Monday 11 January 2010

VAREKAI: Cirque Du Soleil


VAREKAI : CIRQUE DE SOLEIL 
            Royal Albert Hall, London. January 5th 2010. 1930 – 2230.



Wherever the wind carries you, you will always be home.

It may be called Cirque de Soleil but there is something about the spaces between the bodies of colour and the spectacular lighting that takes you far away from the Royal Albert Hall. The hall’s usually characteristic organ vanishes into a fairytale forest swarming with fantastical creatures. The domed ceiling disappears, shrouded in space-light. The audience shifts and sighs with the bamboo reeds and the hollow tuned music. You really are in the embrace of Wherever: Varekai.

The first sounds are rustling, the odd chippers of inhuman creatures, the odd tweet or cackle from the sky or gurgling from the deeps. Then a voice, a call to dance, appealing to all sorts of phantasms: the nymph-like, the bug-like, the bird-like and then, with a shiver they creep back into the safety of shadows. One strange creature remains – looking like a cross between a man and yellow corn, he peddles a contraption reminiscent of the winning log-chopper from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. His is a slapstick piece based on sound – competing nature and technology and setting the stage for the characters we are about to see burst forth in deep blues and reds and yellows and in sunlight. The story is vague, as nebulous and luminescent as the stage’s moonlit fantasia, but at its centre is Icarus. Falling in a looping, twisting descent from sun-yellow smoke into the twilight world below, he comes face to face with the impossible and with love. 

Sinking into this magic-filled world for the first-time is almost too easy. Unencumbered by expectation, the suspension of disbelief departs with the first dazzling display of dancers dipping and darting between bamboo trees. Yet what really captivates and enthrals is the music. The music is a character of its own – representing nature, echoing the voices of the creatures below, reflecting the depth and complexities of emotion and leading the audience by the hand as the journey continues. Peppered by babble beyond translation, the music takes from a plethora of different influences. The chorus recalls Eric Whittaker, the solos Lebo M, the fiddle Le Boheme: the swirl of calypso and samba soaring into Asian overtures.

There is too much to say. The acrobatics are extraordinary, breath-taking and terrifying. There were times when the temptation to turn your gaze was almost impossible to resist, but the music urges you on. The comedy draws laugh after laugh from the audience, even the slightly out-of-place Butlins act which sees a magician trying and failing to control his blond-haired assistant who similarly tries and fails to stay standing in her heels.

Of course, as the reputation Cirque de Soleil suggests, there is a price as extravagant as the show. Tickets start at £41, programmes at £12 and drinks, ice creams or nibbles in the interval come with typically immoderate mark-ups. However, if asked whether that price was worth paying the answer would have to be yes. For a moment, the briefest flash of time, the world falls away, the impossible becomes possible and the darkness of space becomes more fantastic that the glamorous lights of the circus.



Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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