A stunning odyssey of horse and rider
With 65 horses, 45 riders and acrobats, 10,000 tons of rock, earth and sand, and a lighting rig to put the Rolling Stones to shame, Odysseo rode into town last week.
Not rode: thundered into town.
Odysseo is the latest creation of Cavalia, the Canadian Montreal-based performance group built on horses and the humans who train, ride and love them. Assembled by Artistic Director Normand Latourelle, who was one of the artists behind the Cirque du Soleil, the show borders on the mythic, combining aerial dancing and acrobatics with the power of hard riding.
Latourelle grew up an urban child. His only contact with horses was on carousels. Even so, he had his favorite wooden horse, and he would wait through rides in order to ride that horse. These days he has his own carousel, and his own herd of prime horses, collected from across the world and including Arabians, Spanish Purebreeds and Warmbloods, Lusitanos and Quarter Horses. Eleven breeds in all.
Unusually, all the horses are male, 12 of them stallions. While this gives the horses’ performance an extraordinary power and vitality, it also means an additional risk for the trainers and performers who need to be constantly aware of and control the horses’ aggressive instincts. Watching the horses break into the occasional misbehavior adds to the excitement. It gives their movement and interaction a frisson of rough-house play. These are not docile animals. They are, however, beautifully trained. And it’s clear, watching the riders and trainers give their horses the occasional kiss on the nose, that they are loved.
But you don’t need to love horses to love Odysseo.
With beautiful men and women in the absolute prime of their physical lives and horses that are so well groomed and trained that the coats covering their exquisitely muscled bodies glow as if polished, the show is breathtaking.
And it doesn’t matter much whether the horses are trotting across the stage in a circle, running free in a herd, or galloping ferociously across the stage while riders perform life-threatening tricks on their backs, it’s all thrilling.
A mythic story
Like the Cirque du Soleil, Odysseo presents a kind of storytelling. The story is that of the global presence of the horse and the human. Images cast by 18 cinematic projectors across a cyclorama equivalent to three of the largest cinema screens create immense landscapes ranging from the Mongolian steppes to the African savannahs, through which horses and humans run, side by side.
Perhaps the most stunning effect is the transformation of a two-dimensional picture of a grassy landscape into a three-dimensional hill. We don’t realize we are looking at an enormous tilted arena of sand until riders come over the hill and out of the seemingly flat landscape.
Later the sky will cloud over and drop to the earth below, leaving riders and horses reeling in the vastness of the galaxy’s night sky.
Cavalia’s Odysseo is more than horses. The acrobats are also breathtaking. And in their physical prime. The combination of the two when it occurs takes on an aura of magic. In the section titled “The Angels”, four horses enter the arena and parade in a tight circle, each has two riders, a man and a woman. Suddenly, the women are lofted into the sky, their long silken white scarves trailing to the ground. While men and horses continue riding in a tight circle the women above perform aerial dancing. And as the women dance, the men spin them, pulling the scarves in a tight continuously pirouetting circle within a circle. There are no spotters, only men, horses and angels turning in their own revolutions.
And we gave up horses for automobiles! Whatever were we thinking?
– Jaime Robles
By popular demand, Odysseo has extended its stay at AT&T park in San Francisco through January 10, adding more than 20 matinee and evening performances. Go, if you can! The Rendez-Vous package includes dinner and a visit to the stables after the show. The food is excellent and plentiful and the stable visit mindboggling. Information and tickets can be found at www.cavalia.net.