Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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created and directed by Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila
Les 7 Doigts de la main, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
November 2-December 4, 2016
“Circus in the Kitchen”
In Cuisine & Confessions circus acts become a thrilling means of personal expression. Les 7 Doigts de la main (The 7 Fingers) follows the same recipe for success of Traces (2006) by turning the everyday into the extraordinary. While Cirque du Soleil creates beautiful but alien worlds on stage inhabited by stage beings, Les 7 Doigts shows that the marvellous can happen in ordinary setting such as a kitchen as in its current show. The performers do not take on roles in a bizarre scenario, but rather play themselves and their circus acts reflect elements of their personal stories. The result is to demystify the circus, to show that people don’t need glittering costumes or dazzling settings to prove that they have amazing talents.
Ana Cappelluto’s set is a large functioning kitchen with a huge centre island. There is a proscenium height Chinese pole stage left, but otherwise Cappelluto has cleverly hidden any needed circus apparatus in the set itself. During the long pre-show, the performers mingle with the audience and audience members are invited to help the performers in preparing the three dishes that are actually cooked and served by the end of the show – a cheese omelet, vegetable pasta and banana bread. The fact that the artists actually cook during the show is a bit of a gimmick but it does serve to link the audience to the performers which is one of Les 7 Doigts’s chief goals.
The show includes three particularly fantastic acts that are alone worth the price of admission. One involves Anna Kichtchenko’s aerial silk routine with her silks red-check coloured as if they were tablecloths. She tells no particular story into the standing mic, but we see that the other characters try to load her with used clothing that she casts off in the course of her act, suggesting that she is freeing herself from ideas that other impose on her. After doing a number of unusual poses and drops, Kichtchenko finishes with an exquisite windmill rolldown.
Americans Sidney Bateman and Melvin Diggs do tell us their story. It is about kitchens being a safe place in their lives and about their hopes to escape the troubled area of St. Louis where they grew up. The cast then take rectangular frames that have served as trim on the kitchen cabinets and construct Chinese hoops from them. Batemen and Diggs then proceed to execute the most exciting Chinese hoops routine I’ve ever seen. Not only are the “hoops” not round, but neither performer is the short, slight acrobat who usually is seen in this kind of act. Bateman looks rather hefty for an acrobat and Diggs looks too tall and lanky for hoop diving. Yet, the very unlikeliness of their appearance makes their achievement all the more amazing as they individually and in sync dive head-first, feet-first and even bum-first through the frames that look too small for them. Their varied acrobatic approaches and finishes prove that one has to judge the suitability of an apparatus by the artists’ ability not by appearance.
The show’s concluding solo act is by Argentine Matias Plaul, who through most of the show has been functioning a type of clown. At the end, however, Plaul becomes serious and relates that his father was one of the desaparecidos during the Dirty War in Argentina. Plauel remembers his father being kidnapped right before his eyes when the family were out for a walk. Plauel brings the anger and hurt of these memories to a fantastic routine on the Chinese pole where his flags seem to represent efforts to hold out against authority while cramped poses and releases and re-catching the pole signify struggle. When as Plauel narrates that the family realized their father must be dead, Plauel executes a hair-raising death drop from the very top of the pole to within inches of the floor.
The other five performers contribute more whimsical routines. Argentine Pablo Pramparo juggles weighted kitchen whisks and metal bowls. Finn Nella Niva, the female clown of the group who can’t stop speaking of desserts, does an acrobatic floor routine executed on the kitchen island and nearby tables. Swedish-American Mishannock Ferrero, who is the main speaker for the group, performs a beautifully choreographed dance routine with Russian Anna Kachalova that seamlessly combines hand-to-hand and even banquine.
What makes Les 7 Doigts remarkable is not its parade of circus acts but the fact that under Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila’s direction everyone appears able to help out in some way in every act. The most striking impression is of the whole group working together as one. Many of the solo routines are linked with dance numbers that combine acrobatics so that the show seems as much about dance as about the circus. Besides the troupe’s individual specialties, it is its all-round abilities in a wide range of circus arts that makes makes the show continually surprising. We hardly expect the aerial silks expert Kichtchenko also to be a contortionist, but she is. We don’t expect a Chinese hoop master like Bateman also to be an expert on the diabolo, but he is. All nine are expert in modern dance.
The least successful aspect of the show is its attempts at humour. Inviting three audience members on stage and abandoning them with a microphone is funny for only a few seconds before it becomes embarrassing. The most successful joke the troupe plays on a volunteer, however, is to have him hold an average-sized chopping board while blindfolded while Bateman prepares to throw a kitchen knife at the board. (No one is hurt.)
The message of Cuisine & Confessions like that of Traces is that circus performers are not exotic creatures but ordinary people who have mastered extraordinary skills. It is this ethos that is likely to impress young theatre-goers with the idea that everyone has special talents and they don’t need tights and capes to advertise them. The 90-minute-long show is ultimately about home and family – home focussed on the kitchen and family focussed on the the troupe’s camaraderie. While the solo acts do wow, what remains is a feeling of warmth from a show where everybody helps everybody else to achieve their best.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Cast of Cuisine & Confessions; Melvin Diggs and Sidney Bateman. ©2015 Alexandre Galliez.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2016-11-03
Cuisine & Confessions