Live wires

There’s not much glitz or glamour in the world of public access television, and that’s part of what makes the medium enticing to Winnipeg artist Gislina Patterson, who’s spent hundreds of hours watching YouTube clips of low-budget, off-the-wall programming that wasn’t beholden to Nielsen ratings or network interference.

“What’s really exciting about those shows is that they’re this really pure, free form of expression,” says Patterson, who with Dasha Plett runs We Quit Theatre, a collaborative performance collective that wilfully and skilfully defies expectation.

“It’s people making something that they really like, that they really, really want to make. They have professional equipment, but there’s no expectation of what the material they create will be. And there are really beautiful things that emerge out of that.”

Plett and Patterson’s latest beautiful thing is Men Explain Things to Us … And We Like It!, a project that is exactly as it sounds, but so much more.

In front of a construction-paper Winnipeg skyline, the duo play themselves in the guise of clueless late-night talk show hosts who listen enthusiastically as men explain their passions; the overarching result is a alt-comic exploration of masculinity the hosts intend to be sincere, odd and enlightening.

“We both, as trans people, have really complicated and intricate relationships to masculinity that I think we’re really interested in exploring further,” says Plett, a sound designer who performs experimental music across the city under the moniker Princess Dasha. “Femininity is so analyzed, scrutinized, discussed, discoursed and constantly put under a microscope, so we were really interested in what would happen if we tried to do the same thing with masculinity, and get in there. Zoom in, zoom in, zoom in. Computer, enhance.”

The first episode — on the subject of fantasy — was shot in Winnipeg last Friday and simulcast to YouTube and to screenings at the Dave Barber Cinematheque, at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and to a live performance venue in Guelph.

Topics broached were Dungeons and Dragons, explained by Omar Samuels, and becoming Mick Jagger, explained by tribute artist Cory Bellhouse.

Noise artists Camping with Bret — Winnipeg’s Bret Parenteau, Sam Neal and Pat Klassen — provided sonic interludes from the comfort of a purplish cave.

Around 120 people tuned in. In-studio seating for upcoming episodes dealing with romance (Friday) and men (Feb. 20) — sold out in minutes, but the programs will be shown free at Cinematheque or on a pay-what-you-can basis for home audiences. All screening information can be found at wequittheatre.ca or on Instagram @wequittheatre.

“I would say there’s an element of this project that’s a love letter to Winnipeg. We wanted to make something with the fascinating, but also strange, people and artists of Winnipeg. Let’s celebrate those people,” says Plett.

Featuring “advertisements” commissioned from video artists across Canada and musical guests curated by local sound art festival Send+Receive, Men Explain is filmed in front of a live studio audience at We Quit’s Exchange District headquarters, with director Ryan Steel — who wrapped up production on his first feature film, Meat, last fall — heading up a crew equipped with vintage camcorders and recording gear.

Using equipment, and a format, that some might consider antiquated is an esthetic, practical and pointed choice to explore media production and audience access options in 2026.

“One of the things we’re trying to think through with this project is that theatre is very expensive to produce, and as arts funding gets less and less, as live performance continues to grapple with that, we want to ask what (artists) mean to the public,” says Plett. “All this means that getting work programmed is harder and harder. So we were really interested in keeping this project going, imagining alternate forms of creative partnerships, and imagining different ideas of what a venue is.”

“Maybe a venue is a really enthusiastic person who has access to some meeting room, a bed sheet and a projector.”

The cable access-YouTube hybrid is also an attempt by We Quit to revisit the “much-decried format of Zoom theatre,” which Plett and Patterson felt was too quickly abandoned.

“For the most part those experiments left a lot unexplored at the intersection of live streaming and live performance, so we really wanted to lean into that,” Plett says.

As a followup to last fall’s stage production of Glory, a movement-driven reconsideration of vintage media utopias (Playboy and Free to Be You and Me), Men Explain sees We Quit continuing to splice themselves into nostalgic formats, blurring the lines between past, present and future.

“Our references are mostly 1990s public access TV, the costumes and the set are leaning pretty ’70s, but our guests are all real men who live in the year 2026,” says Patterson — the child of local theatre couple Arne MacPherson and Debbie Patterson — who was just named to Prairie Theatre Exchange and Manitoba Association of Playwrights’ two-year playwrights unit.

“There are a lot of visual nods to that more nostalgic era,” says Plett. “I think we feel a lot of kinship with those eras but they also didn’t have a lot of trans people visible in them. This project is in so many ways inspired by the stuff we love, but it’s also placing ourselves within it, creating a little fantasy world where the ’70s also includes people like us.”

For Patterson, each heavily improvisatory episode feels like a puzzle being produced, shared and somewhat solved in real-time.

“We have all the correct pieces for a talk show, but they’re totally wrong in different ways,” he says. “I’m really excited about what will come together.”

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman

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