Luminato 2009: Cirque de L’émeute de Personnes Âgées

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. That Friday night I got there about an hour in, my whole attendance was an impulse move, spur of the moment. This won’t be the most formal capturing of events, but then again I won’t be exactly writing about what Cirque du Soleil did, more like what happened in their absence. When I arrived at Harbourfront the first two and most obvious visual cues were exactly what I expected. A big dramatic set made of garbage and waaaay too many people between me and it to see it. I stumbled about the crowd looking for an in, but with every heavenly seeming path was another swift disappointing “sorry we need to keep this aisle clear for performers”. Eventually, around the back end I managed to find a cluster of short-enough people for me to peer over and see what all the sure to be flamboyant fuss was. About half way through the scheduled performance I had hoped that I would be catching the peak of spectacle.

There was a woman in yellow walking grace-y through the water and a gaggle of men dressed like swamp reeds splashing water in unison. “Don’t worry King” I thought, “this is totally going somewhere.” Behind me I saw more performers, clowns and creatures that circled the audience for the poor members on the fringes. What was unusual about it however was that the performers on the fringes of the circle seemed infinitely more interesting than what was going on in the center. More and more people ducked out, carving my path closer and closer to the summit. “What a bunch of chumps,” I thought, “see that bar, over there. The one held up by two other bars above. Some kind of unusually dressed person is totally going to flip out on that bar. It’s going to make this thing so great!” Slowly the outer crust of clowns vanished into the crowd, the yellow woman and splish splash warriors as well following suit and with the music carrying on I had starting my pulsing preparation for Cirque to haul out the big guns. And I waited. And they waited. And everyone there most certainly waited.

A haze of confusion sank heavy as the crowd, you could practically feel it squeezing you in. An old lady in a pink track suit in front of me began to yell at the tech tower. “WHAT IS GOING OOOON!?” the pugsly man in black with black shades seem unphazed by the woman. “WHAT IS GOING OOOOOOON?!” she yelled again, the tech man talking into his hear as if everything was going according to plan. Another head popped up from the tech tower, another pugsly dude with a big fancy camera, started to take shots of the audience and I began to worry if this was all some kind of awful joke on us.

Twenty minutes to go and some very anxious feet below me beginning to wear thin I finally heard an uproar of applause from an end of the stage I could not see. “Time to kick ass and take names” I thought, outreaching my digital camera above my head as my second pair of eyes. But it wasn’t any clown or trash monster in the water, no, it was three dudes from the audience. Getting soaked, twirling around, lifting their hands up to warrant a cry. A couple more bodily rotations and they packed it back in to dryer land, but I knew their influence would catch on. But moments later a family man and his kids took it a step further, jumping into the water, twirling and dancing all the way to the stage structure, making a rotation around it and then heading back to the edge. And so of course this carried on. Family packs of three, four, jumping into the water, spinning around, getting cheered on and as I looked back to the tech tower they seemed to act business-as-usual. The music was still carrying on. “Something is going to happen,” I thought, “the question now is will it be done by the circus or a riot of old people.”

Then it started, it clicked, with less than ten minutes on the clock and an old shivering Indian woman only just making it to front of the crowd, things broke down. Boos and hiss stung from the mass, louder and louder eventually overpowering the music that lay down on us. I heard another splash from the water but this time a different variety. A more hollow splash, flat and broader. It eventually drifted into my sight. An old couple had stolen Cirque’s boat, which floated by the side the whole time assumedly for the show. They sat back and relaxed while a smoothie of cheers and boos rumbled from the side of the water. They bobbed in their dingy for a fair time before a man in a suit trudged in the water to pull them back to the side. He plotted them back on dry land, turning his head up only to stare down a wall of aggravated free-event-goers. Through the crowd noise I could hear him say, “There will be an announcement soon.” And my lips made the sort of expression as if they were tugged to the side by a fish hook. The music carried on even longer, now a few minutes after the time the show was scheduled to end. “Maybe they were just waiting for it to get dark?” I heard in front of me. Suddenly the music clapped out, replaced by a dull and tired voice that spoke “Thank you every body for coming out, see you tomorrow.” And of course, an uproar of boos erupted ground up. I don’t know what I missed when I got there late, but I felt if it was the kind of spectacle to satisfy then the audience would have clued up when the best had come and gone. No, this was not a satisfied posse. The same security guard who pulled the old hijackers to shore, now stuck, wedged into the angry audience in the most fuck-all tone said, “Well, that’s what you get for a free show.” To which another old woman rose up and smacked him, “It isn’t free! We pay taxes for this!”

Jumping through hoops at the Harbourfront Centre. Photo/Matthew Filipowich

I scurried back to the streetcar, surrounding commentary of disappointment carried me the way there. My evening hit a wall, a little anticlimactic, too much to sleep soundly that night. I went to finally see Star Trek I guess. Wasn’t that Orion chick hot? Damn.