Montreal Circus Troupe Takes Rainy Trip Down Memory Lane Feb. 20
February 5, 2007
Circus, theater, dance, music and dialogue come together with memory in Rain, a production by Montreal's Cirque Éloize. The performers–specializing in contortion, trapeze, juggling, acrobatics and aerial rings–take a passionate, poetic and playfully wet journey at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20, in Eisenhower Auditorium.
Cirque Éloize (serk El-wuz), now in its second decade, is one of the companies that has made Québec as famous for animal-free circus as it is for hockey. The company has performed for more than three million people in 20 countries.
Tickets for the Center for the Performing Arts presentation are $29 for an adult, $16 for a University Park student and $20 for a person 18 and younger. For tickets and information, visit www.cpa.psu.edu or phone (814) 863-0255. Outside the local calling area, dial 1-800-ARTS-TIX. Tickets are also available at Eisenhower Auditorium and Bryce Jordan Center, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays; Penn State Tickets Downtown, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday; and HUB-Robeson Center, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays. University Park Allocation Committee makes Penn State student prices possible.
Rain is set at a theater in which a circus-type show is rehearsing. There, in a series of vignettes, theater and reality become indistinguishable for the performers.
"The protagonists exchange glances revealing little love stories, secret passions, flashes of intimacy," notes Daniele Finzi Pasca, author and director of the show. "The artists are out of the past, characters from collections of old photos, handsome and strong like our grandparents."
In Rain, Pasca, who also directed Cirque du Soleil's Corteo, has unleashed "wild wackiness awash in wispy wistfulness," writes a New York Times reviewer. "An imaginative merging of physical feats and playful poetics, Cirque Éloize's Rain has the seeming spontaneity and relaxed interactive quality of a happening," writes a critic for Variety.
"There's a certain kind of feeling in this show, almost a sense of nostalgia, like a strange need to go back to the house you came from, the house where a family once lived, where your roots are," Pasca notes.
Before it ends, the show is also filled with much-anticipated showers falling from an imaginary sky.
"When I was little, when the first summer storm came, I was allowed to go out in the garden and play in the rain and get soaked to the skin," Pasca recalls. "I still love that feeling of freedom–shoes full of water, clothes drenched, hair dripping. Let it rain," we'd say. It was as if we welcomed whatever came from the sky. Sun or rain, we didn't care."
Nittany Bank sponsors the performance. FOX 8, ABC 23 and 93.7 The Bus are the media sponsors. Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring Cirque Éloize performers Krin Maren Haglund and Jonas Woolverton, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.
Contact: Laura Sullivan, 814-863-6379