There's nothing like it! The old, the new, the coming-soon and the never-was blend seamlessly. Multidiscipline, multicultural and lingual, multieverything. I think Cirque du Soleil shows are incomparable even to each other, though the NYTimes review of "Corteo" opening last night suggests it's the only comparison we should even attempt.

[quote=John Rockwell]Drawing, like other major circuses, from the same international pool of small traveling circuses and circus schools, augmented by fresh talent from Eastern Europe and Asia, Cirque du Soleil has elevated the once marginal and innovative "new circus" experiments of Europe into an international brand name.

The Cirque format has surpassed the older-fashioned. . .
This is another exercise in slightly fey Cirque fantasizing
. . . accompanied by the sort of music mimes would make if mimes made music.[/quote]

I saw their resort show at DisneyWorld's Pleasure Island a few years ago, from the equivalent of center court, only three rows from the stage -- at any moment I was sure the tower of 50 chairs would fall directly on my head or a careening vehicle would drive off the lipless edge into my lap. And performers did come into the seats from all directions, you never quite knew what was coming or what it meant. Talk about live!

[quote=John Rockwell]
. . .weirdly, at one point, masses of dead skinned rubber chickens rain from on high. . . Flowing fabrics — most of the women are dressed in Victorian underclothes — lend acrobatic and aerial maneuvers a grace that they would lack in spandex. Particularly ingenious are the various suspended angels who decorate the stage picture and also serve to deliver needed equipment to the aerialists.[/quote]

So I'd differ gently with the reviewer not in what he experienced but only in what it "meant."I personally think that as weird, surreal and incomparable as the Cirque du Soleil experience is, it makes a dandy metaphor for real life.

And therefore, that School or at least any schooling we pretend is Education -- you knew I'd get to that, right? -- ought to make its experiences more like this, and a lot less like church liturgy to be mouthed mindlessly in unison through the ages.

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