ovo!
moominmolly took me to see cirque de soleil's latest touring show to reach our city, for my birthday last night.
it was really good! It might be just because we were so close (we had 3rd-row seats), but it seemed to me they did a good job of re-using characters, giving performers roles in framing other performers' acts-- so that by the end i felt like i recognized all of them, and wasn't just confused as to who all those extra funny-looking people on the stage were (as i sometimes am at other cirque shows).
i felt like there was a lot of casual contortion, which serrin might like; maybe part of what made me think this was that one of the most-recurring characters was a sexy catlike gamine spider contortionist woman; :) she did a lot of playfully sneaking props out to performers and so on, and made fun use of trapdoors.
the clowns were good, and well-integrated into the storyline-- the clowns largely carried the storyline, which i think was a good choice. moominmolly noted, and i agreed, that there wasn't any point when we were thinking "okay, the clowns can be off the stage any time now," which even in the cirque shows i often find myself thinking. but i think part of what leads to that for me, often, is clowns doing fairly stock clown acts, breaking out of the storyline to do it and not even giving the reward of an interesting performance for the price; here even the obligatory "pull people out of the audience and make them do silly things" bit was integrated into the plot.
cirque shows often seem to trend towards pretty traditional gender roles, so here was something i was intrigued to see (and aweome in its own right): the first act was a pretty, flowy, masculine sensually-wrapping-body-around-the-apparatus piece. it was a handbalancer, performing on this big spirally piece of... playground equipment. he did a lot of straddled flaring-legs stuff like you might see on pommel horse (maybe that's part of what made it read as masculine, to me). also he could hop from one hand to the other in a one-handed handstand...
similarly there was a 3-person partner acro routine with 3 women (ranging in heights), two of them basing. the flyer was still a 100-lb woman, of course. but still. that act was also fun because the flyer was kind of goofy, although it occurred to me afterwards that "goofy" here basically just meant "sometimes she flexed her feet."
most jaw-dropping act: slack wire, hands down. money quote from me in the audience: "after that, riding that unicycle on the wire is going to be kind of anticlimactic... oh, but he's going to do it upside-down, isn't he? of course he is."
interesting evolutionary piece: the power track/trampolines against a wall/climbing wall piece, which also showcased how all the different kinds of characters (all the characters in the show were different kinds of bugs) had very different movement styles. so fun.
other standouts: the moths-in-love spanish web/corde lisse routine, which frobzwiththingz and klingonlandlady should see. the six-young-asian-ladybugs partner foot-juggling routine (yes, this included three performers foot-juggling their three partners... who were themselves foot-juggling other objects at the time). the diabolo-and-tumbling-whenever-he-got-bored routine, mostly because i'd never seen anyone juggle 4 diabolos before (he flubbed it the first try, also-- genuinely, I think, since failing to build dramatic tension doesn't seem like a usual cirque act style). the central spider-contortionist's eight-legged fur coat...
there was also a high cradle/swing act-- flying trapeze type stuff-- but i don't know enough about that to really say much about it. a bunch of guys dressed as cockroaches. :) their safety net took a long time to get set up and involved a tech guy in black with a headset running onto the stage, which i think was not part of the regularly-scheduled program; as moominmolly noted, this was a place where it was advantageous to have most of the stage-switching done by performers in character who were still interesting to the audience even if they were basically vamping until the tech guy figured out what was wrong...
nice little touches: the grasshopper's legs. confetti in the shape of butterflies, that fluttered down like butterflies when it fell. the peg stilter, who we initially mistook for having painter's stilts because he was so steady (sure, it's totally appropriate to compare my skills to a professional performer in cirque de soleil, right? but man... i gotta practice more.)
as noted elsewhere, despite the name, the show is a lot about insects and not very much about eggs. but still, very fun.
it was really good! It might be just because we were so close (we had 3rd-row seats), but it seemed to me they did a good job of re-using characters, giving performers roles in framing other performers' acts-- so that by the end i felt like i recognized all of them, and wasn't just confused as to who all those extra funny-looking people on the stage were (as i sometimes am at other cirque shows).
i felt like there was a lot of casual contortion, which serrin might like; maybe part of what made me think this was that one of the most-recurring characters was a sexy catlike gamine spider contortionist woman; :) she did a lot of playfully sneaking props out to performers and so on, and made fun use of trapdoors.
the clowns were good, and well-integrated into the storyline-- the clowns largely carried the storyline, which i think was a good choice. moominmolly noted, and i agreed, that there wasn't any point when we were thinking "okay, the clowns can be off the stage any time now," which even in the cirque shows i often find myself thinking. but i think part of what leads to that for me, often, is clowns doing fairly stock clown acts, breaking out of the storyline to do it and not even giving the reward of an interesting performance for the price; here even the obligatory "pull people out of the audience and make them do silly things" bit was integrated into the plot.
cirque shows often seem to trend towards pretty traditional gender roles, so here was something i was intrigued to see (and aweome in its own right): the first act was a pretty, flowy, masculine sensually-wrapping-body-around-the-apparatus piece. it was a handbalancer, performing on this big spirally piece of... playground equipment. he did a lot of straddled flaring-legs stuff like you might see on pommel horse (maybe that's part of what made it read as masculine, to me). also he could hop from one hand to the other in a one-handed handstand...
similarly there was a 3-person partner acro routine with 3 women (ranging in heights), two of them basing. the flyer was still a 100-lb woman, of course. but still. that act was also fun because the flyer was kind of goofy, although it occurred to me afterwards that "goofy" here basically just meant "sometimes she flexed her feet."
most jaw-dropping act: slack wire, hands down. money quote from me in the audience: "after that, riding that unicycle on the wire is going to be kind of anticlimactic... oh, but he's going to do it upside-down, isn't he? of course he is."
interesting evolutionary piece: the power track/trampolines against a wall/climbing wall piece, which also showcased how all the different kinds of characters (all the characters in the show were different kinds of bugs) had very different movement styles. so fun.
other standouts: the moths-in-love spanish web/corde lisse routine, which frobzwiththingz and klingonlandlady should see. the six-young-asian-ladybugs partner foot-juggling routine (yes, this included three performers foot-juggling their three partners... who were themselves foot-juggling other objects at the time). the diabolo-and-tumbling-whenever-he-got-bored routine, mostly because i'd never seen anyone juggle 4 diabolos before (he flubbed it the first try, also-- genuinely, I think, since failing to build dramatic tension doesn't seem like a usual cirque act style). the central spider-contortionist's eight-legged fur coat...
there was also a high cradle/swing act-- flying trapeze type stuff-- but i don't know enough about that to really say much about it. a bunch of guys dressed as cockroaches. :) their safety net took a long time to get set up and involved a tech guy in black with a headset running onto the stage, which i think was not part of the regularly-scheduled program; as moominmolly noted, this was a place where it was advantageous to have most of the stage-switching done by performers in character who were still interesting to the audience even if they were basically vamping until the tech guy figured out what was wrong...
nice little touches: the grasshopper's legs. confetti in the shape of butterflies, that fluttered down like butterflies when it fell. the peg stilter, who we initially mistook for having painter's stilts because he was so steady (sure, it's totally appropriate to compare my skills to a professional performer in cirque de soleil, right? but man... i gotta practice more.)
as noted elsewhere, despite the name, the show is a lot about insects and not very much about eggs. but still, very fun.