What’s up: Top 5 picks

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This article was published 02/02/2017 (3491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 

The Great Skate

Winnipeggers love to get out for a good skate in winter, whether it be at a local rink or on one of the two rivers that cut through the city. Anyone who has visited The Forks on a winter weekend can attest to the hundreds who convene where the Red and the Assiniboine converge and take to the ice.

Which is almost certainly one of the reasons the local chapter of the November Project, a group of fitness enthusiasts who meet bright and early for gruelling workouts every Wednesday morning, have organized an event on Sunday, Feb. 5, to help celebrate the season.

The Great Skate is a six-kilometre race that begins on the ice at The Forks and wraps up on the Red River Mutual Trail. Don’t be intimidated — the race is open to skaters of all skill levels. In fact, if you don’t have skates, the rental shop at The Forks will be open beforehand for all your needs.

After the race, participants can stick around for an awards ceremony, as well as a brunch by Nuburger and Tall Grass Prairie at The Common at The Forks. Hey, with Sunday’s forecast looking brisk, nobody will judge you if you tucked into a pint of stout or a hearty glass of red wine from the kiosk at the market, right?

Registration is free, while the brunch costs $12. To register in advance, visit wfp.to/gcE; otherwise, skaters can register in person between 8 and 8:45 a.m. in the atrium at The Forks.

—Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson

 

 

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Starting From Baroque

Winnipeg opera buffs can get a taste of five famous shows this week, thanks to the University of Manitoba Opera Theatre class.

The annual excerpts show by students from the Desautels Faculty of Music is called Starting From Baroque and debuts Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the John J. Conklin Theatre at the university’s Taché Arts Complex, 162 Dafoe Rd. W. Two more performances are scheduled: Friday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Feb. 11, at 2:30 p.m.

The group will perform excerpts from Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo; Francesco Cavalli’s L’Egisto; The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart; A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Benjamin Britten and The Seagull by Thomas Pasatieri.

Tickets are $20 for adults and $12 for students, and can be purchased at the Music General Office, Room T319 at the Taché Arts Complex, or with cash at the door.

 

— Alan Small

 

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Cathy Jones

If you’re a fan of CBC satirical news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and if a particular source of your laughs is Canadian comedy veteran Cathy Jones, maybe a short highway drive isn’t too much to ask.

Jones is currently touring Canada with her one-woman show, Stranger to Hard Work, and her only Manitoba stop is on Friday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. at the William Glesby Theatre in Portage la Prairie. The show is a mix of standup comedy and soul-searching confessions that finds Jones discussing a range of topics that includes the aging process, living in the age of social media and dealing with attention deficit disorder.

Tickets for the show are $45, available at the William Glesby Centre.

— Brad Oswald

 

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Shärt International Comedy Film Festival

Short. Long. In between. From Australia to Sweden, and from Gimli to Transcona. The fifth annual Shärt International Comedy Film Festival has the screen-silliness scene very well covered. The event, which takes place Saturday, Feb. 4, at the Park Theatre and is hosted by local favourite Big Daddy Tazz, features comedy films in three categories — Sharty Shorts (less than one minute in length), Regular (one to 20 minutes) and Longer Laughs (20 to 60 minutes).

The well-populated regular-length category boasts entries from Spain, Britain, France, Lebanon, Australia, the U.S. and Canada; among this year’s local selections are Flashkick: A Kumite Revenge Story by Transcona’s BJ Verot; Imitations, a collaborative effort by Winnipeg-based Ian Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco that screened at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival; and The Audience Choice Runner-up by Trevor Kristjanson, Kevin Tabachnick and Chaz Beaudette of Gimli.

Tickets for the event, which include pre-show cocktail reception and gala screening, are $15, available at the Park Theatre or EventBrite.ca.

— Brad Oswald

 

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Soul Sisters

When Danielle Sturk was just 14 years old, she decided to leave the Catholic Church, leading her concerned mother to tell the rebellious future filmmaker that it is always more effective to rock the boat “when you’re still inside the boat.”

Coincidentally, that exact sentiment is expressed by a nun, Sister Darlaene, in Sturk’s documentary Soul Sisters, a multi-faceted look at the Catholic Sisters of Manitoba starting Friday, Feb. 3, at Cinematheque.

Sturk initially took on the subject out of curiosity.

“I have a fairly strong feminist bent and I had been brought up Catholic and this was something I had wanted to look into,” says Sturk, now 49. “What are these women doing there? What is appealing to them in what is, to my mind, a fairly patriarchal construct where women aren’t given a voice, or a place?

“I thought it was an opportunity for me to explore that and, at the same time, give voice to a group of people who don’t necessarily have a public voice.”

Even if Sturk herself remains in the camp of the lapsed Catholic, the film is very much a celebration of the women who provide aid, comfort and relief to segments of society most would prefer to ignore.

“It definitely made an impression on me,” says Sturk, whose previous work includes the Rachel Browne dance documentary A Good Madness. “I think for many people who haven’t actually met nuns or haven’t rubbed shoulders with them, they’ll discover highly educated people for the most part, varied people. They’re fascinating and they’re individuals.”

Sturk hasn’t changed her mind about returning to the fold, but she is impressed by the work being done in the name of the church.

“I still feel there’s a lot of raging against the night to do there,” she says. “But what I did see was people who feel that social justice is terribly important.

“If I were to take anything from my background, it’s that early Christianity was about taking care of thy neighbour, which relates to right now with our whole political environment,” she says. “A society should be judged by how they take care of the weak and vulnerable and that’s what these nuns have done.”

Sturk’s 55-minute doc runs with a shorter film from 2012, Les Filles de la Croix, director Dominique Rey’s meditative examination of the lives of a disappearing order of nuns in Winnipeg, Brazil, Argentina and France. Showtimes are at www.winnipegcinematheque.com.

— Randall King