical show on the Quebec national holiday, regularly attract over one hundred thousand people. The height for the French musical scene is reached every year during the Francofolies. The festival attracts international artists from La Francophonie, popular artists from the Quebec musical scene, and emerging artists noticed during preceding festivals.
Montreal's English-speaking music scene also succeeds in getting attention from popular media around the world. The growing success of the current variety of artists and bands, with Arcade Fire arguably leading the way, owes much to the city's culture of melting together different genres of music present from many different cultures. A variety of music festivals and independent local record labels also helps sustain this success. Other Montreal bands include Wolf Parade, Mobile, and the Unicorns.
The Montreal International Jazz Festival illustrates well this melting of genres. Far from limiting itself classical jazz (a style that Montreal always represented with jazzmen such as Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones), it features a great variety of artists who have espoused rhythms and styles from around the world. Smaller musical festivals include Montreal Nuits d'Afrique ("African Nights"), Montreal Reggae Festival, Pop Montreal, FestiBlues international de Montréal, Mutek electronic music festival, and Osheaga rock festival.
[edit] Theatre
Theatre in Montreal is dominated by French-language productions, in part because Montreal has traditionally been a center for most successful Quebec plays. As a result, the most celebrated and internationally recognized Quebec playwrights have all worked in Montreal at some point, including Montreal's son Michel Tremblay (The Guid-Sisters, Forever Yours, Marilou), Montreal's adoptee Wajdi Mouawad (Wedding Day at the Cromagnons, Littoral). Most established French-language theatres are found in the Quartier Latin (eg. Théâtre du Rideau Vert) or near Place des Arts (Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Théâtre Jean-Duceppe). In contrast, English theatre struggled but survived with the Centaur Theatre. Ethnic theatre, by the 70s, began to be a force, notably with the Black Theatre Workshop under the leadership of artistic director Tyrone Benskin, the Yiddish Theatre established at the Saidye Bronfman Centre and later with the Teesri Duniya Theatre. More recently theatre has been taking a more activist turn with emerging organizations such as ATSA and the Optative Theatrical Laboratories, and festivals such as the Anarchist Theatre Festival, MAYWORKS, and the Infringement Festival.
[edit] Literature
Montreal has a rich, yet still relatively young literary history in both French and English literature. A large number of novels have captured the realities of Montreal. While any list will understandably be subjective, a few works are agreed to be important in Canadian and Quebec literature. Written in 1947, Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (in French Bonheur d'occasion), which chronicles the life of a young woman in the neighborhood of St-Henri, marked Quebec literature for its urban texture. The work of Mordecai Richler, highlighted by The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), depicts the lives of poor English-speaking residents of Mile End. Mostly Michel Tremblay perhaps best summarizes the alienation of poor working-class Montrealers at the onset of the Quebec [Quiet revolution]. The all-time best-selling novel in Quebec literature, Yves Beauchemin's The Alley Cat (Le Matou), depicts a relatively similar neighborhood twenty years later. The later work of Emile Ollivier, for example La Brûlerie, is a portrait of French-speaking immigrants establishing their lives in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood.
[edit] Cinemas
There are plenty of English-language screens in the city, mostly downtown. The largest and most modern are the central Paramount Montreal and the AMC Forum, both located on Ste-Catherine Street. In addition to presenting movies from the majors, the AMC Forum also presents independent movies of repertory cinema. Other cinemas concentrating on repertory movies are the high-tech Ex-Centris and the Cinéma du Parc.
Cineastes have on occasion chosen Montreal for their movies. See Montreal in films.
[edit] Museums
Montreal has a vast network of museums, art galleries and exhibition centers. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possess a various collection of European, Amerindian, Inuit, and Canadian arts, including important paintings from Montreal's own Betty Goodwin, James Wilson Morrice and Paul-Émile Borduas. The Musée d'art contemporain has concentrated its collection mainly to emerging post-war Quebec artists, with arguably some of the best artistic works in Quebec from Alfred Pellan and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
Montreal also features many history-related museums such as Other praised museums are the Redpath Museum, the Stewart Museum, the McCord Museum of Canadian History, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Montreal Museum of Archeology and History.
The region is also home to a number of science-related museums. Many of them are located in the Olympic Park complex, including the Montreal Biodome (which reproduces four ecosystems of The Americas), the Montreal Insectarium, the Montreal Botanical Garden and the Montreal Planetarium. On the West Island, the Ecomuseum draws many visitors, and features an outdoor setting complete with animals native to the area. A recent addition to Montreal's museum scene is the Montreal Science Centre located in the Old Port, and featuring many hands-on experiments in various fields of science. The Laval Cosmodome houses both Space Camp Canada and the Space Science Center. A short drive south in Granby, is the Granby Zoo, notable for its wide variety of animals and amusements.
[edit] Night life
During the period of Prohibition in the United States, Montreal became well known as one of North America's "sin cities" with unparalleled nightlife, a reputation it still holds today. In part, its bustling nightlife is attributed to its relatively late "last call" (3 a.m.), a large university population, the drinking age of 18, and the excellent public transportation system combines with other aspects of the Montreal culture to make the city's night life unique. The diversity of the clubs in Montreal attests to the popularity of its night life, with night clubs, pubs, bars and singing bars ("boîte à chanson"), latin clubs, african clubs, jazz clubs, lounges, after-hours houses, and strip clubs all attracting different types of customers.
The most active parts during Montreal night life are the Downtown and the Quartier Latin. Saint-Denis street, which goes across the Quartier Latin, attracts a majority of the French-speaking population. Saint-Laurent Street (known locally as "the Main") is also one of the most popular streets. A majority of English-speaking Montrealers frequent the western part of the Downtown, with Crescent Street being one of the most popular streets in this sector. These three streets are all crossed by Downtown's most commercial street, Sainte-Catherine Street, which extends to its East in the heart of Montreal gay night life.
[edit] Francophone
Montreal is the cultural center of Québec, French-speaking Canada and French-speaking North America as a whole, and an important city in the Francophonie. It is the largest French-speaking city in North America, and the cultural capital of the Quebec province. The city is a hub for French-language television productions, radio, theater, circuses, performing arts, film, multimedia and print publishing. The best talents from French Canada and even the French-speaking areas of the United States converge in Montreal and often perceive the city as their cultural capital. Montreal is also the most important stop in the Americas for Francophone artists from Europe, Africa and Asia.
Some 30 years after the adoption of the Charter of the French Language, a greater number of first- or second-generation immigrants have established themselves in Montreal, such as playwright Wadji Mouawad (Lebanese origin), singer Nicolas Ciccone (Italian origin), author Dany Laferrière (Haitian origin), and actor Aimee Lee (Chinese origin), who all contribute to Quebec's culture.
[edit] Anglophone
Montreal is also the cultural capital for English Quebec. The Montreal Gazette newspaper, McGill University, and the Centaur Theatre are traditional hubs of Anglo culture. The cultural divide between Montreal's and Canada's Francophone and Anglophone culture was strong and was famously referred to as the Two Solitudes by Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan. Reflecting their deep-seated colonial roots, the Solitudes were historically strongly entrenched in Montreal, splitting the city geographically at St-Laurent Boulevard. This split, however, has become less and less apparent in the past decades, although Anglophones still concentrate in the Montreal boroughs of the West Island. Yet they have become more bilingual, as 66% of Quebec Anglophones claim to be able to carry on a conversation in French. Thus, while tensions can occur between Anglophones and Francophones, contemporary Montreal is home to a diverse collection of cultures and peoples who generally live together amicably.
[edit] Cultural contribution from other communities
Other cultural communities, be it first-generation immigrants or long-time settlers in Montreal, have greatly contributed to the originality and flavor of Montreal. Many festivals and parades are organized to celebrate the contribution of these communities, such as the Irish Saint Patrick Parade, the Greek Independence Day Parade or the Festival des Nuits d'Afrique. Montreal's Jewish community has been a leading contributor to Montreal's cultural landscape and is renowned for its level of charitable giving and its plethora of cultural and social service community institutions. Among these are the world renowned Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, and Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.
[edit] Montreal cuisine
Perhaps no single contribution from the allophone communities is more acknowledged than in Montreal's culinary fabric. Italian, Greek and Jewish communities have contributed to the mix of Montreal's delicatessens and other restaurants. Jewish contributions include two world-renowned items, smoked meat sandwiches and Montreal-style bagels. Lebanese falafels and Japanese sushi have become much-appreciated cuisines in the city. This wide variety of cuisines certainly underlines the fact that Montreal is one of the cities in the world with the highest number of restaurants.
[edit] See also
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