In a moment, a review. But first, a realization.
In 2008, this reviewer noted that Cirque’s last Winnipeg show, Saltimbanco, was difficult to review. After all, you can’t really review a man doing handsprings from another man’s head: it just is. It just happens. It’s incredible to see, and then it’s over, and how could we add to that?
Two years later, Cirque is still hard to review.
But last night at the MTS Centre, between the crackpot clowns searching for an effective mode of transport and the spandex-clad acrobats making leg-twirling leaps from what can only be described as bendy, human-borne balance beams, we changed our minds about why.
Cirque isn’t just a challenge because of the tricks. It’s a challenge because for two hours, it is its own world. You either live in it, or you don’t.
This weekend, we have something new to see, to live and to leave with: Alegria, Cirque du soleil’s seventh show arrived in Winnipeg Thursday. It appears here for the first time since its 1994 debut underneath big-top tents and 16 years later, the piece still transforms.
Thursday night, the MTS Centre was Marie Antoinette’s demented court. Thursday night, the arena was a blizzard and a tear-stained path. Thursday night, it was a lonely field guarded only by a moon, a scarecrow and a pair of contortionist nymphs entwined through and around and behind each other.
Tonight, it will be those things again. And Saturday and Sunday. (Yes, tickets are still available.) And thousands of Winnipeggers — up to 6,400 can see the show each night — will talk about this world they saw next week.
We’ll muse that visually, Alegria is less sumptuous than Saltimbanco, and more subtle. Instead of blaring circus colours, the show is awash in watercolour blues and greens and browns. Performers in silver-blue bodysuits prance across a muted marbled stage. Even the pitch-perfect clowns tone it down.
We’ll say too that Alegria’s nine acts were, at least until the end, less stunning and more storytelling. The first act was slower than the second, which opened with the sudden plunge of an acrobat flinging downwards from a bungee cord. (That acrobat’s performance, like much of Cirque’s finest moments, was as lyric as it was lithe.)
Although the show is new to us, some things we know from the last two Cirque du soleil visits: the thrill of the opening trapeze artists going up, up up; the chilling heart-rush of their fall; the whoosh of 6,000 exhaled breaths as the artists, caught by the backs of their knees, rise again to grip the ropes.
Even though they are wearing wires and will not crash, we go through this clutch-and-gasp each time.
And that is what Cirque is about. It is as much about the shared exhalations as it is about the 55 taut and twirling performers; it is as much about the twitters of laughter at the clowns’ antics as it is about the crystal-studded costumes and eerie animal spirits.
That is Alegria in a nutshell, a night of joy, adventure and peerless beauty. A night to see a world grown out of the vision of a Quebec street performance troupe and say simply, "how grand." It may not be as dazzling as some of the shows to come before or after, but still, its vision soars complete.
