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written and directed by Michel Lemieux & Victor Pilon

Cirque du Soleil, Air Canada Centre, Toronto

January 7-10, 2016

“Fko kxap si Vitrautralur!” (“The Tree of Souls is in danger!”)

Cirque du Soleil’s latest show to visit Toronto, Toruk - The First Flight, premiered in December last year in Montreal.  The action is set on the lush moon Pandora, the world James Cameron created for his 2009 sci-fi film Avatar.  On the plus side, the show is visually dazzling and features fantastic sets and costumes based on designs from the movie along with a massive lighting and projection design unlike anything you will have seen on stage.  On the minus side, the story is uninspiring and poorly directed and the circus acts seem almost incidental to the action.

It’s been so long since Avatar came out that no one except fanboys will likely remember much about the plot of the movie or the inhabitants of Pandora.  It doesn’t really matter because writer-directors Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon have set the action 3000 years before the events of the movie.  Those who do know the film will recall that a toruk (pronounced to-ROOK, rhyming with “book”), a giant dragon-like bird, plays in important part in the action.  The bird is both feared and worshipped by the Na’vi, the tailed, blue-skinned humanoids who inhabit Pandora.  In the film the female Na’vi character Neytiri tells the American Jake that the first man to ride a toruk was thousands of years ago.  The fact that Jake has befriended a toruk is what leads the Na’vi to honour and accept him.  The story of Toruk - The First Flight is thus about that first time when a Na’vi came to ride a toruk.

Lemieux and Pilon have given the show a Storyteller (the sonorous John Raymond O’Neill) who speaks in English to guide us through the action as it unfolds.  His presence is absolutely necessary since all of the dialogue is in Na’vi, the artificial language created for the film, and since the actors’ skills at mime are so underdeveloped that without the Storyteller’s words we would never know what was happening. 

The story is is quite simple and more inspired by fairy-tales than science fiction.  We are among the Omaticaya clan, one of the five clans of Na’vi on Pandora and the same clan that was most prominent in the movie.  Two lifelong friends, Ralu (Gabriel Christo alternating with Jeremiah Hughes) and Entu (Guillaume Paquin alternating with Daniel Crispin), both aged fourteen, must undergo an initiation ceremony to signify their adulthood.  Ralu succeeds brilliantly in accomplishing the set tasks and wins his clan’s symbol, the bow and arrow.  Entu, however, fails and flees in shame.

Meanwhile, all is not well on Pandora.  The female Shaman (Cumie Dunio, not so much an old woman but a Céline Dion soundalike in a pile of nets) has foreseen that an earthquake and and an erupting volcano threaten to destroy the Tree of Souls, the link between the living Na’vi and their deceased ancestors.  The only way to avert this catastrophe is for a hero to ride the dreaded toruk.  And the only way to tame the toruk is to gather the chief symbols of all five clans.  Ralu immediately takes on the challenge, finds Entu and reassures him of his continued friendship and after the two commune at the Tree of Souls, they set out on their quest together.  

The third clan is the Anurai who assemble the skeleton of a Thanator, rather like a gigantic panther, on which they perform a balancing act.  They provide a toruk-shaped belt.  The fourth clan is the Tipani who are deft at manipulating poles and staffs.  From them the heroes require a special shield.  And finally, the fifth clan is the Kekunan who live near a colony of Mountain Banshees represented by traction kites.  From them the travellers require a headdress.  One of many of the story’s oddities is that after the somniferous seeds, the most important object the three acquire is a horn to summon a toruk – and that, contrary to the five clans-five objects structure, is just lying about on the ground.

In terms of storytelling, gathering a set of magical items to defeat an enemy is a standard fairy tale motif, probably most familiar to people from J.K. Rowling’s use of it in the Harry Potter novels where Harry and his two friends have to collect seven Horcruxes to defeat the villain Voldemort.  Yet, the Harry Potter novels are exciting and Toruk is not.  This is because in Harry Potter the heroes are under constant threat from an outside force to prevent their completing their task.  In Toruk, the protagonists are not.  Thus, all we get is a fourfold iteration of the same action – the three meet the new tribe, see their special activities, obtain the sacred object and depart.  Though the show may seem like an adventure story, it is episodic, repetitious and essentially undramatic.  There may be momentary individual conflicts but there is no overarching conflict in which the characters are involved. 

To make matters worse Lemieux and Pilon often fail to stage the story effectively.  Ralu needs the five special objects to tame the toruk, but how precisely they help tame the bird we never see because Lemieux and Pilon don’t put this crucial sequence on stage.  It is also hard to understand how riding the toruk will stop the menacing volcano from erupting since riding the bird rather than anything else is what the story emphasizes.  It seems, though, that somehow, crash-landing the toruk in the volcano is the secret, but how the rider manage to do this and escape unscathed is totally unclear.  For about a fourth of the audience it will be literally unclear since the directors stage this event behind a mound called “The Island” in the centre of the acting area. 

If you come to Toruk, as you normally would to Cirque du Soleil, in order to see astounding circus acts, you will be quite disappointed.  The first main act involves leaps from bar to bar on a giant loom and jumps from the loom landing on a crash mat.  First of all, the directors place the loom so far upstage behind “The Island” that it is not well seen and simply dwarfed by all the space of the arena around it.  Second, the directors keep the stage so busy with the Omaticaya clan running and tumbling about and with acrobats doing aerial rope routines that the scene is full of distractions and makes it impossible to focus on the acrobatics on the loom. 

The same is true of the Tsyal’s routine on aerial silk to retrieve seeds to tame the toruk.  Aerial silks usually involve only one or two silks.  Here the acrobat uses two but the design has two more hanging down around the acrobat so that she is not always clearly visible.  

In Act 1 the show’s first well-presented act is balancing on the skeleton of a Thanator.  This at least takes place on “The Island” instead of behind it.  The performers spend quite a lot of time setting up the multipart skeleton leading us to think they will use it in some unusual fashion.  In fact, they don’t.  Except for a few headstands using the parallel ribs for support, the only circus act that occurs is a performer balancing on the fulcrum of what is essentially a large teeter-totter with bony protrusions.  Much as others may spin the skeleton around, standing at the fulcrum of such a device is just not challenging enough to be interesting. 

With the poles and staffs of the Tipani clan at the start of Act 2, we think something of note may finally happen.  Again the act takes place on “The Island” for everyone to see.  After a general Chinese pole routine, four performers climb individual poles and do various planches before arriving at the classic flag position.  Then the four rotate the poles in sync, leading us to think this will segue into a grand finale involving slides or drops.  But no, after just a few waves round the poles as flags, the performers stop and the act is over just when it is warming up. 

The last main act involving kites of the Kekunan clan is fun but not especially impressive.  Cirque du Soleil has used figure kites as birds on the ends of poles before, but this is the first time it has featured large four-line indoor kites.  While the smaller kites of some performers failed and kept scraping along the ground, Sébastien Clarke, the expert with the largest kite (64.5 square feet), makes it soar over the heads of the audience and the most enjoyable sensation of the evening is simply to hear the rippling of the kite fabric as it passes above.  A kind of aerial ballet of kites eventually emerges with two fliers of large kites situated on “The Island”.  Unfortunately, Acrobatic Performance Designer Germain Guillemot felt the need to add performers jumping through or ducking under the kite lines which causes only distraction not interest.

If you go to Cirque du Soleil only to experience a strange artificial world, then Toruk may have some appeal.  To be fair, Cirque du Soleil does not advertise Toruk as anything more than a spectacle, or to be specific, “A live multimedia immersive spectacle that brings to the stage the breathtaking world of James Cameron’s Avatar”.  Purely as a spectacle, the show is beautiful.  Conceived as a stadium show rather than a big top show, the playing area is 85 by 162 feet or slightly more than one half of a standard NHL hockey rink, thus turning the rink into an enormous thrust stage.  A wall cuts the rink in two and serves as the back wall of the stage.  This is designed as the trunk of a gigantic tree, the Hometree of the Omaticaya, and is 80 feet wide and 40 feet high and flanked by lateral screens. 

In the centre of the playing area is the mound called “The Island”, which is useful only when action occurs on top of it, not behind it.  The area surrounding “The Island” is flat but the flat area is surrounded by what Cirque calls “The Green Belt”.  This is an elevated, padded bank covering the rink boards all along the front row of the audience that includes hidden trampolines to allow the Na’vi to spring and tumble and features numerous fissures through which retractable three-dimensional vegetation can appear or disappear. 

Lemieux and Pilon are most famous for their ability to integrate projections and live performance as they did in La Belle et la Bête: A Contemporary Retelling that played in Toronto in 2012.  And, indeed, the most magical aspect of the show is its extensive use of projections that cover not only the back wall, but the entire playing surface of the rink and sometimes even the audience for a total projection surface of 20,000 square feet.  As an audience we are viewing ever-changing projections on surface that is five time the size of a standard IMAX screen.  The projections, more than any other element, gives the show its “immersive” quality.  Highlights of the projections include the shuddering of everything in sight to simulate an earthquake and the changing of the playing surface into a sea that washes in from the audience. 

The one time the projections do not work is in an ambitious scene where the Na’vi climb up sheer, rocky cliffs in order to break the barrier between them and a lake behind.  In this case, the cliffs, projected onto the Hometree, and the water that spouts from holes made in the rock look too much like underprocessed CGI effects and lack the reality of the other projections.

One inherent difficulty with the show, unlike all other Cirque du Soleil shows, is the sameness of all the characters.  Since they are all Na’vi, their “skin” is, of course, really an aqua blue hooded bodysuit, that from a distance makes all the performers look too much alike.  It is often difficult to tell the men from the women.  Worse, it is often difficult to distinguish the show’s two main heroes Ralu and Entu, even though they have their own dedicated follow-spots.  Ralu and Entu themselves look more like identical twins than unrelated friends, with only a red braid in Entu’s hair to distinguish him from Ralu.  And, although there are five different clans on Pandora, only the Tipani clan looks noticeably different from the Omaticaya since the Tipani wear small yellow shields. 

The pleasure of watching Toruk is much like watching an exotic parade.  This feeling is enhanced by the use of life-sized puppets to represent the fauna of Pandora such as the vicious Viperwolves, the six-legged Direhorses and the comical Austrapedes that look like a cross between ostriches and flamingoes – all of which look like refugees from the opening of The Lion King.  The most spectacular use of puppet-like objects are the gigantic flowers that the Tawkami clan use made out of huge banners of ultralight fabric in which they envelop themselves. 

The toruk of the title is a huge puppet also, but the set-up of the show diminishes its effect.  Over the central “Island” is a hood that holds all the equipment that needs to be dropped into place at that location.  Because this central part of the ceiling is occupied, the toruk when it appears is only able to fly as far as the edge of the “Island”, thus only about a third of the way across the playing area.  This is rather too bad, because after the thrill of the giant kite sailing over our heads earlier, we anticipate something even more exciting when the much-hyped title beast finally appears. 

For most people, however, two hours of spectacle without a well-told story or thrilling circus acts to sustain it is boring.  So much time and expense has been lavished on making the show visually appealing, the creative team seems to forgotten that spectacle needs to have some point or else it is empty.  For La Belle et la Bête, Lemieux and Pilon used a proscenium stage and only three actors.  With such an enormous thrust stage, half the size of a hockey rink and a cast of 35, keeping a focus on the action itself, let alone on the storytelling and acrobatics is clearly beyond them.  And then, unlike other Cirque du Soleil shows, Toruk does not take us to a newly imagined world but backwards to a world already fully imagined on screen.  This effort to replicate rather than innovate seems to have transformed the creative team’s instincts into a quest for pedantry and conformity with the minutiae of online Pandorapedia rather than allowing them to grow and flourish as they do in such thrilling shows as in ‘O’ (1998), Kà (2005), Koozå (2007) and Kurios (2014).  Let’s hope Cirque du Soleil gets back to form with its next show Luzia arriving later this year.              

©Christopher Hoile

Running time: 2 hours including 20-minute intermission.

Tour stops completed after Toronto:

• Centre Vidéotron, Quebec City, QC 

January 14-17, 2016;

• The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, MI 

January 22-24, 2016;

• Toyota Center, Houston, TX 

February 11-14, 2016;

• Verizon Arena, North Little Rock, AR 

February 17-21, 2016;

• North Charleston Coliseum, North Charleston, SC 

February 25-28, 2016;

• BB&T Center, Sunrise, FL 

March 3-6, 2016;

• AmericanAirlines Arena, Miami, FL 

March 10-13, 2016;

• Amalie Arena, Tampa, FL 

March 17-20, 2016;

• BOK Center, Tulsa, OK 

March 24-27, 2016;

• Sprint Center, Kansas City, MO 

March 30-April 3, 2016;

• Chesapeake Energy Arena, Oklahoma City, OK 

April 6-10, 2016;

• KFC Yum! Center, Louisville, KY 

April 28-May 1, 2016;

• U.S. Bank Arena, Cincinnati, OH 

May 4-8, 2016;

• Value City Arena, Columbus, OH 

May 11-15, 2016;

• FirstOntario Centre, Hamilton, ON 

May 20-22, 2016;

• Budweiser Gardens, London, ON 

May 25-29, 2016;

• Dunkin’ Donuts, Centre, Providence, RI

June 1-5, 2016;

• Infinity Energy Arena, Duluth, GA

June 15-19, 2016;

• PNC Arena, Raleigh, NC -cancelled-

June 22-26, 2016;

• Canadian Tire Centre, Ottawa, ON

June 30-July 3, 2016;

• Pepsi Center, Denver, CO

July 21-24, 2016;

• Pinnacle Bank Arena, Lincoln, NE

July 27-31, 2016;

• United Center, Chicago, IL

August 3-7, 2016;

• Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Inadianapolis, IN

August 10-14, 2016;

• Legacy Arena, Birmingham, AL

August 19-21, 2016;

• Bridgestone Arena, Nashville, TN

August 24-28, 2016;

• Ford Center, Evansville, IL

September 1-4, 2016;

• Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY

September 7-11, 2016;

• Prudential Center, Newark, NY

September 15-18, 2016;

1. •BMO Harris Bradley Center, Milwaukee, WI
   

September 22-25, 2016;

• Target Center, Minneapolis, MN

September 28-October 2, 2016;

• MTS Centre, Winnipeg, MB

October 5-9, 2016;

• Save Mart Center, Fresno, CA

Oct 27-30, 2016;

• Citizens Business Bank Arena, Ontario, CA

November 2-6, 2016;

• Staples Center, Los Angeles, CA

November 11-13, 2016;

• Talking Stick Resort Arena, Phoenix, AZ

Nov 16-20, 2016;

• Valley View Casino Center, San Diego, CA

Nov 23-27, 2016;

• Golden 1 Center, Sacramento, CA

November 30-Decemeber 4, 2016;

• Moda Center, Portland, OR

December 7-11, 2016;

• Pacific Coliseum, Vancouver, BC

December 14-18, 2016;

• Rogers Place, Edmonton, AB

December 22-26, 2016;

• The Forum, Inglewood, CA

January 12-15, 2017;

• T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, NV

January 18-22, 2017;

• INTRUST Bank Arena, Wichita, KS

January 26-29, 2017;

• Smoothie King Center, New Orleans, LA

February 1-5, 2017;

• ARENA VFG, Guadalajara, MEX

February 10-12, 2017;

• Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico City, MEX

February 16-19, 2017;

• Arena, Monterrey, MEX

February 23-25, 2017;

• Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland, OH

March 3-5, 2017;

• Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, PA

March 8-12, 2017;

• Wright State University Nutter Center, Dayton, OH

March 22-26, 2017

-end of North American tour-

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) A Tipani and a Viperwolf; the Omaticaya loom; the land of the Kekunan; Entu, Ralu and Tsyal on a bridge. ©2015 Errisson Lawrence.

For tickets, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com/toruk.