RMTC’s the Bridge revamped in online format

It was in January 2020 when newly minted artistic director Kelly Thornton announced her first programmed season at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — a little more than a year, and a lifetime ago.

By June, her inaugural season was abbreviated, and later in the year, jettisoned altogether in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Thornton, one of the more heartbreaking cancellations was the Bridge, a “Festival of Ideas” intended to replace the Master Playwrights Festival.

Conceived as a multi-faceted community event encompassing plays, panels, concerts, symposiums and communal gatherings, the Bridge would “balance great theatre with dialogue and insight,” Thornton said when she first announced it. “It’s a place to ask questions, laugh, listen and learn.”

“It came out of a talk about how do I serve my community? What do I do for next generation of artists that are wanting to feel included. How can I support them?” Thornton said.

On the night table: Carol Off

Carol Off: Author, True Patriot Love

I’m about to start On Treason By Patrick Lennox. I recently finished reading Margaret Atwood’s memoir Book of Lives and loved it; I came to understand, from her point of view, all the things that made me fall in love with Canadian literature as a young person. Now I understand how difficult it was to actually get published in this country from the points of view of those writing, and all the wonderful, wacky stories Atwood has about culture in Canada.

Carol Off launches True Patriot Love on Wednesday, Nov. 25 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

Group’s second LP made to get hearts racing

While a live performance is a moment in time that comes and goes, a record is something that, ostensibly, lives on.

Both are important, often complementary methods of artistic expression for any band of musicians, not the least independent local artists carving out names for themselves in the dark heart of the continent.

Claire Thérèse & the Lockdown are celebrating the vinyl release of Racing Heart, its second full-length LP, with a gig tonight at Public Domain. The group’s last full-length record, Villainy!, was released in 2022.

“For me, this seems like perfect timing,” says Thérèse, primary vocalist and songwriter in the group. “This album has been done for almost two years now. I don’t even know if I would call it procrastination, (but) there are just those steps that one needs to take to actually release something into the world, and that’s how long it has taken me.”

Database issues cloud city homeless numbers

The head of End Homelessness Winnipeg says she has no confidence in data about the city’s homeless population due to problems with the federal system that tracks those numbers.

Jennifer Rattray, the organization’s chief executive officer, told the Free Press Thursday it continues to work with the federal government to resolve problems with the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System, which keeps tabs on people who access homelessness services.

CBC has reported it obtained an internal memo from EHW that shows that as of the end of March, the number of chronically homeless Winnipeggers had fallen to 436 from about 4,400, as a result of efforts to correct the database.

Earlier this year, the organization had reported more than 8,000 people were accessing services.