Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Controversial cadaver exhibition coming to town
Posted: 11/08/2010 1:00 AM
MOVE over, TV's Six Feet Under.
The parent corporation of the MTS Centre is hosting a controversial exhibit featuring real human cadavers --in a building separate from the one the hockey players and rock stars perform in.
True North Sports & Entertainment will hold a news conference Wednesday morning to announce the dates and location for the U.S. touring show Bodies: The Exhibition in a new facility called The MTS Centre Exhibition Hall.
"It's in a separate downtown building altogether," True North spokesman Scott Brown told the Free Press in an e-mail.
A company owned by Winnipeg's Chipman family (principal owners of the MTS Centre) has been working with downtown development agency CentreVenture to convert the former A&B Sound, the Mitchell-Copp Building, the former Wild Planet building and other parcels of land on a block bounded by Portage, Donald, Ellice and Hargrave into a sports and entertainment district.
Brown would provide no further details except to confirm that the exhibition hall was not in the long vacant Metropolitan Theatre on Donald.
Any of the properties being redeveloped could be converted into an exhibition space.
With 12 versions of the show in circulation from Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, Bodies has been touring widely for many years in the U.S. and abroad.
It consists of 12 full-body corpses in revealing poses and 250 additional specimens which illustrate a variety of physiological and health conditions.
Its graphic nature has drawn both beefs and bouquets. The Seattle City Council voted in July to ban the show from returning to the city under an ordnance that forbids commercial displays of human remains that don't have proof of consent.
Premier Exhibitions' former head, Arnie Geller, recently filed a lawsuit in Florida against a rival show, claiming that it used the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 11, 2010 D2
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"But a city can be smothered by too much reverence for its past. The skyline must keep acquiring new peaks, because the day we consider it complete and untouchable is the day the city begins to die." - Justin Davidson - May 2010 Issue of New York
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