Ghosts of pasts faced in spirited production

Under the light of a lakeside moon and its brighter-than-the-city constellations, in the glow of a sacred fire, a portal to awakening opens for three men grieving the loss of their childhood friend in this spirit story, an absorbing, eerie and chill-inducing first play from Norway House’s Rhonda Apetagon.

Gathered on terrain they once knew better — a petroform landscape that lies across the lake from a community that forever connects them, no matter if they stray — George (James Dallas Smith), Dale (Jeremy Proulx) and Shane (Daniel Knight) are committed to stoking the embers until Warren is laid to rest in a funeral service several kilometres away.

In the wake of the attempted cultural erasure at the hands of the residential school system and anti-Indigenous laws, their understanding of traditional healing practices is admittedly lacking, and their reliance on worldly comforts is apparent: Dale wonders whether a backyard bonfire with better cell reception would have sufficed.

No, say his friends: this is what Warren — whose trusty weed lighter sparks the kindling for the authentic onstage fire — would have wanted: to be with his buddies, in the shadow beyond the pines, as he makes his transition into the spirit world.

Next Prairie Theatre Exchange season will capitalize on what works

Five Canadian productions are slated for next season at Prairie Theatre Exchange, a downtown institution that’s in the midst of a post-pandemic bounceback under the leadership of artistic director Ann Hodges and managing director Katie Inverarity.

Midway through their first full seasons at the venerable Portage Place company, Hodges and Inverarity have helped oversee a 59 per cent increase in subscriptions with a 27 per cent leap in single-ticket sales compared to 2024.

So when it came time to program PTE’s 54th season and her second at the helm, Hodges — who inherited the artistic mantle in 2024 from Thomas Morgan Jones — figured she wouldn’t try to fix what’s firing on all cylinders.

Announced Friday, the 2026-27 season will kick off with a trip to the rink for Tracey Power’s Glory, based on the story of the Preston Rivulettes, a women’s hockey team that won 95 per cent of its games over a dominant decade between 1931 and 1940. Set to be directed by Mariam Bernstein, the production (Oct. 13-25) will feature several hockey games choreographed by Victoria Exconde to era-specific swing music directed by Joseph Aragon.

Docu-drama 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' uses real recordings to speak to horror of war

In one sense, the film — nominated for Best International Feature Film as the Tunisian entry at this year’s Academy Awards — is a universalist cri du coeur. In another, it’s a provocative case for the impossibility of neutrality in representing or addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

What’s up: St. Patrick’s Day events

The Dust RhinosWest End Cultural Centre, 586 Ellice Ave.Sunday, 8 p.m.Tickets: $25-30 plus fees at wecc.caSt. Paddy’s Day is basically Superbowl Sunday for Winnipeg Celtic-rock outfit the Dust Rhinos.

In fact, in an interview with the Free Press in 2024, founder and leader singer Blair McEvoy figured he hasn’t had March 17 off since, oh, the year 2000.

The band has a private gig on St. Patrick’s Day proper, but McEvoy, Dan Cannon (bass), Darren Wittmann (drums), Ryan Spracklin (mandolin and fiddle) and Ivanka Watkin (fiddle) want to party with you on Sunday at the WECC, where they will be performing what they’ve dubbed the Cross Canada Celtic Songbook. (Home for a Rest is probably a setlist safe bet.)

The show is all ages.

One Tech Tip: How do you use an f-stop?

Film photography has been undergoing a renaissance, especially with younger people who love its unique look and analog vibe.

But while Gen-Zers and younger Millennials embrace film, analog cameras are not as easy to use as the digital cameras they grew up with. What does ISO mean? What is an f/stop anyway? How do I figure out the right aperture?

George Walker IV, an Associated Press photojournalist based in Nashville, helped outline the basics of film-based photography for this week's One Tech Tip.

Walker, who joined the AP in 2023 after 30 years as a photographer at The Tennessean newspaper, said shooting on film is a good way to learn the basics of photography because it “forces me to be patient and concentrate to make the pictures that matter."

First-time playwright’s social work training helps craft horror drama In the Shadow Beyond the Pines

The type of writing that thriller aficionado Rhonda Apetagon does on a day-to-day basis isn’t anyone’s idea of creative fun: as a trained social worker, the first-time playwright is accustomed to filing reports about “the real scary stuff” in life: loss, addiction, violence and the abuse and maltreatment of children.

“That’s way scarier for me than ghosts,” says the director of Kinosao Sipi Minisowin Agency, which provides child and family services to members of Apetagon’s community, Norway House Cree Nation.

Apetagon’s debut play, In the Shadow Beyond the Pines, premièring tonight at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, takes place at the intersection of those two strains of horror stories, sending three grieving men (Daniel Knight, Jeremy Proulx and James Dallas Smith) into the forest to light a sacred fire for their recently departed friend, Warren, who was the quartet’s “glue” since childhood, holding the group together even as the joys, pressures and traumas of adult life pulled them apart.

Apetagon wanted the play, set on the outskirts of an unnamed northern community, to highlight the double-edged nature of living in a remote environment, where the combination of intense togetherness and relative isolation presents both threat and opportunity.

Brandon-based visual artist focuses on precarious labour in series of portraits

What you’ll notice first in the portraits by Lisa Wood on view now at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba are not the subjects’ faces, but their hands.

Gesticulating hands, reaching hands, hands covering a mouth. Tattooed hands. Hands attached to wrists wrapped with friendship bracelets and smartwatches, tracking thousands of steps logged over hundreds of shifts. Hands that perform labour.

“I love painting hands,” the Brandon-based visual artist says. “I think that when a viewer sees faces, they’re thinking about that particular person, but when a viewer sees hands, they’re personal, but I think that we can connect more or think more about ourselves when we’re seeing somebody else’s hands.”

The paintings are part of a suite of works that compose SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity, a multimedia research-creation project that shares the experiences of rural Manitobans navigating precarious work — whether that’s insecure, short-term or contract-based employment — created from more than two years of research.

CBC initiative brings opposing views to same table

British prime minister Winston Churchill, remembered more for decisive force than diplomacy, is also credited with saying, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

RWB presents reimagined version of Tchaikovsky classic The Sleeping Beauty

The classics tend to be the classics for a reason, and The Sleeping Beauty, the classical fairy-tale ballet choreographed by French-Russian master Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s masterwork score, is no exception.

But that doesn’t mean they have to be done the way they’ve always been done.

The version the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will perform at the Centennial Concert Hall this week is an adaptation by the company’s new artistic director, Christopher Stowell, which was created for the Oregon Theatre Ballet in 2010 and is now part of three other companies’ repertoires.

“Part of my mission, I think, in keeping this art form that I love relevant, alive and on people’s minds and appealing to people, is to take a work that has been part of the repertoire for a long time, like Sleeping Beauty,” he says. “It’s 100-and-something years old, and I love it, and I value it, and it has an important place in our history.

Winnipeg Comedy Festival celebrates event’s 25th year with national lineup

This year, Dean Jenkinson celebrates six years as the Winnipeg Comedy Festival’s artistic director and the festival’s 25th anniversary.

The Winnipeg standup is also a contributing writer for This Hour Has 22 Minutes (a role he’s had since 2007), and can brag, if he wants to, that he’s crafted material for such acts as the Muppets, Joan Rivers, Neil Patrick Harris and Sarah Silverman.

During his time on the comedy scene, he has grown somewhat philosophical and, as the festival announces its full lineup for the April 20-26 event, he reflects on subjects such as regionalism in Canadian standup and hot-button topics like “woke” versus edgy humour.

Packing Winnipeg venues with laughing locals while helping regional comics springboard toward a broader national and international audience is what the festival is all about, he says.

Deer-in-headlights look fitting for disgraced ‘prince’

WHAT IT IS: A press photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving a Norfolk police station after he was arrested on charges of misconduct in public office and held for 11 hours.

Is ‘Tristan’ the hardest opera to stage? This director thinks so, and signed on at the Met

NEW YORK (AP) — In his book on reinventing opera, director Yuval Sharon describes “Tristan und Isolde” as “the single hardest work in the traditional repertoire to stage.”

Yet here he is, about to make his Metropolitan Opera debut at the helm of a new production of Richard Wagner’s epic love story.

“It’s something I wrote before I got the job, and it’s part of why I took the job,” said Sharon, author of 2024's “A New Philosophy of Opera.” “Because I knew it was the hardest, and I love impossible challenges.”

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he has admired Sharon’s work “since he was an enfant terrible” known for innovative productions in Los Angeles and Detroit.

Vancouver artist one of three creative minds behind official FIFA World Cup poster

This summer's FIFA World Cup is already a hit with Vancouver's Carson Ting.

Ting is one of three artists behind the official World Cup poster, unveiled this week to mark 100 days to go before the June 11 kickoff of the 48-team tournament in Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

Ting, 50, collaborated with Mexico's Minerva GM and American Hank Willis Thomas on the poster, the final piece of World Cup art. Organizers released 16 official host city posters last year, including ones for Vancouver and Toronto.

He says the World Cup project is a career highlight.

What's up: Author Sarah K.L. Wilson, Jordan Miller exhibition, One Gay Choir, International Women’s Day Rave, Sound Like Light concert

Compost — whose shows are known for integrating Joel Penner’s pristine time-lapse recordings of plant life cycles — are promising an “immersive night of music, sound and light” Saturday at the Centennial Concert Hall’s Sound Bites Room.