All of Lethbridge’s summer  festivals  and attractions begin this week. Most of them at Casa.

The Lethbridge Jazz and Blues  festival  bring Grammy award winning drummer Larnell Lewis and Joy Lapps to the Sterndale Bennett Theatre, Monday, July 4.

 Tickets ate $43 and $45. The show begins  at 8 p.m.

Classical music fans will be overjoyed that The Centric music Festival returns to Lethbridge this week. The First concert is  at Casa featuring violinist Alina Khvatova and pianist  Cheryl Emery-Karapita paying tribute to the tragedy in Ukraine by performing  a distinctive program of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian music, featuring Lyudkevych, Latoshinsky, and Wieniawski, and Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky.

The second Centric concert is at Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden, Wednesday, June 6,. Music in the Garden features the 2022 Centric music fest String quartet including violinists Laurie Syer, Eric Auerbach, viola player Gabe Kastelic and cellist Julie Amundsen. That concert begins at 7:30 p.m.

 The third concert is in Indian Battle Park at 7:30 Friday, July 8. Music in Nature also features the 2022 Centric music Fest String Quartet. Both  performances feature will be performing Phillip Glass’s String quartet No. 2 “Company” and  Alexander  Borodin excerpts from String Quartet No. 2.

The Centric Festival wraps up with the Rising Stars concert at Casa on Saturday, June 9 at 7:30 p.m. It features the inaugural winner of the 2022 Centric MusicFest/Primo Music Association scholarship: violinist Alayna McNeil, as recommended by adjudicators and the scholarship committee of the Lethbridge and District Speech Arts Festival. She will be performing some of her winning repertoire, including works by Prokofiev, Bach, and Brahms with pianists John-Paul Ksiazek and Deanna Oye. The 2022 Centric MusicFest String Quartet are also performing with visiting colleagues, Laurie Syer and Eric Auerbach. They will be joined by artistic director, pianist Ryan Kolodziej, in a performance of Brahms’ dramatic Piano Quintet in F minor

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 Tickets are $35 for adults, $15 for students for each show or a festival pass for $85.

 If you’re looking for family friendly fun, Hootenanny’s The Junk Show happens every Wednesday through Saturday in Galt Gardens at 10:30 a.m. It runs until the end of July

 The Lethbridge Shakespeare Performance Society opens their season’s production go Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet at Casa, Thursday, July 7 at 7:30 p.m. They will also be at Legacy Park at 7:30 p.m.. Admission is by Donation.

This year‘s Hootenanny is making art out of junk for July.

The popular local devised theatre family production of Hootenanny returns to Galt Gardens all July beginning on Canada Day, then Saturday morning.

 “The Junk Show” features Ahona Sanyal and Quinn Larder play Rusty and Dusty, two junk collectors who have some fun with rubbish, sorting junk into piles labelled “No Good” and “So Good,” but get lost in their imaginations playing with their finds.

“Rusty and Dusty are two junk collectors who make friends and learn that everyone and everything has value,” Sanyal summarized.

“We make puppets out of the junk, we go into medieval times, underwater and into space,” continued Sanyal, who is excited to be part of Hootenanny again. She was part of last year’s Hootenanny— “The Risky, Yet Rewarding Adventure of Pearl and Dot.” They had to take the year before that off because of Covid.

Director Nicola Elson, who also works at the University of Lethbridge, didn’t have as much time to dedicate to it due to the strike and Covid affecting operations at the university.

“Usually I like to devise a skeleton of a script and work off that, but I wasn’t able to do that this year, so this is truly devised theatre,” Elson said, adding they let the junk inspire the story.

“ They dialogue doesn’t really matter as much for theatre for young audiences. It’s more about physical acting and colour,” she said,  noting she visited an art junkyard called Bin Diver near Irricana , outside of Calgary and collected an array of items like bicycle wheels, old mops, motorcycle helmets, watering cans, clocks, fans and lamp shades to use.

The Lethbridge Shakespeare Performance Society gave a preview of this summer’s production of Hamlet  at the Grand opening of  Festival Square, next to Telegraph and across from the SAAG.

 Producer Kate Connolly is excited to bring Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy to stages all over the city this summer.

“This is our eleventh year and we were able to do this throughout Covid,” Connolly said before the show.

 While  the local thespians usually concentrate on the comedies, they have explored some of Shakespeare’s tragedies including Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth and the Tempest .

 Connolly is excited to have a full slate of shows and new venues for this year.

“We have 17 shows this summer, which is the most we’ve ever done,” Connolly said, noting most of the July shows will be outside Casa on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m..as part of Upside Downtown. 

They also have three shows at the Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden, Galt Gardens, Legacy Park and road trips to the Historic Empress Theatre in Fort Macleod,  Coutts Centre outside Nanton and the Venue in High River.

“We’re very excited to be part of the very popular Upside Downtown concert  series ,” Connolly said.