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The Arts

SUPPLIED Carolyn Basha’s (second from left) husband Gilles Fournier and children Emelia, Maura and Sam Fournier organized a concert in her honour.

Music and memories

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Yesterday at 2:02 AM CDT

Carolyn Basha, a behind-the-scenes superstar of the Manitoba arts world, will be celebrated by her family and friends at a memorial concert on Friday at the Desautels Concert Hall — a University of Manitoba venue Basha helped will into existence.

Before her death in July 2024 following a brief and sudden bout of cancer, the university’s director of major gifts — a trained classical pianist and longtime arts volunteer — ensured the school’s newest performance facility got as much financial support as possible, raising millions of dollars toward its construction.

Stephanie Levene, the university’s associate vice-president of alumni and donor relations says that though Basha didn’t live to see the venue’s opening last September, the concert hall’s existence is a testament to her late colleague’s commitment to the project.

“Her fingerprints are all over every aspect of it,” Levene says.

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Stellar cast doubles down on hilarity in funeral comedy

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Stellar cast doubles down on hilarity in funeral comedy

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Friday, Oct. 17, 2025

Dearly beloved and decidedly estranged gather for overdue hellos and forced goodbyes in Liars at a Funeral, a genial comedy about changing characters that’s carried by a perfectly selected cast faithfully committed to the undertaking.

As the clouds of a superstorm encircle an unnamed small town, the relatives of Mavis (Mariam Bernstein) flow, one by one, into the Prairie Rest parking lot, returning to emotional territory they’ve long avoided or neglected until absolutely necessary.

“I only come home when someone’s dead,” Evelyn (Monique Marcker) says, scripting her mother’s eulogy in her head to her gay BFF Frank (Cory Wojcik) outside the chapel doors.

But the memorial will have to wait, even as granddaughter DeeDee (Shannon Loewen) and the ambitious funeral employee Quint (Mackenzie Wojcik, Cory’s son) pepper the austere premises with preparatory tissues.

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Friday, Oct. 17, 2025

Dylan Hewlett photo

Playwright Sophia Fabiilli gives each actor the opportunity to play multiple roles.
Dylan Hewlett photo Playwright Sophia Fabiilli gives each actor the opportunity to play multiple roles.

PTE gets $100-K donation from theatre co-founder

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Preview

PTE gets $100-K donation from theatre co-founder

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025

Colin Jackson gave the Prairie Theatre Exchange audience reason to cheer before the show began Wednesday when he announced a $100,000 donation to the downtown arts organization, located since 1989 in Portage Place mall.

Jackson, who in 1973 co-founded Manitoba Theatre Workshop, the organization’s predecessor, said that he was spurred to make the sizable contribution when he first heard the company had hired its newest artistic director, Ann Hodges.

That hiring caused “a wave of joy” amongst the older generation of PTE’s boosters, said Jackson, flanked by Hodges and managing director Katie Inverarity on the set of season-opening production Liars at a Funeral, a comedy written by Sophia Fabiilli.

The energetic Jackson, who lives in Calgary and for whom PTE’s studio theatre is named, reflected on the organization’s opening acts in the former Grain Exchange Building.

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Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025

JOEY SENFT PHOTO

Colin Jackson presents a donation to PTE artistic director Ann Hodges on Wednesday.
JOEY SENFT PHOTO Colin Jackson presents a donation to PTE artistic director Ann Hodges on Wednesday.

Family feuds get resurrected in lively Prairie Theatre Exchange comedy

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Family feuds get resurrected in lively Prairie Theatre Exchange comedy

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025

Portage Place is under construction, but Prairie Theatre Exchange is open for business.

Above the silenced food court, on the third floor of the downtown shopping mall, the regional theatre company is readying for its season-opening run of Liars at a Funeral, a zippy comedy from Toronto playwright Sophia Fabiilli about a memorial service that turns out to be an elaborate sham. Mavis (Mariam Bernstein) isn’t actually dead: she just figures the news might be the one thing powerful enough to unify the warring factions of her estranged family.

Not only is the matriarch alive and well, but any rumours of PTE’s hibernation during Portage Place’s $650-million redevelopment are exaggerated and unfactual.

Ann Hodges, the company’s artistic director, says that the box office is “much more in line” with pre-COVID figures, while season subscriptions, which cratered in 2020, are experiencing a significant rebound.

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Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025

Dylan Hewlett photo

Cory Wojcik (left) and Shannon Loewen in Prairie Theatre Exchange’s season-opening production of Liars at a Funeral.

Dylan Hewlett photo Cory Wojcik (left) and Shannon Loewen in Prairie Theatre Exchange’s season-opening production of Liars at a Funeral.

Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra posts $141-K surplus

Conrad Sweatman 4 minute read Preview

Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra posts $141-K surplus

Conrad Sweatman 4 minute read Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025

Angela Birdsell is venturing out on a high note.

Last year, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra executive director, who in August announced she would not be renewing her WSO contract, had a hard time seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

The WSO was facing a $1.3-million budget gap, which Birdsell says seemed intractable at a time when the orchestra’s board-designated COVID reserve was used up. To boot, the WSO was carrying forward a $250,000 deficit from the previous season.

This week, the WSO announced at its annual general meeting that the orchestra is closing its 2024/25 books with an operating surplus of $140,919.

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Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025

MATT DUBOFF PHOTO

WSO ticket sales this past season rose by 30 per cent over the previous year.
MATT DUBOFF PHOTO WSO ticket sales this past season rose by 30 per cent over the previous year.

U of M grad shortlisted for Sobey Art Award

Conrad Sweatman 3 minute read Preview

U of M grad shortlisted for Sobey Art Award

Conrad Sweatman 3 minute read Friday, Oct. 3, 2025

ARTIST, curator and writer Chukwudubem Ukaigwe has been shortlisted to represent the Prairies region for the prestigious Sobey Art Award 2025.

His work is on display until Feb. 8, 2026, at the National Gallery of Canada for the 2025 Sobey Art Award Exhibition with five other artists representing the Circumpolar, Pacific, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic regions.

The annual award is the largest and arguably most important Canadian prize for contemporary visual artists.

Sobey recognition can be life-changing: shortlisted artists receive $25,000, while remaining longlisted artists (from 25 in total) receive $10,000. The winner, announced Nov. 8, receives $100,000.

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Friday, Oct. 3, 2025

Supplied

Artist Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Supplied Artist Chukwudubem Ukaigwe

Edgy New York comic gears up for pushing buttons at Winnipeg show

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Preview

Edgy New York comic gears up for pushing buttons at Winnipeg show

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Sam Morril.

There’s a better chance almost everyone you know who’s addicted to Instagram and TikTok has.

The New York standup comedian thrives in a space between edgy online counterculture and traditional mainstream success, with its network TV and Hollywood trappings.

No surprise that the gravelly voiced comic, who relishes barbs that needle both sides of hot-button issues, talks smack about both worlds.

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Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025

SUPPLIED

Sam Morril performs at the Club Regent Event Centre Sunday at 7 p.m.
SUPPLIED Sam Morril performs at the Club Regent Event Centre Sunday at 7 p.m.

Hamming it up online

Eva Wasney 4 minute read Preview

Hamming it up online

Eva Wasney 4 minute read Monday, Sep. 29, 2025

One man’s attempt to pass off hamburgers as “steamed hams” has become another man’s magnum opus.

Winnipeg graphic designer Tyrone Deise has achieved YouTube fame for his creative renditions of an iconic Simpsons sketch in which principal Seymour Skinner hosts school superintendent Gary Chalmers for an unforgettable luncheon.

The episode, which first aired in 1996, sees Skinner serving his boss fast food after his carefully prepared roast goes up in flames. Calf stretching and alleged aurora borealis sightings ensue.

Deise, 44, is a hobbyist filmmaker who grew up watching The Simpsons. After seeing the episode memed online, he decided to remake the steamed hams bit in the style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He submitted the silent, black-and-white Super 8 film to the local WNDX Festival of Moving Image and uploaded it to his YouTube channel (@TyroneDeise) in 2022, without a second thought.

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Monday, Sep. 29, 2025
Hamming it up online

Winnipeg Film Group programmer left no scrap behind

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Winnipeg Film Group programmer left no scrap behind

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Friday, Sep. 26, 2025

Dave Barber kept nearly everything.

His family, friends and co-workers knew this, but still, when he died in 2021, members of the longtime Winnipeg Film Group programmer’s inner circle were astonished by the variety contained in Barber’s personal archive, which held more than 50 years’ worth of typewritten letters — to Groucho Marx, to George Lucas, to the makers of Hawkins Cheezies — plus hand-designed leaflets, ambulance bills, inane newspaper clippings, Cinematheque programs, nuclear fallout plans, printed-out emails and one-of-a-kind bits of Canadian film arcana.

“Not literally, but sort of literally, a cheese-sandwich recipe was next to the earliest bylaws for the Winnipeg Film Group,” says filmmaker and writer, Clint Enns.

Over the past three years, Enns and Andrew Burke, a professor at the University of Winnipeg, sifted through 47 banker’s boxes filled with Barber’s personal effects — narrowing the trove down to produce a touching, hilarious and all-encompassing portrait of the city’s most devoted evangelist for independent film, clarifying the enduring vision that underlied his pack-rattish tendencies.

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Friday, Sep. 26, 2025

SUPPLED

Dave Barber as a young man: From the Archives of Dave Barber — edited by Andrew Burke and Clint Enns
SUPPLED Dave Barber as a young man: From the Archives of Dave Barber — edited by Andrew Burke and Clint Enns

Indigenous stories given wings by peers, playwrights

Ben Waldman 8 minute read Preview

Indigenous stories given wings by peers, playwrights

Ben Waldman 8 minute read Wednesday, Sep. 24, 2025

Six Indigenous storytellers are sharing new works with local audiences this week through Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Pimootayowin: A Festival of New Work.

From October to May, the participants — Martha Troian, Dannielle Morrisseau, Andrea Friesen, Julia Ross, Kirby Fults and Donnie Osler — worked with program director and playwright Ian Ross (FareWel) to learn with and from one another, a peer-focused experience that Friesen, a longtime stagehand and lighting professional, describes as eye-opening.

“The others gave me the strength to continue on telling my story as they said to me, ‘This is a powerful story and it needs to be told and heard.’ Those words will forever sit with me,” says Friesen, whose Redwood Woman — a fact-based story of a young Métis woman raised in Winnipeg’s Child and Family Services System fighting to keep her child — will be read tonight at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

Friesen, Troian and Fults talked to the Free Press about their experiences working within Pimootayowin, a word that means journey in Anishinaabemowin.

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Wednesday, Sep. 24, 2025

Supplied

Ian Ross (standing) introduces Martha Troian’s reading of her new work, The Creatives.
Supplied Ian Ross (standing) introduces Martha Troian’s reading of her new work, The Creatives.

WCD’s season lineup promises to keep audiences on their toes

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Preview

WCD’s season lineup promises to keep audiences on their toes

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Saturday, Sep. 20, 2025

Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers are putting the Winnipeg part of their name in bold with a hyper-local 61st season.

“It’s the first time in a really long time that all three subscription series shows will feature local dancers,” says artistic director Jolene Bailie. “So that’s huge for us.”

Typically, at least one show in the WCD’s subscription series — which is composed of three shows, usually presented at the Rachel Browne Theatre in the fall, winter and spring — will feature a visiting performer, as when Canadian contemporary dance icon Margie Gillis brought her solo show Old to Winnipeg last season.

This season will, however, feature a visiting choreographer. The first show of 2025/26 is Croquis (Nov. 21 to 23) by Vancouver choreographer/performance artist Ralph Escamillan, who served as a WCD artist-in-residence during the pandemic and could only work with the dancers virtually.

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Saturday, Sep. 20, 2025

JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS

Carol-Ann Bohrn and Reymark Capacete perform Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ Retuning.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS Carol-Ann Bohrn and Reymark Capacete perform Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ Retuning.

Play serves as prism for different politics, histories

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Play serves as prism for different politics, histories

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Thursday, Sep. 18, 2025

If you can’t make it to opening night for the latest production from Theatre Projects Manitoba, don’t fret: there are five premières for The Only Good Indian, with each solo performance vastly different from the next.

Developed in 2017 by Jivesh Parasram and Tom Arthur Davis, OGI invites theatre artists to individually interpret their own politics, cultural backgrounds and personal colonial histories as the clock ticks away on an explosive vest.

“There’s a suicide bomber on stage, and there’s a time limit, everything’s going to blow up and we’re all going to die,” says Parasram, who with Davis runs the action-based theatre collective Pandemic Theatre, founded in 2010.

While much of the material consists of scripted political lectures that have been delivered during prior runs in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto, each artist — Parasram and Davis, along with Winnipeg’s Debbie Paterson, Eric Plamondon and Hazel Venzon — responds creatively to a set of prompts to consider the bomber’s mindset, filling in the blanks to provoke reflection and audience introspection: What pressures might drive such desperate action? How severe must a situation be for one to consider such a seemingly irrational decision?

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Thursday, Sep. 18, 2025

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS

Only Good Indian creators Tom Arthur Davis (left) and Jivesh Parasram (right) and performer Eric Plamondon (centre) at the PTE on Tuesday.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Only Good Indian creators Tom Arthur Davis (left) and Jivesh Parasram (right) and performer Eric Plamondon (centre) at the PTE on Tuesday.

Taking Reel Pride in transformation

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Preview

Taking Reel Pride in transformation

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Wednesday, Sep. 17, 2025

Reel Pride isn’t entering a mid-life crisis.

At 40, the annual Winnipeg LGBTTQ+ film festival appears as forward-looking as ever — though at the moment, its president, Ray Desautels, is feeling reflective about its arc.

“The festival started at a time when … you didn’t see LGBTQ characters on television, and if you did, they were shown in a very poor light or very stereotypical way,” he says.

“It’s become more, I think, a gathering place for queer people and queer arts … It’s more of an arts festival, not necessarily just strictly the film festival that it used to be. So we’re a gathering place for the queer community and its allies and supporters.”

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Wednesday, Sep. 17, 2025

Supplied

Odd Fish follows childhood friends Björn and Hjalti as they open a restaurant and as Björn transitions into Birna.
Supplied Odd Fish follows childhood friends Björn and Hjalti as they open a restaurant and as Björn transitions into Birna.

Artist explores internal dialogues with a surreal twist

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Preview

Artist explores internal dialogues with a surreal twist

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Friday, Sep. 12, 2025

Can you ever truly be alone with your thoughts when your thoughts don’t leave you alone?

In the oil and acrylic paintings that populate Bria Fernandes’ solo show, Things Left Unsaid — on view now at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg — feelings and thoughts of self-doubt, anxiety, grief and displacement show up as physical visitors, often in the most banal moments of daily life. Like when you’re brushing your teeth, say. Or making coffee.

In the 2024 work Ain’t Misbehavin’, they arrive when the central figure is pulling on her socks. A melancholy blue figure leans against her thigh as though seeking comfort. Another appears from behind, hands on her shoulders.

“She’s trying to live her life, and she’s having these thoughts, and the thoughts in her mind are coming out into reality and interacting with her,” Fernandes says.

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Friday, Sep. 12, 2025

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS

Bria Fernandes’ show Things Left Unsaid is on display now at Gallery 1C03 in the University of Winnipeg.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Bria Fernandes’ show Things Left Unsaid is on display now at Gallery 1C03 in the University of Winnipeg.

Playboy un-funnies

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Friday, Sep. 12, 2025

Legends are printed and shredded to ribbons in Glory, an astonishingly well-calibrated demonstration of technical wizardry, textual analysis and embodied historiography from the independent collective We Quit Theatre.

Across two hours, this performance invites audiences back in time behind the gates of the Playboy Mansion, a self-mythologized Xanadu overseen by publishing magnate Hugh Hefner (impeccably portrayed by Emma Beech, whose serpentine delivery consistently surprises and delights).

Other guests to the party include undercover bunny Gloria Steinem (Dasha Plett), a hapless Shel Silverstein (Arne MacPherson) and a charismatic MC (the banjo-plucking Dhanu Chinniah) who serves as a spiritual guide and protective spirit as the dreamhouse turns nightmarish.

Like the listeners of the gender-affirming album that forms the sonic backbone of the production, Glory is free to be whatever its creators decide it should become, and the result is a brilliant, modernist portrait of trans liberation — from theatrical expectation, from societal oppression and from the rigid binary gazes that silence, censor and threaten equitable expression by marginalized groups.

Photographer focuses on finding the whimsical

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Preview

Photographer focuses on finding the whimsical

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2025

Synesthesia — a psychological condition associated with sounds producing the sensation of colours and shapes — is supposed to affect many of the world’s musical savants.

Interdisciplinary Winnipeg artist Ayoub Moustarzak seems to have this condition in inverse.

“This song was a little backwards. I started with visuals,” he says of his debut single, Breaks Apart, a theatrical ballad featuring pianist Dallas Nedotiafko, released in August.

“(My music) is more of a visual storytelling experience that comes with a song.”

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Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2025

Ayoub Moustarzak photo

Edmonton pop artist Margo.
Ayoub Moustarzak photo Edmonton pop artist Margo.

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