From Corteo
DETAILS
Comedian Patton Oswalt once described Cirque du Soleil as “what a gay jester would dream of if he was high and exhausted.” Full of surreal imagery made possible by the incredible physical abilities of its performers, Cirque du Soleil is often accepted by laypeople as an essential theatrical experience that, while they can appreciate the nigh-superhuman talent involved, they don’t necessarily understand.
Fortunately, understanding of a circus show’s narrative has never been requisite to the enjoyment of it. Cirque du Soleil’s upcoming show, Corteo, promises to be one of its most accessible yet, though its stronger story will still be complemented with giant trampolines shaped like beds, trapezes and people who can do way too many backflips.
“It’s the story of a man imagining his life,” says Alison Crawford, artistic director of Corteo. “It’s a story of a clown who starts off imagining his funeral, and then from there, goes through the rest of his life. Of course, he’s a circus clown, so in the circus, there are acrobatic acts. He meets the people in the circus who are acrobats. There’s some little people and a giant as well. They are all the characters that are very dear to him. We didn’t really want the acrobats to be acting, so they’re all using their real names, and just being themselves.”
Crawford describes herself as the guardian of the performance. Once a director of creation picks a director to tell a story, the director then goes through each department —makeup, costuming, acrobatics, etc. — and chooses “conceptors” from each. The show is then built around the movement from one feat of acrobatic insanity to the next, and the story is gradually massaged in. After this, once the talent has been recruited from across the world and it has been practised again and again, it goes on tour and Crawford takes over. She ensures that no major deviations are made from the original intent of the piece, and if they are, they’re made for a good reason. “Around January, the set is ready, and we go in and start staging,” says Crawford. “We try to see what works and what doesn’t work. Then we start tweaking. It’s a very intense creation process.”
Though stage actors can run lines to get into character, acrobats and dancers don’t have the luxury of vocalization. Instead, they draw from an established somatic vocabulary that uses gesture and movement to communicate. For all of Cirque du Soleil’s strange images and arcane meanings, the principles they’re based on are relatively simple and age-old. “It’s a very old circus — I’d say 18th century,” says Crawford. “It’s very theatrical — much more about humans throwing humans, even though it’s one of the most technical shows we have on tour.”
