If you’ve ever stepped foot inside Distortion for Musique Non Stop, you know it’s an infectious experience. The music, the people, the dance floor, it’s all unlike anything else you’ll find on George Street.

Tonight Musique Non Stop is bidding its countless fans a fond, albeit temporary farewell. Benjy and co. are taking a break for a while, and deservedly so. This will be the 23rd instalment of the electrically eclectic, always free dance party at Distortion.

Perhaps in a bid to try and hide the tears in everyone’s eyes, the theme for tonight’s Musique Non Stop is sunglasses at night. Best glasses win a prize!

Featuring Dee Jay Benjy and Little Dan, Musique Non Stop 23, the last for some time, gets underway at 11pm and goes late.

Broken Accidents, a multidisciplinary theatre production three years in the making (sort of, we’ll get to that) opens tonight at the newly renovated, still not officially opened yet, RCA Theatre at the LSPU Hall.

I sat down with director Lois Brown yesterday evening before the final dress rehearsal to find out how Broken Accidents came to be and what it’s been like getting it here.

"Suicide Pete's first attempt." A scene from Broken Accidents. Click to enlarge.

We’re inside the RCA’s black box theatre, Lois and I, sat in the front row in plush red seats while dancers/actors and actors/dancers clad in sweats saunter and stretch on the stage before us. There’s a level of comfort in the air here that you can easily put your finger on: these people have spent real time together, they are familiar with one another.

They are, in every good sense of the word, family.

I ask Lois about the show and it’s not long before she’s describing how lovely and talented cast member and fellow collaborator Sara Stoker is, she leaning against the far wall of the stage, raising her legs one at a time above her head the way you or I would raise an arm.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Broken Accidents is or how it came to be and already I’m pulled in. It’s appropriate that we’re sat in the audience because suddenly I feel like I’m a member, and the show isn’t opening for another 24 hours.

"Suicide Pete's first attempt." A scene from Broken Accidents. Click to enlarge.

Three years ago, author Joel Hynes approached Lois with a book titled Broken Accidents by Toronto-based author Philip Arima, emphatic that it ought to be dramatized. Together with choreographers Sara Stoker and Louise Moyes, they drew up plans for its staging.

It wasn’t easy, with a writer, a director and two choreographers each bringing such distint processes to the table, almost like a game of paper rock scissors where everyone needs to be the winner for the game to be a success.

Eventually Lois and Sara brought in performers such as Lisa Porter, Mark Bath, Phil Winters, and Molly Graham, and after two weeks of exploration the results were presented to an audience. Still not the finished piece, but things were moving along steadily.

Then Lois was struck by a vehicle. Or, as she put it, ran over by an SUV. Both her legs were broken. She couldn’t walk for six months. Broken Accidents (a now painfully ironic title) was forced into an almost year-long hiatus.

"Suicide Pete's first attempt." A scene from Broken Accidents. Click to enlarge.

In January of this year Lois and Sara assembled the avengers and began picking up the pieces of Broken Accidents, running rehearsals on the Arts and Culture Centre stage — literally. As Lois explained, the stage there is so big you can actually get up to a full run as you thrust yourself across it. The space made for some much-welcomed development of what was now an abundance of material.

In order to pare this material down to its bare essentials, Joel Hynes was brought back along with Amy House to workshop the piece. Together with Lois they hammered out what would become the working script for Broken Accidents, which for the last five weeks Lois has rehearsed with her cast on the stage of the RCA Theatre.

Getting five weeks of access to this stage is unprecedented, and will likely never happen again. It came about as a happy accident: since renovations on the space have only just recently been completed there are no other shows in production requiring it. Once things are up and running again the stage will be in hot demand, access to it for rehearsals limited to days, never weeks.

Were it not for this situation, which Lois’ accident forced the cast of Broken Accidents into, she says the production could never have come to be as it is. What it’s proven is that there is a real need for a studio rehearsal space in St. John’s. It’s something that’s always been know, Lois tells me, but with Broken Accidents we have definitive proof – this level of production is what we’re missing out on.

"Suicide Pete's first attempt." A scene from Broken Accidents. Click to enlarge.

Broken Accidents explores themes of fear and alienation, confronting the notion that we’ve made ourselves less safe by becoming more afraid. Intense visual imagery is presented in amongst scenes of dialogue between characters, moving the story along in distinct yet equal measures.

Lois summed up the differences between the two disciplines in Broken Accidents nicely in that for the dancers, there are a lot of props, while for the actors, not so much. Both are being forced to conflict with and then adapt to the things they are less accustomed to, which in a lot of ways is in keeping with the story’s themes.

Broken Accidents opens tonight at 8pm at the LSPU Hall and runs until Sunday, August 15th. Tickets are $25 and there is a pay-what-you-can matinee at 2pm on Sunday. For more information or to book your tickets go to the RCA website, or call the Hall 753-4531.

Or you could win two free tickets! Simply leave a comment here and you’re entered into our 6pm draw this evening. The winner will receive two tickets to Broken Accidents for whichever night they choose.

Note: all comments must be accompanied by a valid e-mail address (we don’t collect that stuff in any way, but it helps keep the number of repeat entries down to a minimum, which is only fair).

UPDATE: Congratulations to craigor on winning our draw for two tickets to Broken Accidents. Enjoy the show!

From his Twitter feed this morning:

Close enough! And nice jab at the rest of Canada, I might add.

Wolfgang Gartner will be laying some incredibly sick beats down at The Rock House tonight. The few remaining tickets are $25 and can be found at Ballistic on Water Street.

Before we begin, I want to make it clear this is not some headline grabbing exposé on drug culture. Drugs and electronic music share a well documented past, present, and no doubt future. One needn’t point a finger to point that out.

I’ve always despised the word underground when describing electronic music; the connotation is that it’s secretive, that there’s something to hide, which I don’t think does the scene here any favours. In other parts of the world, electronic music is as mainstream as hip hop, pop and rock, and the scenes in those regions flourish with exciting nightclubs and festivals dedicated solely to the harmonious enjoyment of the genre.

The dirt I’m referring to in the title of this post has to do with the conditions wherein the local electronic music scene has had to hang its collective party hat of late. The clubs that cater to electronic music lovers these days also cater to — there’s no other term for it — sketch bags. By the droves.

A sketchy person is a person you can’t trust, plain and simple. They’re no fun to be around, and they often cause harm to those around them for the sake of their own benefit.

These clubs, some of which started out with so much promise, have been demoted to dives through a combination of this tendency to attract sketch bags, and of club owners who don’t take the safety and comfort of their clientele seriously.

Filthy bathrooms, poorly stocked bars, and rampant thievery and violence prevail over the squeaks, beeps and bumps of whatever the DJ’s playing, no matter how fresh the track or loud the sound system.

I’ve stopped going out to regular Friday and Saturday night electronic music events because I just can’t stand to be around it anymore.

Which is why I was so excited to learn that JFK of MSTRKRFT is playing his upcoming show at The Majestic.

Even if the change in venue still attracts the same sketchy crowd, the change in atmosphere, with clean, well maintained fixtures and a likely more vigilant staff should help keep the problems to a minimum. Hopefully it will serve to discourage them from coming back, too, should more electronic music promoters decide to use this venue in the future.

A1C Gallery has hosted several successful dance parties in this vein, and Musique non stop at Distortion has been sketch-free for all the times I’ve graced its albeit pungent dance floor.

In the meantime, the club owners need to start addressing the problems that have become rampant in their establishments, or they’ll likely find themselves with fewer and fewer people on their dance floors as venues like The Majestic step in to fill the void.

I hadn’t heard of this fellow previously, but I guess he goes to Ryerson and appears on “Out of the Fog” all the time. Well done video, although a little harsh at points. I assume he’s not worried about offending his “bigger” fans?

One of his “Out Of The Fog” appearances:

The list of cities around the world that DJ Heather has played in is vast. I was going to drop it here, but when I hit paste my scroll bar shrank down to such a teeny little nub that I decided instead to stick with just the cities she’s played in Canada: Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Hamilton, London, Montreal, Nelson, Ottawa, Quebec City, Vancouver, Victoria, Windsor, Whistler, Winnipeg.

After tonight, St. John’s gets added to the list.

DJ Heather was raised in early days of Chicago House Music and has since gone on to redefine the genre in the city that all but invented it. That she’s even coming here is cause enough to dance.

Word is local promotion company sceneSTIR caught wind DJ Heather was playing the Underdog Promotions 6th anniversary party in Halifax last night, and they pulled a few strings to land her here.

*tips hat*

If this town knows what’s good for it, Loft 709 should be a full house tonight.

It was all hips, hops, pops and locks last Friday at the MUN Field House in St. John’s for the province’s first ever Hip Hop dance competition, Hustle To Get Here.

Every b-boy and b-girl in town will be throwing it down full-on tonight at Newfoundland and Labrador’s very first Hip Hop dance competition: Hustle To Get Here.

Sick promo video, right?

Expect to see some fierce and fancy battles go down, with everyone vying to be this province’s original #1 b-boy and #1 b-girl.

Check it out tonight, 7pm at the MUN Fieldhouse. Then head over to the new and improved Breezeway for the official after-party.

Advance tickets for Hustle To Get Here have sold out but there are still 100 available for purchase at the door. Bring your stub to the after-party and you won’t even have to hustle to get $5 off the price of admission.

We’ve been doing our darndest here at Signal lately to let you know about the impending arrival of Bass Kleph and the dance floor joy he’ll bring to this city come Saturday night.

But don’t just take our word for it.

Here’s a video message Bass Kleph recently recorded from London, to we, the fine people of St. John’s.

Don’t see that often.

Advance tickets at Ballistic are reportedly running low. They’ve got a special deal on for early birds who like to flock together: buy four tickets and the fifth one is free.

Bass Kleph’s most recent track is called $pend My Money, and apparently the promoters are taking that literally. Lucky for you!

Newlyweds Jill Keiley and Don Ellis didn’t see it coming.

In the middle of their wedding reception last weekend, the entire hall suddenly broke out into a choreographed dance routine to the tune of (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.

Look!

The spectacle was the brainchild of friends Robert Chafe, Andrea Hann and Kim Mullins. As Chafe explains, they came up with the idea “figuring that Jill, the queen of the big musical event, needed a big musical surprise at her wedding.”

Among other things, Keiley is known for spearheading the 24-Hour Mystery Musical, an annual event in St. John’s that sees an entire musical production come together, from announcing to the volunteer cast and crew just which show they’ll be doing to performing it in front of an (often large) audience in exactly 24 hours.

In order to prepare the wedding guests for last weekend’s surprise musical number, Chafe and friends held super secret rehearsals. For anyone unable to make the rehearsals, they posted a video of the routine online.

The effort paid off, as you can see from the highly energized and incredibly synchronized performance the crowd gives right through to the end when the camera zooms in on the married couple’s astonished faces.

Thanks to Ed Kennedy for shooting the video and sharing it with us!