Super Cirque works its wonders
CIRQUE du Soleil is (or was) a visionary take on conventional circus, back in London with its 38th show.
not having seen the previous 37, I was all set to be thrilled, frightened — I never can watch an act that I think could actually kill the artists — and entertained. And I was, I was.
The show is called Luzia and the theme is Mexico, which I associate nowadays with drug cartels and a scary homicide rate, but which here involves Frida Kahlo-style dresses, huge Day of the Dead paper cutouts, cute cacti, girls dressed as hummingbirds and 1950s- style film sets ... from a time when Mexico really was glamorous.
oh, and rain; whole curtains of rain fall on the set, in astonishing decorative patterns. I never could work out where it all went.
The clown — the big, gangling Fool Koller — doesn’t talk, but his act, communicating through whistles with the audience, was the funniest of the evening.
And the acrobats! The feats of strength and dexterity are something else.
one muscleman hand-balances on a metal T-bar with balletic skill, while Ugo Laffolay does astonishing splits on some enormous bendy canes against a backdrop of camp onlookers in bathing costumes.
But the point at which I couldn’t watch, and instead sat with my head in my hands, was the swing to swing act, where the acrobats did somersaults from one moving swing- boat to another. My daughter, who is 13, relayed the results: ‘ They’re doing it
backwards! Triple somersault!! Two at a time!!!’
The juggler, Cylios Pytlak, dazzled with his increasing numbers of shiny batons; when he got to seven, they slipped. oddly, that one failure made the whole thing more human than all the perfect physical feats of the evening.