Arts and Culture
Every summer, usually in July, the largest music festival, the Island Music Fest on Vancouver Island takes place in the Comox Valley. Performers and audience members from near and far gather for three days of camping and an eclectic mix of music. There are several other festivals in the area and they include the North Island Festival of Performing Arts, Fiddlefest, Comox Valley Highland Games and the Comox Valley Piano Society puts on performances at the Stan Hagen Theatre.
The city is home to the Comox Valley Youth Music Centre, originally the Courtenay Youth Music Camp, a two week long annual summer school, which has increased to a six week program. Notable people involved with the centre include Harry Freedman who taught there 1971-1982, Gilles Bellemare (composition), Diana Krall (piano), Nancy Argenta (voice), Ingrid Jensen (trumpet) and Renee Rosnes (piano).
The Sid Williams Theatre, located in downtown Courtenay, is the major performance theatre in the Comox Valley. Other theatres include the Rainbow Youth Theatre, the Courtenay Little Theatre and the Stan Hagen Theatre.
The Vancouver Island Regional Library has a branch located in downtown Courtenay. The Courtenay branch offers many services such as free WIFI for library members, computer access, and printing and photocopying stations.
Read more about this topic: Courtenay, British Columbia
Famous quotes containing the words arts and, arts and/or culture:
“For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
—Joyce Cary (1888–1957)
“If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)