By Cecilia Nasmith

When COVID-19 cancelled their month-long series of talks and presentations on Alberta in spring of 2020, Northumberland Learning Connection became one of the more successful stories of pivoting to continue.

On June 17, the organization will present the eighth of a string of one-time on-line presentations of timely interest – and their fifth in 2021.

Creativity In The Time of COVID is the free 7:30 p.m. presentation, a look at whether this past year and its restrictions has diminished people's creative spark or spawned new masterpieces – much like the situation William Shakespeare encountered in the 17th century, when he wrote King Lear during a plague.

Five panelists will present a case from their own experiences.

Ottawa-born Angela Hewitt – whose career took off in 1985 when she won the Bach international piano competition – is the only woman to be awarded the City of Leipzig's Bach Medal. She was inducted into Gramophone Magazine's Hall of Fame and is a Companion of the Order of Canada and an OBE. During 2020, she posted short piano works almost daily on Facebook

Best known for the ground-breaking CODCO TV series, Greg Malone has been a comedian and political satirist for almost half a century. He returned to live theatre in 2012 and is launching a series of on-line readings of the poems of Cavafy, performing at the Perchance Shakespeare Festival and in rehearsals for a production of King Lear.

Emily Urquhart's first book Beyond The Pale was a 2015 Globe and Mail best book. She is the winner of a National Magazine award, and her most recent book (The Age of Creativity) has been called both moving and timely. She grew up with a ringside view of the solitary pursuit of creativity as the daughter of artist Tony and novelist Jane Urquhart.

Reneitta Arluk is Director of Indigenous Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta, becoming the first Indigenous person and first Inuk to graduate from the program. She is also the first Inuk and Indigenous woman to direct at the Stratford Festival.

Another Banff Centre luminary, artistic director of the summer music program Roman Borys is one of Canada's most active chamber musicians. A founding member of the three-time Juno-winning Gryphon Trio, he has been artistic director of the Ottawa Chamber Festival and continues to work with his Gryphon colleagues at the Banff centre.

NLC has been bringing timely and thought-provoking programming to the local community since 2005 in series form, with twice-yearly line-ups of lecturers, presenters, special events and field trips centring around a single theme. The last of these was a fall 2019 series on artificial intelligence.

The spring 2020 series on Alberta had to be cancelled but, later that spring, they lined up University of Guelph Professor Emeritus David Waltner-Toews for a single Zoom session called Animal Farm: An Alternate View of Pandemics.

Two further sessions came along that year, Basic Income: An Interview with Hugh Segal and Watching China: Professor Joseph Wong.

The new year kicked off with a presentation called Is The Balance of Power Black followed by an examination of two other questions – Is Canada at a Pandemic Pivot Point (March 11) and Barry Blitt: How Far Is Too Far (April 15). On May 13, there was a session on Reimagining Long-Term Care.

You can register for the free Creativity in the Time of COVID by visiting the Northumberland Learning Connection website.