Wordless puppet show explores father-daughter ties

Having a parent who travels for work is a challenge for any child, but whenever Shizuka Kai’s father left on a voyage to capture elusive footage of white wolves and kodiaks, there was an element of danger that didn’t exist for other children.

“I would say I kind of grew up with my dad telling us that he actually might not come home,” says Kai, a Vancouver-based puppet maker and theatre artist. “A moment I vaguely remember as a kid was when he sat us down and explained the life-insurance process because (he) might actually get attacked and eaten by a bear, and that’s the reality of this project (he was) doing.”

That reality is put through a puppeteer’s lens in Otosan, the closing production of the 2025-2026 season at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

Based on Kai’s experiences growing up as the child of a dogged wildlife videographer, combined with memories from a joint trip to Alaska in Kai’s early 20s, Otosan — on to May 17 — is told in a wordless tabletop puppet show featuring lifelike renderings of father, daughter, grizzly bear and snowy owl.

What's up: poetry, art show, Stink-O-Vision, Dill the Giant

Writes of Spring poetry launchMcNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Ave.Sunday, 2 p.m.FreeA dozen Manitoba poets will convene at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location this weekend to share their words exploring both land and sea.

The annual Writes of Spring poetry reading, a joint venture between the Free Press, the Winnipeg Arts Council and Plume Winnipeg, takes place Sunday at 2 p.m.

The 11th annual event helps celebrate National Poetry month, with Manitoba poets submitting work with the hopes of being selected for the collection of poems (which appear in print in the 49.8 section of Saturday’s Free Press).

This year’s collection, whose theme was “land and sea,” was edited by Ariel Gordon and melanie brannagan frederiksen, who will host the event. This year’s selected poets, who will also be featured at the launch, are RYAN AD, Jody Baltessen, Janine Brown, Joanne Epp, David Jón Fuller, James Hargrove, Bertrand Nayet, Désirée Penner, proma tagore, Alexander Wiebe, Jess Woolford and Chey Wright (also known as IDIC Verse).

Get ready for the bare-knuckle round — Debaters returns to Winnipeg Comedy Festival

Is Big Oil a good thing for Canada? Do butter tarts beat Nanaimo bars? Should Canada become the 51st state? Is Velcro better than laces?

It may sound like you’re overhearing snatches of conversation from both the kids and adult tables of a family party, rather than questions posed on the CBC Radio One program The Debaters.

However, the weekly family-friendly program on CBC’s primary radio news service has always been a little more fun than factual, a little more whimsy than weighty.

“I prefer when it’s got a little bit of meat to it,” says Steve Patterson, the Ontario comedian who has hosted the show since 2007.

Once punished for weaving, this Mexican artisan uses her loom for LGBTQ+ resistance

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Xaneri Merino wasn't meant to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps.

Now a transgender woman, she was identified at birth as a boy in San Pedro Jicayán, an Indigenous community in southern Mexico where men are largely barred from becoming weavers.

Merino was expected to tend cattle or work in the fields. Yet her grandmother defied those rigid gender norms, passing on to her the ancestral practice of the backstrap loom — an ancient, portable device operated using a strap secured around the weaver’s waist.

“She began sharing her knowledge with me in secret,” said Merino, who used to hide in her grandmother’s adobe home to weave at age 13. “She taught me how to make the thread from scratch, to feel the textures and respect nature.”

Priceless 2,500-year-old golden helmet returned to Romania after Dutch museum raid

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — A priceless golden helmet dating back 2,500 years was returned to Romania on Tuesday after the national heirloom was stolen from a Dutch museum where it was on loan last year.

The ornate Cotofenesti helmet and three golden bracelets — some of Romania’s most revered national treasures from the Dacia civilization — were taken from the Drents Museum in January 2025 in a raid which shocked the art world and devastated Romanian authorities.

But after 14 months of investigations, diplomatic tensions, and three suspects in an ongoing trial, most of the artifacts arrived at Bucharest Henri Coanda International Airport on Tuesday from where authorities transported them under guard to Bucharest’s National History Museum. They were displayed in a glass cabinet, flanked by masked, armed guards.

Cornel Constantin Ilie, the museum's interim director, said that the artifacts have been returned “not as simple patrimony items, but as relics of our historical memory, as the legacy of a civilization that continues to define us.”

Musical tale of emancipation a real tour de force

Aspiring reporter Annie Londonderry (Berkley Silverman) has a story to tell the readers of the World, so she arrives at the newspaper’s headquarters, the tallest building in New York City in the year 1894.

Opera season finale offers a fresh take on Figaro

Unlike their characters, the cast members of The Marriage of Figaro have been getting along famously.

“We’ve had way too much fun during rehearsals because everybody’s so talented and funny,” says Alberta-born soprano Caitlin Wood, who makes her Manitoba Opera debut Saturday night during the company’s season finale.

The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart’s beloved ensemble comedy, was last presented locally in 2015.

A sequel to The Barber of Seville, the opera unfolds during the fraught wedding day of Figaro (Robert Mellon), the former barber-turned-valet, and Susanna, a fellow servant to the Count (Phillip Addis) and Countess (Miriam Khalil) Almaviva.

'Boob Tree' sculpture among WAG artwork reimagined at flower show

Karen Lischka and her adult daughters, Lauren Hall and Maddie Lischka, are figuring out how to transform hydrangeas into boobs.

They are among the more than 100 professional and amateur florists who will be interpreting 95 artworks from WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection for this weekend’s Art in Bloom, a biennial show presented by the Associates of the WAG and Petals West that features fresh floral displays inspired by art in the gallery’s collection.

Pieces by Wanda Koop, Bîstyek, Marcel Dzama, Robert Houle and Abraham Anghik Ruben, to name a few, are among those getting the floral treatment.

For their installation, Lischka and her daughters have decided to riff on Phyllis Green’s iconic Boob Tree. The cheeky 1975 sculpture is exactly what it sounds like: a tree whose crown is composed entirely of bright pink crocheted breasts.

What's up: Sheepdogs, Maple-infused meals, Props N Hops, WMC McLellan Competition, Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: An 8-Bit Big Band

The SheepdogsBurton Cummings Theatre, 364 Smith St.Friday, 8 p.m.Tickets $47 to $119 at TicketmasterThey’re called the Sheepdogs, but the Roaddogs would have been an appropriate name for the band led by frontman Ewan Currie.

Since 2022, the Saskatoon rockers have played nearly 300 shows across North America, Europe, the U.K., and Australia, including an arena tour in support of Bryan Adams last fall. Now, they are on their Out All Night headlining tour in support of their latest album, Keep Out of the Storm, which will stop by the Burt on Friday.

Those who were quick on the draw for tickets know the band is also in town tonight to celebrate the Times Change(d)’s 25th anniversary. That show is sold out; limited tickets to the Burt show remain.

— Jen Zoratti

Wealth of musical talent providing the sounds of silents

The score will be settled in real time on Saturday at the inaugural Winnipeg Silent Movie Festival, with local musicians set to provide live, improvised soundtracks to 10 films released between 1912 and 1929.

New discovery solves mystery of the location of Shakespeare’s London house

LONDON (AP) — Fans of William Shakespeare know that the great playwright came from Stratford-upon-Avon, the riverside English town where tourists still throng to see his childhood home.

But he made his name in London — though few traces of him remain in the British capital.

A newly discovered 17th-century map sheds new light on the Bard’s London life, pinpointing for the first time the exact location of the only home Shakespeare bought in the city, and where he may have worked on his final plays.

Shakespeare scholar Lucy Munro, who found the document, said that it supplies “extra bits of the jigsaw puzzle” of Shakespeare's life. And as with so many discoveries, it was partly due to luck.

New dance work explores life’s tensions

The pressures of modern life have a way of piling up.

Piles of work. Piles of debt. Piles of laundry. Piles of information and memes and media to parse. Piles of expectations. Piles of physical stuff added to cart during late-night shopping binges because we think it’ll make the piles of stress and worry (about the cost of groceries, about war, about aging parents) easier to manage, lighter to carry.

We become surrounded by these metaphorical and literal piles until, one day, it all becomes too much.

Accumulation, a new work choreographed by artistic director Jolene Bailie that will close Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ 2025/26 season, lives in the tension before the breaking point.

Story of first women to cycle around the world a freewheeling, perilous trek

In Ride, the musical that closes the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre season, a Latvian-born American woman with an unmistakably Jewish surname attempts to circumnavigate the globe on two wheels in 15 months or less just before the sharp turn of the 20th century.

But as she speeds toward renown on her Columbia bicycle, pedalling her way toward becoming a proto-feminist model for women’s independence, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky — born in 1870, died in 1947 — faces a fork in the road: to retain her heritage, or to ease her passage across borders through the all-too-common sacrifice of acceptance through anglicization.

For director-choreographer Lisa Stevens, the production is relevant in 2026 for the same reasons that the story of “Annie Londonderry” was captivating in 1894.

“We’re still asking the same questions: who gets to be seen, who gets to be heard, who gets to be believed and how one needs to reinvent themselves, or hide, to be able to survive,” says Stevens. “Who has to change their persona in order to thrive?” As the rider asks, “How far do I have to go in order to move forward?”

Laser’s blue light gives green light to enter world of pure imagination

Before the humans take the stage at the beginning of Glitch, the audience’s senses are already activated.

Throughout the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, it’s cloudy. Over the sound system, pipes drip. Through squinted eyes, one can almost make out a staircase and the downward swoop of a curtain. “I have a question,” a young girl asks her grandmother before the matinee production begins. “Why is it so foggy?”

The fog is a stand-in for the plumes of dust that one might find in the basement of an abandoned theatre, where four friends — Carlos Mendoza, Léa Noblet Di Ziranaldi, Chloé Ouelle-Payeur & Marie-Ève Dion — stumble onto a world of balletic make-believe.

As they head down the staircase, the friends cross flashlight beams. When the quartet takes its first collective steps, each member is reluctant: what transpires is a testament to the transformative power of a performative green light — a signal to go where you’ve never gone before.