Cirque du Soleil's newest production, Corteo , remixes the dazzling Cirque formula of virtuosic physicality, show-biz zaniness, and spectacle. Director Daniele Finzi Pasca came up with the concept and headed a team of 14 creative masterminds. Premiered in Montreal in the spring of 2005 before starting a 10-year international tour, Corteo will be in the big blue-and-yellow tent colony at Suffolk Downs through October 15. The pretext is the funeral of a clown (Mauro Mozzani). Surrounded by his circus companions and attended by a troupe of angels, he looks back on his life as a performer and anticipates an afterlife filled with even more splendid buffoonery, tricks, and marvels.
Female rope dancers dangle from crystal chandeliers in sumptuous gowns. The chandeliers start to spin. The women strip down to silken underwear and slither through the big ornaments, perch elegantly in mid air, hang from one foot. The chandeliers are dipping and swaying dizzily all the time.
In micro-timed pairs and quartets, gymnasts pinwheel in 360-degree arcs over the horizontal bars, avoiding collisions by inches. Trampoline acrobats don't just bounce off beds and seesaws, they do somersaults and half-gainers in the air. They bound across the space like kangaroos. They spring up and are caught by other people on high platforms and swung down into new corkscrew pathways.
A woman in a glittery red jumpsuit traverses a tightrope in pointe shoes, rides across on a unicycle, makes a barefoot transit while swiveling hula hoops around her torso. She has a safety wire attached to her waist, but there’s an angel hovering nearby too, encouraging her as she walks up another tightrope fixed at a 40-degree angle. Who knows whether it’s skill, engineering, or magic that keeps her steady.
The aerial work wafts farther into fantasy with “Helium Dance.” The Dead Clown has captured the Clowness, an elfin Valentyna Pahlevanyan, in a rotating harness attached to six enormous balloons. She seems delighted to be up there, waving her arms and feet as if to enhance her flight. Finally Mozzani releases her and she sails free over the audience. When she drifts down, ecstatic spectators loft her up again by her tiny feet.
The show comes down to earth in “Teatro Intimo,” a boisterous toy-theater event. Valentyna and her partner, Grigor Pahlevanyan, attempt to enact Romeo and Giulietta but end up more like Punch and Judy, assisted by five or six self-important stage managers all crammed into the booth with them.
The skill and the inventiveness of Corteo often seem about to spill over into excess, even surrealism. That’s probably true of all good circuses; no wonder they fascinated 20th-century intellectuals and artists. Cirque du Soleil is not unaware of its cultural lineage. In one of several processions the performers play quadruple-belled horns that resemble Cubo-Futurist noise machines. A line of disembodied shoes follows the procession. In one relatively quiet moment a clown walks across a tightrope upside down, carrying a lighted candelabra.
And did I mention the man who stilt-walked a two-legged ladder? And the glass harmonica with tuned bowls on a revolving stage? And the horse with high-heeled shoes?
