Culture of Montreal


was referred to as "Canada's Cultural Capital" by Monocle Magazine. The city is Canada's centre for French-language television productions, radio, theatre, film, multimedia, and print publishing. The Quartier Latin is a neighbourhood crowded with cafés animated by this literary and musical activity. Montreal's many cultural communities have given it a distinct local culture.
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 manifestations of high culture, a long-lasting tradition of jazz and rock music, and tentative experimentation in visual arts, theatre, 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.

Arts

Place des Arts

A cultural heart of classical art and the venue for many summer festivals, the Place des Arts is a complex of different concert and theatre halls surrounding a large open-spaced square in the downtown. Culture lovers will find six concert and theatre halls, five of them inside: Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Théâtre Maisonneuve, Théâtre Jean-Duceppe, Cinquième Salle, Studio-Théâtre and one outside site: l'Esplanade. Classical dances, operas, plays, and music performances 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 located across the Esplanade from Place des Arts, and some of the most important theatre troupes and musical concert scenes are found nearby in what is now called the Quartier des Spectacles.

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 since the 1980s. 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 seamless integration of multi-disciplinary arts into the choreography of these troupes helped pave the way for the popularity of the Cirque du Soleil, a multimillion-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.

Classical music

The Place des Arts also harbor the headquarters of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra that performs 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 popular Montreal orchestras that perform regularly at Places des Arts are the Orchestre Métropolitain conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and I Musici de Montréal, a chamber orchestra founded by Yuli Turovsky and since 2011 conducted by Jean-Marie Zeitouni. I Musici de Montréal are considered among the greatest interpreters of the works of George Frideric Handel. Place des Arts are also the home of the Opéra de Montréal, the most prestigious opera company in Montreal. One Montreal radio station is entirely devoted to classical music.

Music

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 or even the Olympic Stadium, 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 help sustain this success. Other Montreal bands include Wolf Parade, Mobile, the Unicorns, and Simple Plan.
The Montreal International Jazz Festival illustrates well this melting of genres. Far from limiting itself to classical jazz, it features a great variety of artists who have espoused rhythms and styles from around the world. Smaller musical festivals include the Festival International Nuits Afrique, Montreal Reggae Festival, Pop Montreal, FestiBlues international de Montréal, electronic music festival, and the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival.
Every Sunday in Parc Mont-Royal near-downtown Montreal, there is a huge impromptu drumming festival in which hundreds of drummers are invited to jam. Tam Tams.

Theatre

Theatre in Montreal is dominated by French-language productions, in part because Montreal has traditionally been a centre 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 Michel Tremblay, who revolutionized Quebec theatre by writing in the local dialect, joual, and Montreal-adoptee Wajdi Mouawad. Most established French-language theatres are found in the Quartier Latin or near Place des Arts. The city also hosts the Festival TransAmériques, a two-week showcase of international experimental theatre.
In contrast, English theatre struggled but survived with the Centaur Theatre. In 1979, David Fennario achieved notable success and notoriety with Canada's first bilingual play, Balconville, which documents rivalries between the English and French working class in the suburb of Pointe-St-Charles. 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 and Dummies Theatre. The 80s saw the feminist company Imago Theatre be formed. In the late 1990s, Montreal started to become a hotspot for low-budget independent English theatre with companies such as Optative Theatrical Laboratories, Infinithéâtre, MainLine Theatre, Gravy Bath Theatre, Sa Booge, Persephone, Pumpkin Productions, and Tableau D'Hôte Theatre adding to the scene. More recently, the 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.

Literature

Montréal 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 Québécois literature. Written in 1947, Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute, which chronicles the life of a young woman in the neighborhood of St-Henri, marked Québécois literature for its urban texture. The work of Mordecai Richler, highlighted by The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, depicts the lives of poor English-speaking residents of Mile End. Mostly Michel Tremblay perhaps best summarizes the alienation of poor working-class Montréalais at the onset of the Quebec Quiet revolution. The all-time best-selling novel in Québécois literature, Yves Beauchemin's The Alley Cat, depicts a relatively similar neighborhood twenty years later. The later work of Émile Ollivier, for example, La Brûlerie, is a portrait of French-speaking immigrants establishing their lives in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood.
The nineteenth-century poet Émile Nelligan, whom American critic Edmund Wilson famously called "the only first-rate Canadian poet, French or English," has many schools and libraries named in his honour in Montreal and around Quebec.
Montreal was also the centre of literary modernism in English Canada, led by the Montreal Group of poets including A.M. Klein and F. R. Scott in the mid-1920s.
Montreal hosts a number of events related to literature, including the multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, which takes place every Spring, and the Expozine alternative press fair every fall. Cult MTL is a local print publication and website in Montreal focusing on culture, music, film, arts, and city life.

Film

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 include the Cinéma du Parc.
Cineastes have, on occasion, chosen Montreal for their movies. See Montreal in films.

Museums

Montreal has a vast network of museums, art galleries, and exhibition centres. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possesses a varied collection of European, First Nations, 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 on emerging post-war Quebec artists, with arguably some of the best artistic works in Quebec from Alfred Pellan and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
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, the Montreal Insectarium, the Montreal Botanical Garden, and the 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 Centre. The Musée des ondes Emile Berliner in the South-West borough is dedicated to Canada's music industry and the inventor of the gramophone, Emile Berliner. A short drive south in Granby, is the Granby Zoo, notable for its wide variety of animals and amusements.