While it would be a stretch to suggest Michael Bell was pre-ordained to bring David Bowie’s music to the masses, there’s no question the longtime Peterborough entrepreneur is right where he belongs at this stage of his life.

That’s front-and-centre on performance venue stages, bringing the iconic music of the late glam rock-pop singer to life for longtime fans, and those who are just now discovering the immense and diversified talent of arguably one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

The Bowie Lives, which Bell debuted in 2017, comes to Market Hall Performing Arts Centre (140 Charlotte St., Peterborough) on Friday, January 10th. Tickets to the 8 p.m. performance cost $38 ($43 for assigned cabaret table seats) and are available in person at the Market Hall box office, by phone at 705-749-1146, and online at markethall.org.

Opening with guest solo acoustic appearances by Lindsay Barr, Ian Kurz, Matt Diamond and Lizeh Basciano — each will perform a favourite Bowie song — The Bowie Lives is a sequential presentation of Bowie’s extensive catalogue, ranging from his early hits such as “Ziggy Stardust” and “Suffragette City” through the 1980s and 1990s when hits such as “Fame”, “Golden Years”, “China Girl”, “Modern Love”, and “Let’s Dance” dominated music charts around the globe.

That the Market Hall show is being presented on the fourth anniversary of Bowie’s passing from liver cancer is by design, explains Bell.

“This is an event I’m going to be holding every year somewhere,” he says. “I really want to build an annual remembrance regardless of whether it lands on a Tuesday or whatever and, through that, build a bigger show with a bigger offering.”

“As we’ve grown the show, rather than a tribute, I’m calling it a Bowie spectacular. It’s a happening. It’s an immersive experience. The multimedia offering has an educational bent to it. The show itself is chronological, starting with Space Oddity and ending with Lazarus.”

“It’s a progression. People watching the show will recognize the progression of fashion, the progression of the music and the progression of the sound.”

VIDEO: The Bowie Lives promo video

There is no shortage of material to cover.

Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, England in 1947, Bowie embarked on a musical career in 1963 (he changed his stage name from Davy Jones in 1965 to avoid confusion with singer Davy Jones of American rock band The Monkees). He zoomed to a huge following with the 1972 release of the single “Space Oddity” and never looked back, selling an estimated 140 million albums worldwide on the strength of 11 number one charting albums.

In addition, Bowie was an actor in several films and stage productions, his first major film role being his critically acclaimed portrayal of an alien from a dying planet in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth. In 1996, his diversified and game-changing sound earned him induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

As for Bell, a Peterborough resident since moving to the city at a young age, his passion for music flourished as a student at Adam Scott Collegiate. With high school pals John Crown, Rick Kemp, and Alex Stangl, he formed and fronted new wave/punk band Strobic Axe in 1980.

After that band broke up, Bell found himself in Toronto, first performing as one half of a folk music duo before fronting club bands Trixie Goes Hollywood and Eye Eye — the latter winning the highly touted Q107 Homegrown Contest in 1984. What followed was his first go-round doing the Bowie thing.

“The (Bowie) show in the 1980s was a bit of weirdo show,” recalls Bell. “My heart wasn’t really into doing the show. It was the idea of my agent. I had just won the Q107 thing and then it was like ‘OK, what are we going to do in the midst of waiting for a record deal?’ The tribute thing was just starting to happen in a big way. My agent was booking a lot of stuff, so I went with it.”

Weirdo show or not, that experience gave Bell a growing and greater appreciation of Bowie’s music and its influence on pop culture — something he’s still in awe of to this day.

“The thing about Bowie that was super clever is how he reinvented himself,” says Bell. “He comes out of Berlin and he’s working with Brian Eno, so he picks up a whole generation of new fans. In the 1980s, he reinvents himself by picking up Nile Rogers who’s producing all the top dance stuff of the day.”

“He then reinvents himself in the 90s again with Nine Inch Nails. He was playing with a classic rock band, comes to America and does an R&B album, surrounding himself with people in that genre. A lesson I’ve taken away from his life is find good people, let them do their thing, and fit in to what they’re on about.”

Following his musical adventures of the 1980s, Bell found himself back to stay in Peterborough, where he met and married Michelle.

He founded The Wire MEGAzine, a monthly tabloid that tackled various political and social issues head on while providing articles and information on Peterborough’s bustling arts scene. Outside of a lengthy hiatus early on, The Wire has been published every month since.

“When I left the music business, I left it to be with my wife and raise a family,” says Bell. “Starting The Wire was a way to stay in the business but stay home. I vowed to myself when my kids (daughters Jessica and Bianca) are good and they’re gone, I’m going to go back out.”

Before that occurred, there were serious diversions, including two federal election runs as Peterborough’s Green Party candidate and extensive involvement with Transition Town Peterborough, a movement aimed at strengthening the local economy via a number of innovative strategies and approaches. But never, ever, far from his mind was his first passion: music performance.

“I knew people loved Bowie but the question was ‘Am I going to be able to have a band that’s capable of doing this?'” he recalls thinking when he first broached the idea of The Bowie Lives.

“There’s a reason there aren’t a lot of Bowie tributes. There’s an even bigger reason why a lot of the Bowie tributes out there just focus on the Ziggy period — that material is a lot easier to play.”

“It’s not hard to find somebody who can be (longtime Bowie guitarist) Mick Ronson and play Ziggy Stardust. That’s a pretty easy song. But once you get into stuff like Young Americans and Ashes To Ashes, there’s a lot of stuff going on.”

“When I put the show together the first time in the 1980s, my problem was I wasn’t connected enough. I didn’t know where to look for players.”

Enlisting musical director Michael Beauclerc, this second Bowie go-round features a stellar band in the form of I, Mother Earth bassist Chuck Dailey, guitarist Jason White, saxophonist Matt Lagan, keyboardist Sandor Schwisburg of The Abrams fame, and Beauclerc on drums.

“I had been off the road forever so it was really a start over thing for me,” says Bell. “We got together for a couple of rehearsals in Peterborough. It was ‘Here’s the YouTube channel, here’s the arrangements … learn them.’ When we add a new song now, we do it during the sound check. That’s as much rehearsal as a new song gets.”

Almost immediately, The Bowie Lives earned critical acclaim, including a rare five-star rating from Richard Crouse, host of Pop Life on CTV. He deemed the show “unbelievable” after catching a performance at Toronto’s famed Cadillac Lounge.

“Doing Bowie has really pushed me,” says Bell. “I’ve got big chops. On a good day, I’ve got a full three-octave range. I’m singing stronger now than I’ve ever sung. I don’t want to sound flippant, but it’s effortless for me.”

In addition to a generous helping of Bowie’s music, the Market Hall show will also offer the opportunity to meet legendary Canadian music photographer John Rowlands. He will be in the lobby with samples of his iconic work, sharing stories of his many encounters with music’s biggest names while autographing copies of his book.

VIDEO: The Bowie Lives debuts at Oshawa Music Hall in 2017

“The guy has spent his whole life chasing tour buses around the world and has shot everybody, from The Beatles to Elvis and on and on and on,” says Bell, noting his list of subjects includes capturing Bowie during various phases of his career.

A documentary titled Being David Bowie, described as “a feature-length documentary film archiving the ups and downs of David Bowie tribute artist Michael Bell”, is scheduled for release in late spring/early summer.

For more information on The Bowie Lives, visit www.thebowielives.com.

From January 23rd to the 26th, the ReFrame Film Festival returns to downtown Peterborough for its 16th year.

Presenting 39 documentaries from around the world, this year the festival is featuring two films by locally celebrated filmmakers with content closely connected to Peterborough.

LA Alfonso returns to ReFrame for the world premiere of his film Circus Boy and Rob Viscardis presents the extended version of his and Natasha Luckhardt’s film Town of Widows.

Last featured at ReFrame in 2018 when he debuted his well-received film Birthmark, LA Alfonso’s Circus Boy is a look at a special “day in the life” of local circus performer Thomas Vaccaro and his protégé Ethan Hinshelwood.

The artistic director of the Peterborough Academy of Circus Arts, Thomas began training Ethan when he was 12 years old and, in the years that followed, their relationship went far beyond that of teacher and student. Thomas has become a father figure to the boy, which led to Thomas and his husband Michael adopting Ethan into their family.

In Circus Boy, LA documents a visit from Thomas’ mother who travels from North Carolina to meet Ethan for the first time and to watch the team perform with the cyr wheel.

“I’m a member of the circus community,” LA says. “When my friend Thomas met his student Ethan, he asked me if I’d be interested in filming them working together. I started seeing it in my head, and thought maybe it’d be interesting to follow this story for years and see how this kid develops.”

After a few year of sporadically filming the pair, the course of the project changed in April when Thomas called LA and told him of his mother’s upcoming visit.

“I got a call from Tom and he said ‘My mom is going to meet Ethan for the first time, do you want to film it?'”, LA recalls. “I said ‘I don’t want to film it unless this is for real. I want to do this if this event becomes the focal point for the whole story.’ So we ended up scraping money together to hire two professional cinematographers (one being Rob Viscardis) and decided to do a ‘day in the life’.”

An emotional and joyous film, Circus Boy features the thoughts and feelings of all the players in the film, including a very eye-opening conversation between Thomas and Ethan’s mothers, that ends with Ethan and Thomas performing their signature performance piece on the cyr wheel, called Parallels.

“Parallels is about a mentor and a mentee and what you pass on as a mentor is passed on by the mentee, who will one day be a mentor himself,” LA explains. “I chose the cyr wheel as the focus for the film because, as it is a circle, it represents the cycle of the mentor and mentee. Notice all the circles I put in the film. It was on purpose.”

VIDEO: “Circus Boy” Teaser

Known for his emotional and personal autobiographical documentaries, Circus Boy is LA’s first film that isn’t about him, but LA does put his own heart on the line when creating this film.

“This film is about missing fathers and how mothers compensate for that,” LA says. “It’s a story that hasn’t been told very much, but we all know it. It’s a very human story. The undercurrent of the film is that Thomas is the new father trying to compensate what he experienced from his father. Ethan’s father had trauma that made him unable to accept his child, so Ethan needed more than what his father could provide — and that’s when Thomas came in.”

“By making it, I’m hiding behind everything with my own father. It’s being told through another person’s story, but being told through my craft of editing and focusing on telling a true story that’s not just in front of me, but inside of me.”

The 75-minute Circus Boy will screen at 5 p.m. on Friday, January 24th at Market Hall Performance Centre (140 Charlotte St., Peterborough). There will be a live circus performance at the screening.

In Town of Widows, Rob Viscardis tells a very different type of story. When he heard about a crowdfunding campaign by Natasha Luckhardt to document the story of cancer survivors and widows of deceased General Electric workers in Peterborough fighting for compensation, the two teamed up to create a hard-hitting and emotional investigative documentary.

In honest and poignant interviews with the survivors, Rob and Natasha have created a film centred on a piece of Peterborough history many people don’t know about, or at least don’t want to acknowledge.

“The people in the film call it ‘the conspiracy of silence,'” Rob points out. “There is this company that has provided all these families their way of living, and it’s done good things for the community. They’ve donated to the United Way and to local sports teams. So people don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Employees themselves would be scared to say anything and risk losing their jobs or their pension. At least that’s what they think.”

“It’s so personal for so many people,. When you see the film, you see how much people opened up. What’s in the film is just the tip of the iceberg of what people shared with us. It was very emotional and we got to know a lot of people during it and their stories — so many devastating stories. So it was tough. It was a lot.”

Starting filming in 2016, Rob and Natasha followed the story for two years. While shooting the film, GE announced it was closing its operations in Peterborough permanently.

“GE announced the closing while we were still shooting and I was rushing around to people’s homes trying to get reactions,” Rob recalls. “With GE leaving, that makes this film more important. It’s important for people to know the full picture. It’s easy to only remember GE for certain things. But it’s also important because there could be a lot of people suffering because of GE and not even know. So this hopefully brings some attention to it, so people can have some closure or get some help.’

Town of Widows was featured on CBC television and a 45-minute version of the film can be seen online. In preparing it for CBC, Rob had to edit the film to a shorter length than intended. The version appearing at ReFrame will be the full version of the documentary.

A powerful watch, Town of Widows unveils the silent battle of people in our own community, and their continuing fight for compensation in the face of their personal tragedies. The film won three awards at the Canadian Labour International Film Festival in November, including Best Canadian Film.

VIDEO: “Town of Widows” Trailer (CBC version)

“A big part of this film for us was to give a voice to people who had been ignored for so long,” Rob explains. “We’re just happy that we can give that voice because it’s hard for these people to grow their cause. It’s nice to give them this avenue.”

The 90-minute Town of Widows will screen at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, January 26th at Showplace Performance Centre (290 George St N, Peterborough). Filmmakers Rob and Natasha, along with several subjects featured in the film, will be in attendance at the screening.

Two local stories with very different focuses, Circus Boy and Town of Widows are both emotional films telling the real stories of real people in our own community.

With so many films rich with inspirational storytelling being featured at ReFrame, it is unique to have representation from our own community as part of their programming. This month, head to ReFrame to support local filmmakers and discover our community’s stories.

ReFrame passes and tickets are available online at reframe.tickit.ca. A festival pass costs $60 ($50 for students, seniors, and the underwaged), opening night tickets cost $15 ($10 with a festival pass), and day passes (all films on either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday) cost $25.

Tickets are also available at the GreenUP Store (378 Aylmer St. N., Peterborough, 705-745-3238) and Watson & Lou (383 Water St., Peterborough, 705-775-7568), and in Lakefield at Happenstance Books and Yarn (44 Queen St., Lakefield, 705-652-7535).

As always, rush pay-what-you-can tickets will be available at the door for every screening (subject to availability).

The full schedule of the more than 80 documentaries screening during the ReFrame Film Festival, including dates and locations, is available at reframefilmfestival.ca and on kawarthaNOW. You can also follow ReFrame on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

kawarthaNOW is proud to be a sponsor of the 2020 ReFrame Film Festival.