Fri, October 3, 2003

Last night, Andy and I went to see Varekai, which is the new touring show from Cirque du Soleil. Cirque is credited with helping in the revolution to bring "family" back to Las Vegas (helping whom I don't know, but doubtfully Siegfried & Roy and certainly not Molly Sims – I love her, but her new NBC show is not for the PG crowd). They've developed a series of acrobatic performance shows that combine well known circus motifs (trapeze, tent) with spectacular production values and a commitment to whimsy, themed entertainment, and merchandising that can only be described as "Disney-esque." The result is a veritable confit of light, color, sound, and movement that engages all the senses as well as the imagination. My experience with Cirque to date is thus: I love the Treasure Island casino chips which advertise their show Mystère; their resident show at the Bellagio (O) intrigues me (Because it features fire on water people! We're talking about water that is on fire!); I saw their touring show Dralion in Santa Monica a few years ago; and I get very tempted to violate myself when I watch footage of their new "adult-themed" show Zumanity. So, off to a great start!

Varekai appears to tell the story of a young moth who flies too near the sun and falls to the earth, where he meets a caterpillar and falls in love. She loves him, too, but they face obstacles to their union – in the form of jugglers, russian dancers, and trapeze performers. (Trapeze artists just hate to see flightless moths happy. I blame the fundamentalist trapeze training schools in the middle east.) As time passes (along with a great deal of gyrating and aerobatics), the caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and at the end she and the moth are married in a ceremony that involves brightly colored young crayfish leaping into the air. (This is just my interpretation; according to the website, Varekai takes place at a volcanic summit, the moth is a human parachutist [I swear to god he had feathery wings], and instead of a love story it's a "tribute to the nomadic soul, to the spirit and art of the circus tradition." They describe it as "an inspired incantation to life rediscovered." And I thought HBO's Carnivále was presumptuously obscure!)

I enjoy the Cirque shows a great deal, and I'm sure I'll enjoy them even more when I get to see one of the resident shows in Las Vegas, which are held indoors. (Tents were never meant to be conducive to central air conditioning.) Cirque has a tremendous commitment to detail and to spectacle, and so their reinterpretation of the circus as a premium event always feels well worth the money. I don't buy into the heavy-handed spirituality of the music (or the online synopsis), but the beautiful thing is that you don't have to. You can still enjoy some breathtaking feats of strength, agility, flexibility, and coordination. And some costumes that look like something Julie Taymor and David LaChappelle would devise together during an acid trip. (Beyond adding to the theatrics, I think the over-the-top costumes of Cirque du Soleil are designed to focus your attention on the character and not on the performer. Besides the inevitable cast turnover, I think it must be very difficult to find performers who have some of the extraordinary skills that Cirque demands and also "look" the part. By enveloping them in crazy outfits, it becomes more about what these people can do than about what they look like.)

The aerial stunts continue to be the element of Cirque that captivate me the most. It's rare for performers to be strapped into a harness the way Cathy Rigby would be. Instead, they dangle from straps around their wrists, or they're simply tangled up in fabric that they move through as they sway through the air. It's amazingly impressive, and it has a certain organic feel that cable-suspended stunts lack. (Maybe we're just tired of cables because every movie fight scene now features actors floating around on digitally erased cables.) And there's something about the way the performers start at stage level and run in a circle until they slowly take flight that just looks goddamn fun! It's the absolute inverse of bungee-jumping, and it's great for all the reasons that bungee-jumping is dopey. Instead of hurtling towards the ground, you're swaying gracefully upward. Instead of being snapped harshly by your bound ankles, you're pulling yourself up through the cloth and through the air. Cirque does all of this and then redoubles the beauty by use of interaction between the performers, who occasionally suspend or propel each other in a kind of dance.

They also have these great little oriental kids who tumble or perform other feats. In Varekai, there's a young girl who skates around on a simulated pond and then gets lifted into all kinds of impossible positions. What's really fun about that performance is that because of the costumes, she and the only other performer wearing a bright pink suit are immediately connected together in your mind. Wherever she goes, she always has to skate back to her pink daddy. It's very sweet, and the connection the viewer makes is pure instinct. (As Jeremy says on Sports Night, "Small, bigger, biggest – recognizable to any species on the planet as a child, a mother, and a father.") It's brilliant that Cirque recognizes this and takes advantage of it. It elevates a performance that would otherwise be perfectly amazing by adding a familiar element that resonates and creates a little story. Their whole approach makes use of similar tricks to tell an immediately relatable story with almost no language at all (scene-by-scene, I mean, between the characters in each bit; the "inspired incantation" doesn't relate at all). It's quite an inspiration. Another thing the oriental kids do in Varekai is juggle these bungee cords. It's impossible to describe, but basically it's a cord stretched between two weights, so they can spin it over their head while they do flips and things and then hurl it way into the air and catch it. It's great fun to watch, but the whole time they're performing it's impossible to stop giggling at how adorable they are. They're positively miniscule. To lift a line from Dave Barry, they're cute as a button but much smaller. It's like a team of little Short Rounds dancing up there – and the way they scurry they're distinctly reminiscent of the kids from Prince of Space on MST3K.

Watching Varekai, my mind often wandered (in a good way). For one thing, I found myself thinking about the reality of a performance like Cirque. The entire experience is designed to distract the audience from the reality, which is definitely the right way to go, but I was thinking about it anyway. Because everything they're doing up there – flipping through the air suspended by lengths of gossamer fabric or juggling graceful bungee cord yo-yos – is intensely rehearsed. It looks dramatic and death-defying (and I won't dispute that it's risky), but I know that it's much safer than we instinctively believe, because they've practiced very hard. And, as I thought about it, I realized that what they practice is something that Adam Carolla has referred to when discussing how we learn new skills. The performers rehearse until they know very well what it feels like to do their stunts. At that point, two things happen. One is that they no longer have to concentrate on the intricacies of their art, because that familiar muscle memory can take over. And another is that they instinctively know immediately if something feels wrong. So, when Kid Icarus is up there dangling from a piece of mesh fifty feet off the stage, it looks foolhardy for him to suddenly unravel himself, plummeting toward the ground with confidence that a tangle of fabric will stop him in time. But in reality, he'd never go through with it if it didn't feel right. Yes, "the show must go on," but if he didn't feel the net around his ankle just right, he'd find a way to postpone that plunge. I really enjoyed Varekai this way, focusing on how rigorously practiced every tiny movement was. Partly because I was very impressed at the performers' accomplishments, but I think in a small way I was also relieved to think that, maybe, if I spent years and years training myself, I could do it, too.

I also thought a great deal about choreography. This plays a part in the dancing parts of Varekai but features just as heavily in many of the acrobatic feats because the performers are supporting or flinging each other and their movements must be timed perfectly. As I watched the show, I was reminded of a feeling that often overcomes me in war movies (when they're done well). What makes choreography work is similar to what makes a military maneuver work. Each person does what he's trained (rehearsed) to do, and trusts that the others will each do their part. In Saving Private Ryan, the way one soldier provides covering fire so another can change position – it always captures my attention how that common goal, and the rigorous training and belief in one's teammates, provides a sort of security. (It chokes me up in Air Force One with the Secret Service agents, too, as I've mentioned far too often.) Watching these performers dangle each other from the sky or kick each other into the air, I was impressed by the application of a similar kind of trust.

All in all, just about the only element of Varekai that wasn't perfect for me was the audience. As a vestige of its circus roots, Varekai still has the concession stand with popcorn and hot dogs and the like. So the masses – like the refugees at the Hollywood Bowl – couldn't resist pigging out. It's a shame because I see Cirque as a performance show, like a play or an opera, which you watch in silence. But for them it's still a circus, where you munch your popcorn and applaud after every feat rather than the end of each scene. The applause was just non-stop and it started to grate on me like a bad sitcom laugh track. All right! I wanted to say. Of course it's amazing. But it's about to get a lot more amazing, because if this were the best they could do, they wouldn't start with it! A friend said of The Rundown, "what happened to saving something for the climax?" referring to the over-the-top non-stop action scenes. He was right. As entertaining as The Rundown was, every punch was the hardest punch ever, so there was no sense of buildup. Cirque really knows how to save it, but what's great is that the first thing (in each show, or even in each scene) is still mind-bendingly awesome. I wanted to appreciate the performances as whole segments, but those around me preferred to appreciate each beat as the most awesome thing they'd ever seen.

Still, it's an amazing experience in our increasingly cynical and synthetic world, where especially in the last couple of years we've witnessed things we never thought possible, to be transported to a place where the unbelievable is actual and humans can fly. (Clearly it's time for me to stop; I'm starting to sound like the Cirque website.)

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