Wednesday, January 7, 2015

In Which I Discover that My Favorite Show Has Been Gutted and Shortchanged, and Decide to Crawl Under a Blanket for the Rest of the Winter

Cirque du Soleil's Varekai came through Colorado Springs at the end of winter break.  Since I did not have filial piety and did not fly home for the solstice revels (because I was afraid of snow) I went to see Varekai instead.  (And drove through not one, but two snowstorms.  The random factors did not align in my favor regarding snow.) 

When Varekai originally came through Atlanta (9 years ago?  10?) I was utterly enchanted.  Varekai is built off a classic fantasy love story, with Icarus crash landing in a magical forest and losing his wings.  But he and a caterpillar girl fall in love, and Icarus learns to walk, and the caterpillar girl turns into a butterfly girl with mad hand-balancing skills.  Add in beautiful music and costumes, clowns that I actually found funny (clowns usually leave me unmoved), the usual Cirque-caliber jaw-dropping acts, and the touchingly sweet interactions of Icarus and the caterpillar girl, and you have my favorite show ever.

In the Varekai I love we start with Icarus falling out of the sky.  The forest inhabitants run off with his wings, and Icarus mourns them with an aerial net routine.  I've been told (but have not confirmed) that the original Icarus was a child acrobat in Saltimbanco.  He certainly had that boneless flexibility of those who start young!  Anyway, it put net on my wish-list of aerial equipment.  Then we start to meet the forest inhabitants: a grumpy figure with a light bulb on his head, the caterpillar girl, bees (water-globes) and some foot-jugglers, and then (just as our principals get interested in each other), the caterpillar girl is kidnapped and pulled up to the roof in a transparent cocoon (where she hangs for the rest of act 1 and the first part of act 2).  Then her kidnappers perform a 4-woman trapeze act.  This is one of the two best trapeze acts I have ever seen (the other was the 2-woman trapeze act in Saltimbanco).  The coordination was flawless, the styling was powerful and direct, and the shapes you can make with four bodies, instead of just one or two, are much more complex and intriguing.

Varekai continues as we meet more inhabitants of the forest: a lake full of happy critters doing acrobatics, a juggler (parrot, maybe?) in bright blue and green, two flyers who do a duo aerial straps routine: again, amazing technique,  and powerful, direct choreography using two bodies to explore angular symmetries, like figures from an Egyptian frieze.  Also a figure on crutches, who does an entire routine on crutches, barely brushing his feet on the stage at all!  Through all of this Icarus is slowly learning to walk, and the caterpillar girl watches from her prison/cocoon.  But then the cocoon opens, and the caterpillar girl, now a butterfly girl, explores her new strength with a hand-balancing act.  (I have confirmed that the original butterfly girl was the hand-balancer from Quidam, and she goes to eleven as far as both acting and hand-balancing are concerned).  I really liked how this was played, that the butterfly girl explored her own strength first, and only when she's done do we get back to the romance.       

Then at the end, the party!  With Russian swings, and leaping off them into large nets, because it's fun to fly!  And we, the audience, love to see people fly, preferably with nets!  And Icarus and the butterfly girl finally get to sit together and watch!

I was prepared for the original cast to have switched out by now.  But I was not prepared for how the show has been whittled down.  The 4-person trapeze act is gone.  The solo replacement has astounding technique...but this is a case where four people are more interesting than one, no matter how talented the one.  The happy lake critters and the aerial straps and the foot-jugglers are still excellent, but the crutches act has lost the floating look and relies much more on feet.  And overall, everything was rushed through and overplayed: the clowns didn't make us wait to get the joke, the interlude scenes were shortened (and for why?  The music is so lovely I am happy to watch a giant firefly balloon drift about the stage; we can wait a little longer for the next act), Icarus was not convincing about learning to walk (I think he kept forgetting?), and, worst of all, the new butterfly girl has not been taught to stop looking at the floor while performing.

I know that abhinaya (the art of expression) is difficult: movement, speech, costumes, and innermost self*.  I struggle with this in every routine, to actually make something worth watching, not just posing to music.  I fail a lot.  In many ways, a purely technical challenge is easier!  (And I also do weird things with my face when I'm concentrating.  Fortunately I have Elisheba to yell at me about this.)  But.  And but: if you are in Cirque du Soleil, and I am not, you should be better than I am at this.  That is why we amateurs dream about being in Cirque: because you are supposed to be the best.  Not necessarily the world's most flexible or strong (although I suspect you often are), but the best at telling us an amazing story through your performance.  


*angikam, vachikam, aharyam, satvikam
 

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