Cirque du Soleil - Dralion
DRALION is the Cirque du Soleil show for those with ultra-short memories or no previous experience.
Cirque du Soleil brought a new magic to human circus when they arrived in Australia some ten years ago with the first of what turned out to be a series of marvellous travelling shows, Saltimbanco, Varekai and, most memorable of all, Alegria. They had devised a weird and wonderful hybrid of circus, acrobatics and theatre with wildly imaginative costumes and some of the most mind-boggling rubber-jointed performers gathered from all over the world. And a unifying link of a live band and onstage singers narrating the show in a non-language that nevertheless seemed to mean something in the lavish, dazzling spectacle.
”Lavish” is what made the Cirque visually different; the numbers of performers were also lavish and there was even a certain lavishness in the soaring storylines of love, peace, tolerance and multi-creature/ multi-ethnic inclusiveness. Millions all over the world related to what they were seeing: amazing physical tricks and skills, colour and movement and exciting fun. Cirque du Soleil has become a very successful conglomerate and brand.
This year the show in their Grand Chapiteau (big blue and yellow tent) is Dralion and for those with memories of their previous spectaculars, it was a disappointment. The crowd divided visibly between those who had experienced the Cirque before and those who had not and/or were part of the corporate sponsors’ ticket allocation. The former politely applauded each tumbling, juggling, balancing act and were otherwise quiet; the latter whooped and yelled and were as impressed as they ought to have been by the skills and pageantry before them.
Dralion is more of the same and also less. The skills on display are often gasp-making, but if you’ve seen them all before the awful truth is, you want more bang for your buck (and the bucks are considerable: $55 is the cheapest ticket while spending $119+ doesn’t guarantee decent sightlines – just ask the reviewer who was struggling behind a vast audient to be fair to what wasn’t visible.
By its very nature of drum roll and boom-tish, circus has a built in imperative to up the ante: one person skipping while balancing another skipper on his shoulders must inevitably lead to six skippers on their hands and knees with a pyramid of skippers on their backs. Then what? Cirque du Soleil’s earlier shows took the audience on some kind of wacky and uplifting human journey and there was tangible heart and emotion in the performance and the music.
Dralion seems to have lost all that. Or never had it in the first place, perhaps. They’ve been on the road a long time and perhaps the magic has gone in this one, but I suspect it was never there. Travel weariness doesn’t account for the perfunctory nature of the show’s structure, the cynical employment of fillers to draw out the playing time (lots of arm waving and floating about) and the most self indulgent and worst clowns ever.
The show begins with the clowns drawing a member of the audience into the arena for some ritual fun and humiliation. The “act” is interminable and it’s obvious within two minutes that the audient is a plant: he’s actually one of the awful clowns. This is hardly a spoiler, you’d have to be very naive not to twig that a man speaking in a French-Canadian accent and doing fake sheepish giggles is in on the joke. What’s worse is that the interaction is pointless and unfunny; but does take up a lot of time that would otherwise have required some real action on the part of the producers.
The fake audience participation symbolises everything that is disappointing and disconcerting about Dralion. If you work it out quickly you automatically expect something more to happen (because, of course, upping the ante is the norm in such a situation); when nothing does happen – except filling in – you feel cheated. On the other hand, if you’re one of the sweeties who didn’t figure it out, when it’s finally revealed you feel doubly cheated because you also feel silly. Either way a tiny niggle of resentment has been planted.
Essentially, the fake victim represents real fakery: dishonest, cheap and – as my new best friend James, who happened to be sitting next to me, said during the interval, “It’s really cheesy.” He also said something profound about why he was underwhelmed. We go to live theatre and live performances for the thrill of human interaction and contact, because it’s exciting and – no matter how much artifice is employed – it’s not artificial. But trickery isn’t enough if there’s no heart and it’s cynical. In fact trickery is the worst form of trickery. Amen to that.
There is one really breathtaking sequence which has quickly become known as “the trampoline bit” and it’s original, heartstoppingly skillful and crazily brave. Funnily enough it’s also honest, there are no tricks and it’s without artifice. And it’s not enough to carry an entire show.
As we began: Dralion is the Cirque du Soleil show for those with ultra-short memories or no previous experience.
Dralion in the Grand Chapiteau in the Moore Park Entertainment Complex, then touring nationally; www,.cirquedusoleil.com
