CBC Gem’s ‘Cirque Life’ gives glimpse into lives and training routines of performers

TORONTO -  Aleksei Goloborodko is often referred to as the most flexible man in the world — any fans who have seen his snakelike movements in Cirque du Soleil's Luzia will believe that to be true.

The Russian contortionist holds the Guinness World Record for the most number of prone extreme back bends in one minute.

But what they may not know is that he is married and juggles the relationship long distance while performing around the world.

"Cirque Life," a new CBC Gem series premiering Thursday, features Goloborodko along with other cast and crew members, giving a glimpse into their personal lives and training routines. The five-part docuseries was shot in Montreal last summer, recording the performers practice sessions and what little downtime they have while putting on up to 10 shows a week.

In Soutensions, family tensions erupt on the theatre stage

It’s a cliché to call a piece of creative work “my baby,” but for Amber O’Reilly, writing a script, shaping a lyric or giving voice to a poem is the only kind of parenthood she’s ever been chasing.

The 32-year-old O’Reilly has known since the final years of high school that mothering wasn’t of interest to her, at least not in the literal sense.

“As a creative person, I think there are other things I will leave behind in the world after I pass on, for whatever I know,” says the writer, raised in a francophone home in Yellowknife, N.W.T.

“I’m more focused on caring for my parents and other older family members. Rather than bringing new life into the world, that’s where I’d like to contribute. I don’t necessarily need to become a mother to have the role of a caregiver or a caring person.”

Sketch legend Bruce McCulloch embraces dark humour in one-man show

Gallows humour. Dark humour. Black humour. Whatever you want to call it, Bruce McCulloch’s a master of it.

The Canadian comedian, musician, author, actor, director and founding member of sketch-comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall was once singled out in a Kids review as being the “dark purple slice” of the group.

“And not in a very complimentary way, I don’t think, about me,” he says, over the phone from Toronto.

“But I actually took it as a compliment, and I do think I am the dark purple slice of the Kids in the Hall. And so, the belly of the show really is about dark humour that we use in tough times and to get through bad situations, and that’s how we lean on each other.”

Local lifestyle guru Robyn Chubey celebrates release of first book

The launch of Gather Together: Delightful Décor and Simple Recipes for Every Occasion is a dream come true for Robyn Chubey.

The release Saturday at McNally Robinson Booksellers is definitely a “pinch-me” moment for Chubey, 46, who has been wanting to write a book for the last 26 years.

Posting snippets online from a life that straddles the line between aspirational and achievable, Chubey, better known by her social media handle, @life_of_glow, has built a substantial community of followers who visit her page daily to like and comment on gardening projects, home decor ideas, simple craft activities and easy-to-make recipes.

While she’s loathe to be labelled an influencer — “I would call myself a photographer before anything else because everything I’ve done, including the book, has flowed from the fact that I was a photographer,” she says — Chubey acknowledges her substantial follower count was what led to the publication by Rock Point Books of Gather Together.

RWB turns classic 'Sleeping Beauty' fairy tale into waking dream

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet unveiled its dreamy new production The Sleeping Beauty Thursday, with the beloved ballet throwing more sparks than a spray of pixie dust.

Considered one of the pillars of the classical ballet canon, the lushly romantic story ballet features Tchaikovsky’s masterful score. American guest conductor Ming Luke crisply leads the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra throughout the production, with the maestro officially stepping onto the podium as RWB music director this fall, taking over the baton from outgoing conductor Julian Pellicano.

The Sleeping Beauty, composed of a prologue and three acts, is essentially an archetypal tale of goodness triumphing over evil. Its protagonist, Princess Aurora, is doomed by evil fairy Carabosse to die on her 16th birthday, until the benevolent Lilac Fairy of Wisdom saves the day by switching the curse to a 100-year slumber.

Only a tender kiss by Aurora’s true love, Prince Desire/Florimund, can awaken her, as they all live happily ever after.

Ghosts of pasts faced in spirited Royal MTC production

Under the light of a lakeside moon and its brighter-than-the-city constellations, in the glow of a sacred fire, a portal to awakening opens for three men grieving the loss of their childhood friend in this spirit story, an absorbing, eerie and chill-inducing first play from Norway House’s Rhonda Apetagon.

Next Prairie Theatre Exchange season will capitalize on what works

Five Canadian productions are slated for next season at Prairie Theatre Exchange, a downtown institution that’s in the midst of a post-pandemic bounceback under the leadership of artistic director Ann Hodges and managing director Katie Inverarity.

Midway through their first full seasons at the venerable Portage Place company, Hodges and Inverarity have helped oversee a 59 per cent increase in subscriptions with a 27 per cent leap in single-ticket sales compared to 2024.

So when it came time to program PTE’s 54th season and her second at the helm, Hodges — who inherited the artistic mantle in 2024 from Thomas Morgan Jones — figured she wouldn’t try to fix what’s firing on all cylinders.

Announced Friday, the 2026-27 season will kick off with a trip to the rink for Tracey Power’s Glory, based on the story of the Preston Rivulettes, a women’s hockey team that won 95 per cent of its games over a dominant decade between 1931 and 1940. Set to be directed by Mariam Bernstein, the production (Oct. 13-25) will feature several hockey games choreographed by Victoria Exconde to era-specific swing music directed by Joseph Aragon.

Docu-drama 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' uses real recordings to speak to horror of war

In one sense, the film — nominated for Best International Feature Film as the Tunisian entry at this year’s Academy Awards — is a universalist cri du coeur. In another, it’s a provocative case for the impossibility of neutrality in representing or addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

What’s up: St. Patrick’s Day events

The Dust RhinosWest End Cultural Centre, 586 Ellice Ave.Sunday, 8 p.m.Tickets: $25-30 plus fees at wecc.caSt. Paddy’s Day is basically Superbowl Sunday for Winnipeg Celtic-rock outfit the Dust Rhinos.

In fact, in an interview with the Free Press in 2024, founder and leader singer Blair McEvoy figured he hasn’t had March 17 off since, oh, the year 2000.

The band has a private gig on St. Patrick’s Day proper, but McEvoy, Dan Cannon (bass), Darren Wittmann (drums), Ryan Spracklin (mandolin and fiddle) and Ivanka Watkin (fiddle) want to party with you on Sunday at the WECC, where they will be performing what they’ve dubbed the Cross Canada Celtic Songbook. (Home for a Rest is probably a setlist safe bet.)

The show is all ages.

One Tech Tip: How do you use an f-stop?

Film photography has been undergoing a renaissance, especially with younger people who love its unique look and analog vibe.

But while Gen-Zers and younger Millennials embrace film, analog cameras are not as easy to use as the digital cameras they grew up with. What does ISO mean? What is an f/stop anyway? How do I figure out the right aperture?

George Walker IV, an Associated Press photojournalist based in Nashville, helped outline the basics of film-based photography for this week's One Tech Tip.

Walker, who joined the AP in 2023 after 30 years as a photographer at The Tennessean newspaper, said shooting on film is a good way to learn the basics of photography because it “forces me to be patient and concentrate to make the pictures that matter."

First-time playwright’s social work training helps craft horror drama In the Shadow Beyond the Pines

The type of writing that thriller aficionado Rhonda Apetagon does on a day-to-day basis isn’t anyone’s idea of creative fun: as a trained social worker, the first-time playwright is accustomed to filing reports about “the real scary stuff” in life: loss, addiction, violence and the abuse and maltreatment of children.

“That’s way scarier for me than ghosts,” says the director of Kinosao Sipi Minisowin Agency, which provides child and family services to members of Apetagon’s community, Norway House Cree Nation.

Apetagon’s debut play, In the Shadow Beyond the Pines, premièring tonight at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, takes place at the intersection of those two strains of horror stories, sending three grieving men (Daniel Knight, Jeremy Proulx and James Dallas Smith) into the forest to light a sacred fire for their recently departed friend, Warren, who was the quartet’s “glue” since childhood, holding the group together even as the joys, pressures and traumas of adult life pulled them apart.

Apetagon wanted the play, set on the outskirts of an unnamed northern community, to highlight the double-edged nature of living in a remote environment, where the combination of intense togetherness and relative isolation presents both threat and opportunity.

Brandon-based visual artist focuses on precarious labour in series of portraits

What you’ll notice first in the portraits by Lisa Wood on view now at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba are not the subjects’ faces, but their hands.

Gesticulating hands, reaching hands, hands covering a mouth. Tattooed hands. Hands attached to wrists wrapped with friendship bracelets and smartwatches, tracking thousands of steps logged over hundreds of shifts. Hands that perform labour.

“I love painting hands,” the Brandon-based visual artist says. “I think that when a viewer sees faces, they’re thinking about that particular person, but when a viewer sees hands, they’re personal, but I think that we can connect more or think more about ourselves when we’re seeing somebody else’s hands.”

The paintings are part of a suite of works that compose SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity, a multimedia research-creation project that shares the experiences of rural Manitobans navigating precarious work — whether that’s insecure, short-term or contract-based employment — created from more than two years of research.

CBC initiative brings opposing views to same table

British prime minister Winston Churchill, remembered more for decisive force than diplomacy, is also credited with saying, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

RWB presents reimagined version of Tchaikovsky classic The Sleeping Beauty

The classics tend to be the classics for a reason, and The Sleeping Beauty, the classical fairy-tale ballet choreographed by French-Russian master Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s masterwork score, is no exception.

But that doesn’t mean they have to be done the way they’ve always been done.

The version the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will perform at the Centennial Concert Hall this week is an adaptation by the company’s new artistic director, Christopher Stowell, which was created for the Oregon Theatre Ballet in 2010 and is now part of three other companies’ repertoires.

“Part of my mission, I think, in keeping this art form that I love relevant, alive and on people’s minds and appealing to people, is to take a work that has been part of the repertoire for a long time, like Sleeping Beauty,” he says. “It’s 100-and-something years old, and I love it, and I value it, and it has an important place in our history.

Winnipeg Comedy Festival celebrates event’s 25th year with national lineup

This year, Dean Jenkinson celebrates six years as the Winnipeg Comedy Festival’s artistic director and the festival’s 25th anniversary.

The Winnipeg standup is also a contributing writer for This Hour Has 22 Minutes (a role he’s had since 2007), and can brag, if he wants to, that he’s crafted material for such acts as the Muppets, Joan Rivers, Neil Patrick Harris and Sarah Silverman.

During his time on the comedy scene, he has grown somewhat philosophical and, as the festival announces its full lineup for the April 20-26 event, he reflects on subjects such as regionalism in Canadian standup and hot-button topics like “woke” versus edgy humour.

Packing Winnipeg venues with laughing locals while helping regional comics springboard toward a broader national and international audience is what the festival is all about, he says.