Review of Cirque Du Soleil's Varekai Performance in Auckland, New Zealand

"Deep within a forest, at the summit of a volcano, exists an extraordinary world-a world where something else is possible. A world called Varekai." So the website tells us...

I recently had the opportunity to attend the premiere of Varekai in Auckland, New Zealand. Just today, I had the even greater opportunity to attend backstage with Maestro Rafael Sanchez. In the company of Cirque du Soleil's Varekai troupe, one is struck with the sheer intensities of a nomadic gang of world class personalities.
Plenty of reviews of Varekai abound in the popular press. I want to devote this review instead to an exploration of the larger thematics of the circus and the virtuoso performance as they are evoked by Cirque du Soleil's production.

In ancient tradition, the circus recalls two famous sites - the Colosseum and Circus Maximus. Circus Maximus or Circo Massimo (in Italian) is known precisely for its famous oppositional athletics - chariot racing (man - horse - chariot machines) against each other. The other site, the Colosseum, staged another form of oppositional athletics, namely, the gladiators (in Latin, 'swordsmen') against animals and each other. Already we can derive a formulation of circus that abides through history: the circus is a machinery of aggressive becomings involving animals including the human. Machinery on account of the couplings (say between trapeze artists, between animal and human Icare, and between music and image - orchestra and stage). Aggressive because life itself is aggressing against its own terminus as art objects aggress against time and the relentless approaching horizon. Becomings because there is no uncostumed personality on stage. Even the members of the orchestra who are mainly back stage are costumed. What is celebrated then is an intermediary and radically creative space between the everyday person and the virtuoso performance of an assumed identity and world. In the pervasive 9-5 corporate culture within which most of us live, is such a creative space not urgently needed as a generative and productive resource for us to call upon against the ceaseless assault of everyday-ness and boredom?

Whilst Cirque du Soleil has eradicated beasts from its repertoire, it nevertheless conforms to our formulation of the circus. Varekai is no exception to the Cirque tradition. Look at the central figure of Icare (Icarus) performed by Mark Halasi, not to mention the various other characters inhabiting the everywhere forest. Icare descends upon the stage as the winged mythic figure that dared the heights of the sun and fell as the even older reference Lucifer did from dazzling divinity. He descends then as a winged creature already invoking the totemic bird as a vital part of the Icarus machinery. Once descended, Icare loses his wings immediately. This too is significant as it cues us in to the gesture of the name Varekai. If Varekai is a wherever, and its characters the whatever of inspired becomings, this where and what ever take place after a vital event - that of the fall. It is the fall that evokes the question of place and person anew.

"The word Varekai means 'wherever' in the Romany language of the gypsies the universal wanderers."
Asking the question of Daedalus and Icarus, where do you want to go, the answer from the Tower must always be 'wherever' but just not here. The Icarus machinery is an answer to the present event of confinement, restriction and bondage. From the confines of the tower, Icarus and his father constructed the first flight machine, materialising in technological form the first imagination of a becoming-bird. We have always had dreams of flying. Unsurprisingly, today we have the modern aircraft. But we must not forget that the first instance of taking to the skies was sketched out by the man Icarus and his father Daedalus. As the myth goes, Daedalus and Icarus were imprisoned in a tower on Crete by King Minos. Surrounded by the sea, the only possibility of escape (of flight) took precisely the image of winged flight across the waters. Thus Daedalus constructed wings from feathers bound by thread and wax. Once done, father and son took off into the skies. But not before father warns son:

"Icarus, my son, I charge you to keep at a moderate height, for if you fly too low the damp will clog your wings, and if too high the heat will melt them. Keep near me and you will be safe."
Those of us familiar with the myth know that shortly after passing Samos, Delos and Lebynthos, Icarus gets carried away with this becoming-bird and obsessed with brilliance flies higher towards the sun. What son or daughter does not succumb to such a straying? Indeed what is a life without such a straying off the beaten path of history? This melts his wings and undone Icarus crashes toward the seas, presumably dead.

Varekai offers another reading - upon crashing towards the nether regions, Icare does not die but instead is confronted with a new horizon, unmapped from the previous geographical coordinates - Crete (the prison Tower), Samos, Delos, Lebynthos - namely Varekai or wherever. Varekai should be Cirque du Soleil's emblem for no other production evokes the primary elements constellating around a circle of the sun (the dream that is born from confinement and mortality), as well as that which falls in the shadow of the sun - its ghost Icarus - the spirit of one who challenges the sun itself, falls, and repeats the challenge unrepentant - nomad in the wherever not only of the real world, but more significantly, nomad performer in the wherever of the psyche and socius of each city in which the fall and the redemption of becoming is enacted as public ritual.

Does this production not deal precisely and mythically with the questions confronting global citizens daily: Where are we? Where do you want to be? Where do I want to go? Where do our becomings pick us up and drop us off? In a global capitalist culture seriously deficient in tenable mythmaking and social ritual activities (activities that serve to continually renew the coordinates of our Symbolic horizon), Cirque and more specifically its touring show Varekai, present a timely re-iteration of a mythic complex that includes not only the figure of Icarus and a panoply of attendant becomings after the fall, but also Lucifer, Don Juan, and Oedipus. Is the figure of an unrepentant Icare not an echo of an unrepentant Oedipus shaking his fist at the Gods at Colonnus? Returning to the pressing contemporary questions of global mobility and the nomad, what is Cirque's answer?

In one word - wherever. Like the other word often on the tips of the disaffected of today - whatever. Unlike this figure of disaffection, Varekai seems more of a celebration of being or becoming wherever and whatever. Like a travelling world, Cirque's Varekai is the attitude of wherever and whatever... in this we detect of course the stain of commodity and capital - what is often noted in media coverage is the slick Cirque 'formula' that translates into multi million dollar revenues for the Canadian based Cirque du Soleil. We are confronted with the restless attitude of a nomad wandering the wide world, trading images, music and experiences for dollars and sense! More than this however, we also face the belligerent attitude of the street performer, the child, the troubadour and minstrel, engaged in spreading cultural myths and viruses in today's intensive mediascape.

Today's successful entrepreneur finds a reflection in the figure of the gypsy nomad finding satisfaction and a lure wherever her feet happen to tread in the vast world. Is this not also the image of a contemporary virtuoso of life and living? This word 'virtuoso' originally denoted the musical master or maestro but now has expanded to mean anyone excellent.
"The real dignity of the virtuoso rests solely on the dignity he is able to preserve for creative art; if he trifles and toys with this, he casts his honour away. He is the intermediary of the artistic idea" (Gesammelte Schriften; English translation, vii, 1894-9, p.112)
Someone possessing a relation to dignity and the celebration of acts of creation. Rather than diminish the general public's estimation of the arts, the virtuoso then expands, extends, and intensifies an audience's relationship to creative becoming. It raises the question of pure virtuosity for each person confronting the variety of personality virtuosities embodied by the characters of Varekai.

With the experience of both front and back stage performances of Varekai, I left the back stage view with the distinct sense of the excitement of the performers. Viewed from the front, the virtuosity of performance in both athleticism and personality is clear. Seen from behind the scenes, the sense that dominates is that of a real time collaborative symphony of act, music, voice, gesture, and becoming. This sense does violence to my pre-conception of jaded performers and musicians hammering out well oiled roles. Instead, I was confronted with an orchestra celebrating the passage of each sound / music 'act' (in line with ideas developed by Michel Chion, the sound / music really carries the continuity of the visual performance in this production) successfully performed at the level of virtuosity. This is of course also the power of sound and music in general as an energising faculty of the Sensible.

The most abiding image of Varekai after two viewings front and back is that of a virtuoso machine. Orchestra and stage function seamlessly and where there are glitches, virtuoso performances improvise rapidly around these. This is the thrill of real time collaborative performance with an adequate supportive technical / technological infrastructure. I want to end with this attention to the supportive infrastructure. The virtuosity of the production machine means that the audience have the luxury of logistics fading to the background - the music, the voices, the acts themselves all partake of a becoming-imperceptible. Imperceptibility is perhaps the highest praise for the virtuosity of a Maestro.

Leon Tan 2006