delirium

Just got back from seeing Cirque's latest - a departure from their standard spin on the human circus, Delirium is their spin on the concert, with more and varied live music booming through a huge system, a two sided stage, and projections on screens and sheer curtains to augment the sometimes frenetic activity.

If you haven't, you should see a Cirque du Soleil event. Cirque things are so French, with longing gazes, sweeping romantic epic, and emoting just this side of jazz hands, that you'd have to guffaw if not for the truly astonishing feats the perfomers pull off (don't they ever slip?). Their level of performances, like the occasional Olympic athlete, remind me how incredible human beings can be.

Tonight's was the music of globablization filtered through shabby French twists on taste - quirky, dramatically serious, thematically tongue in cheek, almost. I was reminded of a night in Sardinia, when my friend Eric and I found ourselves in a wide, well-lit alley, pressed between an old brick warehouse and a low, wide building updated with glass walls and turned into a line of glowing restaurants and bars that spilled tables out onto the brick. Long story short, a group of a half dozen or so street performers were tottering on stilts, clowning, juggling, and flipping their slow way down the alley. They were studiously ragged, colorful, and excellent performers, pulling genuine laughter and surprise from the crowd. The Cirque shows try to recapture that same aesthetic - there was less of it tonight, but they still included the odd and quirky and almost unsettling amongst the stylish projected images pulled from a tame but very well-funded rave. Sitting there with the light, color, sound, and movement bending in unimagined ways in front of me tonight, I felt the same comfortable happiness I did that night in Sardinia while also glimpsing the new, thoroughly modern direction of global spectacle.