100 year anniversary
City of Brooks celebrating its
Andrea Klassen Medicine Hat News
For the City of Brooks, the last 100 years have brought plenty of changes.
Today the city is one of the province’s fastest-growing communities with more than 13,000 residents, but as recently as 1904, the area was still an unnamed prairie settlement.
As the city marks its 100th anniversary this year, event planners say they’re hoping to get both new and old citizens celebrating Brooks’ rapid, ongoing transformation.
"We have so many new residents coming in all the time, that we really want to show them where the community started from, what our struggles were," says Lisa Tiffin, city communications officer and member of the centennial planning committee.
Mayor Martin Shields
The city’s main centennial celebration, which runs over the August long weekend, will feature a historic tour of the city as well as a guided art tour showcasing work from Brooks artists. The three-day event will also include a pancake breakfast, fireworks and live entertainment.
Mayor Martin Shields says the event will celebrate Brooks’ diversity as well, with food and performances from many of the city’s cultural groups on offer.
Other centennial celebrations include a Mother’s Day tea highlighting the accomplishments and changing roles of women in the community, and the Southern Alberta Summer Games, which the city will host from July 7 to July 10. A number of legacy projects are also in the works, including the refurbishment of the town’s cenotaph. A series of murals depicting Brooks’ heritage and industries have already been completed around the city, in time for the 100th birthday celebrations.
As well, a centennial book featuring photos and stories from the community’s history launched in November 2009. A free Historical Timeline of Brooks is also available. Tiffin says both publications have been in high demand - the first 200 copies of the Historical Photo Album sold out the first day the book was launched, and 5,000 copies of the timeline have already been distributed around the region.
The city’s first centennial event, the Olympic Torch Relay celebrations held in January, also saw a turnout three times higher than expected, Tiffin says.
Shakespeare by the tracks in Brooks
Andrea Klassen Medicine Hat News
When Brooks’ Tumbleweed Theatre stages its annual Little Bard on the Prairie event, the challenge isn’t filling the seats - it’s dealing with the trains.
"We've actually been thinking of calling ourselves Little Bard on the Tracks," jokes company founder Michael Glynn MacDonald. The park is close to a major rail line and trains come through the area about once an hour.
Because the shows are outdoors, MacDonald says there’s nothing to do but wait out the trains. Actors freeze on the spot, picking up the action when the noise dies down.
“We did "Twelfth Night," and we had (one actor) who didn't freeze in place,” remembers MacDonald. “So she was the only one moving, and she'd be sticking snakes down people's pants, putting leaves in their hair, setting up all these shenanigans... People loved it."
The trains are such an integral part of the annual Shakespeare performance, which runs annually on the last two weekends in July, that people protested when the company considered moving to a quieter venue.
“We don’t have any intentions of being the cultural icons of Brooks,” she says. “We’re here to have fun, and I think that’s why it’s working.”
MacDonald says the company has seen steady interest and support from the community, with new faces joining the cast each year and enough funding to support increasingly complex costumes and staging.
After a successful run of "Richard III" in summer 2009, which garnered an audience of about 1,000 over six performances, the company will mount the comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" in 2010.
“It’s a very typical Shakespearean comedy where there’s a mix up, and a wedding, and then the wedding doesn’t happen,” explains Jennissen, who will direct this
Though Brooks’ cultural scene is often overshadowed by other communities in the region, Nik Jennissen, another Little Bard on the Prairie veteran, says there’s a desire in the community to do theatre and enjoy the arts.
year’s production. “There’s two lovers trying to get two curmudgeons together. And there’s a wedding scene, and a dance scene, and a lot of fun and frivolity.”
REPORT ON SOUTHEAST ALBERTA 2010 ■ Celebrating our Community — 95
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