[BCMA] Remembrance week events at the Royal BC Museum

Wed Nov 4 10:15:53 PST 2015

Very appropriate and impressive effort by the RBCM and those performing!

Dan Gallacher

From: Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv. 
Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2015 2:46 PM
To: Communication, RBCM RBCM:EX 
Subject: [BCMA] Remembrance week events at the Royal BC Museum

November 04, 2015 

The Royal BC Museum commemorates past wars 

with Remembrance Week events

VICTORIA, BC – “Cold all night. Feet and hands felt it badly. Nothing doing all night. Rockets, maxim gun and rifle fire. Every time one came over we ducked but on the whole were not greatly worried.” 

So wrote Trooper – and British Columbian – Joe Shires from the European front line to Victoria-based librarian Alma Russell one hundred years ago, on October 24, 1915. Russell, with whom Shires had worked before the war, is one of the soldiers whose hand-written letters, diaries and scrapbook pages members of the public have faithfully transcribed for the Royal BC Museum since its Transcribe project (transcribe.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/) launched in April 2015. 

Projects like Transcribe are just one of the ways the Royal BC Museum helps keep the war-time experiences – by turn frank and brutal, then tame and tedious – of British Columbian soldiers and nurses vivid and accessible to all. 

As we near Remembrance Day in 2015, the Royal BC Museum will embark on a series of special events and educational experiences to commemorate wars past and honour the experiences and lives of men and women from BC who served. 

Our commemorations begin on Wednesday November 5, when military historian Paul Ferguson will present at Live @ Lunch – Discovering Victoria’s Great War at Home. Ferguson will tell us about local connections to the Great War, including heritage sites, memorials and commemorations. Learn where the names Passchendaele, Zonnebeke and Hill 70 await rediscovery in our local community. This Live @ Lunch takes place at noon.  

On Tuesday, November 10, join the Naden Band of the Royal Canadian Navy for a musical tribute: Lest We Forget: A Musical Tribute to The Great War. The concert will take place from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

On Wednesday, November 11, the Royal BC Museum will play host to three special Remembrance Day performances. 

>From 12:15 pm – 12:45 pm, the Victoria Children’s Choir will perform music on themes of war and peace, including songs from the time of both World Wars, patriotic Canadian songs and more recent compositions expressing the common desire for peace and human solidarity.  

>From 1:00 pm – 1:30 pm, Pacific Opera Victoria will stage scenes from a version of Mary's Wedding, a new Canadian opera commemorating the First World War and its impact on a generation of Canadian youth. Join dynamic musicologist and public speaker Robert Holliston as he introduces scenes from Mary’s Wedding, which will be performed by young opera singers.

>From 2:00 pm – 2:45 pm, the Story Theatre Company and the Royal BC Museum offer The Call Went Out, a special presentation of music, songs and poetry of the Great War period, mixed with letters from the young men who travelled over to the trenches. As letters from the BC Archives, written by local soldiers, served as source material, the script and music have a decidedly British Columbian flavour.

All these commemorative events take place in in Clifford Carl Hall, on the main floor of the Royal BC Museum, and are free of charge. For more information about these and other events, please visit royalbcmuseum.bc.ca.  

All performances on Remembrance Day have been funded in part by the Veterans Affairs Canada Community Partnership Fund. 

About the Royal BC Museum

The Royal BC Museum explores the province’s human history and natural history, advances new knowledge and understanding of BC, and provides a dynamic forum for discussion and a place for reflection. The museum and archives celebrate culture and history, telling the stories of BC in ways that enlighten, stimulate and inspire. Looking to the future, the Royal BC Museum will be a refreshed, modern museum, extending its reach far beyond Victoria as a world-class cultural venue and repository of digital treasures. 

- 30 -

Media contact:

Royal BC Museum Media Inquiries 

250-387-5051

news at royalbcmuseum.bc.ca 

@RoyalBCMuseum

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