At The Vancouver Playhouse until January 21, 2023
Tickets from $35 at www.dancehouse.ca or 604-801-6225
Posted January 19, 2023
Is it circus? Is it dance? Is it acrobatics? Yes. Is it absolutely spell-binding? Utterly.
Circa Contemporary Circus, based in Brisbane, Australia, is an internationally-recognized leader in the new wave of performance theatre: a hybrid of movement, dance, theatre and circus. The company has performed in more than 40 countries across six continents to more than 1.5 million people and has received rave reviews everywhere from London and Paris to Berlin. Presented by The Cultch and DanceHouse, Sacre – which premiered in 2021 in Wollongong, Australia – is a rare opportunity to experience this company’s thrillingly audacious work.
Set, in the second part, to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, ten performers – Fran Alvarez, Nancy Luna Gutierrez, Kimberley Rossi, Georgia Webb, Christina Zauner, Jon Bonaventura, Marty Evans, Samuel Letch, Hamish McCourty, Daniel O’Brien – hurtle, fly, collide, leap, run and form human statues following, roughly, Stravinsky’s story of a maiden who dances herself to death in a frenzy of sensuality. The narrative is not apparent or overtly stated but the raw grit, eroticism and human longing are clear in the intertwining and ripping apart of couples, the competitiveness of both men and women, and rejection.
The program begins, not with Stravinsky, but with a highly percussive composition by Philippe Bachman. The women appear in modest black dresses – almost Quaker-like – and the men in trousers. At first, the performers come and go out of the shadows: singly, in pairs, all together. Sometimes they walk or simply run onstage then disappear into the wings. But what emerges are glorious lifts, balances, displays of strength and interplays that are understated, almost workman-like but beautiful. The tone is somber, measured.
Then Stravinsky’s music rushes in and the tone shifts considerably. The women are now in short, silky, black or midnight blue slip dresses; the men’s torsos are now bare. Now it is all passion, tension, tangling of limbs – all ten performers coming together in human tableaux, tearing apart, coming together again in new, more tightly woven knots of bodies. Flying, airborne, colliding, careening. Bodies are hurled against each other in a clash of muscle, sinew and bone.
Lighting, by designer Veronique Benett, is exclusively from overhead and leaves much of the stage in dark shadow. Blackouts sometimes come as a performer hurls him/herself at another, leaving us to imagine the catch. Or a single dancer is singled out in bright light as a movement, like a spinning wheel, is repeated and repeated and repeated.
Familiarity with Stravinsky’s original ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that premiered in Paris in May 1913 (and which almost caused riots in the Théâtre de Champs-Elysées), would enhance appreciation of Sacre but the sheer exhilaration of the strength and beauty of the bodies, the lifts, the couplings, the precise detail of matching tone to music is more than enough to make Sacre a unforgettable experience. The evening I attended, the almost-overwhelmed, appreciative Vancouver audience rose enthusiastically as one in a cheering, bravo-accented standing ovation. Created by Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble and directed by Lifschitz, this is dance – or circus – like we’ve never seen before. It sets a new high bar for performance art.