The right place: Drop-in art studio crafting a community of creatives

On Wednesday nights, The Third Place becomes a drop-in studio, where artists of all mediums and abilities are invited to work on their projects in the company of others.

Comedy fest always about homegrown humour

There will definitely be jokes about the American political circus at this year’s Winnipeg Comedy Festival, but the comics telling them will all come to town carrying Canadian travel documents.

“We’ve been pretty much 99.9 per cent Canadian since our start in 2002,” says artistic director Dean Jenkinson, who announced the festival lineup earlier this week.

“This festival’s mandate has always been to promote Canadian talent and elevate them to a national audience on CBC and expose them to a Winnipeg audience that otherwise would not get to see them perform.”

The commitment to Canadian talent is nothing new for the festival, says Jenkinson, but this year, amid ongoing trade scuffles and cross-border jabs, he says the festival’s ideals were reaffirmed.

Going for baroque at eclectic three-week fest

“He was a madman,” says oboist Caitlin Broms-Jacobs about 17th-century composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

“They used to conduct with these huge walking sticks, which they pounded on the floor, but he got really angry and accidentally pounded it into his foot. And then he died from gangrene. It seems to be the only thing that people know about him. It’s almost like nobody’s even heard his music, right?”

Well, Winnipeggers will soon have a chance to hear the exceptional Lully — a pioneering madman in the worlds of French opera and courtly dance — during the Winnipeg Baroque Festival, which begins tomorrow and runs until April 19.

Broms-Jacobs’ Fierbois duo (which also includes pianist Madeline Hildebrand) performs Lully and others with guests flutist Jan Kocman and Kathryn Brooks at Love and Madness on April 17 at the Canadian Mennonite University’s Laudamus Auditorium.

For Manitoba Juno nominees, it’s more about where they’re from than where they’re headed

Eight Manitoba artist are vying for hardware at this year’s Juno Awards. Sebastian Gaskin and Liam Duncan reflect on their respective journeys to Canada’s biggest annual music award show.

When his latest album, Lovechild, was released in February, Gaskin’s name and likeness got the Yonge-Dundas Square treatment, beaming out from a digital billboard for all of downtown Toronto to see.

Scaling the side of the city’s Eaton Centre shopping mall, the Spotify endorsement was literally enormous. But for the 29-year-old singer, the recognition wasn’t nearly as impactful as a much smaller piece of outdoor advertising unveiled last summer on the road into Tataskweyak Cree Nation.

“I’ll never forget that day,” says Gaskin, who is nominated for Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year at Sunday’s Juno Awards in Vancouver.

Local film and TV productions earn more than three dozen Canadian Screen Awards nods

Manitoban projects and artists account for over 40 nominations at the upcoming Canadian Screen Awards, with film, television and digital media category winners to be announced in five ceremonies held in Toronto between May 30 and June 1.

Leading the pack in the film sphere is Winnipeg-born writer-director-actor Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. The imaginative feature shot in Winnipeg and Montreal boasts 13 nominations, including best feature, original screenplay and five acting nods for its multilingual cast.

Deaner ‘89, a satellite in the FUBAR universe, follows 17-year-old Dean Murdoch (Paul Spence), a suburban hockey jock growing up in Manitoba, where the film (seven nominations) was shot in 2023. Produced by Manitoban company Eagle Vision, nominees include Spence, an ancestor of James Spence, the namesake of Winnipeg’s Spence Street, and locals Rick and Sean Skene, who are nominated for best stunt co-ordination. Winnipeg artist Doug Morrow is nominated for achievement in makeup.

Local directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s international governance comedy Rumours, produced by Manitoban company Buffalo Gal Pictures, netted four nominations, including one for lead actor Cate Blanchett and one for supporting actor Roy Dupuis.

Final exhibit at Cre8ery

Jordan Miller is approaching the end of a very long countdown.

After signing her last five-year lease in 2018, the executive director and owner of Cre8ery Gallery and Studio set a 2,000-day counter on her phone.

Rent for the 8,800 square-foot Exchange District art centre had become untenable and another increase was looming on the horizon. The clock was ticking — literally.

“For Lease” signs went up at the corner of Adelaide Street and William Avenue last week and Miller was forced to finally break the news publicly: after 18 years in business the Cre8ery would be closing for good in April following one final show.

What’s up: Georgia Toews book launch, Beach Boys, Felix, wearable art, puzzle derby

Toews returns for sophomore novel launchMcNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Ave.Tonight, 7 p.m.FreeSpring book-launch season is heating up, and next to visit McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location is Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based novelist and film/TV writer Georgia Toews, who launches her new novel, Nobody Asked For This, tonight at 7 p.m.

Toews’ latest is the followup to her 2023 debut novel, Hey, Good Luck Out There, which chronicled a woman’s time in a rehab facility and how she copes in the aftermath.

In Nobody Asked For This, readers follow Virginia, a 23-year-old comedian in Toronto navigating dysfunctional friendships, grief and relationships gone wrong.

Toews will read from her new novel, and will be joined in conversation by Free Press columnist Jen Zoratti before signing copies of the book.

Tiny meek mouse plays it big when the going gets gruff

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Mouse? Well, in this case, cross off the Gruffalo’s Child’s name for daring to stare down the resourceful rodent during Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s charming 2025 stage adaptation of British author Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo’s Child.

Performed by London, U.K.-based Tall Stories Theatre Company, the touring show that closes Sunday features a crackerjack cast comprised of Yvette Clutterbuck (Gruffalo’s Child), Laura Dowsett (Mouse) and Billy McCleary (Gruffalo/Snake/Owl/Fox).

Director Olivia Jacobs, who also helmed MTYP’s production of The Gruffalo in 2023, once again infuses the 55-minute musical with gentle warmth and often side-splitting humour that appeals to kids of all ages.

In the sequel to The Gruffalo, her beloved 1999 children’s picture book illustrated by Axel Scheffler, Donaldson flips the original narrative to tell its “brains over brawn” story about might — and fright — from the shaggy monsters’s point of view.

Work of Nunavut artists in WAG-Qaumajuq’s residency program showcases unique insights

“Close your eyes. What do you see? Do you have a vision?” asks Martha Siqiniq Aupaluktuq-Hickes.

“I asked my husband that once. After four or five seconds, he said, “Nothing, it’s dark!” the artist says with a laugh. “I never knew there were people (who) don’t see visions.”

While some literally can’t visualize things when they close their eyes (a condition known as aphantasia), others, such as Aupaluktuq-Hickes, are graced with an abundance of vision.

As well as drawing, the artist creates a host of outerwear (kamik, parkas, mitts and crocheted hats) and is one of three Nunavut artists participating in the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq’s second annual artist-in-residency program in collaboration with the Government of Nunavut.

Museum gift shops choose inventory wisely, fill pockets of creators

Museum and art gallery gifts shops are a lucrative business for government-funded public spaces.

The revenue these boutiques generate provides vital support to the organizations they are attached to, often supplementing funding for programming, community activities and collection maintenance.

Whether you are buying a $1,200 original work of art, a $180 backpack or a $30 pencil case, a proportion of what you spend not only goes towards the care of these cultural institutions, it also directly supports the work of artists and makers.

At ShopWAG, WAG-Qaumajuq’s retail arm, your dollar, more often than not, goes into pockets of Canadian creatives.

Calligrapher Janet Murata flips the script from humdrum digital to exquisite analogue

Every time Janet Murata puts pen to paper she is taking part in her own form of resistance.

The calligrapher’s practice is a “gentle act of rebellion against technology and the addictions of smartphones, email and social media.”

Murata weaves her art into her daily routine.

“My calligraphy shows up everywhere, whether I am writing a letter to a friend, a note to a teacher or my grocery list. My pen comes with me everywhere I go, although you can do calligraphy with pretty much everything — you could use a carrot, a feather or a stick — it doesn’t have to be a pen,” she says.

Feds give $9.5 million to Prairie arts organizations

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet has about 2.25 million new reasons to dance. The civic institution is one of eight Manitoba and five Saskatchewan arts organizations getting a share of about $9.58 million in funding through the federal government’s Prairie Performing Arts Initiative, Winnipeg South MP Terry Duguid announced in the ballet’s foyer Friday morning.

One-woman show Prophecy masterfully unpacks mythology of male hubris

In Prophecy, Jessy Ardern’s brilliant retelling of Homeric mythology brought to light by a quartet of long-suffering women, the dining room table is the literal homefront of the Trojan War, a domestic theatre where biscuits and reason are proffered while war is mongered elsewhere by men who never listen and rarely apologize.

Casey and Diana features breathtaking moments and dark humour

The AIDS epidemic that began ravaging the LGBTTQ+ community in the 1980s spawned a tear-soaked legacy of plays, films and books, including Angels in America, Philadelphia and Holding the Man, among so many others.

Award-winning Canadian playwright Nick Green’s moving Casey and Diana is part of that sober lineage, a testament to the power of hope for all those living in the face of impending death.

The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s co-production with Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius, sensitively directed by Andrew Kushnir, opened Thursday at the John Hirsch Mainstage. The story is inspired by the true-life tale of Princess Diana’s groundbreaking 1991 visit to Toronto’s Casey House, Canada’s first stand-alone treatment facility for people living with HIV/AIDS; the way the princess unflinchingly held the hands of the infirm during the height of the crisis smashed barriers in how these patients were treated and viewed in society.

However, the two-act drama, which premièred at the Stratford Festival in 2023, is also about the wounds of family dysfunction and the way communities of strangers can bring solace to deeply scarred souls through newly forged relationships.