REVIEW /// “Wrong kind of retro undermines VOLTA”

As its title suggests, Cirque du Soleil’s latest touring extravaganza is full of youthful, technology-infused energy. As a full entertainment package it’s uneven, a complicated narrative concept bogging down its greatest asset: a sequence of circus acts as awe-inspiring and skilful as we have come to expect from this billion-dollar company.

A new angle here is the addition of sports such as BMX biking and parkour to the more familiar aerials and acrobatics, which along with its pop-electronic score by M83 marks a clear attempt to appeal to a youth demographic. Retro is layered on retro: the show has an ’80s look and feel but also hearkens in its story and design to ’60s counterculture.

This layering of references is fairly successful in making the show feel trendy but its gender politics are depressingly dated: there’s more chest thumping and testosterone-fuelled war cries than a Tarzan movie, while women are consistently positioned as assistants and admirers, literally and figuratively out of the spotlight.

The concept is that the audience is watching the filming of a televised game show called Quid Pro Quo, in which contestants dressed in grey compete to become Elites. This is set up through an effective opening sequence led by the clown Wayne Wilson, who gets the audience whipped up into quite the competitive frenzy. Wilson is charismatic and likeable and seems like the star of Quid Pro Quo (and Volta), so it’s a bit confusing when we are then introduced to a character called Waz (Joey Arrigo) and told that he’s the game show’s host.

Waz’s backstory becomes the driving force of Volta’s narrative. He recalls being mocked in school because he has blue feathers where his hair should be, and a coming-out story is cued, the feathers standing in for his queerness. But these hints aren’t followed up on as Waz is enticed into the world of the Free Spirits, cool kids in multicoloured outfits (costumes are by Zaldy Goco). There are strong echoes of the musical Hair, as a disaffected outsider joins a hippie tribe and is liberated from societal expectations.

The circus and sports acts help tell the story: a rope-skipping number is part of Quid Pro Quo, while a beautiful acrobatic number in which Pawel Walczewski swoops over the stage hanging onto a light fixture and wearing a blue feathered wig has something to do with Waz’s memories of the past. Girders and platforms burst up from Bruce Rodgers’ amazing set in a parkour number that also has performers descending on a huge catwalk.

In the first of several acts featuring BMX, a biker (Takahiro Ikeda) pirouettes and tiptoes on his front wheel up and down the platforms as a ballerina (Elena Suarez Pariente) twirls next to him, the unexpected delicacy of his actions creating a strong synergy with hers. Adult Waz watching home movies in the background suggests that this is his happy childhood memory.

A high-energy rings-and-bungee-cord number ends the first act, which represents some kind of move toward liberation for Waz and locks in the show’s gender dynamics: powerful men show off mad skills and roar at the audience, while women bounce around overhead decoratively, anonymously, silently.

An early second-act highlight is a shape-diving number in which male acrobats run and hurl themselves through hoops placed higher and higher above the stage (and roar about it).

Wilson’s clown has two stand-alone acts, one in which he fights with malfunctioning washing machines in a laundromat, allowing him to display his considerable skills in physical comedy (this was the first time children’s laughter became audible in the audience).

In an extended second-act sequence he eats a hallucinogenic flower and imagines himself as a barely clad god — the audience loved this for sure, but it is also part of the production’s unsavoury current of idealizing non-Western cultures, present also in unspecific references to indigenity in the costume design.

In the show’s most unsettling number, Danila V. Bim is suspended by a big hook through her hair bun and executes all kinds of flying acrobatic moves supported only by her hair. Echoes between her costume and Wilson’s as the imagined god suggest she is part of his hallucination, but the objectification of Bim’s body and the suppressed violence in the act made it more like a nightmare for me.

The show’s most esthetically pleasing sequence is a climactic number choreographed by Julie Perron in which Arrigo reveals extraordinary skill as a dancer capable also of acrobatic tumbling. This functions as the fulfilment of the narrative, so that a last sequence — in which a full BMX park of chutes, Plexiglas screens, and nets is assembled on stage and riders swoop and hotdog — comes across as a sort of crowd-pleasing encore.

Throughout, the live band and in particular singers Darius Anthony Harper and Camilla Backman help ratchet up the high emotion. Martin Labrecque’s lighting is both spectacular and subtle, enhancing the excitement of the big numbers but also helping the audience follow what’s happening by highlighting a character’s face when their psyche or imagination is at play.

I will finish by mentioning the performer who pulls the shortest straw: Paola Fraschini, playing Ela, a pretty roller skater who leads Waz faithfully to his own fulfilment without ever getting a full act of her own. If I had daughters I’d take them to see a show about Ela, but I’d not take them to see Volta, because the show would have virtually nothing to offer them in terms of positive images and messages about their place in its dystopic/utopic world.

{ SOURCE: Toronto Star | https://goo.gl/RCP3wf }