Le Cirque Plume

One of my favorite acts/scenes at Le Cirque PlumeOne of the classes I’m taking here is European Theatre and, in addition to reading and discussing plays, we get to go to see a play (for free!) once every few weeks. And this past Wednesday evening, we went to the circus. It isn’t the circus as we traditionally think of it, though the piece takes places in a big tent and the audience sits on bleachers drinking beer (or hot mulled wine, something you’d never see at Ringling Bros.). There are acrobats and gymnasts and jugglers and climbers; however, there are no animals, no fire-eaters or sword-swallowers, no motorcyclists criss-crossing inside a metal sphere. The troupe we saw, Le Cirque Plume, is a part of (actually, the inventor of) a movement called le nouveau cirque, or new circus, which originated in France in the 1980s. Nouveau cirque transforms the traditional circus acts into scenes within a narrative; it’s kind of a cross between circus and theatre.

The piece we saw, “L’Atélier du peintre” (“The Painter’s Workshop”) told a story of artistic creation through various vignettes of painting, sculpture, and acrobatics, some more theatrical than others. There was dialogue, but not much. There was, however, gorgeous live musical composed by one of the members of Le Cirque Plume. There was a juggler, but not simply in isolation, as in a normal circus: as he juggled rubber balls and bounced them off the floor, the rhythm of the balls becoming the percussion of the song. While he juggled, some of the other actors rolled more rubber balls across a mirror on the floor, which reflected the patterns onto the wall behind the juggler. At the end, the actors laid across the mirror so that they formed the image of a smiling crescent moon in the reflection.

I loved the references to actual works of art in the circus: famous paintings of reclining odalisques, a rectangle of white fabric with a slit in the center, recalling Lucio Fontano, from which “clowns” emerged and fell back into. My favorite scenes, though, were probably the ones with female acrobats. One acrobat climbed a piece of fabric hanging from the ceiling, wrapping herself in it and then flipping and tumbling almost to the floor—like a circus acrobat, it was daring, but here, with the lighting and music and simplicity of the set, the feat seemed more elegant. The circus, or play, or both, is one of my favorite things about Paris so far.

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