2 weeks Ago By Ben Waldman
Andraea Sartison is holding her wrist and remembering a gruelling camping injury that might not meet the standards of a Norse myth. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Andraea Sartison is holding her wrist and remembering a gruelling camping injury that might not meet the standards of a Norse myth. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Andraea Sartison is holding her wrist and remembering a gruelling camping injury that might not meet the standards of a Norse myth.
“It was the most Andraea injury I could imagine,” she says. She was in the back of a motorboat on the Winnipeg River, shielding her two young children and the family dog from turbulent waters and a misty sky. Of course, Sartison cared that her husband stayed behind the wheel and that her dependents remained safely tucked beneath her cape, but she didn’t forget what brought them to the river in the first place.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Tracy Penner performs a scene from the new PTE piece Ponderosa Pine, Tuesday. “I was wearing a blanket to protect me and my kids from all the rain,” she says, pausing for dramatic effect. “But I also had to protect the pumpkin pie.
” She was holding the homemade treat on her arm, pressing it down to keep it still; she wanted to preserve warm memories of autumnal desserts by any means necessary. By the time the boat pulled to shore, Sartison’s arm was toast. “I couldn’t move my wrist for two days,” says the playwright, clad in a white linen jumpsuit and red Chelsea boots.
“But the pie survived, and it was delicious.” That ordeal in Sartison family lore happened two weeks ago, during an annual Thanksgiving weekend camping trip along the Winnipeg River with her husband and their kids, 3 and 5, who are at the age when they’re starting to become historians wearing Osh-Kosh B’Gosh. “They were asking a lot of questions about hunting,” says Sartison, 36, co-founder of the nomadic One Trunk Theatre and the event company Fête Jockey.
“They’re very curious about life and death, to be honest. ‘How does time work?’ or ‘What is yesterday?’ You know, counting down. “My eldest son is very curious about any facts he can get his hands on.
He wants to know less personal stories. I think he’s more a big-picture kind of guy.” When Sartison was five, living in Calgary, she was less attuned to the universe.
“I was, like, really annoying. ‘Look at me, look at me.’ But I was serious.
I was observant and I wanted to be taken seriously. I didn’t want to be treated as a child. I wanted to do performances and for things to be profound, and I wanted people to be like, ‘Wow, she’s got her s— together.
’” With her newest play, — a one-woman show starring Tracy Penner — Sartison set out to use fictionalized familial history to examine the big-picture questions that so consume her eldest child, namely the heritable nature of storytelling. Sometimes, stories carry on simply because they’re compelling enough to merit being retold. begins with the town of Valhalla on fire.
“Our narrator is seeing the town rebuilt, but things are not the same as they’ve always been,” says Sartison, who started writing the script shortly after her first child was born. She had just finished working on a co-production between One Trunk Theatre and PTE. “It wasn’t intentional, but the story of became a question of what a mother character would leave behind for her son.
The (accompanying graphic novel) became the legacy the mother in the play leaves for her child. I was thinking about legacy.” The oral transfer of folklore is a theme that’s occupied much of Sartison’s work, including a 2015 collaborative production called .
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Ponderosa Pine playwright Andraea Sartisan pays homage to family history with her red boots. Set in 1920s Gimli, the play followed a Lutheran Ladies League’s fundraising efforts, drawing on Icelandic narrative traditions and Sartison’s youth as a member of the church. That play helped set the table for Sartison to more closely explore her own family history, which starts in a region of the world renowned for both viking epics, royal sagas and the foundational texts of Hans Christian Andersen.
In 2019, Sartison opened a document on her computer that contained the bulk of the inspiration — plumbed from family lore — for the play now known as She interviewed all her living relatives and asked them the same opening question: if heaven is a small Prairie town, and it’s a place where you live forever, who are you and what are you doing? “The answers were how I built the characters in the town. I asked them lots of questions about iconic stories and what they remembered from their ancestors.” Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions.
Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. She called the computer document “Red Boots” — a slight nod to Andersen’s cautionary fairy tale and a possible hint toward magical realism. “These,” she says, gesturing to her feet, “aren’t the red boots.
But the story is that my Mormor — my mother’s mother — was travelling to Canada; she had all the money that my Morfar — my mother’s father — had sent for her to come join him in Calgary. And she spent the last of it on red patent leather boots. Not on food or for anything else they needed to build their life together.
She just really needed to arrive in beautiful red boots.” Was Sartison’s grandmother so confident in her fortune that she knew a pair of ruby red slippers wouldn’t spell disaster? “I think that’s part of it,” Sartison says. “But I think in coming to Canada she also rewrote this narrative of herself.
” [email protected] Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the .
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. . Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism.
Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider .
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support. Theatregoers can enjoy two artforms for the price of one during visits to Prairie Theatre Exchange this season.
The Portage Place venue has teamed up with Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba to provide gallery space for local visual artists with disabilities. Each production will be paired with new paintings, sculptures, jewelry pieces or other visual artwork on display in glass boxes located in the theatre’s lobby. “We have had these locked display cubes in our lobby for years but have not had outside folks use them,” says Carman Johnston, PTE’s director of development and external relations, via email.
“We thought this would be a great way to add some art to our lobby and support (Arts AccessAbility).” The non-profit network is dedicated to improving access to the arts for artists and audiences with disabilities across the province. The partnership is a chance to get member artwork in front of new viewers and potential buyers.
“This is an amazing opportunity for our artists to have their artwork on display in a setting which will bring a new audience to view their artwork,” says Jenel Shaw, executive director of Arts AccessAbility. “(We’re) excited to partner with PTE, who is always thinking about how to make their space and their plays more accessible.” When possible, the organization is aiming to match artists and artwork with themes explored in each production, Shaw says.
During the season opening run of Bed & Breakfast, a colourful painting by Winnipeg multimedia artist Ryan Smoluk, entitled Piano Cat, was featured in the theatre’s foyer. In line with the magical flora at the centre of Ponderosa Pine, the display case will be populated until Nov. 17 by a miniature torchwork tree sprouting from a blown glass vase created by Pinawa glass artist Brook Drabot.
Ponderosa Pine Prairie Theatre Exchange Opens today, runs to Nov. 17 Tickets at pte.mb.
ca Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the . Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. .
Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
If you are not a paid reader, please consider . Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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