Corteo
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:21:57 -0600Chain Link 3. Reading bottom-up, right?
Jenn (hi Jenn!) bought my a wonderful gift for my birthday last month, tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s touring production of Corteo. All in all, very impressive.
The premise, charmingly, is an aged man’s funeral procession, which continually is interrupted by surreal and mirthful memories and visitations. The funeral procession keeps transforming into a happy marching tune, and everything is accompanied by wonderful levity, including (no pun intended) the scene with the “angels” in which he learns to fly.
It maybe succeeds too well. At a minimum of twice during the performance, a man announces that the levity has to stop, as this is a funeral procession. The levity does not stop for long, but both times I was startled. The tone was such that I was continually forgetting that this was supposed to be funereal.
For aficionados, are Allegria, Quidam, and Corteo a cycle of birth, marriage, and death? In Japan, they toured them as “The Shinto One”, “The Christian One”, and “The Buddhist One”, I think. Don’t worry, they wrote it in katakana.
OK, to some of you the preceding was Very Funny®. For the rest of you, moving on…
The least impressive parts are the bits where I the interactions of Stone Age physiology, 18th century physics and engineering, and 21st century materials are supposed to impress us. (A 1cm braided steel cable and tackle of pulleys is enough to support a lightweight woman? Say it isn’t so! Modern elastics have very high restoring forces? Gol-darnit! The mass of a lightweight man accelerated at 1G is not enough to simultaneously rip out over 100,000 hairs? OK. Ouch. But OK.)
The materials technology did allow some extremely impressive moments, though. 2m rings of gossamer metal (titanium?) were rolled onstage. I thought they were just pretty props, until people spread-eagled themselves within and rode them around the stage. I’ve seen the double-ring hoops with the inset handles for more than twenty years, but the single, thin rings are more impressive, largely because the operator has to adjust his grip when inverted, so that his knuckles are not crushed (he hand-plants at those times.) There were some very talented gymnasts, but then the “ringer” (with a smug expression) came on and did more impressive maneuvers one-handed. I was really impressed, but I have no real gauge. Was this 1⁄3 again as difficult? Thirty times as difficult? I have no way to judge.
Someone closer to bisexuality would probably have enjoyed the whole show slightly more. Personally, I don’t find the male gymnast’s body nearly as attractive as the female dancer’s. Pleasantly, in the other most impressive moment, chandeliers were lowered so they were slightly above stage. I again thought these were visual stage pieces, until female dancers climbed aboard and used them for incredibly impressive contortions and poses. Impressive, and erotic. My mind kept flitting to sexual positions, in an unending chain of “Oh, that’s possible? Hmmm. Yikes, they can do that? Wow. Holy cow, how does she hold that position?”
I’m curious as to the availability of acrobats. The intersection of the people who want to be in a circus and who can suspend themselves by any single muscle in their body (tongues, maybe?) has to be vanishingly small. One begins to understand the history of acrobatic families: early conditioning, combined with some fairly fierce Darwinian selection (Whoops, I guess we don’t have to waste any more training on Jimmy!)
Other impressive moments abounded, including stunts with see-saws, elastics, parallel bars, and trapezes. I was most impressed with the synchronized events, in which mistakes of timing of less than 100ms would have resulted in mid-air collision.
Something that failed to impress me was the tightrope act. Now, I’m all for tethering performers. Watching an athlete plummet to her death can really ruin an evening. But to be impressive, you need to have a slightly slack line. The tightrope artist was tethered by a taut line that seemed to be entirely supporting her weight, which would appear to reduce her act to a problem of posture. For instance, at one point, one foot slipped off the inclined tightrope she was walking. I don’t know if this was planned or not (I think not, and three viewings would provide strong circumstantial evidence) but they covered it masterfully: she hammed up the slip, making it appear dramatic, and the band had a ready musical sting for emphasis. But she ended up horizontally cantilevered off the rope, and she didn’t fall at all. I estimate that to maintain the position without a cable suspending her, she would have had to be exerting a force with her left foot equivalent to that imposed by a foot that weighed half a ton. It seems daft to think the cable was taut for only this moment. If I were rigging the show, and it was staged, I’d have it taut the rest of the time, and slack at the moment of the slip.
The humor was vaudevillian, which is not really my scene, but the audience seemed really to enjoy it. I have to take issue with one aspect, though. Some humor was driven by juxtaposing someone four-sigma larger than average with someone four-sigma smaller than average onstage (a giant and a … well, that’s been covered), and having them both play the fool. I don’t find any inherent humor or pathos in this juxtaposition, not like the humor and pathos in having, say, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton share a debate stage. I would have thought that in moving beyond exploitation of animals, they would also have moved beyond sideshows. But in a sense, they just moved the sideshows onstage.
The giant, it should be said, did play a water harp (a rather naïve one, played by two performers and capable of just four simultaneous notes; I’ve seen one arranged such that one performer can simultaneously be playing a melody line and a series of chords.) And one of the “little people” was able to achieve something immensely impressive: she was tethered to five enormous helium weather balloons, such that she was neutrally buoyant at the stage’s altitude. She “crowd surfed” on point — slight motions of the hands of the audience propelled her about the tent. I was entranced.
The Big Top was arranged such that there was no bad seat in the house and, excepting the extremely uncomfortable plastic chairs and the two young women seated next to us who reeked of marijuana, the performance was extremely, extremely enjoyable. Thank you Jenn, so much, for such a fantastic night out.
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