Imagine the Marx Brothers endowed with Buster Keaton’s naïve humor, tutored under Zen discipline by Cirque du Soleil’s best acrobats. You have pretty much imagined Machine de Cirque – acrobatic performers Raphaël Dubé, Yohann Trépanier, Ugo Dario, Maxim Laurin and Frédéric Lebrasseur – a circus company from Québec, currently at La Scala Paris.
Machine is funny, sweet, strong, skilled, focused. Especially, it’s subtly exciting: perfomer leaps, twists, bounds, tricks and turns consistently touch the limits of possibility, play out where luck and ability meet in fluctuating proportions. Machine de cirque is, as Monty Python once put it, “something entirely different”. Maybe they’ve invented quantum acrobatics. Anyhow, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Witty and complicit like the Marx Brothers: like cows in the presence of a particularly well-endowed bull, we adults nervously pawed and snorted from the beginning to the end of the show. Like Buster Keaton, boyishly joyous and plain sympathique: the gurgly, delighted laughter of the children in the audience filled the air as these five big boys mimed silly suavity with girls, played with the nakedness taboo and good-naturedly whacked each other for the hell of it. Skilled like Cirque du Soleil under Zen discipline: there is, I think, some talent and mental discipline involved in holding sideways by the soles of one’s feet. I mean, what kind of force is required to stand, literally, horizontal, like a flag stretched in the wind?
Frédéric Lebrasseur, the troupe’s drummer-musician-clown, opens the show by slapping up a beat. He uses the beat as a lion tamer might use a whip butt and hoop: to keep his charges grouped and circulating in rhythm, marking territory. Acrobats Dubé, Trépanier, Dario and Laurin prowl around a tall center-stage scaffold-like construction that is drawn forward enough that it narrows stage front to the 50- or 60-foot square rectangle that they mark as performance. Hanging above them are North America’s mantraps: slack wires, insulators, pipes, poles and rails and wheels and planks.
Because performers are elbow to elbow, because a spectator sees everyone moving together in the same straitened space, because of the performers’ energy and concentration, the crowding transforms such fairly standard acrobatic feats as bat juggling or mounting a high-seated unicycle into rather tense drama.
Machine de cirque’s derring-do, boyish joyousness, charm, Zen-strength skill and mastery of drama are not however what makes it entirely different. It’s the troupers’ interpersonal trust and solidarity that does that.
Other acts strive to perfect execution of the just-possible – to get to the “ooohhh-aaahhh point”. Most circus acrobats, I expect, let go of the trapeze wondering, “Have I got the trick right?”. Machine de Cirque’s acrobats, on the other hand, strive for the – “Holy-Cats! point”. As one of them launches roof-ward, I expect he wonders, “Is it the right moment for this?” That’s because, at the point where the mesh of probability begins to overtake possibility, it’s the drama of process that counts. Neither the acrobat or the spectator knows if the trick will work until it does. It’s no longer a question of getting it right or failing. Failing – missing, slipping, falling – is as much success as succeeding. And where failing means breaking your own neck or somebody else’s back, trust and solidarity are not merely necessary, but a necessary condition for daring the trick at all. So, something entirely different.
Machine de Cirque left butterflies in my stomach and it’s been a while since a show did that.
Machine de Cirque plays at La Scala Paris until 3 November but continues touring in Europe and elsewhere. Watch for it wherever on the planet you may be.
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