Life Arts Center

When the Leahy Family Christmas show does its holiday rounds throughout North America, audiences are advised to pull on their clogs and get ready to answer “The Call To Dance.” This is the segment of every Leahy concert when audience members are invited to join the band in a lively step dance.

Can’t dance? Then settle back and enjoy listening to the personable, high energy family from Canada doing what it does best. Each of the eight siblings plays multiple instruments and executes traditional step dancing brought to Cape Breton Island in the 18th and 19th centuries by Scottish immigrants.

A typical show features Erin on piano, Agnes on keyboard, Siobheann on bass and Maria on guitar, while Donnell, Doug and Angus fiddle up a storm and Frank drums to a fare-thee-well surrounded by Plexiglas to control the volume. Should the occasion arise, they can interchange instruments and even call on their three other siblings to substitute for the regular lineup. Agnes, for instance, just welcomed her seventh baby, but eagerly joins the others for local shows. The vitality Leahy projects harks back to their childhood when they learned to divide their time between farm chores, numerous sports at which all excel, and music.

The key factor in their development, Erin points out, was growing up in a house without a television. Their parents removed it so their children would live in a creative and active atmosphere in which everyone took part. Because they lived on a beef farm, they learned to corral the cattle, tend the crops, and cut wood. To them that was just life, hardworking, but very good.

Their mother learned to play the piano and step dance as a child on Cape Breton Island and their father grew up near Peterborough, Ontario where the Irish settled, so he was an expert on the Celtic fiddle. Both were excellent musicians and provided opportunities for their offspring to take music lessons and learn many instruments. On one occasion, Siobheann thought her father was taking her to a violin lesson, but he surprised her by putting a string bass in the van and taking her to a bass teacher. Some of their happiest times were the house parties when friends would show up with or without instruments and we would play music all evening.”

Memories of those happy times inspired their next CD, promising to be their fifth prize-winning recording. Due out in the spring, it is a combination of original tunes and songs with some traditional pieces they have arranged. In addition to being crack instrumentalists, all are equally adept at composing and contribute to their growing library.

Every summer, the family conducts a music camp near their childhood home in Lakewood, Ontario. The reason for establishing it, Erin explained, was to help youngsters develop a skill that would be a satisfying hobby for life. During a show in the United States, they casually mentioned plans to open the camp. The moment it became official on their website, all the spots were booked by students from the U.S. who had heard about it, leaving no slots for Canadians. The second year, they made certain that the local children and others throughout Canada were accommodated.

To this day, many actors struggle with this concept within their actor training. Many acting classes and acting courses tend to veer away from this area, as it is felt that it is very psychological.

This is an interesting standpoint for an industry that is built on revealing the psychology and lives of characters. Surely this requires the actor to delve into the emotional states within themselves to recreate those states for a character? This was what Duse did to create her outstanding body of work.

There is an actor training that does focus on emotional recreation – Method Acting.

Method Acting lessons focus on allowing the actor to get in touch with themselves to recreate emotion, consistently. Its foundations were borne out of Behavioural Psychology, where it was established that humans react to sensorial stimulus.

During Method Acting courses, the actor spends a lot of time reliving personal memories from their past in conjunction with their senses. For example, to recreate joy, they may work on a memory where they experienced extreme joy – and relive that event by recollecting the sounds, sights, tastes, smells and feel of the event. Duringacting classes, the actor carries out these acting exercises to recreate the correct emotional content, as emotion in itself can only be recreated through the senses.

Brian Timoney recently said “It’s important for the actor to be emotionally aware. My approach to acting training is to get the actor to get in touch with this side of themselves to build their ability to express themselves without fear.”

Photography is one of the most interesting hobbies a person can ever indulge on. It is the art or process of producing images of objects and subjects on photosensitive surfaces and eventually producing a copy of each capture made.

Of all the subjects a photographer can choose from, the cutest ones are those involving kids and babies. Nothing brings more passion to any parent than to see their beautiful kids being captured in a high
standard image. Most of the parents ever since in the past always want to have those memories captured as their own flesh and blood grow up and turn into somebody that they have always wanted. Seeing every smile and poses of their kids would really melt their hearts out realizing how beautiful it would be having angels in their lives. Some parents would even hire or ask photographers to take pictures from the very first time their kid would come out into this awesome world. They would not want to miss that valuable time when their baby comes out in spotlight to everybody’s life. On the photographer’s side, it would not be that easy to take a glimpse and take every move the baby would make because of the unpredictable moments the kid would have in that stage of growth.

Gentle and wild it would be, one would be able to witness every inch of a muscle would do by the baby in front of the camera. It would surely be stressful to any parent or even to any photographer capturing every moment because you would be experiencing more than what is expected. Even if you are going to be with some quite mom and dad, the thing with that is they are actually excited and cheerful about the whole thing. Maybe they just do not have the complete idea on what and how to feel about it the first time, but eventually they would know along as they go about it. In doing such thing, you have to show the parents that you actually know what you are doing. You can not just do it on your own, you have to ask for assistance from then and more so to give details on what you are doing and why. Other than that, there are a lot more ideas and techniques a photographer can do just to catch the attention of the baby, because as we all know, it would be really hard for you to keep them in place. The most important thing is, no matter how hard it would take, you will still end up with excellent images because it is always about the charm on how you go about the whole thing.