Theater Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Body and soul
Cirque du Soleil offers arty spectacle
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Quidam
Directed by Franco Dragone. Creative director Gilles Ste-Croix. Set by Michel Crête. Costumes by Dominique Lemieux. Lighting by Luc Lafortune. Sound by François Bergeron. Score and musical direction by Benoit Jutras. Choreography by Debra Brown. Presented by Cirque du Soleil at Suffolk Downs through September 8.


The billowing Big Top meets the amorphous big idea in Quidam, the latest surreal extravaganza from the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil to hit Boston. This 1996 creation from the folks who brought you Saltimbanco, Alegría, and Dralion presents spectacular circus feats wrapped in a heavy atmospheric aura that calls to mind Robert Wilson, René Magritte, Philip Glass, new age, and, occasionally, Jesus. The show, which some may find relentless or pretentious, is often quite beautiful, never more so than in the second-act presentation of Yves Decoste & Marie-Laure Mesnage’s " Statue. " In this meditative and physically astonishing up-from-the-primordial-ooze, Adam-and-Eve display of slow-motion balance, the artists’ muscular, near-naked bodies ponderously and exquisitely change configuration as they hold each other up in ways that marry the imagery of Leonardo da Vinci to the rigors of sideshow strong men. That this almost holy routine, gorgeously accoutered by somber, advancing figures extended from the ceiling, is followed by a clown act in which tears spout from dog ears points up my chief gripe with Quidam. Too much tedious buffoonery gets in the way of both the eye-popping acrobatics and a striking surrealistic frame.

Hey, I don’t exactly know what Quidam is about. Listening to the creators of Cirque du Soleil tell you what they think they’re doing is like cracking open a fortune cookie. But there’s no doubt that the show, which begins with a tableau in which a young girl ignored by her parents answers the doorbell of the imagination, has more swirling through it than peanuts and sawdust. The child opens a framed, freestanding door through which advances a tall, headless figure bearing an umbrella — and a bowler hat for which he has no resting place. He bestows the chapeau on our heroine, who hovers at the periphery of the rest of the show, missing and making connections. (The parents, too, are threaded throughout, the father at one point floating above and toward the audience, his head cracking through his torn newspaper.) At the end, the girl must surrender the bowler to the headless man, but in the meantime, arty acrobatics — encased in imagery balletic, Biblical, sinister, and plaintive — ensue.

Over 18 years, Cirque du Soleil has grown from a French-Canadian street entertainment to a cottage industry, with eight ethereal and differently conceived spectacles, all performed inside a sculpted tent that seats a couple of thousand, touring the globe or ensconced in Las Vegas and at Disney World. As is customary with Cirque’s wares, Quidam employs accomplished athlete artists from various nations, and they’re abetted by a house troupe of dancer acrobats whose distinctive personae are enhanced by costume and attitude. The work, Vegasy and gossamer at once, unfolds against an insistent orchestral score by Benoit Jutras that runs the gamut from classical strings to eerie tinkle to Les Misérables. Among the strange denizens of Quidam, in addition to the headless apparition armed against the storm that sometimes invades the score, are a white-faced, kohl-eyed devil flexing boxing-glove hands, an insouciant MC with a green Dairy Queen curl, and a whirling dervish in a flame-colored wig. A belabored yet delicate trio of clowns, called Las Velasquez, pick up on the show’s visual motifs, including red and pink balloons that swell and pop like the illusions.

Past Cirque creations have suggested the airy, menacing whimsies of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. Quidam, overarched by five conveyor rails on which artists and effects glide in and out, up and down, without benefit of cables, put me in mind of stage director Robert Wilson’s epic and stately the CIVIL warS. That is, if the renowned theater director were to stage a coup at Caesar’s Palace.

Truth to tell, with its unsettling and beautifully lit background pageantry (from harem girls handling nooses to white-suited figures loping like greyhounds), Quidam might get by on atmospherics alone. But it doesn’t, presenting, among other feats of awe-inducing skill, a 14-member acrobatic troupe who leap and somersault like trampolinists — except that they take off not from springing canvas but from one another’s knotted hands. Isabelle Vaudelle is an aerialist and contortionist whose eloquent bodily maneuvers come sheathed in streamers of red that extend from grid to floor. Hula hoops and jumping ropes, too, are raised to the level of art in this show that, however esoteric its marginalia, consistently offers suckers born every minute feats to die for.

Issue Date: August 1 - 8, 2002
Back to the Theater table of contents.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend