Daring Cirque du Soleil returns to form
Luzia (out of 4) Co-written and directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca, associate direction by Brigitte Poupart, under the guidance of Guy Laliberté and Jean-François Bouchard (Cirque du Soleil). Until Oct. 16 at the Grand Chapiteau, 51 Commissioners St., Port Lands. cirquedusoleil.com or 1-877-924-7783 Circus — particularly the work of Cirque du Soleil — is all about surpassing boundaries.
We go wanting to see things we’ve never seen before: the deftest juggler, the most daring hand-balancing act, the most gravity-defying of aerialists. Perhaps even (though this is really hoping against hope) an actually hilarious clown.
Soleil’s particular innovation in circus practices — which helped it become one of the world’s leading live entertainment companies — is delivering such world-class acts in highly estheticized environments, usually based around a concept or style (for example the world of insects in Ovo, steampunk for Kurios).
Along the way the company tends to make rather grandiose claims about the shows’ subject matter and significance (e.g. “The story of mankind’s evolution found somewhere between science and legend,” about the Robert Lepage-directed Totem).
Well, they’ve gone and outdone themselves now.
Luzia is outrageous, overstuffed and a veritable festival of cultural appropriation: “a waking dream of Mexico” conjured up by a Swiss and a bunch of Quebecois, celebrating (I’m quoting the press kit here) Mexican culture’s “monumentality,” “speed” and “poetic vision of reality” via a “surreal menagerie” including a comic chorus of sentient cacti (one of which has an erection).
Oh and it rains a lot in Mexico, apparently; justification for several acts involving onstage downpours and pools that appear and disappear as if by magic, an extension of Soleil’s innovative use of water in its longrunning Las Vegas show O.
The Dutch clown Eric “Fool” Koller is the audience’s guide to Luzia, as he wanders around trying to fill up his empty canteen. Koller is one of the funnier Soleil clowns in recent memory and also becomes a conduit for the show’s crowning “OMG” moment, as he stands rightly awestruck at the beauty of silhouettes of flora and fauna projected onto a water curtain (set and props design is by Oscar-winning art director Eugenio Caballero and projection design is by Johnny Ranger).
Water also figures prominently in the show’s outstanding aerial act, a straps number by Canadian Benjamin Courtney. With grace and phenomenal strength he hangs over the stage, executing complex choreography while suspended by one and then both arms.
He drops down at one point into an onstage pool, meant to invoke a sinkhole that Mayans believed was a route to the afterlife, and interacts with an enormous puppet jaguar (designed by Max Humphries) in another moment of intense and moving beauty.
Another combination of circus skills and design to produce a wow effect comes in the work of the unbelievably deft juggler (Rudolf Janecek). His reflective silver pins seem to turn from matter into light the faster and faster he throws them.
And wow again: Ugo Laffolay, with a physique like an old-fashioned strongman, balances on his hands on poles stacked higher and higher in the air, an extraordinary feat of training and control.
But it’s typical of the show’s esthetic of overkill that this act is presented inside the mini-fiction of a “tribute to Mexican cinema of the 1920s” and that Laffolay is playing an actor playing a lifeguard hamming it up for spangly clad bathing beauties on the stage floor. As Laffolay’s trick goes higher and gets more dangerous, our attentions are pulled between him and the action below in increasingly distracting ways.
It frequently feels like the show’s creators didn’t know how to control all its energies and impulses (“it’s like the Eurovision Song Contest meets Mother Courage meets War Horse,” noted my companion at one point).
There may be context for this in its complex production history. It was conceived by the Swiss-born Daniele Finzi Pasca, and written by him and his wife, Julie Hamelin Finzi.
But her illness and death earlier this year led Finzi Pasca to withdraw, leaving the show in the hands of associate director Brigitte Poupart, an actor and theatre director who has never worked with Soleil before.
Finzi Pasca is an acclaimed visionary in the circus world and his signature is visible in the emphasis on poetically gorgeous stage pictures (as in an early number, designed in hues of yellow, with three women twirling on a trapeze and Cyr wheels), and on whimsical creatures such as band members wearing suits and alligator heads. Numerous moments in which the whole company fills the stage in complex tableaux are evidence of the creators’ theatrical sensibilities.
This may be a dreamed-up Mexico, but its promotional potential was sufficient to inspire the Mexican government to put $47.7 million (U.S.) of sponsorship into the show (sparking protests from Mexican artists who argued that money could have been better spent making work by and for people within the country).
Cirque du Soleil has struggled in recent years with panned shows (including, currently, Paramour on Broadway), financial instability leading to significant staff layoffs and, last year, founder Guy Laliberté selling the company to a consortium of foreign investors.
After the poorly received Avatar spinoff Toruk, this show represents a return to form, for better or worse: it left me gasping in awe at the skill and daring of its acts, and at the company’s capacity to run roughshod over cultural sensitivities.