style="mso-spacerun: yes"> At a mere fifty foot distance lies
Venice, complete with an ersatz Saint Mark’s Cathedral, lagoons, and
gondolas. A faux Venetian palazzo
houses the Guggenheim Las Vegas in deference to Peggy’s penchant for things
Italian. Paris, ancient Rome, and
Egypt await as the visitor makes his way through a sea of gamblers past islands
of neon and gin wedding matrimonial chapel shoals.
But where
most of Las Vegas succumbs to kitsch, the Cirque du Soleil’s “O” transcends it,
while sharing interesting affinities with the Poetic Realism of Jean
Cocteau. Its stage, discreetly
contiguous to the gaming rooms of the Bellagio Hotel, consist of a 1.5 million
gallon pool of water. In Jean
Cocteau’s 1932 surrealist film “The Blood Of A Poet,” the poet passes through a
mirror into a state of poetic consciousness. For “O” Director Franco Dragone, a grand pool of Narcissus
lies at the boundary of ordinary life and the fantastic.
While
seated in the theatre (which resembles a European opera house), the public is
introduced to clowns who sport tattered umbrellas, insufficient to protect them
from cascades of water that hail from the ceiling. The clowns are followed by fairies and warlocks from a
netherworld who make their way through the seated audience, cracking whips
against the aisles and disappearing into fissures in the vast red curtain that
still obscures the stage. In an
instant, what appears to be a single curtain, flies off in myriad diaphanous
pieces in as many directions, revealing a vast pool of water.
A headless
woman, in Elizabethan garb, is slowly lowered into the pool on a rope,
surrounded by the legs of swimmers poised upright in the water.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Like the eye of Luis Bu�uel’s
Andalusian dog, cut with a razor, the wound of this headless woman invites us
to a place where our rational mind no longer reigns over the senses.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Like the swimmers, or Cocteau’s little
girl who walks on walls in “The Blood Of A Poet,” gravity and all laws of
physical nature are defied. The
acts that follow are as disparate and compelling as the rooms into which
Cocteau’s poet wanders.
Descending
from the sky to the water, celestial acrobats dive into the pool, swimming in
synchronized constellations like a Buzby Berkley choreography.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> A skeletal ghost ship appears in the
sky manned by a crew of men and women who, through the movement of their
bodies, cause the vessel to sway back and forth like a great pendulum.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> One by one the sailors abandon ship,
casting themselves from dizzying heights into the pool below.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Then the stage is cleared, save for a
burning clown, seemingly unaware that he is aflame, inscrutably seated on a chair
on the surface of the water. In an
alchemical marriage of opposites, this man walks amid implacable flames upon
the water of the stage and then disappears. The burning clown is followed by dancers with flaming
batons, who create mesmerizing trails of light with their movement.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> An African shepherd now enters the
stage singing a traditional song.
Dancers from the troupe cajole a man from the audience to enter the stage,
where he is made to climb a one-hundred foot rope ladder to the catwalks only
to plunge, head first, back into the pool along with other players who had
awaited him on high. Mongolian
contortionists enter the stage, moving and folding their bodies with the grace
of a medusa in the sea.
Perhaps
the most extraordinary performance of “O” is the “Russian Swing.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> For this act the set becomes a boiling,
turbulent pool framed by disintegrating ramparts of what appears to be
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> mud and straw.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Water nymphs bear their king out onto
the water on a suspended, swinging throne, crowned by a great bronze bell.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> To stage right and left issue divers,
with swinging platforms on either side.
As many as three standing men and women ride the swing at either side of
the pool, rocking back and forth.
Whenever either swing reaches its highest point above the pool, the
diver springs off of it, soaring one hundred feet toward the opposing side
before entering the water in a graceful dive. No sooner does one diver soar into the water but another
leaps onto the rocking swing from behind.
From left and right divers fly into the water under the stern gaze of a
bell-crowned Neptune.
Part of
the allure of “O” lies in its music.
Original music composed by Benoit Jutras accompanies “O,” played live by
musicians in a booth beside the stage.
Peppered with African, Middle Eastern, and Klezmer influences, the music
enters into dialogue with the players to great effect.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The vocals of Roxane Potvin compliment
the clarity and depth of the watery stage. African musician Toumany Kouyat� also provides a suggestive
rendering of a traditional song to the accompaniment of the kora, an African
lute.
Cocteau in
his experimental films was proud to be an “amateur” and realized his works with
an economy of means and prodigious creativity. Despite it high production value, Cirque du Soleil’s “O”
retains a sense of improvisation and collaboration between the director and
cast and the inclusion of audience members brings the production still
closer. When the performance was
at an end and I filed out with the rest of the audience into the casinos of the
Bellagio, I realized how completely “O” had taken hold of me.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Like the Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood Of A
Poet,” “O” genuinely and seemingly effortlessly, evokes the spirit of fables
and myths. |
