By S.E.Barcus
Ex Machina/Robert Lapage and Cirque FLIP Fabrique join forces to produce a theater-circus-wrestling extravaganza with — SLAM! (…and tease toward something even greater…)
At Meany Theater, Seattle, Sept 28, 2024
Photo, Stephanie Bourgeois.
(WARNING – I love giving details, so there are ‘spoilers’ inside, if you haven’t seen the show yet.)
Contemporary Circus: the Blend
“In a double scope network, the two inputs have different (and often clashing) organizing frames…. Sharp differences between the organizing frames of the inputs offer the possibility of rich clashes…. Such clashes offer challenges to the imagination. The resulting blends can turn out to be highly creative.”
Mark Turner, “The Art of Compression,” from The Artful Mind
OK, “contemporary circus” – you had my curiosity, but now … you have my attention.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to a big, gawdy, late-Elvis-phase circus at Radio City Music Hall. A ‘traditional circus’ with a ringmaster, where we saw the elephants stand, the tigers growl, we bought the tchotchkes, we saw the motorcycles circle around their globes, etc…. Then, sometime over the last 40-odd years, as a culture, we decided, maybe the animal part of all of this was … kinda fucked up?
Concurrent with that sentiment was the development of a newer (“cirque nouveau”) — yet in some ways older (“vaudeville”) — type of circus, born out of that same 1970’s energy that gave us postmodern theater, street theater, and performance art. By the 1990’s, this had evolved into ‘contemporary circus’ – circus sans animals – mais cirque avec non-linear stories and/or themes and original music, all initially heralded for us in the U.S. pop culture by the spectacularly successful shows of Cirque de Soleil, out of Quebec, selling out night after night at Disneyworld and Las Vegas.
Over the past decades, more and more extraordinarily talented companies would pop up, (including Seattle’s own Teatro Zinzanni!), with many – if not most – coming from France and Quebec, including one of our producers tonight, FLIP Fabrique, also out of Quebec. FLIP says it is a company that focuses on producing shows with astonishing feats set to “true visual poetry” made-up of world class artists with an “uncanny ability to have fun and move the audience.” … Well, shit. They really sums up tonight’s show. You can kinda just stop reading right now. Goodnight!
Now — combine this with Robert Lapage and his creative company, Ex Machina — which has been inventing multidisciplinary performance works since 1997 (ALSO out of Quebec! — oh, and they called themselves “Ex Machina,” minus “God,” well before the Alex Garland film, btw…). Combine these two forces, and you now have a dovetailing of creative energy that blends into one of the most humorous and entertaining contemporary circus experiences I’ve ever had, with SLAM!, a theatrical-circus-pro-wrestling extravaganza.
On with the Show
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
Walt Disney
SLAM! starts with an older, really frail Tim-Conwayesque-looking fellow suddenly doing an hilarious faceplant to set the tone for the night (in case someone thought they’d be seeing “REAL” wrestling matches, or something!), and a vocal reminder to us, that we, the audience, are also a character in this exaggerated sport of costumed heroes and villains. We are encouraged to act our part — to scream bloodthirsty cries and hoot and holler for “our side,” and feign outrage when any dastardly deeds are done!
Two ringside announcers then set up the matches — speaking to us in cartoon gibberish, with unintelligible high-pitched and low-pitched robotic Laurie-Andersonish voices. (Oh, man, it was soooo digital.) Throughout the night, these two are hysterical, essentially our clowns, constantly being bowled over again and again, papers flying in the air, slapstick a la Buster Keaton. They and other downstage ‘acts’ often serve to segue several of the “ring” acts – “wrestling ring”, in this case — that need time to set up.
Our first match involves a big ferocious red-costumed “strong man,” performer Jonathan Julien, vs a hunky heavy-metal biker dude (Cédrick Pinault). It is basic WWF wrestling fare to set the stage, with cues to the audience on who is the good guy and bad guy based on color schemes and speaker-fed ‘boos’ or ‘yays’, that were quickly and enthusiastically taken up by the crowd. Very effective. (Such a kinky pleasure to see a high-brow, well-dressed, likely not-very-working-class crowd at UW’s Meany Theater go so ape-shit for this! Touché, creative directors.) Adding to multidisciplinary spectacle was a large video screen behind the “wrestling” ring, with live video made by a cameraman, who followed most of the wrestlers throughout the night, giving the whole rambunctiousness evening a stadium “LIVE, up on the jumbo-tron!” vibe to it all. (Maybe in the future, they can REALLY get the audience involved, with audience cameos, like they do at baseball games….) (Uh … on second thought … it would probably take an army of lawyers to get that done in the U.S. Nevermind.…) These more-straightforward early fights highlighted ground acrobatics, all the tumbling and somersaults and gymnastics of actual pro wrestling (impressive enough!) – but with the added, inventive play of expert circus producers and performers.
Photo: Stephanie Bourgeois
The second match involved the biggest, baddest Scotsman I’ve seen since Samurai Jack, vs “Superhero,” the super-flipping acrobat, Stéphane Pansa. The show makes excellent use of the Scotsman’s kilt, from sarcastic curtsies to the ref, and us, after a dirty punch, all the way to smothering Superhero’s face under it, played up for all the stinky inuendo. The other fights involve an Amazon-strongwoman (Maeva Desplat), vs “Pretty Cowgirl”, with gruesomely funny, perfectly-timed, crunching sound effects of broken bones, and the loser ultimately thrown into a garbage can, true WWF-style!
Then back to another segue, with Pansa, now as a janitor cleaning up. Before mopping, he accidentally gets too much of a sniff of the cleaning fluid, thus turning his mopping into an “Heffalumps and Woozles”-like circus trip, complete with live capture and clever use of Song Remains the Same-like “trails” of his mop-flipping on the giant video screen for us. And all nicely set to original music by composers Bob and Bill (Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard), very French-sounding, like a tune from Yann Tiersen’s Amelie.
Then we gets our Mexican wrestlers! Our luchadors! A good guy vs a “Diablo” – who is complete with devil horns and a Day of the Dead sidekick! This diablo (Jérémie Arsenault, one of the founding members of FLIP), has a secret weapon that he uses in the ring. He juggles – or rather spools – it out against his foe. He even uses it as a garrote once (eesh!). Can you guess what this weapon is? A diabolo, of course! Get it!? (Oo, oo, oo – idea! — in a future show, have him use this ‘devil on two sticks,’ while on stilts! So, he, too, would be a ‘devil on two sticks!’)
It’s insidious, but soon, we realize that slowly but surely, the basic ground acrobatics of even the wrestling matches have been infiltrated, with each match, more and more, by circus acts, seamlessly. Where we started with “basic” tumbles, we will evolve by the end to wrestlers bouncing and throwing each other high up into the air for death-defying flips and feats…. This rolling out, this pacing and timing of the whole show, by the artistic directors Lepage, Steve Blanchet, and Bruno Gagnon (the latter, another FLIP founding member), on the macro scale of “show,” is as expert as the timing needed to catch every one of the twelve cotton candy sticks juggled by the individual performers. Just a wonderful, expert, disciplined, and cohesive work done by all of these artists, at every level.
After a knock out, more clowns – (bumbling paramedics this time) – and then the love story and the best hand-to-hand work of the night, performed by Adèle Saint-Martin and Fabien Cortes (with a near “rip-off” of the ripping-off-the-mask scene from Sam Raimi’s Spiderman…). I hope Mr. Cortes never needs rotator cuff surgery. Ouch!
Then our janitor cleans again – and out of his garbage can pops out, not “Pretty Cowgirl,” but — a creepy “bug”! Eeek! Really, this is Naomi Eddy, perhaps the most incredible contortionist I’ve ever seen. She starts with that freaky all-fours backwards walking schtick — something out of a Japanese horror film like The Grudge — ALWAYS a crowd-pleaser. Then, more trippy video in the back, as the camera focuses on and multiplies — in a live, overhead feed — Ms. Eddy’s every bizarre contortion, creating a spell-binding kaleidoscope. Nice! But JUST when I felt this was doing her a disservice – upstaging her unbelievable skills a bit – the directors must have sensed that (again, perfect timing), and Ms. Eddy gets to play the end of the act all alone for us, spot-lit, majestically insane, with a mind-boggling ability to go where no one has gone before. How does she do it? Double-jointed everywhere? Stretching eight hours a day, every day? Probably needs to be both, to do what she does. (How else can one give birth to one’s self?!) And all to some dreamy Portisheadish-like music by Bob and Bill, perfectly complimenting the mood.
Stéphane Pansa then returns to transform himself from a behind-the-scenes janitor to one of the more impressive acts of the whole night, with his slack wire walking. And handstanding. And cart-wheeling?! And bouncing across it while swinging it from side to side, almost 180 degrees, like it’s some goddam jump rope?! Holy cow, Batman!
Ah, but what wrestling tropes haven’t we seen yet? Oh yeah — tag team wrestling! Cat People vs Swingers, and lots of hysterical jealousy and lust thrown into the pratfalls and clotheslinings. Even our clown announcers and cameraman and ref join in to the fracas – and after a funny burlesquey strip tease by the ref, turning himself back into “biker dude,” all the wrestlers eventually return for the finale, trying to out-jump one another to reach the lights, where the ring girl has all the cash winnings … just out of their reach. Like foxes to grapes – man, do they jump high! How do they do that?! Oh! The literal wrestling ring has, itself, by the end, turned into a literal circus ring, thanks to its floor being swapped out for a trampoline. And another shout-out to the composers, I dug that Bolero-infused techno-riling-up-sports-music, yo! Ravel?! — “w00t!”
The Lesson
“You know, I learned something today.”
Kyle Broflovski, South Park
You know, it was pretty genius to mix a contemporary circus piece with a WWF theme. Everyone knows pro wrestling is “fake.” And that theater is “fake.” We suspend our disbelief in both places. But here – we have a theatrical show, about pro wrestling. Fake upon fake. (Is that a double negative?) Only – while the “punches” are actually just loud slaps and pre-choreographed flips – this show shoves in your face just how talented you have to be to pull this stuff off. Somersaulting yourself in mid-air as if you’d been hit – but hadn’t, really – might actually be HARDER, due to the lack of force actually pushing you into the air. Your own body and core has to mimic the thousands of Newtons of force a punch would’ve delivered. You have nothing to leverage. You have to do it yourself!
They also chose a theme that sooooo lends itself to quickly getting an audience riled up and involved. (It’s almost cheating!) And given the ridiculous aspect of the wrestling — along with clowns and acrobatics – the audience is involved in a very fun, immersive, and often hilarious way. If you’re a snob and hate WWF, (like me), you will go into this thinking it will be funny and kitschy and amaze you with talented circus acts that will poke fun at pro wrestling. And you will leave being correct about all of that. Except that last bit. This, surprisingly for me, did not make fun of professional wrestling. This enlightened me to it. This show is paying homage to it. Because, all of the above that you, rightfully, loved – the humor, the kitsch, and the amazing physicality and skill – can actually be found in professional wrestling itself, if you deign to step into the low-brow pleasure of checking it out…. (You snob, you!) (And it doesn’t all have to be for conservatives, either! Jesse Ventura! Forgive me!)
Whimsy
Now that contemporary circus has my attention, I’ll close with some fanciful thoughts regarding contemporary circus and its use – or rather non-use — of language, along with areas I would love to see explored in the future (as more of a theater-lover, myself).
First, the French-aspect of non-use of language: I notice in most circus – and also in much of French art that we are exposed to, or at least that becomes popular in the U.S. — actual language is often explicitly chosen NOT to be used, as an artistic choice. Take the gibberish spoken by the announcers in this show, tonight. I imagine some of this must come from such an ingrained cultural love of gesture, from the land of mime and Marceau, and love of abstraction, from the land of Descartes, and love of dance, from the land that gave birth to and proudly nurtured the Ballets Russes…. But so much? I think of the films that were popular that had little-to-no dialogue — Le Ballon Rouge, Quest for Fire, The Artist, The Bear … and often, they are French…. How much of this theoretical tendency is for love, and how much is for convenience, to not have to learn and speak English, but still be able to perform and make a living in English countries? Is any of it subconscious — to avoid the reality that the lingua franca is no longer … franca? (Or, worse yet, is often anglais?! — goodness knows French and English cultures have had their own “rough and tumbles” over the centuries.) Is there a French subconscious bias to non-verbal art for any of these reasons?
Next, the circus-aspect of the non-use of language. Much of this is the current nature of circus, of course, which performs more to our “non-dominant” visual and musical brain than to our “dominant” hemisphere with its language areas, making the art more like dance, rather than theater. But contemporary circus, since its founding in the 1970s, wants to break boundaries between disciplines. Indeed, this FLIP production, collaborating with Lapage – more of a theater artist (although seemingly with a broad, Richard-Schechner-like, brush…) – likely hoped to break down yet more boundaries — and in many ways, they succeed, with this extraordinarily funny and creative work, that turns our vicarious, high-brow spectators into blood-thirsty WWF fans!
I think one future evolution for contemporary circus, and also for theater, could be an attempt to truly blend the two. And when I say, “theater,” I’m talking about the naturalistic, linear plays with plot and character and dialogue that we have been oppressed by and lived with since Aristotle – especially since Ibsen, Chekhov, and classic Hollywood cinema. What would happen if this truly incorporated circus? Not just a beautiful, surreal dance, here or there, like in Singin’ in the Rain (or its update, La La Land), and not completely surreal, like some David Lynch film, or Richard Foreman play. But a linear play – that actually bakes-in the circus.
Can you imagine a play, or musical, that incorporates circus acts as an essential element to moving along a linear plot? At first it would be disconcerting for audiences. The stressed parent talking about how hard it is to juggle all their responsibilities (juggler)…. The moment the lovers fall in love (hand-to-hand)…. The ambitions of the young, wanting to soar to new heights (trampoline/high wire/trapeze)…. A creature from a ghost story, like Woman in Black (stilts/puppetry/magic) …. The forlorn antihero, feeling that she is “… a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here” (contortionist)…. Etc. Not just tying together moods and emotions, non-linearly, based on a theme. But all within a linear play.
If this worked, it would be potentially as revolutionary as when music first truly infiltrated drama during Monteverdi’s time, leading to this little invention you might have heard of … a little thing called “opera,” evolving into today’s little unkown form I think they call, um, “musicals”. They must have seemed strange at first — having “arias” be a part of the story, actually moving the plot along?! By now, the “verfremdungseffekt” of Brecht from these songs – thought to re-awaken disbelief, since they are so seemingly incongruent and unnaturalistic, compared with the play – might not be the case any longer. Songs in musicals are so encultured now, that I’d bet – (if you slapped an fMRI on a musical spectator) – that spectators today might just suspend disbelief as equally for the songs as for the dialogue.
Maybe this true combo of play and circue has already been done? Maybe it has never sold well, in the past, because it was too disconcerting for modern audiences? Well, if so – try again! Audiences have more and more exposure to, and love for, cirque nouveau, and cirque nouveau’s mission is to challenge itself, to form new blends. Just the facts — for the first time in their greater than 60-year history, The Seattle Rep included a contemporary circus piece, with The 7 Fingers show, JUST last season. And they are already including them again this season! And Seattle Symphony presents Cirque Noir this week! It’s a friggin’ invasion! Traditional theater audiences and contemporary circus are now ripe for a “true” mixture, after these past two generations of cirque nouveau successfully enculturating itself into the modern psyche/zeitgeist. I demand to see this integration one day! Come on, guys … before I croak! 😊
“Relatively few conceptual integration networks … are successful. … But this constant attempt at blending provides a robust way of introducing a strong engine of variation into our conceptual systems…. Although they begin by blending structures that one might think have no business being blended, nonetheless provide quite powerful new conceptions.”
Mark Turner, “The Art of Compression,” from The Artful Mind
Ok, done. Thank you Ex Machina/Lapage and FLIP Fabrique Cirque! The only downside to this particular show was … that it was ‘one night only’?! Passengers at the Rep last year stayed up for a full month. Why do Meany shows have to close so soon…?! Boo-hoo-hoo!!!
Ah, well. C’est la vie.
Vive La Cirque!
Copyright 9-28-2024
** Featured cover photo, Maeva Desplat. Photo: Stephanie Bourgeois
S.E. Barcus 
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