Le Poulailler8 octobre 2009
L’atelier du peintre
Cirque Plume is certainly not in need of any recommendations. After five years of silence, it’s back with a new production, L’atelier du peintre (The artist’s studio). A world waiting to be discovered and rediscovered, to be shared or kept to oneself.
What better scene of creativity than the artist’s studio ? Centre of the world of the imagination, a crossroads where muses, whims and fantasies can be indulged, a platform where colours and textures merge, lines and movements, frames and shapes, the kingdom of the solitary artist in front of his easel always was and still is a source of inspiration, both for the person who occupies it and those who visit.
Bernard Kudlak and his circus friends, actors and musicians are first on the scene with their battery of techniques : Kristina Dniprenko spins round inside her German wheel, Laura Smith floats above her trampoline, Antoine Nicaud flies from aerial straps, closely followed by Chelsea O’Brian. They and all the others have one or even two or three musical instruments up their sleeve, magnificently orchestrated by maestro Robert Miny. Whilst spellbinding circus acts perform on stage, with a touch of poetry to make them fill the picture without a break, and whilst music is used to intoxicating effect and the movement of the performers amazes the audience, comic interludes intersperse the various acts, traditional light relief in the dramatic structure, providing an opportunity for Bergson laughter that people never tire of criticising in public but privately adore !
With an endless round of games with frames and mirrors, freely borrowing from Las Meninas by Velazquez, quoting from Dali’s Jesus or leaping to a reference to Magritte’s weightlessness, plainly mocking the trance-like state inhabited by the creative soul, once again Cirque Plume demonstrates a capacity for stunning innovation over and above its supreme technical mastery. Magic, technique and humour find a new way of expressing themselves in each of their productions, constantly surprising us.
After Plic-Ploc, a true symphony based around water, a spectacle of studied style and subtle charm, in the Artist’s studio Cirque Plume takes childish delight in messing about with materials, scribbling pictures, splashing colours on without a care or design, and emerges from all that apparent disorder with a sort of creative primitivism. Very childlike, but also very funny, the show is suitable for those aged 5 upwards.
Myrto Reiss