Cirque du Soleil's Egg

The egg rules the insect world in OVO, now being presented by Cirque du Soleil. The company gives its trademark athletic, fanciful performance to live music on a stage with an organic form. The costumes portray whimsical appearances of bugs, usually; some are abstruse yet still colorful. There are Spiders, a Dragonfly, Fleas, Butterflies, Ants, Scarabs, Cockroaches, Crickets, and a Mosquito. In these costumes are tumblers, contortionists, acrobats, aerialists, a juggler, and a slack-wire artist. Rounding out the show as emcees are a fly, a foreigner and a lady bug, not as energetic as the other performers but still quite lithe. The show's theme explores the bug community faced with life and death questions in the form of a giant inflatable egg.
Flipo the fly (Joseph Collard from Belgium), Étranger the foreigner (Francois-Guillaume from Canada) and Coccinelle the lady bug (Michelle Matlock from the U. S.) introduce the various acts with distractions of comic lazzi or improvisation with the audience as the scenes are set up. Through these between-the-scenes episodes, they encounter the egg and make peace with its metaphorical importance. Flipo falls in love with Coccinelle and tries to woo her. They argue and she stalks off stage. Later she returns and kisses Étranger, who is crushed. In the end the entire cold-blooded community gathers around a table for a banquet, featuring the egg. The story is plain enough, but the addition of the acrobats provides thrilling visual interludes amidst its telling.
The opening community scene, complete with egg, is set to background sounds of insect chatter. Music is provided by a banda set up stage left and right. The singer stands with the stage-right group. The sounds of Brazil are mixed with African styles to produce samba, reggae and electronic Rio funk. Cirque’s sound system is flawless, providing distortion-free amplification that fills the big tent with surround sound. Throughout the show, cricket sounds are also played on keyboard.
The invertebrates, usually the ants and fleas, help with scene changes. They move eighty-pound dandelions, nets, webs, and flying set pieces, all in well coordinated order. Some of them also perform circus arts. Writer and Director Deborah Colker's synchronized choreography of the community scenes, when all arthropods and arachnids are moving around on the amoeba-shaped stage, is carefully arranged and gives a visually pleasing sense of teeming activity. The upstage backdrop membrane with holes suggests a maze of tunnels or a hive.
The acts include a surprising amount of invention to spice up some standard routines, plus some innovative approaches to new material. The Creatura (Lee Brearley of the U. K. in a woven costume) has collapsing limbs like a Slinky and no head. With the size of the arms and legs, the costume suggests an elephant, but perhaps there is a bug out there that moves like that. The show opens with the egg, and a man walking on a spiral jungle-gym to elegiac music while Coccinelle looks on. Act II opens with a haunting melody and vocals, and then proceeds to a fog-shrouded web with spiders. The inspired costuming of the spiders here is almost scary with predatory black widows, red widows and white ones, all with hourglass shapes sewn in. The males stand by while the spiders climb the web. Marjorie Nantel, one of the Spiders, also performs an aerial silk act in Act I called "Cocoon" where she begins inside the silk, a distinctly different approach.
Foot jugglers twirl stuffed kiwi slices, pushing them into the air and swapping them with others. Then they manipulate corn cobs. Insect food figures large here. There is some roughness in the coordination of this act, but it is spectacular and amusing. Foot jugglers appear later as feathery legs with coconut heads sticking up from holes. Cirque builds its repertoire to ever more difficult and stunning acts during the show. Most spectacular of all are the aerialists. Clad in brown and gold they swing from trapezes left and right to a platform in the middle, over a net. This highly synchronized act shows off mid-air spins and tumbles with unerring catches – except once. But that’s okay; the aerialists exit their aerie by falling into the net anyway. In this and other acts, the performers who have finished their bits cleverly indicate the active ones with crouching gestures and signals to the audience.
The highlight of the show comes when the tumblers bounce on trampolines set up below a climbing wall and straight down the middle of the stage. With the trampolines' help, they pop up to the wall and walk straight up it. Their eerily insect-like ninety degree landings on the wall and repeated momentary sticking truly suggest an insect invasion; as soon as you shoo away one horde, another lands.
Gringo Cardia's set is of a largely amorphous shape, but provides for unexpected entrances through holes that open. It also provides some spaces for full-body slides. Liz Vandal's costumes are a show in themselves. Occasionally, the nature of the bug is not readily apprehended, but the Crickets are a masterpiece of engineering. When they crawl, the motion of their hind legs is effectively reminiscent of the actual insect. While there are some raw moments in this two-hour show, the performers recover adroitly without missing a beat. The visual spectacle keeps the near-capacity audience in this big tent attentive and enthralled. When the slack-wire artist (Li Wei of China) brings on his unicycle, there is audible disbelief from the house. The entire production is sweetly sensational and excitingly professional.
OVO continues through January 24 under the blue and yellow Grand Chapiteau set up near AT & T Park. Tickets for this U. S. premiere ($45.50 to $250) are available on line at www.cirquedusoleil.com or by phone at 800.450.1480.