The motion in emotion

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This article was published 17/01/2025 (434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Guillaume 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 performer of Life-Cycle, opening Jan. 17 at Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP). “Then I trained and now I fall less.”

A story of perseverance and self-discovery, with Doin’s character returning to his past to better comprehend his present, Life-Cycle was created for Montreal’s Complètement Cirque festival by Doin and director Yves Simard.

Simard and Doin knew the bicycle could help carry the type of story theatre 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-artistic 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 acrobatics, illusions, puppetry and clowning. 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 prepared 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

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