By MEGAN WARREN
For ArtSpring
It’s time to show some love for local performers! On Friday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m., the Salt Spring Community Showcase brings six incredible local acts to the ArtSpring stage.
There is so much to say about the Showcase artists that if we covered them all in one article, we’d need our own issue. For this week, let us introduce to you three: The Singing Amma, Matthew McKinney, and Tangle McClaron.
Lisa Maxx: The Singing Amma
Lisa Maxx believes the whole world needs a lullaby. With over 50 years of experience singing children to sleep, Maxx is currently channeling this lifelong practice into a dedicated lullaby album under the stage name The Singing Amma. Her set at the Showcase features soul-healing tracks designed to regulate the spirit as much as the ears.
Known to many as Lisa Sigurgeirson or Lisa Sig, Maxx daylights as a parenting coach and understands the profound science behind her art. “I often talk about that precious time at bedtime,” she explains. “It’s not just a nice thing to do; there is so much brain science coming out now about what lullabies do for our nervous system regulation. It is really beneficial, both for a child’s sleep and in general, to get us through our days.”
Many of her original lullabies were inspired by specific children. In “Nature’s Lullaby,” for example, she weaves the wind, birdsong, and lake ripples that were the soundtrack of her outings with a child who finished each walk with a nap on her lap in her wheelchair.
For Maxx, this performance is a personal triumph. Despite being a regular Salt Spring performer in the decades since she debuted in a school production of Oliver Twist at Mahon Hall, the pandemic, a house fire, and chronic illness, have put her stage career on hold since 2020. “I feel like I’m rising from the ashes,” she says. “I’m really excited that my debut back on the stage is at ArtSpring. It’s a relaunch of Lisa Maxx.”
Matthew McKinney
When you hear the word “bard,” chances are you don’t picture a performer from this century. Matthew McKinney is out to change that, describing his style as a “homegrown, old-time Bardic weave for these times.” His folky riffs and “soapbox-sermon” lyrics draw on myth, history, and modern existential challenges to create a sound that gestures at the antiwar anthems of the ‘60s and ‘70s . It’s no wonder his music is most at home in the barns, backyards, and community spaces that defined his recent US tour.
McKinney has been a Salt Springer since 2017, when he moved from the US to work with the W.O.L.F. kids program at the Wisdom of the Earth school. He sees his roles as a counselor and a musician as different forms of the same skill, both relying on deep listening and a precise sense of timing. “With counseling, you can say the right thing at the wrong time or environment, and it won’t mean as much,” he says. “But, if you say it with the right timing, it can change a person. That’s such a musical skill.”
At the Showcase, McKinney will play songs from his new album, Singing at the End, with storytelling woven between each track. “We’re on the precipice of massive transitions in the world, culturally, politically, socially, environmentally and also digitally,” he says. “Singing at the End is about finding our own way to contribute the innate giftedness that we each have to share in hard times.”
His set aims to help audiences make peace with the “darkness playing out on the world stage” and find gratitude for life amidst it all.
Tangle McClaron: Entangled Puppetry
Decades after first roaming ArtSpring’s dressing rooms as a high-school theatre kid, Tangle McClaron is returning for a full-circle performance at the Showcase. Her award-winning 10-minute puppet show, “How the Whale Brought the Rain,” is a literal transformation of the island’s landscape. McClaron carves her puppets from local driftwood, a medium she first embraced in 2010 when she and a friend started Entangled Puppetry with endless creative energy and zero budget. While walking a beach, she discovered a piece of wood that “held the suggestion” of a whale, sparking an original creation myth about how the West Coast became wet.
After “How the Whale Brought the Rain” won Canmore’s 10-Minute Play Festival, McClaron decided not to lug the fifty pounds of driftwood puppets back to the coast. Now performing alongside her husband Tyler, McClaron has recreated the show’s puppets using driftwood she found beachcombing with her children on the shores she grew up exploring.
For Tangle, puppetry is a powerful medium for both education and wonder. “A lot of the amazing and fantastical things that we see are digital. They’re separated from us by a screen,” she explains. “But with puppetry, we’re able to experience these three-dimensional moments of magic, and we’re able to make them tangible and bring them to life.”
“We’re living in interesting times, which also can be troubling times,” she says. “As an artist, sharing a sense of whimsy is a way to connect people with hope.”
Tickets are available now at the ArtSpring box office or online at purchase.artspring.ca. $30 adults, $10 youth. Book yours now and get ready to be blown away by the talent in your own backyard.