Thin on family tale, thick on spectacle
Reversible (out of 4) Directed, written, and choreographed by Gypsy Snider. Until Jan. 6 at the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St. Mirvish.com, 416-872-1212 and 800-461-3333
Circus is about the immediate, about youth, and about strength. Get a trick wrong in the split-second, and someone could get hurt or die. To be a player in the high-performance world of contemporary circus, being superfit and young are pretty much prerequisites (clowning is the notable exception).
This haunting, melancholic show from Montreal’s 7 Fingers pushes against these given qualities. It’s built around stories told to its eight performers by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The show’s creator, Gypsy Snider (one of the 7 Fingers troupe’s founding members), has crafted vignettes that explore these memories through the performers’ circus skills. This theme opens up some lovely avenues for the performers to expose vulnerabilities while showing off the topnotch, wow-factor skills that 7 Fingers is known for. That said, the memories have clearly served more as fodder for the creators than as narrative through-lines for the audience to follow.
There are some points when an act tracks back directly to an establishing statement made about the performer’s forebears. These provide gratifying moments of connection — none more so than the stunningly talented Emi Vauthey’s too-brief comic contortion routine as a reluctant bride in a massive pile of tulle, referenc- ing her Japanese grandma who escaped an arranged marriage.
Julien Silliau’s performance on the German wheel (two big linked circles of metal in which the performer rolls and spins), against a voice-over about his war vet granddad and some appropriately percussive music, also really clicks.
Other wisps of story, as with the connection between handbalancer Maria Del Mar Reyes and a janitor who helps her find her keys, don’t really go anywhere. Most of the performers are from Quebec and France and speak English with strong accents, while Del Mar Reyes speaks mostly in Spanish, which limits the show’s capacity to lean on language (in anglophone markets, at least).
Another central creative element are the movable walls of Ana Cappelluto’s set, which the cast members roll around to suggest inside and outside spaces, further augmenting the theme of reversibility, established by the backwards movement of time.
Beyond creating flexible and continually interesting playing areas, I didn’t find much resonance in the indoor/outdoor contrast: again, this came across like something useful to the creators, but a bit mystifying if you don’t read the show program.
There are some rich scenes in which the performers explore shifting intimacies and power dynamics in relationship to a circus apparatus, as with a whole-company sequence on and around a Chinese pole. As some of them clamber up and over each other to get to the top of the pole, others execute acrobatic floor choreography in changing pairings, some malefemale, some same-sex.
Circus still cleaves to traditional gender roles and tends toward the heteronormative (men are strong and throw things; women are beautiful and airy and are thrown); this number and a few others nudge the door open.
Natasha Patterson, for example, executes graceful choreography while adeptly juggling four shiny red balls, putting her own stamp on a circus skill traditionally associated with men. Other elements of the show, more traditionally gendered, are a lot of fun: Vincent Jutras and Jérémi Lévesque play out an ongoing bro dynamic in tumbling, and teeterboard routines.
Placing two hanging aerial routines next to each other is a risky move that mostly pays off. Rather than feeling frustrated as my attention moved between Émilie Silliau’s rope act and Vauthey’s work on aerial silks, I found it exciting to take in their movements together, including some heart-stopping sudden falls.
The routine doesn’t quite reach its potential, though — it flirts with but does not really explore the performers’ relationship (competition, solidarity, attraction, some combination thereof?).
The show’s penultimate scene is amongst its strongest in the way it offers evocative imagery connected to the memory theme. Hugo Ragetly creates amazing visual poetry with his small white juggling balls as the cast hang pyjamas on a laundry line behind him. What the clothes represent and what it means when Ragetly puts on an oversized nightie are left open: I saw generational connection, mortality, and the capacity for transformation. This opens up into a magnificently playful final scene.
Under Colin Gagné’s music direction, the varied recorded score — everything from piano solo to hip hop to a cover of Terence Trent d’Arby’s “Sign Your Name” — plays an important role in supporting the acts and the shifts in tone between them.
This production, which premiered in 2016, is one of seven shows that 7 Fingers is currently touring around the world. The emerging tradition of a 7 Fingers show in Toronto at holiday time offers opportunities for awe and delight, and a window onto the latest trends in contemporary circus from its global hub in Quebec.