Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 17, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba CO M I N G S O O N ! Read the Winter issue at: winnipegfreepress.com/fp-features Available in your Free Press (subscribers) on March 29 and at Manitoba Liquor Marts - while supplies last! DON’T MISS THE SPRING 2025 ISSUE ROBERT ETCHEVERRY / MTYP In Life-Cycle, Guillaume Doin rides his bike to dazzling effect during the wordless performance. THE MOTION IN EMOTION FRIDAY JANUARY 17, 2025 ● ARTS & LIFE EDITOR: JILL WILSON 204-697-7018 ● ARTS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ARTS ● LIFE SECTION C CONNECT WITH THE BEST ARTS AND LIFE COVERAGE IN MANITOBA ▼ Pamela Anderson finds gold under glitter as Vegas dancer A mood piece about age and obsoles- cence, The Last Showgirl is a slender 89-minute drama with a shimmery, delicate vibe. Centring on the dying days of an old-style Las Vegas revue, the story draws its poignance from Pa- mela Anderson’s tremendously tender lead performance. The film opens with a brief flash for- ward — mercifully brief because it’s a dance audition, and Shelly (Anderson) is struggling. We immediately feel for her, and by the time we come around again to a fuller look at this scene, now realizing how and why Shelly is here, it’s even more devastating. After that anxious glimpse of Shelly’s audition, we go back a few days, to an announcement by longtime stage manager Eddie (Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista) that Le Razzle Dazzle, the show that has been Shelly’s professional home for over 30 years, will be shutting down in two weeks. Scripter Kate Gersten, a TV writer making her feature-film debut, sets up a deliberately simple narrative time- line and then breaks it into fragments, some evocative and moving, some a lit- tle too slight. We get glimpses of Shelly as she tries to reconcile herself to her past decisions and possible future. Director Gia Coppola (Palo Alto, Mainstream) follows these brief encounters with a light hand and an al- ways empathetic camera. Shelly might assert that their floorshow is all about “spectacle,” but the film is resolutely anti-spectacle. There’s a loose, low-key realism here. We soon see that away from the rhinestones and feathers, under the ex- aggerated stage makeup, Shelly is just a fiftysomething woman barely getting by, without a pension or health insur- ance, probably a few paycheques away from losing her small tract house. From conversations backstage, we learn that the “le” in Le Razzle Dazzle is doing a lot of work, as Shelly keeps reminding the other dancers that their show “has its origins in French cul- ture” and the glories of the Paris Lido. ALISON GILLMOR MOVIE REVIEW THE LAST SHOWGIRL Starring: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista ● McGillivray, Polo Park ● 89 minutes, PG ★★★ out of five ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS Pamela Anderson returns to the big screen in a story about the dying days of a Vegas revue. ● CONTINUED ON C2 ‘We try to use all the movements I can do on the bike to try to understand, what can the bike say? Where can the bicycle take us?’ G UILLAUME Doin rides two bicycles every day, but only one of them is street-safe. On his daily commute through Montreal, he straddles his trusty two-wheeler before arriving at the theatre. There, he climbs onto his work bike: a special, yellow vélo without brakes that he whips around the stage at freeway speeds before balancing his body weight on the curled handlebars and leather seat as if it were the most natural way to get around town. Doin makes it look easy, but he wasn’t always so graceful. “At first, I fell off a lot,” laughs Doin, the creator and gymnastic perform- er of Life-Cycle, opening tonight at Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP). “Then I trained and now I fall less.” A story of perseverance and self-dis- covery, with Doin’s character return- ing to his past to better comprehend his present, Life-Cycle was created for Montreal’s Complètement Cirque festi- val by Doin and director Yves Simard. Simard and Doin knew the bicycle could help carry the type of story the- atre company DynamO likes to share — a blend of motion and emotion that transcends linguistic barriers. At first, Simard didn’t grasp how challenging it was to master the bike, the kind used in the niche sport of artistic bicycling — a style of riding more akin to figure skating than it is to BMX. “I was always asking Guillaume, ‘Can you do this? Can you try that?’ And then he made me try his bike, and I understood why it took so long to do his tricks,” says Simard, the co-artis- tic director of DynamO Théâtre, the company that, alongside Doin, created the show in 2019. Founded in 1981, DynamO creates shows that emphasize movement and crossover between different types of stage entertainment, including acro- batics, illusions, puppetry and clown- ing. The company has performed in over 30 countries, braking eight times at MTYP with various shows. Life-Cycle uses the bicycle as a literal vehicle for storytelling, with Doin manipulating the bike’s fixed architecture to dazzling effect during the wordless, hourlong performance, recommended for audiences eight years and up. “There are elements of magic and illusion, too,” says Simard, who leaves the stunt-riding up to Doin. “We try to use all the movements I can do on the bike to try to understand, what can the bike say? Where can the bicycle take us?” says Doin, whose training as a circus performer pre- pared him for the daring movements in the show. So far, the bicycle has taken the performer all around the world, from Seoul to Madrid to Bogotá to Guelph. “We’ve performed it now over 100 times,” says Simard, who especially enjoys putting on shows for young audiences, which, like riding a bike, is a restorative experience. “It’s quite good for the soul of the artist.” ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com THEATRE PREVIEW LIFE-CYCLE ● Manitoba Theatre For Young People, 2 Forks Market Rd. ● Tonight to Jan. 26 ● Tickets $24 to $27 at mtyp.ca ROBERT ETCHEVERRY / MTYP Guillaume Doin BEN WALDMAN ;