Although they must have started designing the current Cirque du Soleil extravaganza that opened at AT&T this past weekend long before Donald Trump made his controversial speech, there is something ironic and defiant in its theme. Luzia, as the event is named, celebrates the culture of Mexico. And it’s everything you know and love about the Cirque dressed up in farmworker straw hats, cactus blooms and tin hearts on a background of fiery red.
In short it’s spectacular. And it’s wild.
The event opens with its circular stage packed with marigolds. Two acrobats in adorable hummingbird suits, yellow tights and yellow lace-up boots flutter in pulling wagons with tiny tin robots. Zoom zoom! The robots have watering cans for hats and red tin hearts on their diminutive chests. The puppetry of the robots alone is enough to cause wonder in the audience’s collective hearts. Once the audience settles down to a mild roar – quiet is unknown at the performance, the woman next to me took to screaming during the aerialist’s act – the stage is flooded with tumblers and acrobats sporting plumed outfits as colorful as a pandemonium of parrots.
A woman who haunts the entire program appears dressed like a monarch butterfly, trailing bright flags of wings attached to long poles. A huge articulated horse appears center stage. And the butterfly soars into the air to hover over its massive back.
My favorite costumes were the musicians, who were all wearing huge heads of animals: crocodiles. But the flamboyance and inventiveness of the costuming and make-up, not to mention the sets, seemed to be infinite. Other masks of exotic fauna adorned performers in their many parades across the stage: swordfish, some other metallic-y fishy creature who seemed to be devouring the head of its wearer, an armadillo, a man enfolded by the curves of a snake, mating beetles, iguanas and more unidentifiable insects. A trio of sexy cactuses added to fun, waggling their spikey appendages at the audience.
Costumes were designed Giovanna Buzzi. Eugenio Caballero was the sets and props designer, Patricia Ruel was the creative director.
The name Luzia is a portmanteau word, combining luz (light) and lluvia (rain). And where you might expect a lot of light in an event produced by a company that goes by the title of Circus of the Sun, rain seems less likely. But rain it did, torrentially. And frighteningly, rain poured down in the midst of both aerialist acts. Hold on tight! The female trapeze artist was accompanied by two women garbed in dresses decorated with trails of ants and winding wildly across the stage in Cyr wheels, the large hula hoops that the performer stands in the middle of while spinning in one direction or another. Between them, they created a three-ring circus of ultra dynamic and breath-taking movement. Rain pouring down.
The male aerialist was accompanied by an articulated jaguar, who padded slowly to a central pool, a watering hole shared with a tattoo-bedecked aerialist who descended from the top of the tent 62-feet above to spin and splash in the water with death-defying aplomb.
A frenetic juggler dazzled and two soccer ball-spinning performers did things with that ball that Pele could only dream of. Scuba divers descended from above, and vaqueros and vaqueras danced wildly in red leather outfits trimmed with enormous tin hearts painted red in the midst an elaborate silvery field.
The musicians were joined by strong-voiced dramatic singer, Majo Cornejo. Simon Carpentier composed the acoustic score which was then filtered through the electro-pop of Nortec Collective’s Bostich + Fussible, giving the music a brassy Latin American and Mexican sound, and infusing the entire performance with jubilant daring.
So, compañeros y compañeras, get on your boots and bridle your butterflies. Head on down to the Cirque du Soleil’s latest – the fabulous and imaginative Luzia!
– Jaime Robles
Luzia continues January 29, 2017, at AT&T Park in San Francisco. For tickets and information visit cirquedusoleil.com.
Photo by Laurence Labat.