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by Daniele Finzi Pasca & Julie Hamelin Finzi, directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca

Cirque du Soleil, Big Top, 2150 Lake Shore Blvd. West, Toronto

June 18–August 3, 2026;

Big Top, St. Laurent Shopping Centre, Ottawa

September 10–October 18, 2026

“A Waking Dream of Mexico”

Leaf through a lavish travel photobook long enough and the images stop behaving like documentation. They become invitations for the mind to wander. Imagination gains the upper hand, and you start picturing what life there might feel like. That is the aesthetic logic of Cirque du Soleil’s Luzia, a fantastical journey through a dreamt-up Mexico.

Here, each vision feels luminous and surreal. Director Daniele Finzi Pasca does not offer the land of the Aztecs as geography so much as atmosphere. He draws from its traditions, colours and sounds, then refracts them through reverie and stagecraft. The result is a sequence of inspired tableaux: a glowing desert, a smoky nightclub, a vibrant ocean floor, a candlelit swamp and a convivial banquet — each one turning another page in the show’s atlas.

Part of the show’s astonishment comes from Giovanna Buzzi’s costumes. Think of the polychromatic butterfly dress from the poster image, worn by Olivia Aepli: a vibrant piece with wings stretching more than three metres each. Or consider the sumptuous costumes worn by chanteuse Majo Cornejo, including a white gown whose fluttering skirt is scattered with red flowers. From inverted mermaids to silvery reptilian musicians, the costumes carry us through a bizarre, exuberant land where every figure seems caught between folklore and hallucination.

Our guide through this quirky realm is Andrii Lytvak’s parachuted traveller, dropped into the landscape with the wary curiosity of a clown. His striped costume, with its faded reds and greens, nods faintly to Harlequin. At times, he is the butt of the land’s jokes, as when he gets lost on the ocean floor, and is mocked by a trio of cacti (Gerardo Ballester, Nelson Smyles and Enya White). At others, he becomes a sly adventurer, needling the audience with impish confidence.

The acts themselves are mostly delivered with the polish one expects from Cirque du Soleil. Acrobatic poles, football dance, trapeze work and hoop-diving unfold with impressive synchrony. The rotating stage binds these acts together. It gives spectators a shifting, panoramic view, while also serving the production’s central conceit of exploration.

The acts themselves are mostly delivered with the polish one expects from Cirque du Soleil. Yet not every sequence lands with the same dramatic force. However enchanting and synchronized, the desert trapeze dance and Cyr wheel sequence (Zore España, Sarah Togni and Enya White) do little to disguise how loosely they use their setting. The landscape feels more like a pretext for what remain fairly conventional circus routines. The same is true of the Chinese pole sequence, where handsome reptilian costumes suggest a richer narrative possibility than the predictable display of technical skill the number finally delivers. The rotating stage binds these pieces together, giving spectators a shifting, panoramic view while also serving the production’s central conceit of exploration.

Luzia works best when a number becomes more than an exhibition of skill. Ugo Laffolay’s hand-balancing act, framed as part of a film shoot on a deliberately flimsy cardboard beach, is a comic highlight. Playing a swaggering lifeguard, he is pushed by an impatient director into ever more difficult balances, rising on canes until he hovers more than six metres above the stage. Here we are not only admiring strength and control, but watching a performer trapped inside an escalating joke.

Aleksei Goloborodko’s contortion act has a similarly theatrical charge. Set designer Eugenio Caballero places him in a fairy-tale swamp, on a glass bridge above a circular pool. Dressed in scaly green, Goloborodko fixes the audience with an unblinking, almost lidless stare. His body twitches and uncoils in precise little bursts. He gives the act a reptilian demeanour, all sly stillness, sudden little snaps and cold-blooded control.

Ten years after its Montréal premiere and last Toronto visit, Luzia returns to Toronto with one of its defining inventions still intact – a touring circus built around water. (CdS’s sit-down production of the hydrocentric ‘O’, of course, has been playing in Las Vegas since 1998.) As Cirque du Soleil’s first touring production to make water integral to its acrobatics, Luzia succeeds in turning it into more than a technical innovation. Rain becomes a narrative counterpart and a character in its own right. It represents the long-awaited release the inhabitants have been craving after days of aridity, but also a playful force through which performers fling themselves and run drenched. It even assumes the role of a mischievous interlocutor for Lytvak’s parachuted traveller. In a Mr. Bean-like sequence, he chases a patch of rain that keeps sliding just far enough away to exclude him.

At times, though, the production settles for bravura display, proceeding by accumulation: one ravishing picture following another. Still, it makes for an exquisite spectacle. With its vast scenic apparatus, its great circular backdrop shifting from sun to moon, and its curtain of rain reflecting flickering images in mid-air, the show remains a machine for wonder. It may not always deepen, but it dazzles.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Olivia Aepli: as Monarch Butterfly; Ugo Laffolay, Hand Balancing, © 2022 Anne Colliard; Aleksei Goloborodko, Contortionist; Cyr Wheel artists under rain curtain © 2022 Matt Beard.

For tickets visit: www.cirquedusoleil.com.