Totem, Cirque du Soleil. Image supplied. Photo: Matt Beard.
Cirque du Soleil was started 30 years ago by two Canadian street performers and is now the largest theatrical producer in the world. Eighteen shows are now touring the globe, and the jewel in the crown, Totem, will next year be heading for Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth after its opening Tuesday in Sydney.
It’s a massive, high circus tent show fusing acrobats, trapeze, comedians and other trick-masters you’d know from the old circuses, but with astonishing new-look theatricality, choreography and staging design.
Holding it all together, as both writer and director, is Canada’s famed showman Robert Lepage. His signature use of film in epic theatre shows (his opus The Seven Streams of the River Ota is still unforgettable after two decades) is beautifully employed here to make the natural worlds of Totem.
On a slopped oval stage surrounded by giant reeds, film projections conjure up oceans, lakes, swamps, marshes, volcanic islands and unlimited skies. From across and under these turbulent worlds, or over a huge arcing Scorpion tail of a bridge, come the amoebas, leaping frogs, reptiles, animals, Neanderthals and human natives which are part of us all.
That theme of man’s link with nature and other species is then variously explored – or forgotten – in an incredible catalogue of athleticism and circus bravado at its very best.
It’s beautifully realised, for example, in the American Indian couple arriving by canoe on wintry rapids and, dressed in silver and white and roller skates, spinning around each other atop a small drum, married together in nature. But human progress is forgotten as two sexy, bickering lovebirds sport similar agility and courage on a swing. Do we care?
While I expected more of a narrative arc from Lepage, his Totem theme does deliver an explosion of beautiful costuming, patterns and sparkling aesthetics variously drawn from Mayan, Aboriginal, Asian, African, Flamenco, Bollywood and celestial worlds – to say nothing of the nuts and leaves from numerous forest glens.
The most modern setting is an antique 19th Century laboratory where a mad scientist inside a cone of glass artfully spins a night sky of coloured balls – something presumably about the Western habit for boxing in the human experience.
Cirque de Soleil has often drawn stylistically on world cultures and their percussive and journeying music, and in Totem it is arguably best realised. This globalism is a nice match to the varied national backgrounds of its super talented casts, whose energy and showmanship drives us all before them. The five female unicyclists with bowls piled on their heads, tossing them back and forth without hands, make you gasp. So too do the psychedelically patterned gymnasts leaping and spinning high on flexible poles, before exiting the show as cosmonauts heading for new frontiers of space.
The tickets cost a bomb and there are a few mediocre moments of assembling and circus carry-on, but by end the magic of it all is ecstatic.
Rating; 4.5 out of 5 stars
Totem
Now showing in Sydney
Under the Big Top on The Showring at the Entertainment Quarter
Melbourne opens January 21, 2015
Brisbane opens April 10, 2015
Adelaide opens June 11, 2015
Perth opens July 31, 2015
