Travelling troubadour ‘smitten with Winnipeg’

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This article was published 17/11/2021 (1778 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Orit Shimoni is finding out how sticky Winnipeg can be.

Shimoni had been a travelling musician with no fixed address for 11 years, but a house concert in the city in March 2020 proved to be her last for more than a year when the COVID-19 pandemic closed stages big and small.

Her days of travelling were brought to a screeching halt too, including her regular gig performing aboard Via Rail’s intercontintenal train.

So she stayed in Winnipeg. At first she lived with friends, but when the pandemic proved it was going nowhere, Shimoni had no choice but to do what she hadn’t done in more than a decade: get a place of her own.

Almost two years later, the 42-year-old remains in Winnipeg, and it’s grown on her.

”I think my plan is to come and go, but I’m using this place as home base now,” she says. “I am not rejecting Winnipeg. It’s not like as soon as I can leave I’m leaving.

“You should tell your readers I am quite smitten with Winnipeg.”

While she spent the first year of the pandemic indulging her creative side — she released a new album, Lorem Ipsum, returned to painting, learned video editing and continued to write a memoir about her life on the road — she spent more time learning how to live in one place rather than performing.

It wasn’t until May 2021, at a backyard concert in Winnipeg, that she was able to perform an in-person show again, but she was surrounded by fear and anxiety.

”I was really nervous that I didn’t have the whatever it is that is the performer in me. It was such a long time to go without, and there was so much external and internal upheaval and doubting and questioning everything.”

Her doubts didn’t last long, though.

“I arrived and I stepped over an imaginary threshold into the space I was to perform in and I immediately went back (to singing). It was extraordinary. It was showtime and it was emotional.

“It was absolutely so replenishing.”

The positive experience gave Shimoni the courage to perform a few concerts across the Prairies during the summer, adjusting to varying levels of pandemic restrictions along the way, and to visit family in Calgary.

She used to travel by planes and trains, but stuck to automobiles for her summer shows, tagging along with folks who were driving west.

“I ended up with more shows than I thought, and it was this whole new model of touring,” she says. “It was just very uplifting all around. It was truly wonderful… It was like blood flowed in me again after a pretty scary patch of nothing.”

She’s back in Winnipeg for the winter, however, and as luck would have it, she has found a show of a different kind.

Shimoni performs tonight in a concert called the Travelling Jew at the Berney Theatre as part of the Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture. The Rady JCC event has the Israeli Canadian troubadour performing with multi-instrumentalist Paul Balcain and offering some memories of more than a decade on the road and of her recollections of the Middle East, where she grew up and spent six years teaching before becoming a musician; her first gig was in Jerusalem.

“I am really stoked about this show and it’s really meaningful to me,” she says. “The show is really retrospective of my work but through the lens of my Jewish identity.”

Shimoni is fluent in Hebrew, and while her rootsy, folksy style of songwriting is mostly secular, she says her Israeli and Jewish background plays a significant part in her music.

“There’s no reason why I can’t trace a story of that, how that identity interplayed with my career as a Canadian singer-songwriter,” she says. “It’s a lot more integrated than I thought when I was younger and I’ve thought about it and written about so much that it’s not that much of a stretch to present it as its own show.”

Karla Berbrayer, who is Tarbut’s music producer, saw Shimoni at a backyard concert and thought she’d be a natural for the festival.

”This is new for her, and I know it’s a departure and something exciting,” Berbrayer says. “I feel quite confident that it’s going to be a great show.”

Shimoni has lived in many places over the years, but she says she considers Jerusalem her hometown; she has both fond and difficult memories of the city.

“I’ve lived there through very harrowing violence and went through definite trauma there,” she says.

She’s grown accustomed to life in Winnipeg and has found the city, especially those who appreciate music, has embraced her.

She was surprised by the warm welcome she received at a backyard concert in Riverview in September that heralded her return from a few weeks in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Sixty people came out for the show.

”I didn’t know a soul when I got here and I played a sold-out show on my way back here, so that was pretty good,” she says.

Shimoni has plans to perform in Europe in 2022 — some small shows are set for Germany next year and she has hopes for some in the Netherlands and Belgium — but the unpredictable nature of the pandemic will have a lot to say about her musical future.

“What I’m going to do from here on in is a big question. I just don’t know,” she says. “I’m not as terrified as I was when the lockdown happened that everything is over.

“It’s an interesting new beginning.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall