Downtown courtyard party with Otonabeats

You’re reading the August 23, 2024 edition of the Peterborough Currents email newsletter. To receive our email newsletters straight to your inbox, sign up here.

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Good morning and welcome to the arts and community edition of the Peterborough Currents newsletter. My name is Alex, and I send this email every Friday to catch you up on what’s happening in the community.

This week:

• Otonabeats hosting daytime dance this Sunday downtown
• Michael Cloud Duguay releases new album steeped in local nostalgia
• Right to Heal and Big Mama’s Kitchen present stand-up comedy night

Let’s get started!

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Otonabeats spins up a downtown dance party this Sunday afternoon

Since 2021, Otonabeats has introduced the Peterborough community to seasoned and emerging DJs through their monthly talent showcase and dance parties. They’ve become known for their late-night dances under the stars, but this month they partnered with the Peterborough Arts Collective (PAC) to bring the party downtown on Sunday afternoon.

Their all-ages dance, called Day Breaks, will take place at the Bankers Common courtyard from 1 to 8 p.m. The show will feature eclectic range of music by local DJs Dance Camp, DJ Bubble, Pyself, DJ Isla, and Purdon. There will also be face-painting, crafts, and live art-making, with the art piece made during the show to be raffled benefitting the Arts Collective. 

“In a way, we’re kind of returning to our roots of the show, but we’re doing it a little bit differently,” said Otonabeats organizer Ryan Mclean Purdon. “The very first event we ever did was an outdoor daytime thing where we ran a power cord from a friend’s house into the back of a park, set up the DJ gear in the booth, and folks came out.”

Purdon said that he hopes families spending time downtown will wander over and take part in this weekend’s event. “I think what I’m most excited for is to have people dancing in the sunshine in downtown Peterborough. It’s not something we’ve had the opportunity to do yet.”

The Bankers Common is just south of the Water and Hunter Street intersection, accessible through the alleyway beside Watson and Lou. Entry is by donation.

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Local musician’s new album is a dreamy homage to Peterborough’s 2000s music scene

For Michael Cloud Duguay, the launch of his album Succeeder is a celebration of coming home.

“I had left Peterborough in 2012 and lived away for a really long time, but when I made this record in 2021 it sort of planted a seed where I gained a bit of new perspective on this community and found for the first time in a long time that I was pining to be in Peterborough again.”

Although he lived on Wolf Island in Kingston at the time, he felt called to revisit his youth in Peterborough and decided to collaborate with various local talents to bring the album into being. 

The initial recordings for the album were done three years ago, in the height of the Covid 19 pandemic.

“It started as a songwriting exercise, really just to keep myself sharp and get myself doing something and to not feel too disappointed about having to cancel all my shows,” Duguay remembered.

The plan then was to write one song about every place he ever called home, and much of the material that came out of the exercise focused on Duguay’s time as an up-and-coming musician in Peterborough.

He added that the album attempts to emulate his sonic memories of Peterborough during his teenage years and young adulthood in the 2000s. “I wanted it to sound like my memories of that time… sort of like tripping down Hunter Street being like 17 or 18 years old, dipping in and out of bars and catching all this amazing music and having my mind blown,” he said.

“There’s no way I could accurately bottle that and pour it back out, but I was trying to bring it through the lens of nostalgia and memory and to give it a sort of dream quality. So I hope that people who were around at that time in downtown Peterborough, when they listen to it that they can hear a bit of that.”

Now Duguay is back and working in the Peterborough music scene again with his own record label, Watch That Ends The Night Records. To learn more about Succeeder and Duguay’s future projects, visit www.michaelcloudduguay.bandcamp.com

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Stand-up comedy show this Saturday will support Right To Heal’s ongoing mission

This Saturday at 6 p.m., outpatient addiction support centre Right to Heal at 441 Rubidge Street will host a stand-up comedy fundraiser benefiting their ongoing efforts to support people in our community living with addiction.

For $50 per ticket, Big Mama’s Kitchen, located in the Right to Heal building, will prepare a dinner for guests to enjoy while they experience a Yuk Yuk’s comedy show. 

Performers will include multi award-winning comedian Jeff McEnery, and Toronto-based comedian Anjelica Scannura who produces Prince Edward County’s Haymaker Comedy Festival and will soon go on tour with Yuk Yuk’s. Gilson Lubin, former MTV Canada host, will serve as emcee for the evening.

All ticket sales will go towards operating expenses for Right to Heal and Big Mama’s Kitchen. “Our mission is to build a healthier community, one person at a time,” said Liz Shaughnessy-Rowe of Right to Heal.

She explained that although the organization receives funding from the Ontario government to run outpatient addiction treatment programming, it isn’t enough to support the community of about 300 people who access services at the dedicated 441 Rubidge Street building.

“One of the things that people don’t understand is that when you’re trying to get used to a new way of living, it’s hard to find safe places in the community to eat or to socialize that don’t kind of get you moving back into your old way of living,” Shaughnessy-Rowe said. “So we also feed our clients, which is unfunded, and we put on different things for the community that they can enjoy while staying on the path.”

Tickets to the dinner and comedy show are available on the Right to Heal website.

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PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Live music at the Wednesday downtown farmers’ market

Peterborough born-and-raised performer Kevin Michael Outwater played a folk ballad while community members shopped for local goods. Outwater busks at the Peterborough Regional Farmers’ Market downtown most Wednesday mornings. (Photo: Alex Karn)

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