An unforgettable 365 days

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This article was published 26/12/2017 (3092 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The city’s arts community in 2017 took on the challenge of putting a Winnipeg spin on the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. Shows great and small adorned the province’s stages, providing a year full of memories for audiences.

There were art installations, choral concerts, theatrical productions, jazz shows, museum exhibitions and dance extravaganzas.

On top of those, the city hosted the Canada Summer Games, and to go with it, 12 days of free concerts at The Forks that included a who’s who of Canadian performers, from Tanya Tagaq to Brett Kissel, from the Sheepdogs to the Trews and Manitoba artists such as Royal Canoe, the Crash Test Dummies, William Prince and Fred Penner.

The shows, and the Games, were a hit, but the excitement of the concerts — not to mention the unbeatable price tag — took its toll. Interstellar Rodeo, the music festival launched by Six Shooter Records in 2015, claimed it couldn’t compete with free, government-funded shows, and 2017’s event, which included Beck and Broken Social Scene, would be its last here.

More sweet and sour news affected the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra over the past year. As it prepared to launch its 70th anniversary of shows in the fall, it also had to launch a search for a new conductor. In May, Alexander Mickelthwate, who has been the artistic director for the WSO since 2006, said the 70th anniversary season would be his final one with the orchestra, after the two sides failed to agree on a new contract. Mickelthwate accepted the baton from the Oklahoma City Philharmonic instead.

The show must go on, and so has the WSO’s 70th anniversary season, with Mickelthwate at the head of the orchestra. He led the symphony in a sold-out collaboration with famed violinist Itzhak Perlman in September, and again with an official anniversary evening that brought 93-year-old Victor Feldbrill, who conducted the orchestra from 1958-68, back to the podium for one more bravo. The anniversary continues into 2018, with composer Philip Glass playing a key role in the Winnipeg New Music Festival in January.

There were exciting highs, but the saddest of lows in Dauphin as well in 2017. The small western Manitoba city, host of the wildly successful Countryfest since 1990, once again hosted a rip-roaring event over the Canada Day long weekend, with Keith Urban, Luke Bryan and Johnny Reid playing to rowdy, sold-out crowds. But the foundation of another great event in 2018 has been overshadowed by the death of Countryfest president and Dauphin mayor, Eric Irwin, who died suddenly at the age of 62 while on a Florida vacation in November.

“Not only we were colleagues together in Countryfest, we were friends. We did a lot of things together. You know, trips to Nashville, seeing music together, stuff like that,” Countryfest promoter Rob Waloschuk told the Free Press.

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Winnipeg’s jazz community was also jolted in 2017 over sexual harassment allegations directed at Steve Kirby, the former director of jazz studies at the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Faculty of Music and a regular performer at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival. As first reported in the Free Press, Kirby retired from his tenured U of M position in June, but later in the year accepted a similar professorial position with the Berklee School of Music in Boston. It wasn’t until after a Free Press report was published that Berklee learned of Kirby’s U of M situation, and the school placed Kirby on leave.

Several former students of Kirby’s have since come forward, describing abuse by Kirby. Daniel Jordan, a member of the folk trio Red Moon Road, said he mailed back his bachelor of music degree to the U of M to protest the university’s handling of the matter. “I truly hope that one day you find the courage to take a stand against sexual harassment and systemic abuse of power. Until then, I remain ashamed to be your alumnus, devoid of respect for you or your institution,” he wrote.

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The Winnipeg Art Gallery continued its pivot toward Indigenous art in 2017, with exhibitions such as Insurgence / Resurgence, which opened in September that was curated by Jaimie Isaac and Julie Nagam, two Indigenous curators recently hired by the gallery and the University of Winnipeg. The exhibition included boundary-stretching works by 29 artists from across Canada, including Kenneth Lavallee’s Creation Story, a massive banner that draped across the front wall of the gallery.

The gallery’s Inuit Art Centre, which has been in the works for several years, became closer to reality in 2017. Not only did the WAG make room for the building by demolishing an old studio to the south of Memorial Boulevard in the summertime, it also secured $10 million in provincial funding — the previous NDP government had promised $15 million — in December.

The gallery also hosted two exhibitions devoted to the works of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in the summer, providing Winnipeggers a rare look at the National Gallery of Canada’s complete set of the Vollard Suite of prints the artist created in the 1930s.

Just a few blocks away, the Manitoba Museum unveiled titans of its own. World’s Giant Dinosaurs, a new exhibition that included life-size replicas of the prehistoric reptiles, squeezed into the brand-new Alloway Hall. The hall was opened in 2017 as the latest in renovations at the Main Street museum.

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diAt first glance, an empty field that sits on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares doesn’t look like one of Winnipeg’s most lucrative concert venues. But put a giant big top that seats 2,600 people on that patch of land at the corner of Kenaston Boulevard and Sterling Lyon Parkway, like Cirque du Soleil did when it brought Kurios — Cabinet of Curiosities for a six-week run in June and July, and Manitobans stepped right up to purchase tickets.

The Cirque show followed the successful strategy devised by Cavalia’s Odysseo show in 2015, which the Quebec-based horse and acrobatics extravaganza hopes to repeat when it returns to that same vacant lot at Kenaston Boulevard and Sterling Lyon Parkway in May 2018.

A number of big-name concert tours found their way to Winnipeg in 2017, including Guns N’ Roses’ stadium tour that rocked Investors Group Field Aug. 24. The newly renamed Bell MTS Place hosted the likes of Ed Sheeran, Chris Stapleton, Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, Bruno Mars and Brad Paisley. However, the concerts of the year, arguably, were Sept. 22-23 when Burton Cummings played two sold-out shows at his namesake theatre, which unveiled a new Manitoba-themed marquee for the occasion. The former Guess Who frontman said during the shows that he was blown away by the honour and in response, belted out an array of classic hits from his days with the Deverons, the Guess Who and his solo career. Expect something similar when he celebrates his 70th birthday on Dec. 31 with a performance at the Club Regent Event Centre.

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Winnipeg’s theatre community began a season of farewell for Prairie Theatre Exchange artistic director Robert Metcalfe, who announced at the beginning of the 2017-18 season he was stepping down. A replacement has yet to be named. The Rainbow Stage also announced in September that artistic director Ray Hogg was resigning, but the not-for-profit musical theatre company plucked Winnipegger Carson Nattrass from its acting ranks to take over the job several weeks later.

The city’s acting community came together in November for the inaugural Winnipeg Theatre Awards, honouring the likes of actress Sharon Bajer, who starred in the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse production of Hand to God and Ray Strachan in the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s The Whipping Man. Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now, also a Warehouse play, won most outstanding production.

Meanwhile, the Royal MTC began its 60th anniversary season in October with Shakespeare in Love, a theatrical adaptation of the Academy Award-winning film. But its marquee title this season is the regional theatre première of the Broadway hit Come From Away, a musical that takes place in Gander, N.L., after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The production begins a month-long run on Jan. 4.

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca Twitter:@AlanDSmall