As an instantly recognizable brand celebrating their 30th anniversary, Cirque du Soliel must stretch a tightrope between making it new and delivering on the expectations of its loyal customers. Totem strikes the perfect balance with a dazzling display of cutting edge technology blending into the timeless mystique of the circus.
The exuberant mash-up of global cultures sees the foundational myths of indigenous peoples scrambled together with an evolutionary genealogy that begins with a celestially animated turtle and culminates in cell-phone-man.
The wildly anarchic taxonomy flits from primordial amphibians to inquisitive scientist and gravity defying acrobats with a pair of brashly intrusive clowns puncturing any tendency toward pomposity. The traditional feats of strength, subtlety and daring supply a lavish serving of the wow factor.
The show is written and directed by Robert Lepage who thrilled audiences at the 2009 Auckland Arts Festival with a riot of wildly inventive theatrical images. His visual finesse is evident throughout the show with stunning choreography of routines that make an elegant ascent in degrees of difficulty while managing a beautifully crafted integration of props, lighting and costumes.
Early highlights include the startling precision of a troupe of synchronised unicyclists, in bejewelled body stockings who casually toss bowls from head to foot with pinpoint accuracy and an astonishing pair of foot jugglers who had spinning discs orbiting like celestial bodies around their shapely sequinned legs.
For sheer visual panache it would be hard to go past a scientifically themed routine that featured an exuberant chimp in a lab coat with assistants who turn a set of test tubes into pan pipes while a Charles Darwin figure has fluorescent balls bouncing like electrons within a conical glass flask.
