Guy Laliberté vs. Norman Bethune
By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 - 0 Comments
Sure, healing battle wounds is a noble pursuit. But is it as entertaining as Cirque du Soleil?
Guy Laliberté
Why he’s famous: For making the circus cool with the Cirque du Soleil
Why he deserves to win: Laliberté didn’t just take out the goofy animal stunts from the circus when he decided to class up the tent a little. He brought in a focus on character-driven narrative to replace them, effectively hybridizing the circus with theatre and opera. Thanks to him, acrobats no longer have to fear being mauled by a lion or bear while on the job.
Norman Bethune
Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.
Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.
Next: Alexander Graham Bell vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best
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Guy Laliberté vs. Michel Tremblay
By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments
The man behind Cirque du Soleil takes the playwright who brought us ‘joual‘
Guy Laliberté
Why he’s famous: For making the circus cool with the Cirque du Soleil
Why he deserves to win: Laliberté didn’t just take out the goofy animal stunts from the circus when he decided to class up the tent a little. He brought in a focus on character-driven narrative to replace them, effectively hybridizing the circus with theatre and opera. Thanks to him, acrobats no longer have to fear being mauled by a lion or bear while on the job.
Michel Tremblay
Why he’s famous: Tremblay made his literary characters speak the way they would in real life.
Why he deserves to win: Tremblay didn’t invent ‘joual,’ the gritty street slang of Quebec’s underclass. What Tremblay did, though, was make it a staple of Quebec theatre. Tremblay’s first successful play, Les Belles Soeurs, cleared a path for future playwrights by breaking with the more formal and conservative traditions of the art form—most notably by having his working class characters speak a working class dialect, and most touchingly with a memorable ode to bingo: “Moé ya rien au monde que j’aime plus que l’bingo!”
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Guy Laliberté's space concert, Sarah Palin's revenge, and a tribute for the Man in Black
By Ken MacQueen - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
Newsmakers of the week
Just add water
His Cirque du Soleil shows are a staple in Las Vegas, one of the planet’s most profligate users of water, but space tourist and Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberté is on a self-described “poetic social mission” to raise awareness of the need for access to clean drinking water. The Montreal-based Laliberté, who spent more than US$35 million for a 12-day visit to the International Space Station, donned a red foam clown’s nose as he arrived at the station last Friday, but his trip isn’t all fun and games. On Oct. 9, the Cirque founder hosts an all-star webcast at onedrop.org as the station orbits the planet. The two-hour “poetic tale,” written by novelist Yann Martel, brings together personalities from 14 world cities. Among them: former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, U2, Peter Gabriel, Shakira, Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, environmentalist David Suzuki and Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman. Laliberté says he hopes the event will raise awareness for One Drop’s aim of “water for all, all for water.”Paradise doesn’t come easy
Kurtis Coombs, a 19-year-old political science major at Memorial University, had a first-hand lesson last week in the dark art of politics. For almost two days, he was the elected mayor of Paradise, Nfld., where he lives with his parents while commuting to school in St. John’s. But Canada’s youngest mayor found his victory short-lived. A recount shaved his razor-thin three-vote victory into a tie with incumbent Ralph Wiseman. The draw was settled by putting both names in a recycling bin and picking the winner. With that, Wiseman returned to office and Coombs is back in class. A Facebook page has been set up to assist Coombs “in keeping the job that was stolen from him.” On Tuesday, a judge ordered a second recount. Continue… -
Sex, drugs & acrobats
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments
On the eve of Cirque du Soleil’s 25th anniversary, a new book exposes the stunning rise and wild times of its billionaire founder
As it approaches its 25th anniversary on June 16, Cirque du Soleil is solidly entrenched as one of Canada’s greatest entertainment and business success stories. From its almost mythic origin as the creation of a group of young Québécois idealists, hard-working, hard-living, utopian-minded street performers led by a (literal) fire-breather named Guy Laliberté, the Cirque and its postmodern, animal-free productions now span the globe. Laliberté, who used to sleep in parks while performing for spare change, parlayed his extraordinary drive and ambition—and rode the wave of Quebec nationalism unleashed by the Parti Québécois election victory of 1976 (premier René Lévesque was a crucial early Cirque supporter)—into becoming one of Quebec’s six billionaires. On the eve of his 50th birthday, Laliberté’s $2.5-billion personal fortune now puts him at number 261 in Forbes’ ranking of the world’s richest people.As for the Cirque’s other founding mythology—that its long, strange trip has always been a sex- and drug-fuelled odyssey, according to Guy Laliberté: The Fabulous Story of the Creator of Cirque du Soleil (Transit)—rumour hardly exceeds reality. Author Ian Halperin, a journalist and gossip writer whose previous unauthorized biographies include Céline Dion: Behind the Fairytale and Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, argues that a heady ’60s mix of hedonism and social consciousness has always marked the Cirque. Halperin, a Montrealer, is from that world—he had an uneasy platonic relationship with Laliberté’s embittered ex-common-law wife, described at length in the book, even as he eventually sided with Laliberté in their split—and he approves of his subjects’ zest for life. Especially Laliberté’s, of whom Halperin writes that he shares the author’s own “unquenchable thirst for life’s pleasures balanced with a passion for social justice, traits we know are not incompatible.”
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Dishing the dirt on Cirque
By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 5, 2009 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments
Unauthorized biographer Ian Halperin on how he discovered the seedier side of the biggest show on earth
Q: Your latest book is Guy Laliberté: The Fabulous Story of the Creator of Cirque du Soleil. How did you get interested in the topic?
A: Through Andrew Morton, basically. We’re friends, and we were in a New York cab late one night when he was wondering who to write about next. This was just after publishing his Tom Cruise book. I told him the biggest, still unknown entertainment story was Guy Laliberté, and Andrew said, “Who?” I explained, and the next day he phoned me and said I knew the story so much better, I should do it. So I did.Q: How did you find all the Cirque performers, past and present, you spoke to?
A: I had already met many over the years. I was a professional sax player in Montreal for 15 years. I often performed with Cirque tango players, even acrobats. I knew people already, and I knew about their crazy world.
