The Tideline - Halifax Examiner

Halifax poet laureate Sue Goyette, an early-run Tideline guest, returns one last time to discuss her new book Monoculture, out in October. Neither poetry nor fiction, its hybrid form imagines a near future where Nova Scotia's last living forest has become a tourist attraction and explores our relationship to trees and the land through the website's comments section. It's ever evocative and poignant and at turns funny...

The debut feature of Halifax hyphenate Koumbie — known as an actor for the stage and screen, a writer, and a director — will have its world premiere at the Atlantic International Film Festival on September 22. Bystanders tells the story of a lifelong friend group rocked to its foundation by accusations of sexual misconduct against one of their own. He's their friend, brother, even ex-boyfriend — so now what? As Koumbie puts it...

The multi-hyphenate Jackie Torrens — we're talking writer, director, actor, broadcaster, icon — stops by ahead of the Atlantic International Film Festival screening of her murder mystery doc Bernie Langille Wants To Know What Happened To Bernie Langille, which had its world premiere at Hot Docs this spring. Between the military, the time (50 years ago), intergenerational family trauma, and advances in science, Torrens has craf...

The Halifax-based poet and university professor Annick MacAskill has crafted a beautiful (and beautiful to touch thanks to Gaspereau Press) ode to a common but still stigmatized subject matter: pregnancy loss. Shadow Blight considers the pain of pregnancy loss through the classical myth of Niobe, whose grief for her dead children was so monumental she turned to stone. MacAskill speaks to the process of crafting and presenting such ...

The Halifax Fringe Festival is celebrating its first full in-person festival since 2019, which itself was cut short by hurricane Dorian. And that's not all—after seven festivals, executive director Lee-Anne Poole will head out the revolving door of Halifax arts org leaders and hand the reigns over to Sara Graham. Both are on the show this week to talk entrances and exits, why they do the work that they do, the festival's ...

What is there to say that hasn't been said 100 times (probably more) about Halifax's most famous animal? Gus—the de facto mascot of the Museum of Natural History—has been with the museum at its two locations since 1942, after being purchased in Florida for five
American dollars. This weekend there are six chances to celebrate his life and sing happy hatch day to the oldest known living gopher tortoise in the world — T...

To sleep, perchance to dream—in this humidity?! Shakespeare By The Sea's production of Hamlet—its first staged tragedy since 2019— opens on August 5, and director Drew Douris-O'Hara and the man himself, Deivan Steele, stop by the show before rehearsal to chat. Topics include: Climate change's effect on outdoor theatre, the timelessness of Shakespeare's most popular work, the failure of funding models in all time...

Author Andre Fenton returns to the show with a new book, The Summer Between Us: It's a complex, empathetic YA story about teens on the cusp of adulthood in the under-examined summer between high school and university, an expansion of the characters explored in his debut, Worthy of Love. He reveals his writing process, how his personal mission to unpack toxic masculinity dovetails with his hero's, and what inspires him to ...

The riotous gay rock band Partner—aka Lucy Niles and Josée Caron—beams into the show from Montreal ahead of its Sunday afternoon show at the Garrison Grounds for Halifax Pride. They dig into what it was like putting out an album in the pandemic, what pride means to them now, the lives they're still changing, and guitar solos. Plus Adam Reid from Halifax Pride returns to chat about this year's event, back to full strength ...

Martha Paynter is a registered nurse who works in abortion and reproductive health care. Her new book ABORTION TO ABOLITION (with illustrations by Julia Hutt) was published the same week Roe v Wade was overturned in the United States—her launch party was the day
after—and couldn't be a more timely introduction to the history of abortion in Canada. She's on the show this week to talk about how different the two countri...

Logan Robins (writer/director/composer) and Katherine Norris (star/composer) of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company are on the show this week ahead of their provincial tour of HIPPOPOSTUMOUS, Robins' musical exploration of invasive species, colonization, environmentalism, and history. Hear how Pablo Escobar's personal hippos have invaded and are ruining a section of Colombia, why Robins was intrigued to make a show abo...

Juanita Peters is a former broadcast journalist and current icon who writes, acts, and directs, including her debut feature 8:37 Rebirth. A tough, dark drama about restorative justice and the grey of life, the film is up for four Screen Nova Scotia Awards on Saturday. She stops by to chat about the film's COVID shoot, her time as a reporter, what's in the works—plays! docs!—directing Diggstown, and being named ACTRA'...

Dartmouth's annual theatre extravaganza Stages returns live to Alderney Landing this week for shows, works in progress, solo experiments, and all kinds of wild weirdness. That includes SHAKESPEARE'S TIME MACHINE by The Villains Theatre, a classically irreverent comedy by Dan Bray. Co-director Rebecca Wolfe and performer/producer Colleen MacIsaac are on the show this week to talk post-pandemic life in the theatre, their pe...

Five years ago, an idea was born and named after a Barenaked Ladies song about how Halifax sucks. Hello City has been delighting Halifax audiences with its open, supportive, good-natured humour—heck, last summer they were the only pandemic entertainment in town—and friendly, charismatic cast. Liam, Stevey, Gil, Peter, Colin, and Henri—with regrets from Beth and Shahin—stop by for their fourth Tideline appearance (and sole improv-fr...

Singer-songwriter Willie Stratton has wandered a number of genre path, starting with raw acoustic folk as a teen phenom, moving through surf rock as Beach Bait, and landing in a Roy Orbison-style classic country on his new album Drugstore Dreamin'. Ahead of his release show at the Marquee on Friday, he stops in to explain why mixing influences makes
the best art, how he approaches the guitar, and what he likes about his da...

Grace McNutt and Linnea Swinimer are the Minute Women, two Haligonians who host a podcast of the same name about Canadian history as seen through a lens of Heritage Minutes (minutewomenpodcast.ca). In a lively celebration of the show's second birthday, they stop by to reveal how curling brought them together in podcast — and now BFF — form, their favourite Minutes, that time they thought Jean Chretien was dead, and the impact ...

For a show (and cult film) out of the mid-1970s, The Rocky Horror Show was  ahead of its time in its depiction of queerness and gender and—save a handful of instances—has aged surprisingly well enough to fit into this contemporary time. Neptune Theatre's production opens this week (running through June 26) and director Jeremy Webb and actors Allister MacDonald (Dr. Frank N Furter) and Breton Lalama (Riff Raff) squeeze in a cha...

In 1994, Elizabeth Murphy, Patrick Christopher Carter, and Jean Morpurgo staged a now-legendary, free production of Twelfth Night in Point Pleasant Park. On that summer weekend, Shakespeare By The Sea was born, anchoring every summer in Halifax with a slate of Shakespeare and a company-created family show. As its 28th season dawns, Murphy—the surviving co-founder who's been running the company with Jesse MacLean—has decided to...