My Second Founding Fathers Meeting in NYC
A review of the Cirque du Soleil election night performanceby Kristina Pedersen
On election night it seemed very important to bear witness to some kind of circus (dealer’s choice.) So that Tuesday my friend Emily and I packed up our Crystal Pepsi and headed to the Cirque du Soleil on Randall’s Island, NY. I had plans to watch the election coverage at Soho House, a private members club for creatives, but didn’t feel so bad about cancelling my plans to watch a farce on tv with a bunch of people who think their unauthorized remixes of Disney’s Circle of Life/luxury vape ventures are saving the vape world let alone the world world.
Emily scored free tickets to the Cirque show Kurios because she does “freelance” “PR” for a company that sells tickets to things. For those of you with real jobs, this means that she mans a twitter account for 8 hours while continuing her crusade of sending out thousands of resumes daily. Sometimes millions.
Randall’s Island is somewhat of a destination that should only be reached by car/not at all. We took the 6 train up to the tip top of the Bronx and got off just near the bridge to Randall’s Island. We thought it would be a really bad idea for us to walk across the scary huge bridge alone to an island named after a Randall in the dark but did not really say this aloud to each other and continued onward.
Randall’s Island is sort of like a big mass of land completely covered in overpasses. Imagine the worst scariest place on earth and then imagine a giant bridge over you the entire time. And also it’s always night there. Once we step onto this skyless island, Google’s walking directions bow out on us because instead of sidewalks there are only highways here at chez Randall.
Out of nowhere the heavens open up and a yellow cab comes down a highway like a bat out of hell. We flag him down, give him a nod, and he takes us knowingly to the cirque. Soon we can see the unnaturally plastic (as in more unnatural than usual) blue spires of the tents set up near a football stadium. Cirque du Soleil does not require an arena or preexisting structure for their spectacle. Like a proper cirqus, they travel with their tents parceled out into many semi trucks, and set them up on location.
When we pull up there is a little pre-show happening on the roof. Everyone has their heads tilted to the sky watching some clowns performing a very bouncy waltz on top of the tent. Despite how this sounds, it is not interesting.
Cirque du Soleil is officially sponsored by Pepsi and by Mexico the place. We wander into the tent when the waltz is over and the crew is ready for us to enter. Popcorn scent has replaced oxygen inside and we are helpless. We purchase our $9 popcorn with the understanding that this is the business model here. The acrobats and clowns on the roof are just a disappointing elaborate bonus that comes with the down payment on your popcorn, like when the dentist acts like she’s scraping (scraping!!!) stuff (stuff???) off your teeth but you really just came for the new toothbrush and chapstick.
The whole place has a sort of indoor/outdoor vibe. There is an empty VIP lounge and a gratuitous amount of TV screens for a vicinity advertising live performance, all displaying slideshows of the spectacle we are about to watch IRL. At the merch store/area there are posters of various sizes bearing the Cirque logo. This logo is everywhere: on the cups, on the screens. There is a tshirt with this logo. A button attached to the t-shirt reads, “Are you satisfied with your souvenir?” There is a giant spaceship of screens in the middle of it all, creating a general Buffalo-Wild-Wings-esque impression. It’s all a little too purple and silver to actually be sleek but this is the fault of Cirque branding I think. The show itself inhabits a much richer and more complex aesthetic universe.
The name of this specific cirque show is Kurios and is in fact a lot more steampunk than the purple and silver TV space station prepares you for. We file into the show tent which is curiously more intimate than it appears from the outside. The stage is roughly the size of half a basketball court and there are subtly graduated stadium seats surrounding three of its sides. Across the entire stage is a rickety draw bridge that starts at the back of the stage, arches upward, and then arches back down to the front of the stage creating the opposite of a short cut from the back of the stage to the front.
We take our seats and survey the election night Cirque du Soleil crowd. It is mostly middle-aged couples in fancy jeans. Some are dressed for what they believe would be appropriate for the theatre but swing a little too far Vegas, and there is a family that I can only refer to as the jacket family. A man in costume approaches one of the fancy jean couples and offers what is slightly more aggressive than an invitation to walk across the bridge on the stage. This is typical to a circus to allow crowd members to explore the ring before the show. There is something more formal and thus much more dire, socially, about this kind of audience participation though: the attendees must march one by one across a bridge on a stage and feel obliged to look in some way impressed by what they are being invited to do.
The first couple to walk seems chosen, they seem holy. We watch them and we think they are the couple of which the prophecy foretold. We feel briefly jealous and sad that this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity wasn’t thrust upon us. We watch as the male counterpart in the couple attempts to look both cool and politely/appropriately afraid of the bridge. The female looks nothing but angry that she is being made to do this in front of everyone.
This moment we share as an audience with the couple is then totally bastardized by the clown inviting someone else to walk across the bridge on the stage. We feel a collective regret for briefly wishing we had been chosen and now start trying as hard as we possibly can to NOT to volunteer ourselves, as if it would be possible to look so unassuming that we weren’t here for this show at all but rather were here and in fact very busy doing something else and thus could not possibly walk across the bridge at this time but thank you very much. And we watch one by one as the next person is invited to the stage to cross the footbridge and pretends to look like they feel anything at all about it.
While this little game of audience participation plays out, characters enter the stage. There is about 20 minutes before the show is set to start but the performers are already in full blown character. Emily and I appreciate this a lot because it’s as if, for these people, the performance has no beginning or end. Their aesthetic universe is never off or limited, but rather for the price of a nine dollar popcorn they are allowing us to bear witness to their world for two hours.
They aren’t really doing anything up there. They are just giving us a little personality, a little character development. For example: a mad scientist is running around the stage and some other creature characters join him and twist some knobs and goof around and run into each other. Usual stuff, really… And then someone climbs up one of the trapeze ladders and sits on the landing acting rather protagonist-y. You can’t see his face or anything (because he is dressed like Amelia Earhart but instead of a wardrobe the whole vibe is captured in a single skin tight full body suit) but you sense that he is dashing, in a cirque kind of way. I take to him immediately and would defend his honor to this day. He points at things (nothing) and laughs like Peter Pan might laugh with his head thrown back and a big open grin (again, you can’t really see any of this but it’s how he’s acting/cirquing).
The costumes are intricate and curious. Kind of like the tent itself, the costumes impress you mostly because you understand at once that these were made by somebody with their hands.
For example, a man comes around that looks like a sort of gay count dracula worm chef. He is wearing a deep purple dress suit and a two ft (height) by 1.5 ft (circumference) headpiece that features a glowing orb on the end (later in the show it tells the future or something). I take my picture with him because this seems to be the proper cultural expression of respect here on Planet Cirque.
Audience members are still walking across the bridge. No one has nailed the right facial expression yet, though many are certainly taking their role very seriously. Then suddenly, and I have to say on behalf of cirque that the shaming does not feel intentional at all, the lights dim and they fold up and pack away the bridge right then and there never to be seen again throughout the whole show!!!!
Those fools who walked across it!!!! Thinking they were part of something bigger than themselves!!! Those of us who did not walk, again, feel both deeply satisfied at the shame of those who walked and deeply remorseful for ever having wanted to do something simply because we thought we were missing out, thus having experienced the most childish and base sense of want. I wonder if this might be one of the Kurios themes but I think that believing our shame has some grander purpose in the name of art would be giving ourselves far too much credit.
Kurios is a proper circus in every way but in addition to the usual clowns, acrobatics, feats of human flexibility and strength, there is also a loose narrative that guides the audience through the different performances. It is not complicated but is definitely vague enough to freely think twice about. A mad scientist (steampunk vibe, remember, so think like 1850’s vibe) sets up a sort of electrical experiment where a bunch of “lightbulbs” are “connected” to a giant (legitimate) “chair.”
He flips a big switch and there is some big electrical pulses and then he is lifted off his chair and into the clouds far above the stage and into the spire. Next thing he knows he wakes up somewhere (back on the ground) and opens a book and, next to him, a giant book simultaneously opens and inside are two acrobats and an unfinished gymnastics uneven bar (a giant acrobat man is the rest of bar). The small girl grips the giant man’s arms and basically swings around him for fifteen minutes and it is definitely amazing. The rest of the show pretty much carries on like this.
The scientist bops around into different scenes and doesn’t really do anything other than that. Is he a VICE journalist tripping on DMT or is he dead or is he in actual clouds while all this happening?? That is unclear. By the end of the show he descends from the clouds and wakes up again in the chair and wonders (acts like he wonders, never says any words) what the hell happened. The show is called Kurios, referring to a curiosity cabinet popular during the 1800s that was used to display oddities: telescopes, weird figurines, etc. Each performer is brought out on some kind of Burning Man effigy (a giant hand, a giant dusty book) and these are surely the kuriosities.
Most impressive is the live band that scores the whole show. Naturally, each person in the band is the instrument they are playing. The singer has a gramophone on her head (/her head is a gramophone) and she is doing a Sigur-Ros-y kind of thing the whole time: definitely singing songs but they don’t have any real words.
Protagonist Trapeze Guy from earlier ends the first act just before intermission by balancing briefly on three rolling barrels atop a small platform swinging several stories above the stage. Cannot impress upon you how attractive this is. After intermission the performances are only more impressive and the clown scenes more strange in a good way. At one point there is a fully-set dinner table of clowns on the stage mirrored by a fully-set dinner table of clowns hanging upside down from the ceiling and one of them stacks chairs up to the ceiling so he can catch the candelabra that has floated away. And by the end of it all Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.
