Performance: Excentricus, Cirque Eloize

By GILBERT WONG

AOTEA CENTRE, Auckland - To call Cirque Eloize Cirque du Soleil's petite cousine would be true, but it does not do justice to a different and much more intimate experience.

Both troupes feature performers who are alumni of the National Circus School of Montreal and without doubt that strand of circus tradition - human-centred and animal free - is the core of both. But if the Cirques were vehicles, Soleil would be a steamroller, while Eloize is one of those little aluminium scooters: fast, well-designed and fun.

Eloize's 10 circus performers and five musicians led by Anne Charbonneau are on stage and at full throttle for much of the show. Each assumes a character, for example, a hapless fool, female object of desire or disaffected loner, and throughout the 100-minute-plus show, they interact in a series of seamlessly seguing scenarios that blend the artistry of their physical feats, which are considerable, with an emotional rather than linear narrative, driven by the tight playing of the musicians.

The audience is invited into a landscape of elegant staging and evocative lighting inhabited by occupants in clever costumes drawn from some alternative world full of eccentricity.

It's like meeting a strange, extended family who use what are largely everyday items, bicycles, ropes, ladders and skittles in a variety of magical ways. When traditional circus props are required, such as the trapeze or aerial cradle, these are introduced with a subtlety that gives the impression that aerialists Marie-Eve Dumais and Ariane Darche are exempt from the law of gravity.

At ground level Sylvain Dubois turns his bicycle into an extension of his own limbs, while Daniel Cyr on the ladder and giant wheel displays an almost miraculous agility for one with such a large frame.

There is no dialogue, but everyone in the audience, from child to adult, understood and was quickly enthralled by the emotional and physical dynamism. By the end the performers should have been sweating and tired, but Cirque Eloize appeared to be having as much fun as its audience. Which only shows how good they are.