Mayor’s annual awards celebrate achievements of local creators

Mayor’s annual awards celebrate achievements of local creators

Someone let the Winnipeg Arts Council into the secret behind The Secret to Good Tea.

The organization that distributes city funding to the arts handed two of its annual awards to two key artists behind the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production: its playwright, Rosanna Deerchild, and Emily Solstice Tait, the contemporary dancer and actor who portrayed the Trickster in the March 2023 mainstage dramedy.

Deerchild won the council’s Making a Mark Award and Tait took home the On the Rise Award at the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts at the RBC Convention Centre Thursday in front of an audience from the local arts and business communities. Mayor Scott Gillingham addressed the audience, praising the contribution of Winnipeg’s arts community to the quality of life in the city.

“When they called my name, I looked over and Emily and I did the eyeball to eyeball,” said Deerchild, who is originally from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation in northern Manitoba and is a journalist, poet, broadcaster, activist and co-founder of the Indigenous Writers Collective of Manitoba.

Tait, whose dance career took off during the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020-22, with appearances in productions involving Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Cercle Molière, Theatre Projects Manitoba and the RMTC, aims to help other Indigenous artists along as she rises in profile; the $5,000 that comes with the award will help her do that.

“It’s a perfect time, because I’m trying to emerge as a dance artist through this whole pandemic time and I’ve had some exceptional experiences,” said Tait, who, along with two other Indigenous women artists, is starting up an arts incubator business called the Nischtis Collective to encourage others.

“I’m looking forward to seeing where she dances next, dancing off to the stars,” Deerchild added.

The Making a Difference Award went to Alan Greyeyes, the director of the Sakihiwe Festival and an advocate for Indigenous music acts and artists, whether in his previous role with the provincial Crown agency Manitoba Film and Music or as a juror with the Juno Awards.

The inaugural Career Achievement in the Arts Award, which council executive director Carol Phillips said Thursday would be presented annually in the future, was given to the duo of Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey.

Their provocative visual and performance art has long earned laughs from some and inspired uneasiness in others.

Among them is the 1997 public art piece One Gay City, a mock advertising campaign that satirized Winnipeg as a safe haven for the LGBTTQ+ community at the time, or the unforgettable Lesbian National Parks and Services, which saw Millan and Dempsey donning park ranger uniforms and passing out maps with real and imagined lesbian-themed tourist attractions.

During her portion of the acceptance speech, Dempsey remembered when they moved to Winnipeg from Toronto in 1988 — “for cheap rent,” she said to guffaws from the luncheon crowd — and two years later received their first grant from the Winnipeg Arts Council for costumes shaped like plastic Greek columns.

They’ve since called Winnipeg home and Dempsey said they’ve discovered a “big-hearted, generous people,” ready to volunteer at a moment’s notice.

“You have helped make our work in innumerable ways,” she said of the city.

Dempsey and Millan’s latest collaboration has the potential of being their crowning artistic achievement.

“You (Winnipeg) have helped make our work in innumerable ways.”–Shawna Dempsey

They are part of the Winnipeg-based Team Wreford, whose project, Thunderhead, was named the winning bid in 2022 for an LGBTTQ+ national monument in Ottawa.

The structures and adjoining park will be built with money from the LGBT Purge Fund, collected from a class-action lawsuit settlement against the federal government by civil servants and members of the Canadian Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police who were harassed, discriminated against and forced from their jobs because of their sexual orientation.

“We were part of an international competition and we considered it a long shot. There were applications from all over the world,” Millan said. “(It’s great that) somebody outside of the Toronto-New York-Europe world — Winnipeg, the centre of Canada — is going to produce this national monument.

Career Achievement in the Arts winners Lorri Millan (left) and Shawna Dempsey accept their award at the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts at the RBC Convention Centre on Thursday.

Millan says it will embody both rage and hope, and includes Indigenous teachings in the design.

“We had to come up with imagery that was representative of a community that doesn’t really have a lot of singular images in common, so we used images from nature,” she said. “The notion of the Thunderhead is this powerful cloud of energy that rises up and cleanses the landscape.”

[email protected]

Twitter: @AlanDSmall

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