Word: quidam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Well, we can't. Cirque still works, magnificently. From its first moments under the yellow-and-blue big top on the Santa Monica Pier, Quidam (which means "anybody" in Latin) pulls the audience out of domesticity into the ethereum of its wizardly wit. A man and a woman sit in metal chairs, he reading a paper, she knitting. A child sits before them. Then through a door comes a large figure out of a Magritte painting: long overcoat, umbrella, bowler hat, no head. The child takes the creature's magic hat, puts it on--and dreams the three-hour show...
...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...