Ouest France4 October 2013
Caen. We saw the Cirque Plume
Cirque Plume is spending over a fortnight on the Colline aux Oiseaux for Caen’s Outside The Theatre Walls season. To mark its thirtieth anniversary, the troupe presents its new show: “Tempus Fugit? Une ballade sur le chemin perdu”.
In the thousand-seat Big Top, you quickly feel swamped by the crowd. The weather is heavy; rain is lashing down; children are fidgeting; the crowd’s getting impatient. Parts of the stage set quickly take us into a universe which we suspect is timeless. There is a glass ball swaying, an old piano gliding, a can of scrap metal lying about.
Then, total darkness, and the warm voice of Bernard Kulak invites us to take a journey. From out of a heap of scrap iron, a strange person, singing a raucous song to a piano accompaniment, appears. A troupe of cheerful, colourful musicians joins him. And all at once, it’s a party. Everyone has his own colour, his own instrument, his own talent. A happy, childlike little world opens at our feet.
To create reality from just a sound is just what makes Cirque Plume. From almost nothing, they make something wonderful, and they manage to convince the public that happiness comes from simple things. A ball of light becomes a toy, a miraculous hat, an iron bar turns into a friend, a stretched-out cord is a foe. The objects on the stage transform themselves: glasses become instruments; a skirt turns into a top. At the end, the circus gives us one last moment of poetry, with a dance of balls of light, in which you can sometimes see an imaginary serpent being born.
Delicacy, tenderness, humour, lightness and talent, of course, make you want to come back again and again. But hush! there’s no more to be said. The best thing is to go and see it for yourself. Children’s laughter, warm applause: we come out of the show with so many new ideas that we are light as a ... plume!
Caroline MALCZUK