THE BALLOON MAN

Performers get personal in empowering circus
Chris Jones
Theater critic, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
November 5, 2010
Imagine if all the circus stars in the world staged a revolution and kicked out their bosses. Bye-bye, Euro directors with the fancy concepts, the weird original music, the love of undignified costumes. Au revoir, expansionist producers with the brand-tested Elvis and Beatles shows designed to diminish the importance of the individual artist. Zai jian to the gold lame and red velour and the precise disciplines that haven't changed since 1953. Auf Wiedersehen to the very idea of sharing three rings with smelly animals.

You'd end up with something like "Traces," the gorgeously pure, loose and personal circus show that bowed Wednesday night at the Broadway Playhouse and let everyone know that a little group of artists were in charge of their own expression.

Everything about "Traces," the creation of a Montreal-based collective known as 7 Fingers, is designed to put the individual performer in the best possible light. The international artists — there are six guys and one young woman — play themselves, weaving their biographies into the work.

There are no embarrassing costumes — just a variety of comfortable street clothes. The music expresses cool, straightforward emotions. Rigging is kept to necessities. The material is rooted in traditional circus disciplines and classic acrobatics, but street-influenced elements like skateboards and hip-hop moves leaven the mix and free the performers. The audience is acknowledged and empowered as a partner in the work. All kinds of rich emotions — comedy, sensuality, sadness and play — are explored. And while the performers have their specialties, they all contribute generously to the whole.

Most radical of all for anyone expecting either traditional circus or cirque nouveau, there is no separation whatsoever between the actual acts and the linking material. This is as close as I've ever seen this art form come to direct, honest, fulsome, two-way, human communication. "Traces," which was directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, is very, very impressive.

Of course, none of this conceptual packaging would have much impact if the skills on display — this is, after all, a circus show — were not extraordinary. But they are. Right from the opening routine, wherein the performers fling each other all over the bare stage — including a dazzling moment when a guy called Mason Ames throws off Valerie Benoit-Charbonneau as if this formidable young acrobat were a bag of potato chips — the audience immediately understands that it is in the presence of seven massively talented performers working at the top of their games. By the time the incredible Xia Zhengqi gets around to diving great heights through tiny hoops, "Traces" has done far more than draw an outline. It has filled in the emotional core.

Most of these artists are veterans of the Cirque du Soleil. Of course, you're unlikely to have noticed them individually: Cirque focuses the eye on the collective whole. But you'll not only see the likes of Mathieu Cloutier, Bradley Henderson, Philippe Norman-Jenny and Florian Zumkehr at "Traces," you'll feel like you actually get to know them. The atmosphere is family friendly, sure, but also suffused with urban, date-night cool.

If you need a comparative, think "Stomp," where circus skills replace percussion. But that doesn't fully capture the individualized intimacy that "Traces" brings to this typically hyped and expansive art form.

The rhythm of this piece may be jarring for some, and you won't remember "Traces" for the spoken text, although the personal revelations are charming. But you will remember the sense of risk and danger inherent to the form. There are neither nets nor wires, and the relatively low ceiling of the Broadway Playhouse only makes the aerial acrobatics even more terrifying.

"I'll never find someone quite like you again," goes a song at the start of the show, evoking many different aspects of "Traces," a show that dares to take circus artists out of all the different boxes into which they get stuffed, and trusts them to perform their own stories.

cjones5@tribune.com