Word: quidam
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...chat interspersed with clips from his final NBA playoff drive--has an adoring tone and the familiar slo-mo, wide-angle baskebatics. For higher highs and cooler thrills, go Cirque. The Montreal-based art circus has finally made a film that captures the joy and awe of shows like Quidam, Mystere and O by placing Cirque du Soleil's most enthralling acts in natural settings: a bungee ballet in a forest; a living-statue duet in a Renaissance pool; the graceful intricacy of swimmers locking into Busby Berkeley designs underwater in the Bahamas. The performers' precision and daring touch...
...circuses around the world the Cirque brain trust finds the most inventive acts, then retools them to fit into director Franco Dragone's grand and elaborate design. Each show is identifiably Cirque, yet as distinct as a new Robert Wilson opera production. Like other Cirque shows, Quidam has a dozen or so main acts. As the featured artists parade the genius of their bodies in stunts of strength and grace, Cirque's menagerie (Edvard Munch's silent screamer, Clive Barker's Pinhead and dozens of other glamorous mutants) capers around them like bit players in an amiable madman's reverie...
Dragone loves birth and evolution metaphors; they are at the heart of Mystere, still the apex of Cirque sorcery. In Quidam's most enthralling solo turn, a red sash stretches like a birth canal from roof to floor, and Isabelle Vaudelle wriggles and pirouettes artfully in it, a child willing itself to be born. In the spirit of the best Cirque routines, this is wordless drama; it transforms motion into emotion...
...what about the mimes? A trio of French clowns, Les Macloma, is tiresome in its first two appearances, beguiling in its third (a snatch of music played on two balloons and a one-string violin). But John Gilkey, Quidam's emcee, is a gawky delight, especially in a dance routine with a hat rack. Gilkey knows that the body is a deft comic instrument, even as the charming Chinese girls who do the "diabolos" routine (spinning a toy on a string while prancing nonstop in short skirts and Tin Woodman hats) know how to make this precision aerobic workout seem...
...Quidam tours California for the next year before heading to Denver, Dallas, Houston, New York City, Chicago and Atlanta. More buoyant than the 1994 Alegria, less self-consciously surreal than the '92 Saltimbanco, Quidam is prime, mature Cirque. It is beyond circus, beyond theater; it makes the incredible visible...