We went to see the movie Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away recently, in 3D. I haven't had much experienceof the new style 3D, so far, apart from seeing Alice in Wonderland in the format more than a year ago. That particular movie didn't grab me enough to make me want to feel that I needed to see things in 3D for the sake of it, but we couldn't see Cirque du Soleil conveniently in 2D, so we opted for the only other choice.
It turned out to be the right decision. I suspect that some films are made in 3D for the sake of it, and some are planned that way. Worlds Away gives the impression of being planned for the 3D format, and is all the better for it. There's a depth to the visuals that allows things to be going on in a number of places at once and still be visible (although this being typically Cirque du Soleil, there are always random happenings going on that you only just catch). Two or three times a person is caught right at the front of the shot, almost in silhouette, and that didn't seem to work (you wondered if an audience member had just stood up) but otherwise everything has a marvellous clarity.
The film is a compilation, basically, that tries to be a unity by having a very basic story running through. However the story is so thin, that it hardly holds the thing together. A small town girl goes to a circus, sees (only for a moment) a man working at putting up the tent, falls in love with him (apparently), discovers that he's the Airealist in the circus, and distracts him while he's performing. He plunges to the floor, except the floor proves to be sand and gives way beneath him and he vanishes. She jumps in after him and finds herself. Well, who knows where she finds herself - perhaps inside the Cirque du Soleil. Only there are seven separate circuses in this movie (all of them running in Las Vegas at the time the movie was made), and some of their best acts are shown (there are also some rather brief random acts, which don't seem to fit with anything). The Airealist is captured by some bodies (who knows who) and the girl keeps on searching, until finally they're reunited. (Who knows how?)
So irrelevant is all this to what you see on the screen that it barely matters. What matters is the Circus, and the artists, and the design, and the fantastic stage props and machinery, and the costumes, and the utter artistry of these performers. Yes, I know Cirque du Soleil has become the household name for all that's top class in circuses, so you expect the best, but even so, they are always full of surprises. The acts performed in and around the huge pool are wonderful; the marvellous superheroes piece on an assortment of trampolines set up like a huge skateboard park are high energy to the max; the 'fight' on the tilted floor between two groups of acrobats on wires is superbly timed, and perhaps only outdone by the other battle on the same floor (this time vertical) in which the acrobats race up and around and down and through a series of poles sticking out of the floor, with nothing to hold them onto to what amounts to a wall; several of them 'die' with horrendous screams by falling off it- who knows what happens to them, any more than the artists who drop into the water from trapezes and other hanging devices early in the piece.
There's also the exhausting 'boat' that's slung way up in the air and has at least a dozen trapeze artists and strongmen on it: it's constantly on the move, like a giant swing, and the airealists are flung about from either end like rag dolls that suddenly turn out to have muscles and strength once they're back on board again.
I love circuses - poor little circuses with barely any money to rub together (Circus Aotearoa, for instance) or the noisy Zirka Circus - but I love Cirque du Soleil most of all, even though I've only seen it once live - and that was in very confined quarters as far as the circus was concerned, on the stage of the Regent Theatre. I've seen a number of presentations of Cirque du Soleil on TV, including documentaries and such. I just marvel at the attention to detail, the atmosphere, the innovativeness and much more.
This movie may not do much more than capture some of the best acts on film, but it does it exceptionally well, and that's all I need to say.
Showing posts with label aotearoa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aotearoa. Show all posts
Saturday, March 02, 2013
Friday, March 30, 2012
Books from other places
The next topic on Aotearoa Affair’s April Blog Carnival is books from other places. For most of my life, I've been reading books from other places as a matter of course. It's difficult to do anything else when you live on an island at the bottom of the world which has a much smaller literature than the big guns overseas.
Admittedly many of the books I've read have been from England or America, and in some ways these places aren't that different, culturally, from the world I know. But the reality is that any book that's written outside your coastline is going to be give you a different perception of the world: the language used will be full of slang and expressions you have to learn in order to read the book; things will be talked about that are common to the writer but not to you. Places are not your places, and have a different feel about them.
In these days of widespread television and movies, it's easier to have an appreciation of what British and American places look like (and I've actually travelled to the British Isles more than once, and once to a small part of the States). But all this is still within my cultural (Anglo-European) reach - it doesn't step outside it and give me any huge cultural shock.
So what books from other places have really changed my perceptions? I think one of the strongest was Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I'd come across a list of books* that someone wrote about in a magazine; they were books that had influenced him greatly. Things Fall Apart was one of the two from the list that I actually got on and read. Set in Nigeria, here was a world in which humans appeared, and behaved like humans, but everything beyond that was alien. Furthermore, the story of the father and his three wives and the way they interacted was like something out of the Old Testament. I kept thinking: this must be how Jacob had to deal with his two wives - and two concubines. It's all very well to say that the Old Testament is patriarchal, but in fact the women in Jacob's family would have had similar concerns and feelings and hurts and pains to the three wives in Things Fall Apart, and patriarchal society or not, they were as vividly human as the rest of us, and just as strong-natured as the women in this story are.
The other book from the list was V S Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. This brought me into a strange world (a world that no longer exists, I think) in Trinidad, in which large families of husbands, wives, innumerable children and grandparents all lived together. The ongoing consequences of being the one person - Mr Biswas - who rebelled against the enclosing and oppressed feeling was the subject of the book. When I first read this book, I found it a delight. I read it again recently, and what had delighted me the first time seemed sour and gloomy. Mr Biswas, for all his ambition, never manages to get far up the ladder; something always knocks him down, and it's very unsettling. It's the antipathy of those books that state we can achieve whatever we want to achieve, if we put our minds to it. (I read this quote by Emmanuel Katongole the other day: "The idea that we can be anything we wish to be is one of the most insidious lies we can ever entertain." Mr Biswas is hampered by his family, particularly his wife, and by his circumstances. The second reading turned out to be quite depressing, in spite of the humour and wit that pervades the book.
I said above that New Zealand has a small literature. That's true to a point: in the last few decades there have been hundreds of books published in New Zealand that show the culture from the eyes of those who live in it. And we've been a publishing nation for quite some time; it's just that we didn't always mange to see ourselves as different. In recent years the fiction that's been published that features New Zealand has tended to take a fairly gloomy tone - this is particularly true of those books that aim for the 'literary' market. Sometimes this is satisfactory, but there are times when it's nothing but depressing. (Stuart Hoar's The Hard Light is a prime example of this that comes to mind.)
However, thinking about books I've read from New Zealand that have changed my view, I guess one would be The Matriarch, by Witi Ihimaera. I read it a number of years ago. While the characters inhabited a landscape that was familiar, the characters themselves were not. Partly this was because they were Maori, and because they were seen through Maori eyes. It was also because in the part of the country where I live (the South Island) we see a relatively small number of Maori people; most of them live in the North Island. Consequently we South Islanders have a different view of Maori people; we don't tend to be involved in things that are specifically Maori, down here, anywhere nearly as much as people up north. The Matriarch opened my eyes to the difference culture that exists in my own country - a different culture, yet it's one that's well and truly mixed up with the culture that predominates, a culture that is Anglo-European in tone.
So books don't have to be from other places to give you a different perspective. In fact, my feeling is that the closer a book is to home, in a country like ours where we still find it strange to read about street names that we actually know, the more strange it seems. This is a process that takes place as a country grows to understand itself. We're still in the middle of it.
*25.10.12 I've just found the original list.
Admittedly many of the books I've read have been from England or America, and in some ways these places aren't that different, culturally, from the world I know. But the reality is that any book that's written outside your coastline is going to be give you a different perception of the world: the language used will be full of slang and expressions you have to learn in order to read the book; things will be talked about that are common to the writer but not to you. Places are not your places, and have a different feel about them.
In these days of widespread television and movies, it's easier to have an appreciation of what British and American places look like (and I've actually travelled to the British Isles more than once, and once to a small part of the States). But all this is still within my cultural (Anglo-European) reach - it doesn't step outside it and give me any huge cultural shock.
So what books from other places have really changed my perceptions? I think one of the strongest was Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I'd come across a list of books* that someone wrote about in a magazine; they were books that had influenced him greatly. Things Fall Apart was one of the two from the list that I actually got on and read. Set in Nigeria, here was a world in which humans appeared, and behaved like humans, but everything beyond that was alien. Furthermore, the story of the father and his three wives and the way they interacted was like something out of the Old Testament. I kept thinking: this must be how Jacob had to deal with his two wives - and two concubines. It's all very well to say that the Old Testament is patriarchal, but in fact the women in Jacob's family would have had similar concerns and feelings and hurts and pains to the three wives in Things Fall Apart, and patriarchal society or not, they were as vividly human as the rest of us, and just as strong-natured as the women in this story are. 
The other book from the list was V S Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. This brought me into a strange world (a world that no longer exists, I think) in Trinidad, in which large families of husbands, wives, innumerable children and grandparents all lived together. The ongoing consequences of being the one person - Mr Biswas - who rebelled against the enclosing and oppressed feeling was the subject of the book. When I first read this book, I found it a delight. I read it again recently, and what had delighted me the first time seemed sour and gloomy. Mr Biswas, for all his ambition, never manages to get far up the ladder; something always knocks him down, and it's very unsettling. It's the antipathy of those books that state we can achieve whatever we want to achieve, if we put our minds to it. (I read this quote by Emmanuel Katongole the other day: "The idea that we can be anything we wish to be is one of the most insidious lies we can ever entertain." Mr Biswas is hampered by his family, particularly his wife, and by his circumstances. The second reading turned out to be quite depressing, in spite of the humour and wit that pervades the book.I said above that New Zealand has a small literature. That's true to a point: in the last few decades there have been hundreds of books published in New Zealand that show the culture from the eyes of those who live in it. And we've been a publishing nation for quite some time; it's just that we didn't always mange to see ourselves as different. In recent years the fiction that's been published that features New Zealand has tended to take a fairly gloomy tone - this is particularly true of those books that aim for the 'literary' market. Sometimes this is satisfactory, but there are times when it's nothing but depressing. (Stuart Hoar's The Hard Light is a prime example of this that comes to mind.)
However, thinking about books I've read from New Zealand that have changed my view, I guess one would be The Matriarch, by Witi Ihimaera. I read it a number of years ago. While the characters inhabited a landscape that was familiar, the characters themselves were not. Partly this was because they were Maori, and because they were seen through Maori eyes. It was also because in the part of the country where I live (the South Island) we see a relatively small number of Maori people; most of them live in the North Island. Consequently we South Islanders have a different view of Maori people; we don't tend to be involved in things that are specifically Maori, down here, anywhere nearly as much as people up north. The Matriarch opened my eyes to the difference culture that exists in my own country - a different culture, yet it's one that's well and truly mixed up with the culture that predominates, a culture that is Anglo-European in tone.So books don't have to be from other places to give you a different perspective. In fact, my feeling is that the closer a book is to home, in a country like ours where we still find it strange to read about street names that we actually know, the more strange it seems. This is a process that takes place as a country grows to understand itself. We're still in the middle of it.
*25.10.12 I've just found the original list.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Bit of a HitTail catchup
I've been keeping a diary of my time away in Boise, and will be posting some items on the Travel Diary blog in the next few days. I'm obviously still on Boise time, since instead of sleeping through this morning from exhaustion after some thirty-six hours travelling (broken, but only in a sense, by stopping off at my daughter's place in Auckland for the day) I was wide awake at 4.30 am.
So I thought I might as well do something useful...like blogging! Firstly I've just checked out the HitTail top four search words for this week: as usual a pretty mixed bunch.
One item is the meaning or interpretation of Winnie the Pooh . I certainly have no authorative view on this: the only time I've mentioned it, I think, was in this post, and that's relating to a pseudo interpretation of Winnie's meaning from Frederick Crews' Postmodern Pooh. Pseudo and humorous, in fact. Looking back over the number of searches relating to this topic on my HitTail account, it seems that there must be some study being done on this topic in some US University at the moment. Perhaps some English professor has set the students a tongue-in-cheek task...? It sounds like something Alan Jacobs might do - I've just read his book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - about which there'll be more in another post.
The Mousetrap script turns up as well. There have been any number of references to Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, in this blog, as this list will attest, but most of these come from Aug/Sept last year, when I was acting in the play.
The third item is Aotearoa Circus NZ, (the correct name is Circus Aotearoa) which I wrote about back in March last year. Since then a commenter had been to see the Circus, and left me a rather negative note about it. Certainly the circus was a little threadbare - which I noted at the time - but wasn't lacking in talent. The person commenting seems to have had a bit of a rough time at this circus: certainly the troupe were rough and ready, in some respects, but I didn't see anyone in the audience the day I attended getting their hair pulled, as apparently happened to this person.
Last but not least we have Chrissy Johnson. In spite of not having written on this blog for nearly a fortnight, due to being in Boise, Idaho most of that time, here's our old friend - who usually appears under the name of Chrissy Popadics, turning up again. She's the wife of one of the (former?) football players in the Boise team, and I mentioned her again recently because of the new Boise connection my family now has - my new daughter-in-law comes from there.
So I thought I might as well do something useful...like blogging! Firstly I've just checked out the HitTail top four search words for this week: as usual a pretty mixed bunch.
One item is the meaning or interpretation of Winnie the Pooh . I certainly have no authorative view on this: the only time I've mentioned it, I think, was in this post, and that's relating to a pseudo interpretation of Winnie's meaning from Frederick Crews' Postmodern Pooh. Pseudo and humorous, in fact. Looking back over the number of searches relating to this topic on my HitTail account, it seems that there must be some study being done on this topic in some US University at the moment. Perhaps some English professor has set the students a tongue-in-cheek task...? It sounds like something Alan Jacobs might do - I've just read his book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - about which there'll be more in another post.
The Mousetrap script turns up as well. There have been any number of references to Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, in this blog, as this list will attest, but most of these come from Aug/Sept last year, when I was acting in the play.
The third item is Aotearoa Circus NZ, (the correct name is Circus Aotearoa) which I wrote about back in March last year. Since then a commenter had been to see the Circus, and left me a rather negative note about it. Certainly the circus was a little threadbare - which I noted at the time - but wasn't lacking in talent. The person commenting seems to have had a bit of a rough time at this circus: certainly the troupe were rough and ready, in some respects, but I didn't see anyone in the audience the day I attended getting their hair pulled, as apparently happened to this person.
Last but not least we have Chrissy Johnson. In spite of not having written on this blog for nearly a fortnight, due to being in Boise, Idaho most of that time, here's our old friend - who usually appears under the name of Chrissy Popadics, turning up again. She's the wife of one of the (former?) football players in the Boise team, and I mentioned her again recently because of the new Boise connection my family now has - my new daughter-in-law comes from there.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Circus Aotearoa
Last year my daughter, grandson and I caught up with the Zirka Circus, a mostly Asian troupe. This was a circus that relied heavily on every member of the team being willing to so everything, including selling programmes, light sabres, tickets and so on. It was circus rendered small-scale, we thought.
And then we saw Circus Aotearoa. This is circus on a very small, very tight budget. (The aerial artiste's fishnet stockings had a large patch sewn on, for instance.) In fact, our first reaction was, this is pretty budget - and that not thought in the most friendly of senses.
A clown had some fun with small kids and an unstrung tennis racket before the actual show started, but the opening two acts didn't do much to encourage more enthusiasm. The string broke on the ringmaster's eggcup device (it's that thing you have on a string and send flying up into the air in order to catch it). He coped well with this, and managed to do his short act without one handle. The next act was the lady tightrope walker - except that she was performing on what you'd have to call a slack rope. Intentional, I'm sure, but it seemed a little odd.
However, after this, things suddenly picked up and it was a matter of spotting which of the eight performers was doing what for the rest of the afternoon. The ringmaster (yes, this circus, unlike Zirka, had a ringmaster) had a stint as a clown, and was very good. The clown from the beginning turned up again in his own act of balancing on various things that shouldn't be balanced on while juggling, and again as a half-clown tennis pro who juggled his tennis racquets and again in some other guise. The tight-rope lady did various other swinging or trapeze-type acts - four in all. One of the guys who seemed to be on hand only to throw things to the other artists, or pick up after them turned out to be a rope-swinger, doing some dazzling stuff up above our heads. The lady who'd ushered people in and then turned her attention to the sound desk came on for at least three acts in which she turned from total clowning (complete with whistle in one act) to some wonderful stuff with up to ten hula hoops. And a couple of guys who were supposed to throw knives - at someone, it never became clear who - were also on hand to do other jobs and acts at different times. (Their knife-throwing act was both clever and clownish - taking some poor guy out of the audience and fooling him into thinking he'd thrown two knives at one of the cast and somehow managed to hit the right spot each time.)
It was the good Kiwi humour and sense of fun that enlivened the show. A nice down-playing of the talent - talent good enough to fit into any decent travelling circus (you were never sure whether someone had intentionally goofed or whether it was part of the act) , and a sense of teamwork made you forget there were so few performers. There were no pyrotechnices, no lighting displays (in fact, someone had apparently forgotten to turn the - one and only - light on at the beginning), no big pieces of equipment, and even some of the costumes had a slight look of having come from an op shop (those of the clowns rather than the 'acts' people). And yet once it got underway it engaged the audience without difficulty and spoke on a level everyone was comfortable with.
It may not be a show to make you gasp at the displays of skill (we've become a bit blase about people doing daring things) but it's very entertaining and well worth a visit, though if you're expecting to see everything listed on their site's FAQ, you'll be disappointed....
And then we saw Circus Aotearoa. This is circus on a very small, very tight budget. (The aerial artiste's fishnet stockings had a large patch sewn on, for instance.) In fact, our first reaction was, this is pretty budget - and that not thought in the most friendly of senses.
A clown had some fun with small kids and an unstrung tennis racket before the actual show started, but the opening two acts didn't do much to encourage more enthusiasm. The string broke on the ringmaster's eggcup device (it's that thing you have on a string and send flying up into the air in order to catch it). He coped well with this, and managed to do his short act without one handle. The next act was the lady tightrope walker - except that she was performing on what you'd have to call a slack rope. Intentional, I'm sure, but it seemed a little odd.
However, after this, things suddenly picked up and it was a matter of spotting which of the eight performers was doing what for the rest of the afternoon. The ringmaster (yes, this circus, unlike Zirka, had a ringmaster) had a stint as a clown, and was very good. The clown from the beginning turned up again in his own act of balancing on various things that shouldn't be balanced on while juggling, and again as a half-clown tennis pro who juggled his tennis racquets and again in some other guise. The tight-rope lady did various other swinging or trapeze-type acts - four in all. One of the guys who seemed to be on hand only to throw things to the other artists, or pick up after them turned out to be a rope-swinger, doing some dazzling stuff up above our heads. The lady who'd ushered people in and then turned her attention to the sound desk came on for at least three acts in which she turned from total clowning (complete with whistle in one act) to some wonderful stuff with up to ten hula hoops. And a couple of guys who were supposed to throw knives - at someone, it never became clear who - were also on hand to do other jobs and acts at different times. (Their knife-throwing act was both clever and clownish - taking some poor guy out of the audience and fooling him into thinking he'd thrown two knives at one of the cast and somehow managed to hit the right spot each time.)
It was the good Kiwi humour and sense of fun that enlivened the show. A nice down-playing of the talent - talent good enough to fit into any decent travelling circus (you were never sure whether someone had intentionally goofed or whether it was part of the act) , and a sense of teamwork made you forget there were so few performers. There were no pyrotechnices, no lighting displays (in fact, someone had apparently forgotten to turn the - one and only - light on at the beginning), no big pieces of equipment, and even some of the costumes had a slight look of having come from an op shop (those of the clowns rather than the 'acts' people). And yet once it got underway it engaged the audience without difficulty and spoke on a level everyone was comfortable with.
It may not be a show to make you gasp at the displays of skill (we've become a bit blase about people doing daring things) but it's very entertaining and well worth a visit, though if you're expecting to see everything listed on their site's FAQ, you'll be disappointed....
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