Cirque du Soleil's Delirium
I was a little disapointed in Delirium. It was good, but at $20 it was overpriced. I enjoyed it, it was entertaining and colorful, but it wasn’t the ecstatic awe of Cirque at its best. That’s the trouble with sometimes attaining godlike perfection; people expect you to do it all the time... The format was more of a concert with acrobatic floorshow, rather than their norm of an encompassing theatrical production. They made good use of projecting imagery onto scrims and rear screens to envelop the performers in vivid phantasms. But it annoyed me that the director kept cutting to a diagonal shot which mostly just showed the audience and flattened the projections' illusion of depth; it would have been more effective to keep the camera in the center, focused on the stage. Another disappointment was that the film itself was not movie-quality; part of this was due to the scrim creating a haze over the stage, but even when that was pulled back, the picture was grainy, not crisp. Again, if you’re going to charge $20 for a movie, it needs to _look_ like a movie.
The show didn’t have as much of a unified style or overarching story as a normal Cirque production, though themes of time and mortality ran through it, and it had some of their typical elements, including an object (here a red ball) that is played with, exchanged, stolen, hidden, and revealed throughout the show; figures emerging through holes in the stage; quarrelsome and faintly sinister clowns speaking universal gibberish; and a bewildered and bedazzled everyman who at first floats above and eventually descends to join the frolic and fall in love. The music was mostly good, energetic and percussive, with a variety of styles and singers, remixing songs from other Cirque soundtracks (although the samba-disco remix of “Alegria” was just plain goofy). The costumes were patchy, some effective, some not; seemed like they lavished attention on selected principals but bought a lot of the rest of it off the rack. There was one extremely cool gauze coat with a Siberian-influenced motif I would really like a still of. I liked the psychedelic bit where a suspended singer’s giant parachute skirt was stretched across the stage to make another colorful projection screen, while silhouetted figures danced inside in a lively Brazilian number; then they stuck poles into the fabric to echo the shape of Cirque’s travelling tents. My favorite acts were the four-man balancing act, the male pole-balancer, and the contortionist hula hooper whose prismatic hoops enveloped her in delicious whirls of colored light. I also liked how they varied their standard suspended-from-fabric-streamers act into more inhuman, cocoon-like shapes. As ever, Cirque’s acrobats manage to be both alien and magnificently sensual.
In a nutshell, my main response to this was "pretty", whereas my usual response to Cirque shows is "buh"--exultant astonishment.
The show didn’t have as much of a unified style or overarching story as a normal Cirque production, though themes of time and mortality ran through it, and it had some of their typical elements, including an object (here a red ball) that is played with, exchanged, stolen, hidden, and revealed throughout the show; figures emerging through holes in the stage; quarrelsome and faintly sinister clowns speaking universal gibberish; and a bewildered and bedazzled everyman who at first floats above and eventually descends to join the frolic and fall in love. The music was mostly good, energetic and percussive, with a variety of styles and singers, remixing songs from other Cirque soundtracks (although the samba-disco remix of “Alegria” was just plain goofy). The costumes were patchy, some effective, some not; seemed like they lavished attention on selected principals but bought a lot of the rest of it off the rack. There was one extremely cool gauze coat with a Siberian-influenced motif I would really like a still of. I liked the psychedelic bit where a suspended singer’s giant parachute skirt was stretched across the stage to make another colorful projection screen, while silhouetted figures danced inside in a lively Brazilian number; then they stuck poles into the fabric to echo the shape of Cirque’s travelling tents. My favorite acts were the four-man balancing act, the male pole-balancer, and the contortionist hula hooper whose prismatic hoops enveloped her in delicious whirls of colored light. I also liked how they varied their standard suspended-from-fabric-streamers act into more inhuman, cocoon-like shapes. As ever, Cirque’s acrobats manage to be both alien and magnificently sensual.
In a nutshell, my main response to this was "pretty", whereas my usual response to Cirque shows is "buh"--exultant astonishment.