What’s Up: Tanya Talaga, Tara Players, MCO, WhereWeStand, WSO, Make Poverty History concert

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This article was published 14/11/2024 (614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tanya Talaga launches The Knowing

• In conversation with David A. Robertson
• McNally Robinson Booksellers (1120 Grant Ave.)
• Friday, 7 p.m.
• Free

An old brown file folder, inherited from her uncle, sent Toronto-based investigative journalist Tanya Talaga down a path that wound its way through generations of her family’s history — and the impact, past and present, of Indian residential schools on Indigenous communities across Canada.

The folder contained scraps of information about Annie Carpenter, Talaga’s great-great-grandmother, a Cree woman from the James Bay area. Talaga, an Anishinaabe author and member of Fort William First Nation, began trying to fill in the blanks about Annie’s life by visiting a range of First Nations communities where she was thought to have lived, connecting with archivists and scouring archives.

Meanwhile, while reporting for the Globe and Mail on the 2021 findings at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, Talaga also began connecting with more and more school survivors and their families, developing a wider, more overarching narrative around the history of residential schools and the profound, persisting impact on Indigenous families and communities.

The result is The Knowing, published by HarperCollins in August, which Talaga launches in Winnipeg on Friday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location, where she’ll be joined in conversation by Swampy Cree author David A. Robertson.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

Talaga’s previous non-fiction work includes 2017’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, which won the RBC Taylor Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Writers’ Trust Prize for political writing, and 2018’s All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, which was based on her CBC Massey lectures.

Admission is free; the event will also be streamed on McNally’s YouTube channel. And for those wanting to learn more about Talaga’s journey, a four-part documentary series (also called The Knowing) is on CBC Gem.

— Ben Sigurdson

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The Tara Players make their comeback

• Irish Association of Manitoba, 654 Erin St.
• Tonight through Saturday, 8 p.m.
• Admission $15

Following a successful fundraising campaign to save the roof from collapse, the Irish Association of Manitoba’s Tara Players return to their Erin Street stomping grounds for the world première of playwright Brendan Carruthers’ Once a Dream.

A founding member of the players, the Dublin-born Carruthers’ latest is set in a blended reality, with the action taking place in 1980s Ireland, pre-1916 Dublin, and on the battlefields of Gallipoli and Verdun during the First World War.

Directed by Ray Cloutier, with set and costume design by Jane Hilder (a professional landscape designer and collaborator of the indie troupe the 28th Minute), the cast features Tim Webster, Rob Kwade, Alistair Wright, Alison Kolisnyk, Justin Fry and Bernard Boland. Boland’s character, Old Jack Riley, is at the heart of the story, sharing his memories to unburden himself, in the process bringing the ghosts of his past back to life.

Since the company’s founding in 1973, the Tara Players have produced more than 200 plays, operating out of the Irish Association’s 83-seat theatre on Erin Street.

Tickets are $15 at irishassociationofmanitoba.ca.

— Ben Waldman

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Dialogue: Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt

• Crescent Arts Centre, 525 Wardlaw Ave.
• Tonight, 7:30 p.m.
• Tickets: $16-$45 at themco.ca

Witness a magical meeting of musical minds as two celebrated American concert pianists come together as a duo in Dialogue, a program presented by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.

The Grammy-nominated Simone Dinnerstein and the Grammy-winning Awadagin Pratt will perform Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos, No. 3, BWV 1062 in C Minor and Mozart’s Two Piano Concerto No. 10, K. 365 with the MCO. The program, conducted by former MCO artist-in-residence Aisslinn Nosky, will also feature Shaker Loops by John Adams.

Dinnerstein and Pratt are neither strangers to Winnipeg audiences, having both performed here individually, nor are they strangers to each other: they have been friends for a quarter of a century.

“We’ve done various Bach concertos for two, three and four pianos …. but for the past year we’ve started playing recitals together, and it has been tremendously inspiring to work with him,” Dinnerstein told Winnipeg’s Classic 107. “He is such an interesting musician.”

Tickets are available at the MCO’s website.

— Jen Zoratti

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One Land, Two Hearts: WhereWeStand project

• Stuart Clark Garden of Contemplation, Level 3, CMHR
• Sunday, 1 p.m.
• Free; pre-registration required at humanrights.ca

WhereWeStand is a live multimedia project that brings together Indigenous participants and non-Indigenous immigrants to express the commonalities of identity and belonging in the colonialism of Canada.

Aaron McKay, an Anishinaabe man from Rolling River First Nation who now lives in Minnedosa, and Izzeddin Hawamda, a Palestinian man and Winnipeg resident who came to Canada 18 years ago, are two Manitobans featured in the project, which has 12 other participants from across the country.

Working in pairs, the cohort produced creative works that include dance, film, music, theatre and material art, re-imagining their relationship with the land and its people.

The event includes film screenings, live performances and a discussion.

— AV Kitching

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Miller Conducts Marsalis & Liszt

• Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
• Centennial Concert Hall
• Thursday, 7 p.m.
• Tickets $16-89 at wso.ca

If classical music concerts have a natural temporal home, it’s 7 p.m., Tuesday-Thursday. Apparently, organizers believe classical fans to be early weekday risers who party on the weekends.

In this sense, tonight’s WSO concert is utterly ordinary, but its program is anything but.

We have four stops on a tour of the last two centuries of classical music. Franz Liszt’s Les Préludes (1850) is one of the world’s first “symphonic poems,” meaning a symphony that tries to represent the contents of a poem, story or painting. You may not know that Les Préludes represents Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques or what any of this even means – it’s like those French have a different word for everything – but no matter, it all sounds so magnifique.

Moving from Old World to New, we have two pieces by American musicians bridging jazz and classical: Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations (1930) and Wynston Marsalis’s Tuba Concerto (2021). WSO’s former Principal Tuba player Chris Lee performs with the orchestra under the baton of Tania Miller, this concert’s conductor. You may already know that Marsalis, one of jazz music’s greatest living artists, writes symphonic music, but we’re guessing you didn’t know that he – or anyone for that matter – has written a 25-minute piece with tuba in the starring role.

Michael Oesterle’s Entr’actes rounds off the Thursday Classics series. (And for the record, they offer many excellent concerts this season that don’t fall Tuesday-Thursday.)

— Conrad Sweatman

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Fighting poverty through song

• West End Cultural Centre, 586 Ellice Ave.
• Tonight, 8 p.m.
• Tickets $28 at wecc.ca

Make Poverty History Manitoba is hosting its first major fundraising concert since the outset of the pandemic.

Previously an annual event, the show — hosted by Faith Fundal of CBC Radio — will include performances by Polaris Music Prize-nominated singer-songwriter Greg MacPherson and Juno-winning Franco-Manitoban Métis artist Andrina Turenne, who will be accompanied by a full band.

The concert is an opportunity to raise money and support the Make Poverty History Manitoba mission. Formed in 2008, the non-partisan coalition includes more than 100 organizations and thousands of individuals working to address the root causes of poverty through public policy changes at all levels of government.

— Eva Wasney

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