Cirque du Soleil - Delirium

A circus has wild animals and bearded ladies. The spotlights are big, the music is bombastic and simple. A circus is like a large wooden club of entertainment - Cirque du Soleil is more like ninety-nine feathers that tickle the brain all at once.

Last night, I saw Delirium at the TD Bank North Garden (formerly the more easily pronounceable Fleet Center) in Boston. Really, "saw" is the wrong word to use, for this was not just a performance of acrobats and dancers. It was a glorious amalgam of performance, theater, show, and concert, all folded into a multi-layered piece of art - it was a high-pressure assault on the senses, it was an experience.

Being a bit of a theater techie myself, I was tickled by one of the effects they brought to bear:

The stage was flanked on both ends by large screens, each one probably the size of a small IMAX screen. The stage itself had a retractable scrim curtain in front of it, two smaller full-height scrim panels that were completely mobile on the inside, and a scrim backdrop.

Each of these surfaces were used as canvasses for what must have been the extremely expensive projectors at the back of the arena. In one scene, the smaller panels became wooden doors that every few seconds opened to a different figure at a different scale. In other scene, the scrim curtain was let down to project a cosmic fly-through over all three screens.

But because the central curtain was partially transparent, it could be down and the performers on stage could still be visible. This technique was used several times to amazing effect, but most astoundingly in a scene involving a cohort of dancers doing the Cirque version of the robot. With the stage bathed in electric blue but with heavy chiaroscuro, a stereograph line was born from a small cluster of lines at the center and expanded to cross onto all three large scrims.

As the music bounced to a very techno beat (that would make my dj-friend Adam orgasm), the line would morph and pulse at high speed and to the rhythm. Eventually, it became a series of geometric designs all strung along the central line. This effect, the dancing, the music, and the seat-rocking bass all combined to create an experience akin to watching a locomotion move past your nose at full speed while on ecstasy.

Cirque is not for everyone - it does tend to be a little pretentious and/or inaccessible and/or downright weird at times, but as art, it's epic. It is like Jacques Louis David, or Michelangelo, except for multiple senses.