Circus puts you in its spell

Arts editor GILBERT WONG on the slick showmanship of Cirque du Soleil.

It is the moment every performer craves - the collective "Ohhh!" expelled simultaneously by an awestruck audience. At Wednesday night's opening in Auckland of Cirque du Soleil's Alegria it happened more than a few times, but this was the first.

The act was Fast Track and we had just seen the equivalent of an Olympic-standard gymnast execute a triple somersault, orbiting impossibly high above our heads.

The gasping did not stop there. There was the strength and control of Andree Simard in the balancing act Le Bal, the grace and ease with which Alexandre Dobrynine, in The Flying Man, flew from his bungy-trapeze, and the scary dynamism and power of the whirling Aerial High Bar act, which saw eight gymnasts flying, as carefree as monkeys at play, high in the big top.

These moments are circus essentials, combining elements of genuine danger with feats attainable only by artists honed to a peak by years of training. The ideals of human potential and our mortality are packaged by Cirque du Soleil with ribbons and gaudy paper and presented as entertainment. Nothing wrong with that.

Just as the feats of Olympians are founded on high-minded concepts such as the good of human endeavour and the need to compete fairly, the circus, as envisaged by Cirque du Soleil in Alegria, is about the need to astound, to keep those bums nailed to those seats. Get on with the show.

Simultaneously, Alegria plays on the romantic notion we have about the circus being a place for the physically gifted - whether in strength or agility or beauty - who don't or cannot conform.

To the romantic, the circus is a place to which misfits run for a sense of belonging and freedom from social constrictions.

In Alegria the ghoulish Monsieur Fleur (Ebon Grayman) is the pseudo-ringmaster, his body distorted by a humped back and distended belly, his face all leers and facial tics to convey baser desires and wanton pleasures.

The grotesque Old Birds - ungainly, aged figures resembling zebra centaurs - are the decadent aristocracy who are a mockery when contrasted with the performers' brilliance.

Audiences raised with Anglo-Saxon concepts want a linear story that has a definite beginning and ending. Cirque does not deliver this. Its French-Canadian roots are Gallic enough to favour the Continental sensibility that prefers labyrinthine conundrums to logic.

The programme might as well be gibberish for all the efforts of its translators: "Bel'delittuoso grido (beautiful delinquent scream). Thank you. Thank you to the Makers of Rules. To the Breakers of Backs. To the Sincere Autocrats. To the False Democrats ... "

To grasp coherent meaning from Alegria is like reading too much of French philosophers Derrida and Foucault. The head hurts and, just as Cirque intends, you give up and give in to the sensory pleasure. Though Alegria is pseudo-intellectuality designed to convince the audience that they are in the presence of art, in the end it all comes down to expert showmanship. That's where Cirque du Soleil are masters of their art.