The Winnipeg Arts Council office is sold out.
John Waters will be travelling north to Winnipeg this November to talk about his life, career and the city that helped shape him.
Waters, a filmmaker whose movies have gone from art-houses, to the big screen, to Broadway, will be in Winnipeg to give a talk on November 4. The event will help kick off My City’s Still Breathing, a symposium exploring the arts, artists and the city. Local, national and international experts will gather in Winnipeg to deliberate and debate the relationship of art and design to city-making, and the relationship between artists and their cities.
A life-long Baltimorean, Waters’ movies are all set in Baltimore, Maryland, where he still lives. “John Waters is an artist whose work is so influenced by his city,” says Executive Director Carol Phillips. “And in turn the city he lives in has been influenced by his work. He is a perfect example of the symbiotic and essential relationship between culture and city-living.”
About John Waters
Baltimore, Maryland
Born in Baltimore, MD in 1946, John Waters was drawn to movies at an early age, particularly exploitation movies with lurid ad campaigns. He subscribed to Variety at the age of twelve, absorbing the magazine's factual information and its lexicon of insider lingo. This early education would prove useful as the future director began his career giving puppet shows for children's birthday parties. As a teenager, Waters began making 8-mm underground movies influenced by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Russ Meyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Waters has made numerous films using Baltimore, which he fondly dubbed the "Hairdo Capitol of the World," as the setting for his unique films and eclectic adventures. He burst onto the film scene in 1972 with the notorious Pink Flamingos and has a number of highly acclaimed films under his belt including Hairspray, Serial Mom, Female Trouble, Pecker, and Polyester.
Legendary filmmaker John Waters performs a very developed one-man show at festivals, universities, and clubs across the world and has since the 1970's. In it, he details his groundbreaking career in a rapid-fire stand-up comedy format (akin to high-brow comics and monologists such as Spalding Gray, Janeane Garofalo, and Margaret Cho) plus conducts a Q & A afterwards.
The show has played to sold-out audiences in New York, Copenhagen, Boston, San Francisco, Tucson, Washington (DC), Sydney (Australia), and beyond. As a director, actor, graphic artist with showings at galleries across the globe, creator of the wildly successful Broadway musical “Hairspray”, Gay/Lesbian role-model, social commentator, author of numerous books (including his 2010 best-seller Role Models), and even his being immortalized as an animated character on “The Simpsons”-- not to mention being the man who first took a chance, believed, and catapulted Johnny Depp from pin-up idol to serious-actor status and critical acclaim-- Mr. Waters is a renaissance man of almost unprecedented cultural influence.
Download John Waters' pictures.
Photo credit: Greg Gorman
