What’s up: Brian Goldman, Stephanie Ballard, WUFF, Pride, MayWorks book launch

Dr. Brian Goldman book launch

• McNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Ave.
• Tuesday, 7 p.m.
• Free admission

Fifteen years after writing The Night Shift: Real Life in the Heart of the E.R., his account of working overnight in the emergency room (ER) at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Brian Goldman is back with a chronicle of what the medical landscape is like today.

Goldman is a bestselling author, ER doctor and host of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art. His new book The Casino Shift: Stories from an ER on the Edge, published in February, goes hour by hour through the shorter overnight shifts (the “casino shifts” of the book’s title), detailing the types of situations faced by ER doctors and patients. He also sums up the advances in technology that have helped patients, as well as the increasing complexity of patient cases.

McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location will host Goldman on Tuesday at 7 p.m. for the launch of The Casino Shift, where he’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg doctor, educator and bestselling author Dr. Jillian Horton (We Are All Perfectly Fine). The event, co-presented by the Alan Klass Health Humanities program at the UM Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, is free to attend and will also be available on McNally Robinson’s YouTube page.

— Ben Sigurdson

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Remembering Stephanie Ballard

• Celebration of life
• Qualico Family Centre
• Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.

A Living Legacy: A Tribute to Stephanie Ballard

• Gas Station Arts Centre, 445 River Ave.
• Friday, June 12, 7:30 p.m.

The legacy of the late Winnipeg contemporary dance icon Stephanie Ballard will be honoured with a pair of events next week.

The first is a celebration of life that will take place at the Qualico Family Centre in Assiniboine Park on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.; those attending will be welcomed by a Ballard signature: Landscape Dancing, her site-specific work of movement and prayer performed outdoors.

Then, on Friday, June 12, an evening of Ballard’s influential, award-winning works will be presented at the Gas Station Arts Centre at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for A Living Legacy: A Tribute to Stephanie Ballard are $25 at eventbrite.ca.

Ballard, a prolific choreographer, performer, mentor, educator and a pioneer of the artform whose career spanned five decades, died in September. She was 76.

“Stephanie was our matriarch, a champion for dance, for the arts, and for the many lives she touched through her mentorship,” Winnipeg dancer and choreographer Kathleen Hiley told the Free Press in September. “She carried herself with a grace that was both timeless and striking: always elegant, perfectly put together in a sleek black outfit, impossibly large sunglasses, a string of pearls, lipstick and a glass of chardonnay.”

— Jen Zoratti

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WUFF returns to the DBC

• Dave Barber Cinematheque, 100 Arthur St.
• to June 7
• All information at winnipeguff.com

For the 13th time, the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival is back, unearthing the works of seminal experimental filmmakers and planting the seeds for the next generations of cinematic risk-takers.

Boasting a program that gleefully interrogates and transverses artistic borders, this annual project from Open City Cinema features new works by Manitoban filmmakers including Colby Richardson, Olivia Norquay, Daniel Márquez and Eric Peterson, alongside works by filmmakers from Switzerland (Adrian Flury), Bolivia (Luciana Decker Orozco) and Austria (Rainer Kohlberger).

One of the festival’s surefire highlights is Saturday’s Re:Vision program of 3D experimental filmmaking, curated by Houston-born, Toronto-based 3D filmmaker Blake Williams, whose works have screened at TIFF, the Berlinale and in Locarno, and whose writing appeared in Cinema Scope magazine.

Williams’ program traces nearly a century of immersive filmmaking, beginning with a screening of Louis Lumiere’s 1935 short Arrival of a Train 3D, the image-maker’s stereoscopic return to the subject of his pioneering short film. Next is Hy Hirsh’s 1953 film Come Closer, which “used oscilloscope patterns … in harmony with the music of the West Indian carnival,” per specialty distribution company Light Cone.

The work of underground legend Ken Jacobs, a co-founder of Binghamton University’s Collective of Living Cinema, will visit WUFF in the form of 1969’s Globe, which was once titled Excerpt From the the Russian Revolution. Jacobs, who worked in tandem with his wife Flo, died last October, aged 92 after more than 75 years as a working artist.

Re:Vision, which plays June 6 at 8:30 p.m., continues with Apotheosis by Lillian Schwartz — created using manipulated PET scan images; Orbit by Kerry Laitala, featuring “candy apple light emissions; Au hasard, a 3D play on John Carpenter’s They Live by Canadian Darren Dominique Heroux; and finally, Kohlberger’s not even nothing can be free of ghosts, an 11-minute film made without a camera.

From today to Sunday, WUFF is joining the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (520 Hargrave St.) to present Line as Real as Broken, an exhibition by Dani and Sheilah ReStack.

— Ben Waldman

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Pride Festival

• The Forks, 1 Forks Market Road
• June 6 and 7
• Free

There’s a plethora of Pride-themed gatherings taking place across Winnipeg this week as the city celebrates the annual event.

This two-day festival at the Forks offers a full schedule with something for everyone in the family, including canine pals. Festivities kick off on Saturday at noon with Dogs ‘N’ Dabbers Bingo, taking place at the Mamawi Stage. The doggy edition of the crowd favourite sees Winnipeg Humane Society’s therapy dogs make an appearance during this bingo-drag show combo.

Other Saturday events include Drag Story Time, Rainbow Harmony Project Youth Choir and Mama Cutsworth’s Family Dance Party. Festivities continue on Sunday as the Pride Parade makes its way from the Manitoba Legislative Building down Portage Avenue before wrapping up at the Forks where a big Broadway sing-along is planned for 12:30 p.m. Younger members of the family will get a chance to see Manitoba’s best and most-loved frogs Croakinole and Croakette in action as performers Mario and Brittany Lagassé demonstrate via the medum of song and dance — and wiggle — just what it means to be a frog.

There’s no rest as the fun continues all day Sunday, finally wrapping up at 6:45 p.m. with a performance by the Binesi Ikwéwag Singers. For a full list of events taking place over the weekend visit pridewinnipeg.com

— AV Kitching

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Confronting the Resurgent Right book launch

• Whodunit Books, 163 Lilac St.
• Sunday, 4:30 p.m.
• Free

Many local festivals dear to Winnipeggers are international festivals and transplants from elsewhere: Nuit Blanche comes from Paris, Jane’s Walk from Toronto, Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival from Edinburgh.

At first glance one might assume this is true of MayWorks, a Winnipeg festival connecting labour and the arts. But MayWorks is mostly a national festival, and while Toronto launched the first iteration in 1986, Winnipeg has always been essential to its narrative.

After all, Western Canada’s labour movement, eventually evolving into the New Democratic Party of Tommy Douglas, had its watershed moment in Winnipeg during the General Strike of 1919. MayWorks draws on a unique and rich local history, and has its final event this Sunday.

That’s when the festival presents a book launch for Confronting the Resurgent Right, with editor Miriam Edelson and author James Wilt. The work is a collection of essays by scholars and activists examining the rising spectre of the hard right in Canada and features a foreword by Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair.

— Conrad Sweatman

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