Local Arts

Stories from Skins and Skirts features collaborations by Eleanor Hannon and Elizabeth Dancoes, and Jane Kenyon and Jude Neale. Each artist-and-poet pair has maintained a mutually inspiring friendship for years.

The newly opened show at The Kube gallery in Gibsons is the result of intersections between artists with links to the Sunshine Coast.

Time and Shadows, which played at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons on March 23, was a full-length performance developed by Gerardo Avila and Steven Schwabl. Schwabl is a professional actor who first worked with Avila in 2018 when Avila — a career clown, mime and magician with a master’s degree in Hispanic and Italian studies — organized the Satio Circus. 

The longest-running festival on the Sunshine Coast will observe its 50th anniversary this month. The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Performing Arts was founded in 1973 by the Gibsons Kiwanis Club and organized its first adjudicated performances for young artists in 1974.  

The Sunshine Coast Film Society plans to screen the documentary Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe on April 8 at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons (7:30 p.m.), and on April 13 at the Raven’s Cry Theatre in Sechelt (2 p.m.).

Blood Relations, by Canadian dramatist Sharon Pollock, won the Governor General’s literary award in 1981. The play presents a fictionalized version of Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 was tried and acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. 

For Allie Bartlett, whose show, Photographs and Footprints concluded this week at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, the faint click of a vintage Polaroid camera is only the first step in a developing process. After the film reveals its image, she submerges the print in water and separates the emulsion from its chemical and cardboard layers. 

Five Sunshine Coast artists made every hour count during their two-day pop-up exhibition of collage works at the Rockwood Lodge in Sechelt. 

The event will include a demonstration of traditional Easter egg ornamentation, or pysanky, by Gibsons-based artist Janet Ritchey. 

A newly opened showcase by young artists living on the Sunshine Coast filled the Gibsons Public Art Gallery with so many original works that it required a six-member crew to hang more than 170 items.