Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
created and directed by Jeannot Painchaud & Dave St-Pierre
Cirque Éloize, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
March 1-18, 2017
“Nouveau Cirque + Metropolis = Cirkopolis”
In Cirque Éloize’s Cirkopolis is its latest show to hit Toronto after iD in 2010 and Nomade in 2006. In Cirkopolis, that had its world premiere in Helsinki in 2012, circus arts seem to grow naturally from its artful mix of dance and mime. The show takes as its look and theme the dystopian bureaucratic state of Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis (1927), but it suggests that the world of never-ending work has not crushed all hope of beauty or play. Cirque Éloize may be a smaller organization than the world’s main proponent of nouveau cirque, Cirque du Soleil, but, as Cirkopolis demonstrates, when production design, dance and theatre and circus arts work so closely together the result can be often be even more exciting.
Cirkopolis opens with a vision of the title city as an all-grey amalgam of city and machine with clockwork wheels and cogs intruding into every space shown in Robert Massicotte and Alexis Laurence’s computer-animated video that takes up the entire back wall of the stage. The piece begins with a long sequence of modern dance choreographed by Dave St-Pierre where the cast, moving in the angular, Expressionist manner of the workers in Lang’s film, brings tottering piles of papers to a lonely office-worker (Ashley Carr), whose entire job is stamping them to place in another pile.
Designer Liz Vandal has clad all the cast in grey trench coats, suits and fedoras. The only hint of colour is a flash of red in the hatbands and in the pocket square. On the few occasions when the performers twirl instead of lunge forwards, we can see that these grey coats are lined in wide variety of colours – a hint of individuality underneath imposed conformity.
The first circus act arises so naturally out of this scene of pointless bureaucratic action that we hardly notice it at first. Two men (Colin-André Hériaud and Aaron DeWitt) shake hands and this gradually segues into a dramatic hand-to-hand balancing act and two-man banquine with DeWitt often tossing Hériaud into position.
Countering this grey, male-dominant world is the next act. Alone on stage with a large hoop, a Cyr wheel, a young woman (Nora Zoller) takes off her trench coat to reveal a bright red dress underneath, so far the only large swath of colour in the show. Zoller then proceeds to perform the most beautiful Cyr wheel routine I’ve ever seen. Zoller seems merely to be dancing and playing with the wheel to such an extent that it’s hard to know where the dancing stops and the acrobatics start. Of course, she performs the usual Cyr wheel stunts, taking various positions including splits inside the wheel as it rolls in circles on the stage, but all these positions seem merely extensions of a dance which has now become a fluid movement unlike the jerky, Expressionist walk of the mass of workers. Zoller’s act represents the ideal of colour, beauty and enjoyment toward which the the rest of the acts will strive.
First, however, there is a set-back in the form of Frédéric Lemieux-Cormier’s routine on the aerial cube, an odd apparatus I’ve never seen before. The metal cube is suspended from two points so that it looks like four trapezes in a diamond configuration connected by struts. Not only does the angular grey cube contrast with Zoller’s lavender-coloured wheel and Lemieux-Cormier’s grey outfit with Zoller’s red dress, but Lemieux-Cormier’s use of the apparatus is jerky and effortful unlike Zoller’s use of the wheel. The routine on the cube requires releases from one of the horizontal bars leading to swings or catches on another of the set. It may be possible to use the cube in a fluid manner, but the cube seems designed more to emphasize strength rather than grace. Here it seems to function as a metaphor for a man trapped in the hard-edged world of the factory/city.
The next scene depicts an interaction of the worlds of freedom and work. Ashley Carr is once again labouring at his pile of papers on his grey desk when three female workers (Selene Ballesteros-Minguer, Pauline Baud-Guillard and Alexie Maheu) doff their trench coats and like Zoller, reveal red dresses underneath. They proceed to engage in a contortion routine that Carr comically tries to imitate. A trapeze descends and the three deftly combine trapeze work with aerial rope work using the ropes holding the trapeze.
The next scene returns to the office section of the city and recalls the opening scene. Yet, instead of papers being handed into and taken from the office worker, white papers are traded for white jugging clubs. Eventually all twelve members of the cast have clubs and set up six passing teams that then proceed to form various interlocking patterns. Here the relentless mass delivery and picking up of papers that was satirized as drudgery has been transformed to an exuberant exhibition of mass juggling that celebrates skill, precision and fun.
The transformation of work into play is manifest in all the acts following the juggling scene. Ashley Carr, the chief clown, has a delightful sequence where he in his grey suit woos a red dress left on a hanger on coat rack. While Carr’s fantasy of flirting with the dress is comic in itself, it also reflects the longing of the workers in general for something more in the impersonal world around them. The seemingly utilitarian coat rack also becomes an acrobatic apparatus, thus turning the mundane into a item of play.
Other exciting acts are Alexie Maheu and Antonin Wicky’s clever double act on a Chinese pole. As with the trapeze and German wheel, the novelty consists in having more than one performer use the same apparatus at the same time. Flags and hip-lock drops by both performers are exciting in themselves but also reflect the equality of male and female that appears as one of the ideals secretly desired by the works of Cirkopolis.
The male example of pure play, parallel to Zoller’s dance with the Cyr wheel, is Arata Urawa’s fantastic routine diabolo routine. He moves so fast it’s impossible to tell how he remains in such control of the spinning device. One of his most spectacular moves is to leave the diabolo in mid air while he pirouettes and recatches it before it drops. It’s one of the greatest diabolo routines I’ve seen and deservedly earned the the most extended acclaim from the audience.
Selene Ballesteros-Minguer has the misfortune to follow this fantastic act with her routine on the corde lisse, simply a single suspended rope that wraps around herself to create various poses, releases and roll-downs. While no fault can be attached to Ballesteros-Minguer, the position of her act after Urawa’s is a let-down because we’ve already seen many of the elements of her routine on the ropes of the trapeze and on the Chinese pole. To make things worse, Robert Massicotte and Alexis Laurence’s video is in constant motion so that it visually distracts from everything the performer is doing. Painchaud and St-Pierre have already adequately delineated the arc of the show from work to play, from oppression to liberation, so that the video that pictures moving out of the claustrophobic city into the sunshine is really thematic overkill. Besides, in a live performance the change in theme should derive from the actions of the performers not from an animated background.
In any event, the show concludes with a joyous combination of banquine and teeterboard. The workers now wear suits in a rainbow of colours with socks to match. Each of the flyers launched from the teeterboard seems to represent a individual whom the group celebrates. The new society at the end is one where a collective works together for its own benefit rather than as pool of workers exploited by an unseen higher authority. The show, of course, ignores how those higher up regard this rebellion among the workers.
The show beautifully coordinates theatre and circus arts with costume and apparatus design and lighting to create a powerful journey from greyness to colour, from drudgery to play. Despite its misstep with moving projections during the corde lisse act, this is story told through movement of all kinds that is sure to please people of all ages. One not only admires the individual abilities of the twelve performers but their amazing ability to work as a synchronized group both in dance and circus skills. The fact that Cirque Éloize can present such a show in such an intimate venue as the Bluma Appel Theatre with only 876 seats as opposed to the 2000 seats at the Princess of Wales for Les & Doigts’s Cuisine & Confessions last year or the 2600 seats for a Cirque du Soleil big top show, naturally brings the audience closer to the action and makes it even more thrilling. All this makes Cirkopolis a show both theatre- and circus-lovers will not want to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Jérémy Vitupier on the German wheel;Nora Zoller and the Cyr wheel; trapeze act; juggling scene. ©2016 Cirque Éloize.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2017-03-02
Cirkopolis