Photo by Al Seib.
In barely 30 years, Cirque du Soleil has evolved from a busking performance by co-founders Gilles Ste-Croix and Guy Laliberté on the streets of Montreal to a household name. The multi-million dollar franchise has toured practically every continent bringing its incredible entourage of performers, props, musicians, costume and stages to each show. The Cirque du Soleil brand evokes exceptionalism. Every facet of the show, from the make-up to the music, is a marvel to behold and the latest performance to tour Australia, Quidam, maintains the company’s high reputation.
The loose interpretation given to Quidam means a nameless passerby in an all-too-anonymous society – the quintessential stranger. This stranger is represented as an invisible being, dressed in a trench coat and holding an umbrella, a faceless enigma. The premise for the show is the imagination of young Zoe, a neglected child who retreats into the world of the extraordinary as an escape from reality. By delving into the dream world, Artistic Director, Marjon van Grunsven, invokes a bizarre array of characters in a surrealist mindscape inspired by Salvador Dali. Haunting her throughout the show are friends such as Boum Boum, a beast of a man kitted out with boxing gloves, the mischievous Peau D’ane, inexplicably clad in bunny ears while riding around the stage on a scooter and the irreverent Mark, who provides much of the entertainment between acts. Interspersed throughout the piece are glimpses of Zoe’s family, the stereotypical father donning a suit while hiding behind his newspaper and the doting but strict mother. With 40-odd other performers occupying the stage over the course of the show, the mind of Zoe is never dull.
Regardless of whether it’s the simple backyard skipping rope or hula hoop, Cirque du Soleil has a way of turning the mundane into the sublime. Few brands are as synonymous with sheer excellence and talent as Cirque du Soleil. The documentaries that used to grace our television screens featuring behind-the-scenes insights into the training camps lead to a new appreciation of the rigour and training required for acrobats to perform at this level. Equipped with this knowledge, it’s much easier to be forgiving of the minor mishap with the skipping rope or dropping of a baton. Given the intensity of the training that goes into the spectacle, such opening night jitters don’t detract at all from the professionalism of the production.
Having reinvented the circus experience, there is an act to please everyone in this two hour showcase of human physicality. While the types of acrobatics are all too familiar with performance art, its quite another thing to watch these feats Cirque du Soleil style. The incredible diabolo, which is regarded as a child’s game in China, is wielded by Wei Liang Lin with such flair that it becomes a hypnotic device, being tossed high into the arena ​at dizzying speeds. The simple backyard skipping rope becomes a complex, intricate web stretching across the entire stage and featuring over 20 acrobats moving in unison. Baaska Enkhbaatar transforms the hand balancing act into a graceful contortion of back arches and flips so that it’s impossible not to feel a tingling in ​your spine.
The rotating stage promotes an effective design to showcase the prowess of the performers. While the stage is not quite the mechanical genius featured at the MGM Grand, the circular design nonetheless provides viewers with an excellent vantage point and is spacious enough to accommodate the full band of musicians providing the magnificent score composed by Benoît Jutras. A complicated rail and trolley system called the telepherique fixed above the stage suspends a collection of ropes, silks and props to striking visual effect. The incredible Spanish Webs act choreographed with five artists dangling precariously from ropes utilises the full breadth of the performance space and provides an eerie prelude to the Statue act, where Natalia Pestova and Alexander Pestov hold the audience entranced with the practical melding of their bodies.
Being a circus show at heart, there is the inevitable audience participation section where a handful of people are plucked from the crowd to assist a director enact a silent movie scene. Although amusing, the scene does drag on for a while. The finale of the show is the riotous Banquine, a cacophony of human pyramids, jumps, flips and somersaults culminating in a human tower of four people high. Featuring over 15 artists the Italian acrobatic tradition heralding from the Middle Ages is a mind-bending display of precision and agility. Definitely a fitting send off for a production that evokes more of the fantasy realm than modern day.
Rounding off a 20 year season, the finale Oceanic tour of Quidam is testimony to Cirque du Soleil’s worldwide success. With the private company being recently sold to a US and Chinese capital group and Canadian pension fund the future of the franchise looks set for a change of course. Already a fully-fledged brand, the circus looks set to expand into television productions, clothing and more merchandise. Whatever happens, the excited faces of children at AIS Arena on Thursday night would appear to indicate that Cirque du Soleil is always welcome in Canberra. Quidam is undoubtedly a show not just to watch, but to experience.
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
Quidam
Dates: 10 – 20 December 2015
Playing at: AIS Arena, Bruce
Tickets: From approx. $62.00
Quidam will be touring across Australia:
Wollongong 23 December – 2 January
Hobart 6 – 10 January
Newcastle 15 – 24 January
