Word: poole
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...name O plays on the French word for water (Cirque's founders are French Canadians) but also means to evoke the word of wonder that audiences so often express--Ohhhh!--as gorgeous bodies sail through the air or dive from a 60-ft. pedestal into the pool that occupies much of the huge stage. O could stand for the oasis of sophistication Cirque represents with this production and its sister show, Mystere, at Treasure Island, on the four-mile Strip in the desert...
...with seductive New Age melodies. They will know, and then, seeing O, they will be astonished. For Cirque has trumped itself again. Putting on a show in, above and under water has forced director Franco Dragone and the Cirque staff to create an intricate new technology that allows the pool floor not only to rise and descend but to "breathe"; water can seep through instantly to create a dry stage space. Virtually all the performers had to be scuba-certified, and all are dependent on complex mechanical cues, whose failure could mean injury or worse to the athlete-artistes...
...gracefully from another when the two are attached only by their feet? How can one trapeze artist catch another when their apparatus, a ghostly pirate ship in midair, is rocking so vigorously? How does a little princess balance on her head while her trapeze bar revolves high over the pool? And that fellow reading a newspaper--doesn't he realize that his hat, shoes, pants and chair are all on fire? A person isn't supposed to be able to do such things, and few minds are free enough to conceive them. But Dragone is a poet whose language...
More than any other Cirque show, O incorporates these acts into its expansive design. A quartet of carousel horses canters through the air. Angels, hunchbacks, giant toucans materialize as cameo apparitions. Anything may navigate the pool: a bathtub, a giant inverted umbrella, a wayward iceberg, a shark fin that turns out to be the top of a crescent moon. At the end the hunchback plays a grand piano as the princess reclines on it--art, love and beauty in one heartbreaking image--and then, slowly, it dissolves into the water. Here and throughout, O achieves a goal of the highest...
...distance, and a poster next to the weight room illustrates the "6 S's of Fitness" (strength, stamina, speed, suppleness, skill, spirit). The kids racing down the linoleum hallway take Spanish, art, p.e. and government here. They hit baseballs from the pitching machine, and they splash in the pool. But this is not their school. They go to school at home...