Cirque Dreams returns to Seattle

Author

Zach Carstensen
May 22, 2010

By R.M. Campbell

In its more than 20 years of business around the world, Cirque du Soleil has spawned all sorts of children seeking some of its mystique and popularity. Cirque Dreams, descended from Cirque Productions, is among them with shows in theaters, casinos, arenas and parks. Its current show, Cirque Dreams Illumination, runs through Sunday evening at the Moore Theatre.

This somewhat dowdy theater, which has hosted all sorts of events, high and low, for a good share of the past 100 years, the Moore is a good place to present a show that is part circus, part vaudeville, part glossy entertainment. The current production is all of the above. The best parts are the circus performers and the worst is the shlock in which they must perform. There are nearly 30 artists all of whom perform multiple roles. They are amazingly diverse in national origin, with some from Mongolia, Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Belarus in the Old World and the United States, Canada, Argentina, Cuba and Trinidad in the New. They bring years of training and experience to their circus roles, defined in the program as magicians, wirewalkers, vaudevillians, cube aerialists, chair climbers, foot manipulators, percussion jugglers, perch balancers and perch aerialists, ring rollers, paint can stackers, hand balancers and strap flyers. Most of the acts have a novel twist that makes them unique.

They are at turns funny, astonishing, amazing, riveting, marvelous and worth the price of admission. This is a European type circus in which there is one ring and no animals. Everyone is talented and lives to the fullest on stage. The range of acts is quite wide with plenty that seem brand new in concept, although based on a long history of circus acts. The performers possess speed, dexterity, suppleness, confidence with plenty of show biz personality. They are not too high in the sky because of the Moore itself. There is one wire act, a single man (Evgeny Vasilenko) on a slack rope doing all sorts of stunts with good humor and skill. Igor Berstov and Elena Berestova are perch balancers, an act rarely seen for good reason. I have seen it only once, in Germany. She balances herself on various devices perched on his head. Three women do the cube aerial work above the stage as well as contortion work on the stage. The are very slim and very strong and very supple. The smiling Siarhei Kuzniatsou, from his family’s circus center in Belarus, does all sorts of eye-catching balancing acts of a series of paint cans. Who would have thought? Maximiliano Laurino and his brother Emanuel, from an Argentine circus family, do a very slick, hold-your breath, type of acrobatics with their feet. Closer to the U.S. is David Poznanter, with a degree from the University of California at Berkeley in music and theater and acrobatic training in Beijing, doing fluid and clever acrobatics on a giant ring that rolls around the stage. One spectacular act is Jean Chiasson, from Montreal, who does a novel twist on the old: hanging from a rope he dowses himself in a bathtub of water and twirls around in all sort of positions, scattering water everywhere. It is trick that does not grow old. He graduated from the Ecole National de Cirque in Montreal and is a silver and gold medalist of the International Cirque Demain in Paris.

Martin Lamberti is a clown — a vaudevillian who comes from a family of silent film, vaudeville and theater performers for 200 years — who does a piece in which “directs” four members of the audience in a scene for a silent film with only a whistle and gestures. It is very funny. The audience went crazy.

That is all to the good. What is not is the pandemonium of the rest of the show with its mock activities of pedestrians, dancers, film crew, street musicians, handymen, vagabonds, policemen, firemen, sailors, etc. Its is melange that means nothing, only hyper activity with no reason for being except to distract one from the circus performers. Obviously the producers felt the acts were not sufficient to draw a crowds so they added, and added and added, miscellaneous stuff to fill in the spaces, including a singing reporter. They come very closer to ruining the performance. Alas.