Mon, September 6, 2004
Zumanity
Zumanity is marketed as "the human zoo" or "another side of Cirque du Soleil," but it's more aptly described as "Cirque with a Strap-on." It takes the elaborate costuming of a regular Cirque du Soleil show, and cuts out holes where the breats and buttocks should be. It takes the astonishing feats of acrobatic and physical strength from a regular Cirque show, and adds more hip-thrusting and a chicka-bamp soundtrack. Some performers are topless, some are just wearing skimpy outfits, and some are wearing skimpy outfits that have pretend private parts attached/painted on them to simulate partial or full nudity. With this as its "hook" it should be far, far better than any other Cirque show, but in actuality it's not. It's an excellent show, but by Cirque standards it feels a little spare.
For me, this results from two key shortcomings: Zumanity reverses the usual Cirque ratio of dancing to acrobatics, opting for more dancing than most Cirque shows because it gives characters opportunities to writhe suggestively against each other; and, the sex is simply not as steamy as expected. Not that I attended only to see sex or that I can't appreciate something without sex. (I love Calvin and Hobbes for example, absolutely no sex there.) However, Cirque really gives the impression that the sex in Zumanity is going to push the envelope – even the review that we read in the guide book (shut up, we bought it for the restaurant reviews, no we didn't walk around town with it poking out of our back pocket, wearing a flashy Hawaiian shirt and a fanny pack) said that it would make us squirm and challenge our hang-ups about human sexuality. It really, really didn't. I don't even feel like it would've challenged my dad's. Maybe I'm not taking enough into account, but for me the semi-nudity doesn't count towards being "ultra-sexy" because you can get semi-nudity anywhere these days. The Internet, HBO, MTV, the Super Bowl – topless women, while lovely, hardly push any envelopes. So that leaves relatively few areas in which Zumanity does anything at all risky in the erotic arena. There's the dominatrix-style hostess of the show, but she's all talk. She never hurts anybody, just wears a lot of leather. There's the man-on-man kiss at the end of an interesting sort of Greco-Roman street fight. There's the audience involvement: pulling a random guy and (in the case of our performance) a random old lady in her sixties onto the stage to writhe around with the performers. And there's one acrobatic piece which simulates autoerotic asphyxiation. None of these really goes over the top. Certainly the street fight is a fascinating piece of choreography – the fighters alternately embracing and fighting as they speed through the elaborate routine – and the girl strangling herself by the cords dangling her from the ceiling by her wrists and ankles is compelling, but neither one made me uncomfortable, and I didn't get the sense that anyone around me was made uncomfortable either. I can see where they might feel like they should keep it relatively safe because Vegas is a family destination and crawling with buttoned-down midwest types – but I really didn't see any of them in the theatre. It seems as though Cirque has done a fairly good job in the marketing of weeding out the audience members who would be genuinely titillated to the point of squirming.
Which isn't, I suppose, a complaint about the show itself; more of a truth-in-advertising sort of problem. The dancing/acrobatics is more of a problem within Zumanity. By far the most interesting – and most unique – elements of any Cirque show are the acrobatics. They're just stunning. Zumanity has its share of those, but it seems as though a lot of time is devoted to dancing and gyrating, which are attractive in their own way, but hardly Cirque material. There's an entire sequence where a bunch of guys are watching football on TV and some women have to resort to more suggestive dancing and more revealing outfits to distract them from the game: all dancing. More than once, a whole bunch of characters come out and sort of paw at each other while their platform rotates around and around. Revealing, sure, but I'd much prefer to devote that time to more only-at-Cirque feats of strength.
Because the feats of strength are awesome. And in some cases, feature nudity. (They all feature desire and/or love, but most Cirque shows have that anyway.) The most inventive – the reason I wanted to see the show in the first place – is the Fishbowl Girls, two young women wearing only bikini bottoms and swimming around together in a giant plexiglas bowl full of water onstage. They perform all sorts of elaborate handstands and balancing tricks on the edge of the bowl, but the real treat is how they use the curvature of the bowl itself, the buoyancy of the water, and the momentum of each other's movement to pull and twist their way through the routine. It adds a real organic element and what's really interesting is that they make you forget that breathing is a part of the performance. There's so much to follow that you don't notice them taking breaths for their dives and so they seem that much more like mermaids. Very impressive. Another exciting act features a woman and a little person dangling from the customary Cirque sheets of fabric (instead of wires or cables). He frequently does that thing where he wraps the fabric around his wrists and then twists his arms around and around to pull himself up towards her platform high above the stage. She does that thing where she wraps the fabric around her leg and then plummets, only to have it catch her at the last minute before she hits the floor. And they both do a lot of running right off the stage and into the air as the fabric pulls them higher. Really impressive strength and coordination by both of them, and a very lovely scene as well. I'm not sure if he's meant to represent a child or just a smaller lover, but it's tender either way. Plenty of other acrobatics as well, including a young woman in a Catholic schoolgirl skirt and knee-high stockings doing some elaborate dancing with hula hoops as she moves up and down in the air dangling from a rope and flipping her body all around. Almost all of it is amazing – the part with people dancing around in a cage was a little dull and seems to be more about the cage than the dancing – but there could be more. I suppose there could always be more.
Finally, there's the clowns. Every Cirque show has them: they initiate the action at the start and then show up again every so often during the show to bridge between other acts. (They're rarely painted up like typical circus clowns, but they perform the same function, breaking up the action with pratfalls and silliness.) The clowns are the one area in which the sex hurts Zumanity. Typically, Cirque clowns are silly and funny and that's great. In Zumanity, they're also trying to be bawdy, and it just isn't working. There's a lot of furious dry-humping, and plenty of cheeky ass-slapping, or people getting bopped on the head with dildos. There are elements of pretend nudity in which the clowns get all embarrassed about being naked but in fact they're very clearly wearing g-strings adorned with fake genitalia (presumably out of compliance with local anti-obscenity regulations) so it makes the whole thing sort of dumb. Not that I stubbornly demand authentic nudity; it's just that if you're not going to do it, it seems silly to make a big deal out of doing it.
Zumanity is certainly enjoyable, and I'm glad I went (the company is as always a huge part of this), but I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Cirque show. Cirque du Soleil can do far better than this, so if you're only seeing one, see Mystère or O or a traveling show. However, if you're interested to see Cirque mixed with a little Hooters and a little USA Up All Night, Zumanity is certainly worth a try.
