Cirque du Soleil’s ECHO gave me so much. I want to talk about those things first.
The look of the show is fantastic. The only set piece is an enormous white cube — 12 tons and the size of a two-storey apartment building. Designed by Es Devlin, the cube rotates and transforms: chunks of it pop out, so characters can emerge and disappear. The cube disintegrates and re-forms.
The opening passage of ECHO is its most moving. A girl character, unsubtly named Future, and her dog Ewai stumble across … well, the abundance of life on Earth. Costumer Nicolas Vaudelet has clothed Future and Ewai in Magritte-like fabrics: sky-blue, with clouds. But every other element in director Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar’s production is in sync with the whiteness of the cube.
In the opening, there’s a procession of creatures — acrobats dressed as birds, reptiles, animals — all white, all looking like their costumes and headpieces have been cut out of paper. Thanks to projection designer Jérôme Delapierre, the surface of the cube is teeming with life: as the cube rotates, a white whale powers its way through the ocean, white cranes fly. Rigged for aerial performance, the costumed acrobats dance on the cube’s surfaces.
It’s a kind of ecstasy but, when the ecstasy is interrupted, you can’t miss the commentary on climate change.
ECHO is far more hopeful than heavy.
Within this framing, which turns out to be loose, there are some fantastic acts. I’m a big fan of Robel Mezgebe Weldemikael and Mearag Hishe Mehari, who perform a piece called “Icarian Games”. The bigger guy spins the smaller one on his feet. I’ve seen this kind of act before, but I’ve never seen it executed with this level of speed, precision, and variety. I was cheering nonstop — just like everybody under the big top.
For different reasons, I loved “The Fireflies”, an aerial act performed by Charlotte O’Sullivan and Penelope Elena Scheidler. With one of them upside down, attached by hooks in their hair, the pair perform a duet that’s pure kinetic sculpture: the shapes, the lines, the exquisite mirroring.
But ECHO started to lose me a bit. The end of Act 1 features a magnificent giant puppet — that doesn’t do much. And, for me at least, some of the material in Act 2 started to feel repetitive.
In Act 1, I enjoyed the work of the amiable clown team, Clement Malin and Caio Sorana, who manipulate boxes, but there’s only so much you can do with boxes and there’s only so much at stake.
I wanted more escalation in the second act and more tension within individual acts.
By the time we got to “Banquine/Human Cradle”, I felt like I’d already seen the best acrobatics ECHO has to offer. And, when we hit “Flying Poles”, I’d had more than enough of seeing people suspended on single wires.
To be clear, I’m not knocking the skill involved in any of this; I just could have used more variety.
Still, even for curmudgeonly, jaded me, ECHO offered a lot and I’m grateful for it.
ECHO Written and directed by Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar, based on an idea by Es Devlin. A Cirque du Soleil production running at Concord Pacific Place until January 5. Tickets
PHOTO CREDIT: A hint of what Cirque du Soleil’s Echo has to offer.
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