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Rockwell Matters Episode Transcript (11/19/07)

When you enter the Daryl Roth Theatre at 15th Street in Union Square East for Fuerzabruta which is currently ensconced there, the whole thing looks like Studio 54 for the older ones and more modern dance disco palaces for the younger ones, i.e. a lot of smoke in the air in this case pumped in, not cigarettes, or worse, and a lot of people standing. The around the standing around is so-called festival seating which is rock terminology for standing. What their seeing is a 45 to 50 minute circus-act, however it’s sort of participatory just because you’re standing and being moved around, the images are often quite spectacular, people swimming in water above your head with a giant sort of lucite sheet protecting you and them from each other, people swinging around on ropes against mylar curtains, it’s quite spectacular, and the night I went, everybody was having a terrific time, it seemed amongst the performers, certainly amongst the audience.

However what this is, is better seen to me instead of in a disco context as in a circus context, this is a circus-act of the modern sort, of a particular time of modern sort, but, you know, when I was growing up, circus was Barnum & Bailey, three rings, clowns, elephants, people popping out of tiny cars, acrobats swinging in giant Madison Square Gardens roofs, et cetera. But it’s a lot more than that now, and it's the so-called "Cirque Moderne" or Modern Circus movement which basically started in France, now, Fuerzabruta which is the same folks which brought us De La Guarda recently, comes originally out of Argentina and they are influenced by (not to say ripping off) a Spanish group called La Fura dels Baus which did similar, if rather more salacious, spectacles: naked ladies being dunked in vats of oil and such, back in the early nineties, then graduated to the most spectacular Olympics opening ceremony I ever saw and are now doing opera productions. But, basically, this is a Francophone phenomenon. There is a big modern circus school in France and God knows the biggest and most famous of all these modern circus groups is the Francophone Cirque du Soleil from Canada. These things can range from the huge and the spectacular, like the big Cirque shows or like Zingaro, the horse circus, that was here in the mid-nineties, to tiny. The Chaplin family, Charlie's family, the daughter and grandchildren have put on a variety of tiny little shows which are just charming, indebted obviously to Marcel Marceau as well as Charlie, in fact James Thiérrée one of the grandsons, is doing a show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December.

But if you look everywhere, smaller circuses are popping up. The Big Apple Circus, which is at the Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center until January 13 is an example. If you go to Central Europe, Germany and further east, every little town has a touring circus. They’ve now been reinforced by floods of Eastern European circus performers who can get out since the collapse of Communism, and of course, by an enormous influx of people from Asia. The most recent example of that that I saw, in Paris, was something called ‘Monkey Journey to the West’ which was put on by my friend Shi-zheng Chen who did "The Peony Pavilion" at Lincoln Center, back in the late nineties, this is an amazingly amusing (it doesn’t have much substance) but it’s amazingly amusing collage of the most amazing Chinese acrobats and contortionists as well as rock, Damon Albarn of Blur and The Gorillaz, and his animator are a major part of this show.

The mention of rock suggests that the connection to rock-spectacle is large here, also to opera, which is the rock spectacle of an early pre-amplified age. But the Cirque folk are the real winners, I mean there is a Wintuk show, playing in the small theatre of Madison Square Garden right now until January 6th. But if you really want to see Cirque, you should go to Las Vegas, where the big shows are permanently installed and hence have the most amazing machinery. The most amazing being "O," the water spectacle and the more recent "Ka," K-A, which is directed by Robert Lepage and here the connection to rock and opera becomes overt, Robert Lepage is a Francophone-Canadian director, "The Rakes Progress," his production well-traveled is currently at the San Francisco Opera, he’s doing “The Nibelung” at the MET starting in 2010. He also did a Peter Gabriel tour, the imagery in "Ka" is unbelievable. It doesn't mean much, but it’s about the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen. With luck, Lepage’s Ring [Cycle] could be the most extraordinary mélange of circus, rock, spectacle and opera we've yet seen.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.

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