A LIFE IN WAVES
Directed by Brent Whitcomb
2017, USA, 74 min

Thursday, September 6 @ 7 PM | Winnipeg Cinematheque, 400 Arthur St. | $10

Thursday, September 13 @ 7 PM | Winnipeg Cinematheque, 400 Arthur St. | $10 

The first ever feature-length portrait of renowned percussionist Milford Graves, exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. Graves has performed internationally since 1964, both as a soloist and in ensembles with such legends as Albert Ayler, Giuseppi Logan and Sonny Sharrock. He is a founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz, and he remains one of the most influential living figures in the evolution of the form. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle and survival, ruminates on the essence of ‘swing’ , activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan where he performs at a school for children with autism, igniting the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances from around the globe, Milford Graves Full Mantis is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’ music itself.

Thursday, September 27 @ 7 PM | Winnipeg Cinematheque, 400 Arthur St. | $10 

Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-1993) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness” softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference, making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice.

Saturday, October 6 @ 2 PM | Winnipeg Cinematheque, 400 Arthur St. | $10  

Followed by a Q&A with the artist.

Contralto exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary, featuring a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a score using conventional and “non-musical” approaches to sound-making. When a transgender man begins taking testosterone his vocal cords thicken and his voice drops into the so-called “masculine range.” However, trans women’s voices are unaffected by increased levels of estrogen in the body. Being a woman with a  “male voice” creates prolonged and intensified dysphoria – a situation where their identities are betrayed by their bodies and brings with it the higher risk of harassment and violence experienced by trans women. “Contralto” – defined in musical terms as “the lowest female singing voice” – uses the sound of trans women’s voices to explore transfeminine identity from the inside and explores the intimate, peculiar, and powerful relationship between gender and sound.

Sarah Hennies will also perform at the 20th Edition of send + receive on October 7. She is presented at send + receive in partnership with Groundswell.