Folklorama in the family

IVAN Tkach and his sister Isabel are in warm-up clothes, rehearsing to an empty hall with their ensemble, Zoloto Ukrainian Dance. In a little over two hours, they will be resplendent in their dance costumes — Ivan in sharovary, those voluminous pants; Isabel with a vinok, the ribboned flower crown, perched on her head — performing to a full house at the Spirit of Ukraine Pavilion at Folklorama. They will dance in three shows tonight, and are half-way through a weeklong, 23-show run.

Winnipeg musician, guitar instructor an online phenomenon

Steve Onotera might be the most visible Winnipeg musician whose name doesn’t end in Cummings, Bachman or Kreviazuk.

The 34-year-old Japanese-Canadian, who makes his living online as the Samurai Guitarist, has 77,000 followers on Instagram, and a tick over 975,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. There, his guitar-centric videos, some educational (“How to make the worst chords sound great”), others entertaining (“Why is this the PERFECT acoustic guitar song?”), have been viewed collectively more than 100 million times since he became a social media six-stringer in 2014.

(Spoiler alert: it’s the Beatles’ Blackbird.)

Before we begin, though, Onotera, as adept at Vivaldi as he is Van Halen, would like to thank a former classmate for beating him out for the lead-guitar part in a Grade 8 musical production, a perceived slight that caused him to head home, grab his axe and spend the next 12 months perfecting his chops.