Le Cirque Fantastique
By RICHARD CORLISS
SHOW: SALTIMBANCO
TROUPE: CIRQUE DU SOLEIL
WHERE: A YELLOW-AND-BLUE TENT IN THE BATTERY, NEW YORK CITY
THE BOTTOM LINE: Four words -- greatest show on earth.
FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY IS FORBIDden at Cirque du Soleil, the master of ceremonies announces at the outset of its all new show Saltimbanco, "because of the extreme danger it represents to the people of our world." Our world? To anyone unfamiliar with the previous spectacles of this Montreal-based big top -- Le Cirque Reinvente and Nouvelle Experience -- the emcee's remark will seem twee and pretentious. But he's not kidding. Their world is beautiful, seductive, utterly otherly.
Dream of a garden painted by Rousseau, under the canopy of a huge Tiffany lampshade and inhabited by creatures from Fellini's or Tim Burton's wittiest musings. In this Day-Glo, candy-cane fantasia, the whole food chain is on display. The roustabouts wriggle like worms; some of the featured artistes are dressed as tigers or lizards. The clowns could be from a Greenwich Village Halloween parade: Munchkins and bathing beauties, Road Warriors and samurai. This is a circus even Madonna could love -- commedia dell'arte as restaged by surrealists in a birthday-party mood.
And all are invited to participate, at its Manhattan stop or later this year in Chicago, Boston, Washington and Atlanta. Saltimbanco (an Italian term meaning "street performer") will leave no one untouched and few unprodded or untweaked. A visitor may discover a sobbing clown in his lap or find herself in an impromptu troupe of somersaulters. One gent was lured onstage to safari through an invisible jungle, then high-noon it in a sham shootout.
This is also a real, one-ring circus, with acrobats, a juggler, a high-wire tiptoer. And no animal acts; that would be redundant, given all the exhibitions of gazelle grace and leonine strength. Le Cirque evokes the three best responses from a circus audience: "Gee, that clown's funny!" (when Rene Bazinet, a talking mime, gets caught in a bathroom that becomes an aquarium); "Hey, the human body can't do that!" (when one man climbs a Chinese pole on sheer wrist power or descends using only his thighs); and "Ooooh, that's beautiful!" (when four aerialists do a bungee-cord ballet). But no artiste is allowed to be a specialist. All must do double duty, as Harlequins or chorus girls, to fit into the precise, giddy scheme devised by director Franco Dragone and his team.
Three of the star acts illustrate the show's underlying theme: family. Twin sisters Sarah and Karyne Steben -- Sharon Stone in duplicate on the high bar -- perform their mirror-image calisthenics in a space as intimate as the womb. The brothers Marco and Paulo Lorador bend their Apollonian physiques to some wondrous heavy lifting. And the Tchelnokovs (Nikolai, his wife Galina Karableva and their impossibly lithe son Anton, 7) describe patterns of living sculpture that are less physical than mystical. In the harmonious flow of their fearless feats, these performers might be parents and siblings from another, ideal world, where beauty is based on majestic trust.
Forget the word circus; it conjures up nothing more magical than slapstick and animal odors. The grand, ethereal Cirque du Soleil is really primal theater -- an age-old blend of music and motion. The weirdly soothing, polylingual background score, which could be elevator music at a harmonious U.N., rolls out a verdant carpet of sound for all the pretty beasts to strut on. At every moment, in every corner of the Cirque world, stagecraft approaches genial witchcraft. It's an out-of-Broadway experience.