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| Anna Lewandowska on LED Sphere wheel |
Presented by
The Works Entertainment.
Canberra
Theatre Centre: 11th – 21st December.
Performance
on 11th December reviewed by Bill Stephens
The Canberra
Theatre Centre is rapidly becoming the “theatre de jour” for producers to
premiere their shows. It’s a win-win situation, because Canberra audiences get
first look at shows, which sometimes go on to International success like
“Circus 1903” and “The Illusionists”, and for the producers, it’s the
opportunity to finesse their show “out of town” before touring it nationally
and even internationally.
Such is the
case with “Cirque Stratosphere” which had its World Premiere in the Canberra
Theatre last night, and which despite the often astonishing skill of the
featured acts, the show’s concept, which surrounds their individual acts, still
has a way to go to make it comprehensible.
A printed
program might have helped. Hopefully it would have explained what the show was
about, who the audience was watching, and even, who created the show. But as it
was, for most of the audience, attracted by the publicity hyperbole of experiencing
“the Canberra Theatre stage transformed into a futuristic space-age utopia in
which a troupe of Olympic-standard acrobats and gymnasts would perform gravity-defying
acts on a scale never seen before in Canberra”.
Variations
of most of these acts have been seen in Canberra before, though rarely
performed at the skill level exhibited here. So it seemed a pity that the
audience did not realise that it was Anna Lewandowska who gracefully melded
dance and acrobatics to perform an impressive act with her LED Sphere wheel, or
Polina Volchek who amazed with her strength and elegance performing on a
vertical metal pole, or Emma Dutton who performed gracefully in an aerial hoop,
or that it was spinning artist, Felice Aguilar accompany by three anonymous
dancers, who performed a mesmerising, beautifully staged interlude.
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| Aerial hoop artist - Emma Dutton |
Although the
excitement level was upped by duo-skaters Evgenii Viktorovich and Natalia
Viktorovna, flaunting their dazzling roller skating skills on a tiny two-metre circular
stage; and Dmitry Makrushin & Oleg
Bespalov drew gasps from the audience with their astonishing strength and flexibility
performing hand to hand acrobatics; and smiling Nicholas-Yang Wang and
Shengpeng Nie proved crowd favourites with their hoop diving prowess; the
efforts of Dmitri Feliksovich and Denis
and Nikolai Alexandrovich with their teeter board act, Oleg Spigin’s amazing Washington Trapeze act,
and Antonio Leyva Campos’ bungee straps performance seemed restricted by the low Canberra Theatre
proscenium.
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| Duo-skaters Evgenii Viktorovich - Natalia Viktorovna |
Despite the
impressive high-tech paraphernalia, troupes of choreographed, marching
space-persons, dazzling light displays, and booming, unintelligible soundtrack,
how these elements related to the impressive feats performed by the highly
skilled acrobats and gymnasts, remained very much a puzzlement, especially when
the mood being created by the various elements was continually interrupted by
mildly amusing, but totally unrelated, audience participation segments of the
two amiable mime artists, which destroyed the continuity and slowed the pace.
No doubt the
creatives will take advantage of the Canberra season to tighten and polish the
show so that by the time it leaves the Canberra Theatre it will truly be the stratospheric
theatre experience promised.
Photos by Mark Turner
This review first published in the digital edition of CITY NEWS on 12.12.2019