By MEGAN WARREN

FOR ARTSPRING

The curtain goes up this Friday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m. for the Salt Spring Community Showcase! Emceed by Grace Jordan, the Showcase is a night dedicated to the world-class artists that call Salt Spring Island home. Last week, we introduced lullaby creator Lisa Maxx, alt-folk musician Matthew McKinney and puppeteer Tangle McClaron. Now, we turn the spotlight toward the final three acts of this remarkable lineup: fiddler Wesley Hardisty, the duo of Edgar Hann and Em Walker, and the student-creators of GISPA.

Showcase tickets are available now at the ArtSpring box office or online at purchase.artspring.ca. 

Wesley Hardisty

For fiddler Wesley Hardisty, stepping onto the ArtSpring stage for the Showcase is a  full-circle moment. Having spent his teenage years in the building as a GISPA student, Hardisty views this performance as a chance to return as a full-fledged professional and share his evolution with the community that nurtured his start.

Hardisty first picked up the fiddle at age 12 in his hometown of Fort Simpson, NWT. He began composing original music almost immediately, developing a signature sound that pays homage to West Coast and Métis styles alongside the “odd time-signatured, crooked fiddle tunes” of the Gwich’in style. This creative drive has culminated in a landmark year: Hardisty was recently awarded both a Canada Council for the Arts grant and an OHSOTO’KINO Recording Bursary. He is currently preparing to record two separate 10-track albums of original material, slated for release early next year.

At the Showcase, Hardisty will ignite the room with jigs and reels from his “Exodus Set.” While his technical mastery is undeniable, he views music primarily as a vessel for connection. He speaks joyfully of sharing the stage with Charlie Gannon and Sam Howard at the recent Stowel Lake Hootenanny Square Dance and looks forward. At the Showcase, he’s thrilled to be supported by guitarist Justin Kelley of Fawkes and Hownd. “It’s one thing to be a solo player,” he says. “But to be a musician who gets to work with others. At that point, it feels like community.”

Edgar Hann & Em Walker

When Edgar Hann draws the bellows of his button accordion and Em Walker strikes a rhythm on the ugly stick, the 5,000 kilometres between Newfoundland and Salt Spring Island seem to vanish. As the only duo on the island performing with these traditional instruments, they bring a singular East Coast energy to the local scene. If you caught their performances at the 2026 Newfie New Year’s celebration, you know their sound coaxes even the most resolute non-dancers to tap their feet.

Edgar, a Newfoundlander who spent his youth living off the land, is a self-taught master who plays entirely by ear. “I didn’t know what was happening at first,” he recalls of his start at age 12. “All of a sudden, I was picking up short notes, then melodies, and suddenly it was a fast jig. It was a gift.”

Em, a former professor who researched the ancestral links between Irish and Newfoundland melodies, provides the historical heartbeat. She explains that the music carries echoes of the Irish famine, blending resilient joy with a longing for what is left behind. While songs like “Fields of Athenry” are plaintive, Em notes that people from anywhere can relate to the themes of home and displacement.

Joined by Wilf Davies on keyboard and William Steiner on bass, the pair will perform two songs with Newfoundland and Irish ties and a stirring cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” They will close with a high-energy jig, punctuated by Em on the ugly stick—handcrafted by Edgar and complete with beer bottle caps and a cowbell. In the spirit of a true kitchen party, they invite the audience to do more than listen: they invite you to tap your feet, dance the jig, and find a joyful sense of home in the music.

GISPA

At the Gulf Islands School of Performing Arts (GISPA), the stage is a laboratory. For the Showcase, 16 student-creators in Grades 10–12 will premiere an excerpt from their year-end production of The Little Prince, based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This is no traditional adaptation; it is the result of extensive collective creation where every note, step and line is student-led.

Music teacher Michelle Footz notes that the original score “comes from their brains,” with students composing pieces that range from psychedelic textures to Baroque-style waltzes. Meanwhile, dancers (led by Sonia Langer) choreograph the movements while theatre students (led by Jason Donaldson) refine a script. The three disciplines then work together to weave a cohesive piece. Beyond the spotlight, these students are the designers and builders behind the sets, costumes and lighting. It is a true ensemble-based program where even the lead characters help move sets backstage. 

Their Showcase set spotlights three scenes: the Introduction, the Rose Garden and The King. These vignettes explore childhood wonder while offering, as GISPA says in the performance’s description, “an indictment of adult priorities that hasten the loss of that wonder.” 

Through this work, one theatre student wants to “bring people back to childhood ideals, where they can be less concerned with matters of consequence and more concerned with joy and creation.” Says another, “With age, you do lose pieces of your past, but we’d like to show people how to bring back and unearth the joy that they once had.” 

As the students prepare to take the ArtSpring stage, they invite the community to unearth their own sense of whimsy and witness the clarity that emerges when a young creative ensemble finds its collective voice.

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.

ArtSpring audiences are in for an extraordinary musical theatre treat this week as Tymisha Harris’ multi-award-winning show Josephine comes to the stage on Monday and Tuesday, April 13-14.

Harris brings Josephine Baker’s revolutionary life as a singer, movie star, WWII spy, civil rights activist and cultural icon to life through cabaret, theatre and dance genres in the show that has won more than 20 awards since it debuted 10 years ago.

Some of the more recent honours came from festivals ranging from the Gothenburg Fringe (2024 Mind Blown Award) to the Montreal Fringe (2022 Patrons Pick and Outstanding English Production) to the Adelaide Fringe (2020 Critic’s Circle Award) and Victoria Fringe (2019 Best Performance, Favourite Solo Show and Overall Pick).

“From ballgown to banana belt, Tymisha Harris is a tour de force!” stated the Broadway Baby theatre review publication.

“(Tymisha Harris) should be starring in a movie version directed by Baz Luhrmann,” wrote actor, producer, TV personality RuPaul Charles about the show.

According to Josephinetheplay.com, “Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906 and achieved only moderate success in the United States, but became an international superstar after moving to Europe in 1924. She starred alongside white romantic leading men in films in the ‘30s, had multiple interracial marriages and homosexual relationships, and performed in men’s clothing before the term ‘drag’ was commonly used/known. She was a spy for the French Resistance in WWII, a civil rights activist and mother to 12 adopted children. Her success often gave her the opportunity to live free from the racial oppression of her home nation, though she never stopped yearning for acceptance in America.”

Harris, who lives in Orlando, Fla., has worked in performing arts for four decades. Her most recent show, A Cabaret of Legends, expands on Josephine by celebrating other female Black singers, from Billie Holliday to Ella Fitzgerald to Beyonce.

The ArtSpring shows begin at 7:30 p.m. both nights.

Tickets are available through ArtSpring, online or at the box office.