This year, the Cultural Activities Director Professor Micheline White is thrilled to once again offer our students in-person cultural activities in Ottawa and beyond. See below for events we held last year and stay tuned for things we have planned for this year!
2024/2025 Cultural Activities
Shelley, Strauss & Goosby’s Debut
Thursday January 16th, 2025
7:00 PM
The National Arts Centre
We have 9 tickets for this performance at a cost of $10 each!
Before the performance, Humanities music professor James Wright will give a 25-minute talk about the works and composers featured on the program, including the story of the practical-joking medieval European folk-hero, Til Eulenspiegel, and an account of the remarkable life and work of the first African-American woman to be recognized as an accomplished composer, Florence Price (1887-1953).
Tales of rebellion and forgiveness take centre stage in a pair of cinematic works by Richard Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel follows the hilarious hijinks of Germany’s beloved folk hero, while the Rosenkavalier Suite evokes an operatic saga of love and renewal set in 18th-century Vienna. As part of the NAC Orchestra’s Strauss Reimagined series, these works are paired with freshly inked compositions from Juno Award–winning Canadian composers Alexina Louie and John Estacio, each one resonating with the spirit and sounds of Strauss’s lushly Romantic orchestral showpieces.
With a soulful performance style that elicits a “catharsis of joy” (New York Times) wherever he performs, American violinist Randall Goosby makes his NAC Orchestra debut with Florence Price‘s rhapsodic Second Violin Concerto. Discovered more than 50 years after the composer’s death, Price’s work for solo violin and orchestra overflows with memorable melodies that merge the hallmarks of European Romanticism with jazz, spirituals, and Chicago blues.
What do I do to sign up?
LOGISTICS: Please look at your work and course schedules and be sure that you will be free on the evening of January 16th.
Tickets are limited so students who buy a ticket but do not show up will not be allowed to reserve spots at future cultural events (unless the student is sick or has an emergency).
1) Complete the form below.
2) Complete the appropriate waiver within 24 hours of signing up and email it to: collegeofhumanities@cunet.carleton.ca
Download, complete and sign ONE of the forms depending on your age (under or over 18) within 48 hours of signing up and send to: collegeofhumanities@cunet.carleton.ca
If you are under 18 at the time of the trip, a parent needs to sign and you need to coordinate with them well in advance. No one can attend without having filled out the form within 24 hours of signing up (no exceptions).
3) Send $10 to Professor White within 24 hours of signing up via interac to:
Micheline.white@carleton.ca and include your name and stu nu in the notes.
Field Trip Waiver NAC Jan 16 2025 Adult
Field Trip Waiver NAC Jan 16 2025 Under 18 Informed Consent
Jan 16th 2025 at the NAC
PAST CULTURAL ACTIVITIES
First Year Trip to Montreal
The College of the Humanities supports a program of music, theatre, and opera to supplement your course work. First year students participated in the annual First Year Field Trip to Montreal on Saturday September 14th, 2024.
This trip included transportation to and from Montreal, a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and tickets to see The AURA Experience at the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal. Students will also had plenty of time to explore the city.
A Performance by Ballet BC: BOLERO X + Silent Tides + Chamber
Thursday Oct 17th 2024 The National Arts Centre
In this remarkable triple bill program, the NAC Orchestra accompanies Chamber, one of artistic director Medhi Walerski’s most acclaimed and elegant ballets, and BOLERO X, created by Shahar Binyamini for the company in 2023, a masterful reading of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.
For Medhi Walerski, the rhythmic momentum and discordant tensions in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring make it one of the most vibrant compositions of all time, and he describes the creation of Chamber as an echo of what the score provokes in his imagination. Performed to original music by the eminent British composer Joby Talbot, Walerski centralizes the performers in a ritualistic dance that seeks to strike a balance between order and chaos, charging the theatre space with a darkened, absorbing energy. Magnificent and absolutely riveting.
Silent Tides is an intimate work for two dancers that reflects our relationship to one another and to ourselves—the infinite gates where our bodies receive nourishment and otherness, vibration and energy. Touch, time, eternity, love, death, infinity, low tides, high tides.
2023/2024 Cultural Activities
Guided Tour of the Renaissance Galleries
A guided tour with Professor Klebanoff at the National Gallery of Canada on Thursday February 8th at 6:30 p.m.
There is no admission charge to the gallery on Thursday evenings.
Professor Klebanoff teaches HUMS 2101 and 2102 in the College of the Humanities.
The group will meet at 6:30 in Gallery C201 on the second floor, first gallery opposite the stairs and elevator.
Floor plan and meeting spot.
Storgårds, Mozart & Shostakovich’s 5th Featuring Jessica Linnebach at the NAC
Thursday April 4th. 8:00 PM
National Arts Center Southam Hall
The lark is a small ground-nesting bird with an extravagant song that English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams captured in his The Lark Ascending, just as World War I began. NACO’s own Associate Concertmaster, violinist Jessica Linnebach, tenderly conveys the lark’s almost impossibly beautiful call in this masterwork.
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 5 “in an atmosphere of heart-stopping terror” (cambridgelive.org.uk), a time when the mercurial moods of Josef Stalin changed like the wind and an artist’s work could be celebrated one day and be cause for exile or worse the next. Under the baton of Principal Guest Conductor John Storgårds, the NAC Orchestra captures the emotion of this Stalin-approved work that might have saved Shostakovich’s life but never sacrificed his artistry.
The year 1788 was a dark one for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—his decline in fortunes had begun, the bills were piling up, and his infant daughter had just died. It’s probably not surprising, then, that he began to embrace the artistic movement called Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) in his beautiful Symphony No. 40, one of only two he wrote in a minor key.
Tour of Carleton Art Gallery (CUAG) on November 10th 2023
Norval Morrisseau: Medicine Currents
Students had a guided tour of this special exhibit.
Through his innovative visual language, Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau gifted viewers a vision of our interconnected world expressed as a sense of balanced motion at play, understood as Mino Bimaadiziwin in Anishinaabemowin.
Montreal Trip
This year the annual First Year Field Trip to Montreal was on Saturday September 23rd and was partially subsidized by the College. This trip included transportation to and from Montreal, a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and concert tickets to see works by Prokofiev and Mahler performed by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Students also had plenty of time to explore the city.
Maddy, one of the participants had this to say:
From roaming the Museum of Fine Arts to hearing the beautiful music at the Maison Symphonique, Humanities students who attended the trip to Montreal were offered an opportunity to delight in artwork of many kinds.
Trip to NYC (Fall Break)
This year the College has negotiated group rates, super bargains, AND a generous subsidy to allow 3rd and 4th year students to go to New York during the fall break, the most vibrant city on the planet, for four nights (Sat Oct 21 – Wed Oct 25 2023). The small group will take a bus to Syracuse and the take the train down the Hudson river valley to Penn Station and their hotel in is Mid-town. There will be one planned activity per non travel day, (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters). Students will also have plenty of time to explore the City.
Cultural Activities in the Past
2022/2023 Cultural Activities
As You Like It: A Radical Retelling
As You Like It: A Radical Retelling
Date: 2:00 p.m. Sunday January 22nd, 2023
Cost: $ 5.00
Where: GCTC
Map to GCTC
From Cliff Cardinal, creator of Huff, Stitch, and CBC Special, comes a new realization of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Known for his cutting humour, Cardinal’s take on the Bard’s classic brings renewed energy to this twisting comedy about the trials of love and mistaken identity in the lush Forest of Arden. Cardinal’s unpredictability is in full force in this new adaptation. You’ve never seen Shakespeare like this.
Logistics for sign up and payment: Please look at your work and course schedules and be sure that you will be free on the afternoon of January 22. Tickets are limited so students who buy a ticket but do not show up will not be allowed to reserve spots at future cultural events (unless the student is sick or has an emergency).
- Payment. First come, first serve. Thanks to the generous support of the College of the Humanities, the price for a ticket is only 5.00. Please send the five dollars via interac to Micheline.white@carleton.ca
- Email Andrea to let her know you’ve sent the money transfer.
Download, complete and sign ONE of the forms depending on your age (under or over 18) and send to andrea.mcintyre@carleton.ca right away. If you are under 18 at the time of the trip, a parent needs to sign and you need to coordinate with them well in advance. No one can attend without having filled out the form by the deadline (no exceptions).
As You Like It A Radical Retelling Jan 22nd 2023 at the GCTC Informed Consent Under 18
As You Like It A Radical Retelling Jan 22nd 2023 at the GCTC Over 18 Waiver
Hilary Hahn Plays Dvořák & Alexander Shelley conducts Beethoven’s 5th
We have 9 tickets Hilary Hahn Plays Dvorak & Alexander Shelley Conducts Beethoven’s 5th
Date: Wednesday January 18th 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Cost: $ 5.00
Where: National Arts Center, Southam Hall
The NAC Orchestra is delighted to welcome violinist Hilary Hahn, one of her generation’s finest musicians, back to Southam Hall to perform Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, a work that has charmed performers and audiences around the world since its first performance. Hahn’s virtuosity is almost supernatural as she moves effortlessly between moments of tension and tenderness in this abidingly beautiful concerto.
Logistics for sign up and payment: Please look at your work and course schedules and be sure that you will be free on the evening of January 18th. Tickets are limited so students who buy a ticket but do not show up will not be allowed to reserve spots at future cultural events (unless the student is sick or has an emergency). There are 3 steps:
- Payment. First come, first serve. Thanks to the generous support of the College of the Humanities, the price for a ticket is only 5.00. Please send the five dollars via interac to Micheline.white@carleton.ca
- Email Andrea to let her know you’ve sent the money transfer.
- Download, complete and sign ONE of the forms depending on your age (under or over 18) and send to andrea.mcintyre@carleton.ca by Monday January 16th at the latest. If you are under 18 at the time of the trip, a parent needs to sign and you need to coordinate with them well in advance. No one can attend without having filled out the form by the deadline (no exceptions). The forms can are below.
Hilary Hahn NAC Jan 18 2023 Over 18 Waiver
Hilary Hahn NAC Jan 18 Informed Consent Under 18
Music & Mythology, Ottawa Symphony Orchestra & Guests
The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra has kindly made free tickets available for HUMS students to attend their season-opening concert:
“Music & Mythology,” Ottawa Symphony Orchestra & Guests
Sunday, November 20th, 3:30 pm
Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre
Among other things, this inspiring program features three major 20th-century masterworks: the Stravinsky Firebird, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Gabriel Faure’s tone poem Pelléas et Mélisande, as well as the World Premiere performance of Canadian composer Andrew MacDonald’s Double Concerto No. 2: The Triumph of Saraswati.
Apart from the orchestra’s 70 musicians, featured artists onstage will include Tania Miller (conductor); Shawn Mativetsky (tabla); and Catherine Meunier (marimba).
Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of “The Handmaid’s Tale
Friday 28 Oct. 2022. 8:00 PM
$ 5
National Arts Center (Southam Hall)
A bold retelling of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s award-winning novel The Handmaid’s Tale brought to life as a contemporary ballet by choreographer Lila York. A dystopian tale set in a futuristic society that erases human rights—particularly women’s rights— the work tells the story of Offred, the “scarlet handmaid” (concubine) of the Commander, master of a hierarchical and theocratic dictatorship. This darkly romantic, edgy dance drama —performed on pointe —is a tour de force by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Everything about this ballet is entrancing: the dancers’ extraordinary athleticism, impressive costumes by Liz Vandal, ingenious sets, and the stirring music of James MacMillan and Arvo Pärt. Atwood’s penetrating message shines through in York’s finely honed world.
Sign-up and payment:
Payment. First come, first serve. Thanks to the generous support of the College of the Humanities, the price for a ticket is only 5.00. Please send the five dollars via interac to Micheline.white@carleton.ca
Download, complete and sign ONE of the forms below depending on your age (under or over 18) and send to andrea.mcintyre@carleton.ca no later than Wed. 26 Oct. If you are under 18 at the time of the trip, a parent needs to sign and you need to coordinate with them well in advance. No one can attend without having filled out the form by the deadline (no exceptions).
Ballet Field Trip Oct 28- Informed Consent Under 18
Ballet Field Trip Oct 28-Over 18 Waiver
Trip to Montreal
The College supports a program of music, theatre, and opera to supplement your course work. First year students are invited to participate in the annual First Year Field Trip to Montreal on Saturday September 24th. The bus will leave Dunton Tower at 7:45 am and will leave Montreal at 8:15 pm.
This trip includes transportation to and from Montreal, a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and concert tickets to see J.S. Bach’s Cantatas performed by the Chamber choir of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Students will also have of time to explore the city.
Thanks to the generous support of the College of the Humanities the price is only sixty dollars, but sign up soon, spots are limited and the trip usually sells out. To guarantee a spot, please send a cheque for 60 dollars made out to “Carleton University”. Please make sure your student number and name are both written on the cheque. If you cannot provide a cheque, please contact Prof. White at micheline.white@carleton.ca to arrange an email money transfer.
Waiver Forms to be returned by email no later than Monday Sept 19th to: andrea.mcintyre@carleton.ca
Download, complete and sign ONE of these forms depending on your age (under or over 18).
If you are under 18 at the time of the trip, a parent needs to sign and you need to coordinate with them well in advance. No one will get on the bus without having filled out the form by the deadline (no exceptions).
Under 18 Years Old Bus Trip Montreal Sept 24 2022
Adult Waiver Bus Trip Montreal Sept 24 2022
Rashid Johnson Capsule at the National Gallery
What: Personal introduction to the Rashid Johnson Capsule at the National Gallery.
Tour by Kwende Kefentse, former Humanities student, DJ, Creative Director of TIMEKODE and Executive Director of CKCU-FM.
Where: Under the spider (Maman) at the Main entrance to the National Gallery. 380 Sussex Drive. National Gallery of Canada
Date and Time: Thursday, September 8, 2022
Meet with Kwende Kefentse, from 4:30-5:30 for personal tour
Gallery Talk: 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Cost: Free. Please sign up using the link below so I know how many students to expect:
Talk Title: Why DIY? The Future of DIY Club Culture
Description: Join Rachel Weldon, Executive Director of Debaser, as she speaks about DIY club culture with Michael Caffrey, from Ghetto Blast Sound System; Kwende Kefentse, Creative Director of TIMEKODE and Executive Director of CKCU-FM; and Seiiizi, Ottawa Musician, DJ, and Events Technician.
2021/2022 Cultural Activities
Gallery Tours
Two wonderful art experts provided groups of Humanities students with four guided tours of two of Ottawa’s special galleries on September 24th. Catherine Sinclair led the tour of the Ottawa Art Gallery and Professor Randi Klebanoff the National Gallery.
Under the supervision of the Maman Statue (the giant spider), the students were treated to pizza before the tours.
BC Ballet
On November 26th, Bachelor of Humanities students attended a performance of BC Ballet at the National Arts Center.
This spectacular program from Ballet BC, under the new artistic direction of Medhi Walerski, featured three distinct contemporary works by acclaimed Canadian and international choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Crystal Pite, and Medhi Walerski himself.
Talks Featuring Two of Canada’s Most Important Indigenous Authors
On February 10th, Professor White broadcasted a zoom talk from our Lecture Hall. Students were able to attend in person and also had the option to watch it remotely. The College purchased several copies of Richard Van Camp’s collection of short stories: Moccasin Square Gardens and left for students to read prior to the talk.
The talk: The 2022 Avie Bennett Annual lecture series is pleased to present Katherena Vermette (Red River Métis – Michif) on “Storymaking” and Richard Van Camp (Tłı̨chǫ Dene) on “Storytelling.” Their talks will be followed by a dialogue with each other hosted and moderated by Dr. Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the Department of English University of Toronto.
The Scribe
The College of the Humanities was thrilled to present The Scribe on March 2, 2022. A one-man play by Jesse Bernstein that imagined the Bible’s origins in the hands of a simple scribe at a pivotal time in the 5th century BCE. Confronting questions and scholarship about how the Bible came to be, Bernstein combined fact and fiction, research, creativity, and a deep understanding of humanity, to bring this central moment in world history to life.
At the end of his performance, Bernstein answered audience questions and chat with biblical scholars Dr. Shawna Dolansky and Sarah Cook about the scholarship behind the performance.
Carleton University Art Gallery Tours
On March 11th, 2022 The College of the Humanities were offered free in-person tours of a special exhibit at the Carleton University Art Gallery called Drift: Art and Dark Matter which explores the connections between physics and art.
Drift: Art and Dark Matter is a residency and exhibition project generated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB.
Symphony at the NAC
On April 13th, 2022 BHUM students had the opportunity to attend Truth in Our Time at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. It was the Ottawa premiere of the NAC Orchestra commission of Philip Glass on the theme of Truth In Our Time in tribute to Canadian journalist Peter Jennings.