HRM Interesting Person #8: Art Moore

Art Moore is a high school English teacher in Moncton, New Brunswick. I met him in Halifax at the Atlantic Fringe Festival, where he was a performer. Art Moore is interesting because of one fantastic story he has.

The students in one of his classes decided to support a number of nearby University students from Haiti, who were waiting for word from relatives caught in the horrible earthquake there, by sending a large card on which they had all collaborated. When Art Moore went to the University to deliver the card, he was approached by a professor who was interested in leading a team to Haiti to help volunteer with the relief effort. The team needed someone with prior military experience to act as security, and that's where Mr. Moore comes in. As a former soldier with the Canadian Armed Forces, he accompanied the team and help starving, homeless Haitians over in Haiti.

I met Mr. Moore briefly, about a week apart. He was in a rush the first time I met him, because he had to head back to Moncton to teach school the next day. When he saw me again the next time though, he still remembered my name. Art Moore is an every day hero.

Hopscotch Urban Arts Festival: September 11, 2010

According to what I've read, Halifax once had a great hip-hop scene. Unfortunately, when many of its past up and coming artists "made it big", the rest of the hip-hop scene was left to pick up the pieces. This year "the scene" tried to do just that with the Hopscotch Urban Arts Festival.

(An unknown - to me - dancer gives a free "popping" lesson to some eager young students.)

All day long, for 9 hours from 1 to 10 PM on September 11th, there were free hip-hop workshops, free dance lessons, a 100 foot "art wall" graffiti competition, the first ever national break dancing competition in Atlantic Canada, and a free concert featuring Halifax hip-hop legends like the Juno Award winning Classified.

As expected, the Grand Parade where it was located featured what must have been the largest concentration of teenagers who look like they would steal your car in all of Halifax. (Seriously guys, your art is neat, but all joking aside Grandpa Ea-pea is here to say that you really need to pull up your pants, wear a belt, and put your caps on the right way round because you look ridiculous tripping over the crotch of your own trousers.)

Even more impressive was the announcement that the fantastic French urban art artists of Cellograff would be making their North American debut at this festival. Unlike most "graffiti" artists (I'm sure they don't like it being called graffiti, but there's only so many times I can type "urban art" in one post without hating myself), Cellograff do not paint on the side of some business owner's establishment or on one of CN's grain cars, but rather they use large sheets of cellophane plastic stretched out between two trees or street posts to create their unique masterpieces.

Quite frankly the whole thing was not really my bag, but it was impressive, and this rather well intentioned event would have been completely unknown to me had someone not thought to drop a flier in the basket of my EP Cruiser (my new bike), while I was busy volunteering for the Fringe Festival the night before. That's right, this great coming together of me and the Hopscotch festival was only possible because of this unknown canvasser. Score one for canvassing, score one for bike baskets, and more importantly score one for cycling.

Atlantic Fringe Festival: September 2-12

(The Bus Stop Theatre - next to a bus stop on Gottingen Street - is one of the five theatres hosting performances for the 2010 Atlantic Film Festival. It has no operating budget whatsoever. As The Bus Stop Theatre's technical director, Evan Brown, puts it: "it doesn't get any more... fringe than us.")

"Fringe" theatre is a term that originated in 1948 to describe the unofficial companies performing at the second Edinburgh International Fair. The term was coined by the twentieth century Scottish playwright, Robert Kemp, and since then it has been picked up by several festivals and theatres to describe a brand of alternative theatre that can best be summed up as "fun on the cheap."

Despite living in Edmonton, Alberta, home to the oldest Fringe Festival in North America and the second largest Fringe Festival in the world for a number of years, I had never actually checked out any of the performances there. I had always been to poor and/or "busy" (just a synonym for lazy, really) to go, and so it was with great anticipation that I waited all summer for this year's Atlantic Fringe Festival in Halifax - its 20th season.

Again, I found myself somewhat underfunded this year, but with 25 theatre and dance shows ranging from musicals to belly dancing to comedies and dramas, and over 230 performances in five different theatres, I was sure I could find a few shows to see. More importantly, the ticket prices were typically in the $6 to $10 range, so I could do it even on my tight budget.

I ended up settling on three shows I thought sounded interesting, and were all shown in one day in relatively close locations to each other. The first show was called Jewish Girls Don't Kayak, and was about one Jewish woman's journey to find an identity for herself outside of being Jewish, only to discover that she truly was Jewish in the end.

The next show I watched was called My Five Near Death Experiences. This was a series of stories and poems read by Arthur Moore, a teacher from Moncton, New Brunswick, about events that have happened in his life. All of them generally relate back to poems he has written or stories from his classroom.

By far the most entertaining show I saw though, was a performance called Breaking Point. Breaking Point was a play about a teenaged boy who is the youngest child in a family of professional torturers. He is named after his grandfather, who himself was a legendary torturer, and is the son of the greatest living torturer. Unfortunately he is a) not very good at torturing people, and b) has no interest in it. In the play, he must prepare for his entrance examinations to enter a prestigious torturing school soon (or else he won't get a good career), and so his older sister who hates him lends her "help." Hilarity ensues.

Had my Fringe experience stopped there I would have been quite pleased. However, I had read in The Coast that the Atlantic Fringe Festival is always looking for volunteers, and so I cycled over to the head office to see if I could be of service. I ended up signing up to volunteer to sell tickets for nine more shows on the final weekend of the Festival.

As a perk for volunteering, I was allowed to watch any show for which I sold tickets, for free. As a result, by the end of the week I had been to all five theatres, and had seen a dozen different performances. Not a bad result for my first Fringe attempt, if I do say so myself.