Photo: OLIVIER SAMSON-ARCAND
Among the startling visions in "Kooza" are these three "elegant," artful contortionists.
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Which was your favorite Cirque du Soleil show?
A Soleil surprise: Traditionally offbeat Cirque goes traditional
HAVE YOU grown accustomed to Cirque du Soleil spectaculars that seem less like a circus and more like a surreal aerial ballet or Asian action movie fantasy? You know - shows that come saddled with some convoluted, mystical plotline (at least in the program book) about the quest for truth, beauty and humanity?
Or maybe you've come to think of Cirque for its permanently installed mega-productions in Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla., where the tens of millions of dollars spent on high-tech stage machinery often dwarfs the mere mortal performers.
If so, the most intimate and circuslike of Cirque shows, newly landed in Philadelphia and called "Kooza," will really surprise you, thanks to a creator named David Shiner who's steeped in traditional, one-ring circus arts.
"I wanted a more traditional show, a show created around the artists, not on all the stuff around them," explained the writer/director recently. "I wanted to take the high-tech out of it, to really get back to the basics."
The costumes are still magnificent, sometimes offbeat and occasionally a bit unsettling (unless a Broadway-style chorus line of skeletons and a carpet of dancing rats is your idea of dreamy).
The world-conscious music coming from the traditional, circus-styled bandstand also is true to the Cirque performance-art school. This time, the score mixes a rock core with the spicy rhythms of Latin America and India, and featuring a singer Shiner first heard in Mumbai.
But listen closely. Some of the lyrics are in English this time, not that otherworldly Cirque-gibberish!
Clowns also have more to say in this one show, in recognizable speech, than this fan has seen collectively in seven or eight Cirque shows. "We're playing in the U.S., so why not talk in English?" said Shiner.
Another difference this time, the plotline can be boiled down to a one-line essence: Innocent, kite-flying fella waves a magic wand over a box; out pops a jester and we're off to the circus - a particularly terrific circus - where acrobats and clowns rule the roost. (But no chickens, or elephants, or tigers.)
By the way, "Kooza" comes from the Sanskrit word kaza which means both "box" and "treasure."
Born in the U.S.A.
David Shiner is U.S.-born - a rarity among the high creative ranks for the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil enterprise - and is best known in the States for his clowning in the film "Lorenzo's Oil," his guiding role as the original Cat in the Hat in the Broadway musical "Seussical" and especially for the two-man, all-mimed show with Bill Irwin, "Fool Moon," "that we played for three engagements on Broadway in the '90s, and still talk about reviving a fourth time," Shiner said.
David Shiner is U.S.-born - a rarity among the high creative ranks for the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil enterprise - and is best known in the States for his clowning in the film "Lorenzo's Oil," his guiding role as the original Cat in the Hat in the Broadway musical "Seussical" and especially for the two-man, all-mimed show with Bill Irwin, "Fool Moon," "that we played for three engagements on Broadway in the '90s, and still talk about reviving a fourth time," Shiner said.(Irwin, by happy coincidence, is also here in town, through June 15, world-premiering a show at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, "The Happiness Lecture." He and Shiner have agreed to do a "talk back" panel discussion, "Not Just Fooling Around," after the matinee June 7. Admission to the chat is free for all.)
Like Cirque's French Canadian founders, Shiner also started out a street performer, though in Boulder, Colo. And like them, he's been quite the globe traveler.
When he couldn't find good work and appreciation in the U.S. for his funny business, Shiner moved to Paris in 1981, first working in the streets and then landing jobs clowning in traditional, one-ring European circus troupes - France's Cirque de Demain, then Germany's Circus Roncalli (about which he speaks in especially reverent tones) and then with the Swiss National company, Circus Knie.
Welcome to the Machine
Shiner first made a Cirque connection doing a two-man show with a company principal, Rene Bazinet. He formalized the relationship in 1990, joining the cast of Cirque's fourth show "Nouvelle Experience," which spent 19 months on the road and a year planted in Las Vegas. "It was actually the very first show they took to Vegas, for a tented engagement on a hotel parking lot [at the Mirage] that just went on and on and on."
Shiner first made a Cirque connection doing a two-man show with a company principal, Rene Bazinet. He formalized the relationship in 1990, joining the cast of Cirque's fourth show "Nouvelle Experience," which spent 19 months on the road and a year planted in Las Vegas. "It was actually the very first show they took to Vegas, for a tented engagement on a hotel parking lot [at the Mirage] that just went on and on and on."Now, of course, Cirque du Soleil has five permanent shows playing the gambling town in customized mega-theaters and two more installations in the works, including a magic-centric show opening in September at the Luxor called "Chris Angel - Believe," and an on-again/off-again Elvis Presley tribute that hopefully will come together and as well as their amazing Beatles-themed show, "Love."
There are also 10 more tented Cirque shows floating around the world, and plans to expand the empire even more, with three big shows just for Macau, the resort destination off the coast of Hong Kong.
Shiner agrees that those permanent Vegas ventures are "amazing" to behold but "a daunting task" for a director - and not really where his head is at.
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