You all need to know something about me: my girlfriend likes the theatre. She sees a lot of plays. She brings me to them. I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to leave the house most of the time. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, she usually manages to drag me out. However, last Sunday I didn’t complain for a few reasons: 1) It was a circus show. 2) It was free. 3) The Simpsons was a repeat.
So we trekked all the way up to the TOHU, the relatively new circus venue on the same sprawling Saint-Michel lot as Cirque du Soleil’s headquarters and The National Circus School. The show was called Honolulu Punch and it was presented for three performances only as a “work in progress” created by French director Nicolas Cantin and seven young circus artists. It was awesome.
A Honolulu punch is not only a drink, the program book told me, but also a breathing exercise where you breathe in and out as fast as you can for fifteen minutes. When you’re done, you’re supposed to feel supremely calm. The exercise’s intensity mixed with serenity seemed echoed in the show’s motifs of violence and childishness. At least, that’s what I thought; my girlfriend thought I was full of it.
She said that the show didn’t hold together because there was no semblance of a narrative. But it’s not a play, and doesn’t need a narrative. It lays claim to its territory very early on – a dark, brightly colored realm where childlike innocence, playfulness and cruelty manifest in absurd, brutal, hilarious, sometimes chilling ways. In effect, the show seems to posit that our original, childlike state is not far removed from a state of combative aggression. The opening tableau sees one sleeping performer undressed to his bikini briefs by two others and then ordered by another with a bullhorn to don a grotesque pig mask and slam himself into a wall a half dozen times, which he does with alarming force. I wish they would have explored the potential of this bullhorn thing more fully.
In the world of Punch, everything is a weapon, including the performers’ various apparatus. This makes the pairing of disciplines particularly interesting, as in the case of Meaghan Wegg and Joseph Pinzon’s aerial hoop dance, ariel joust, and trapeze duet that opened the show.
Both that and the German wheel/bicycle battle that Kristina Dniprenko and Lo’c Quensel pulled off are particularly fine examples of the intensity, playfulness, grace, and very real danger that characterized the acts.
Even nudity, as in the first tableau, and sexuality are weapons. One tableau sees Quensel and Wegg holding hands and sitting on the roof of the makeshift tiring house on set, like an old couple no longer sure how to intimately interact with each other. Suddenly, Wegg lays a mountain of sloppy, forceful, lipstick laden kisses on Quensel. A moment later he is dangling from the edge of the roof, with Wegg fiendishly trying to stomp on his fingers, relishing every moment of it. Ain’t that always the way it goes?
All the performers are recent graduates of the National Circus School, which means they’ve been training vigorously for at least three years. This fact shows not only in their amazing skills, but in their equally tight bodies. I may have stressed this last point too heavily on the ride home. But at least I fell asleep on the couch faster than usual.
