Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Robert Lepage
Cirque du Soleil, Grand Chapiteau, Port Lands, Toronto
August 11-October 9, 2011
“So, this one didn’t really have a story”. “If it did, I couldn’t figure it out”. “Just lots of cool stuff”. “Yeah”. This conversation between a young couple leaving the Grand Chapiteau after Cirque du Soleil’s latest show Totem pretty well summed up my feelings. Though written and directed by the famed Robert Lepage, this show has one of the weakest narratives of any Cirque show in recent memory. Cirque du Soleil became famous not merely by doing away with animal acts but by setting the human acts in some sort of narrative structure. With Totem the story is such a mishmash it is really better just to concentrate on the “cool stuff”.
According to the press information, “TOTEM traces the fascinating journey of the human species from its original amphibian state to its ultimate desire to fly. The characters evolve on a stage evoking a giant turtle, the symbol of origin for many ancient civilizations. Inspired by many founding myths, TOTEM illustrates, through a visual and acrobatic language, the evolutionary progress of species. Somewhere between science and legend TOTEM explores the ties that bind Man to other species, his dreams and his infinite potential”.
That may sound very fine, but it’s almost impossible to see these ideas implemented in any consistent fashion. The show begins when a a cloth whisks away from a huge structure of bones meant to suggest the carapace of a giant turtle. Into this structure an acrobat known as the Crystal Man (Joseph David Putignano), looking like a human mirror ball descends and starts the lizard-like gymnasts below into action. Thus, apparently according to Lepage, life did not evolve from single-celled organisms in the sea but rather from the effect of disco on amphibians. Oh well, that’s fine since the amphibians launch into such an exciting routine using the two horizontal bars that are part of the carapace with the hidden trampoline beneath. At times there are two gymnasts per bar, all four crossing in mid-air from one bar to the next. It’s too bad the carapace prevents a full views of their movements.
This is immediately followed by an intricate hoop dance performed by Nakotah Raymond Larance, suggesting we have jumped a few millennia forward from the beginnings of life to human civilization. Next we leap to the present to a beach in front of the upstage bank of reeds that hide the orchestra. Here the show’s main clown, Pippo Crotti--one of the most annoying and least funny clowns in any Cirque show--encounters two hunks with fauxhawks and boomboxes (Yann Arnaud and Gael Ouisse) getting ready to deepen their tans. Crotti’s one-joke humour is that, shrimpy and pasty white as he is, he is so macho (and Italian) that he doesn’t notice the obvious difference between himself and the beefy guys on stage.
The gymnastic trio ring act that follows with Arnaud, Ouisse and Alevtyna Titarenko, picks up the image of the hoops and the idea of flying that precede it, but as far as the story of evolution goes, the narrative seems to have concluded after only three acts. The performers of the final Russian bar act enter with lit space helmets on and a view of the earth in the distance as if seen from the moon. Their weird makeup, colourful bodysuits, strange ear coverings and ability to function without the helmets might suggest some further evolution of man, but what happens between the rings trio and the Russian bar is too confused even to be called a narrative.
Popping up without purpose throughout the show after the rings trio are various apes (the simian lead played by Putignano); a red-faced character and devil sticks manipulator called the Tracker (Ante Ursic), who unlike any tracker I’ve seen wears a red frock coat and top hat that lights up when he removes it; a character called the Scientist (Greg Kennedy); and a welcome reappearance of the Amerindian hoop dancer Larance along with various unwelcome reappearances of Signor Crotti.
Perhaps the most unusual act consists of five Chinese girls on unicycles who kick bowls, sometimes sets of bowls, with their free feet into stacks balanced on top of their heads. The precision and speed they use in this odd performance is amazing and builds to a climax that is at once, satisfying, humorous and incredible.
As for a traditional circus act performed to perfection, I’d single out the foot juggling sisters Marina and Svetlana Tsodikova. You may have seen antipodists juggling square carpets before but the Tsodikova sisters take this to another level cycling the carpets from hands to feet and tossing theme back and forth between them. The climax sees the one lift the other with her feet while both are still juggling.
American Greg Kennedy, a former engineer, is already well-known in juggling circles for his significant innovations in the art of juggling. He gives us a taste of his abilities when he propels hemispherical bowls of different sizes around himself so that we notice how their orbits and speeds correspond to their size. His invention and masterpiece is a display of conical surface juggling. In his guise as the Scientist he enters the base of an eight-foot tall inverted plexiglass cone. Inside he rolls balls that can change colour by radio control at various speeds and trajectories around the cone’s interior. The balls whizz around his body in ever changing patterns eventually making Kennedy look like he has become the nucleus of an atom surrounded by orbiting electrons.
The other acts though all well-performed can’t compete in terms of imagination with these four. One clown, the Ukrainian Mykhaylo Usov, does perform a genuinely funny, old school pantomime routine about fishing in Act 1, but in Act 2 he is teamed with Signor Crotti for a simulation of waterskiing, Usov steering the boat, which has little to do with clowning and more to do with showing off the show’s main technical innovation, the “scorpion bridge”, that usually extends from the upstage pod as a standard ramp for entrances but can also curl itself up like a scorpion’s tail to open a space beneath it. Usov’s speedboat is just the tip of the “bridge” and all the ups and downs are merely mechanical manipulation.
Those attending Totem because they love the work of Robert Lepage will be disappointed. The show manifests so little of his style, you would never know Lepage was involved. Only in the interactions of performers with the videos projected on the surface of the upstage pod is their any hint of his current preoccupations. Even then, he uses this technique too seldom and its effects can best be seen only by those sitting farther back in the auditorium.
Cirque du Soleil currently has twenty productions either touring or in fixed locations around the world, with a new one to open this month and another to open in October. They can’t all be equally imaginative or exciting. Of the shows recently to visit Toronto, I would rank Totem behind both Koozå (2007) and Ovo (2009), with Koozå being one of the best in a long while. While it may not be top-drawer Cirque show, I would have hated to miss the Chinese unicyclists, the Tsodikova sisters, Greg Kennedy and especially Simoneau and Ducharme.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo (top): Nakotah Raymond Larance. ©2010 Daniel Desmarais.
Photo (middle): Rosalie Ducharme and Louis-David Simoneau. ©2010 Daniel Auclair.
For tickets, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/shows/totem/tickets.aspx.
2011-09-18
Totem