✭✭✭✭✩

by Les 7 Doigts de la Main,

directed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider

Thomas Lightburn, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto

October 18-November 18, 2007

Traces, the new show playing at Panasonic Theatre, re-invents the circus for the 2000s as much as did Cirque du Soleil for the 1980s.  Traces is, if you can believe it, a five-person circus that takes the whole concept of circuses down to the very basics--people entertaining an audience with their extraordinary skills.  Elaborate costumes and a sumptuous decor are not necessary.  All that is needed are a few well-trained bodies, a floor, two fixed upright poles, skateboards, hoops, a basketball, a piano and some chairs.  They make their amazing stunts look like so much fun you’ll wish you signed up for circus school years ago.

Whereas Cirque du Soleil strives to turn the stage into an exotic, magical locale where anything can happen, the five members of Les 7 doigts troupe (Héloïse Bourgeois, Francisco Cruz, Raphael Cruz, Brad Henderson, Will Underwood) do just the opposite.  They introduce themselves to the audience, state their vital statistics, set up and change clothes in full view all to demonstrate that they are real people, not characters, and to break down the wall between audience and stage.  The set deliberately looks haphazard, as if quickly built from canvas, plastic sheeting and wood.  The “costumes” are street clothes any ordinary twentysomething might wear.  The deglamourization of the stage and performers makes us relate to the performers as people and makes what they achieve seem all the more involving.

The show is a skillfully blending of modern dance, acrobatics, live music, mime and circus acts.  The dancing alone is fantastic, much in the style of O Vertigo, seemingly wild but tightly choreographed, with much hurling of bodies against each other and headlong onto the floor.  Just don’t try it at home.  The music ranges from 1930’s classics to Radiohead, from folk to hip-hop and techno.  Acts range from Raphael Cruz simply singing one of his own songs to fabulous demonstrations of Chinese pole climbing and scary Chinese hoop diving by the whole company.  Other highlights include Henderson’s beautiful pas de deux with a giant metal hoop and Bourgeois’s whimsical acrobatics on a lazyboy chair while engrossed in a novel.  Even the blithe tossing about of spinning chairs from person to person combines fun and danger. 

The show only falters during the spoken intervals between the acts strangely rife with imagery of time, death and destruction.  What this precisely has to do with all the vitality the performers exhibit is not clear except that they supposedly have a desire to leave some “trace” of their existence on each other.  There’s no need to worry about that or to give the show an existential weight it can’t bear.  The joy and skill of the performances alone will leave young and old hugely impressed.                

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-10-19.

Photo: Les 7 doigts de la main. ©Stéphanie Boisvert.