TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082691/0826460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 83 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 60

Aerobics for the Imagination


From France comes a one-ring wonder that makes a circus out of
acrobatics, clowning -- and the audience's dreams

By JAY COCKS


    There is only a bare stage, the magic tricks are
purposely corny, and the largest wild animal is made of chairs.
The entire troupe, including costumes and apparatus, could fit
into a clown car with room left over for a family of four. This
is far too modest to be the greatest show on earth. How about
something simpler: a one-ring wonder. The sweetest little circus
this side of Barnum.

    Le Cirque Invisible has the wit and wonder of some
half-remembered childhood reverie, as well as some of the
contemporary sass of Penn and Teller. But Le Cirque is not quite
invisible. To make it appear full-blown, in all its winsome
glory, the audience must supplement the inventions of its two
creator-performers, Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierree,
with creativity of their own. It is an aerobic workout for the
imagination.

    Premiered Stateside before a rapturous audience last week
at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., Le
Cirque will continue through Sept. 1, then move to Houston's
Alley Theater from Sept. 4 through 18. The current show is a new
version of the Chaplin-Thierree Le Cirque Imaginaire, which
barnstormed Europe and the U.S. for more than a decade.
Thierree, the show's resident jester and prestidigitator, and
Chaplin, who does stunning acrobatics and uses modest props to
transform herself into a virtual bestiary, credit audience
reactions with shaping Le Cirque's evolution. Says Chaplin: "The
circus, or vaudeville, must listen to the audience and try to
meet its wishes or, even better, its dreams."

    Sweet dreams, antic dreams, strange dreams: a man strolls
onstage with a small marionette in the shape of a coffeepot,
then runs off and reappears as a huge percolator walking a tiny
man-shaped marionette. A pixilated sleight-of-hand artist puts
a bunny in a box (ho-hum), pulls out an air pump (hmmm),
attaches same to box and pumps mightily (what?), and finally
produces not the expected exploding hare but a live jumbo rabbit
who appears to be only slightly smaller than a Shetland. All
right, all right -- it's still only a big bunny, but it seems
so large because the Chaplin-Thierree inspiration expands
audience perception even while teasing it.

    Chaplin, the fourth of eight children of Charlie Chaplin
and Oona O'Neill, and Thierree, who has performed for such
talents as Federico Fellini and Peter Brook, share a sense of
theater as a primal force and of spectacle as something inward.
For them it is not spiritual, exactly, but not entirely show
biz either. Their circus began in 1971 in Avignon, when it
featured 30 performers and a regulation menagerie. In the
intervening years, the focus has become more precise, so that
now the whole business can quite handily be contained on a bare
stage, within the confines of the 23-ft. mat that serves as its
sole ring.

    For all its simplicity and deliberately dotty charm,
though, Le Cirque is far from fey. Thierree's tricks and
clowning have the savor of the music hall, and Chaplin's
acrobatics are accomplished with an athletic elegance too tough
to be simply precious. Their son James Spencer Thierree, 17,
also appears for some of the more elaborate routines and
provides bicycle acrobatics of his own, thus making Le Cirque,
in every sense, a family event. The elder Thierree has given due
consideration to posterity. "With this title," he points out
with typical logic, "we can very well continue touring after
death."