La Voix du Nord6 October 2010
Cirque Plume : "L’atelier du peintre" (The artist’s studio), go and see it’quicksmArt" !
See online on http://www.lavoixdunord.fr
The 1100 people in the audience at the Colisée de Roubaix were reunited with the crazy and imaginative world of Cirque Plume.
After ’Plic Ploc’, the magnificent and creative story of water, Cirque Plume, ...
The forerunner of modern French circus, makes a triumphal return to Roubaix with L’atelier du peintre (the Artist’s studio). On the stage, an easel carries the painting by Velasquez known as Las Meninas, a foretaste of the colourful artistic performance that is to come. We are in the studio of an old master or an imaginary museum. It’s a unique place with a strange assortment of props, where the paintings and artist’s materials come to life, where statues move and where mad museum attendants joyfully take part in a festival of colour and movement. Acrobats, dancers, poets, actors, musicians, the entire crazy cast of Cirque Plume invite the audience to enter the 4th dimension in this madcap take on ’A night at the museum’. It’s like a waking dream as we enter their mad, weird, bonkers world. This is no story about water. It is the world of art, of painting that is used, suggested, sublimated by pigments, Chinese shadows, bodies, clothing, smoke, lines drawn by hand, with an air gun, a bazooka, an exploding balloon. Subtle references to Klimt, Ingres, Picasso or Miro. In the artist’s studio, everything can be used as a medium and is fodder for this fantastic fable. The painting is both on canvas and on stage. It’s an imaginary museum of living art made up of abstract compositions that can be amusing or lyrical. It’s a monumental fresco, a form of artistic expression where everyone adds his own brushstroke to the finished painting before wishing the audience ’a silken night with golden fringes’. What else?
Brigitte LEMERY