Dance review: At PuSh Festival, Lontano + Instante put fresh new spin on circus arts
Vancouver audiences have never witnessed anything like the way the Cyr wheel turns in works by la Compagnie 7Bis from France
Lontano.
Instante. Photo by Luc Grandjean
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents Lontano + Instante to January 28 at 8 pm at the Scotiabank Dance Centre and to January 29 online
IF YOU’VE EVER been to a Cirque du Soleil show, you’ve probably seen the Cyr wheel: it’s the piece that looks like an oversize aluminum Hula-hoop, which an acrobat maneuvres in dazzlingly ways, building the spinning device’s own momentum for increasingly difficult feats. Lontano + Instante take this form of circus arts and spin it on its head, transforming it into an entirely new physical language that’s by turns poetic, brutal, metaphorical, and always mesmerizing.
The two solos now on at PuSh Festival are by Marica Marinoni and Juan Ignacio Tula of Lyon, France-based la Compagnie 7Bis. Marinoni’s Lontano opens the performance, the artist, dressed in ruby-red track pants and crop top to match, taping her hands and donning boxing gloves. The Cyr wheel never stops turning as she bobs and weaves in and around it; she drops to the floor, rolls, and throws jabs, the ring within an imaginary boxing ring becoming her relentless and sometimes more dominant opponent, beating her down.
Marinoni is perpetually, virtuosically, in command on the wheel—whether by manipulating it with a single foot as she lies on the floor on her back or with both feet and both hands on it as she spirals in a moving image of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing. Yet the steely object seems to have a mind of its own.
With sounds such as a steady drumbeat, industrial clanks, whipping winds, a train rumbling so loudly it rattles the rafters, and a stadium full of cheering fans, the gripping score escalates in intensity in parallel with Marinoni’s physicality. No matter how often she seems to be defeated, she’s never down for the count. Marinoni’s fighter always gets back up and keeps on swinging, the enthralling piece speaking to the larger battle of life.
Ignacio Tula’s Instante is an entirely different beast. An everyman, he approaches the wheel that’s lying on the floor and takes off his dress shoes, stepping into the centre in his black suit and socks. For almost the entirety of the piece, he turns in circles on the spot as the wheel continually spins around his chest, neck, or waist. The dizzying image evokes a whirling dervish in a mystical Sufi ceremony, this physical meditation offset by the character’s apparent struggle with modern living.
In one instance, Ignacio Tula rests his chin on one fist as in contemplation, like Rodin’s The Thinker; elsewhere, he tears sheets of paper from a book, one by one, each one fluttering to the floor in futility.
There are moments when the artist runs in circles within the metallic hoop, perhaps a nod to how we can all find ourselves spinning our wheels. When he pulls out a large sheet of foil—a survival blanket?—and incorporates it into the cyclone around him, the effect bedazzles: the silvery sheet captures the stark light from above as it whirls, resembling a larger-than-life sparkler as it traps the man inside. Instante seems to ask: What’s it all for?—without giving any answers.
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