Posted by Ruby on Oct 26, 2015 in | 0 comments

AS WE walk into Cabaret Sauvage, Paris’ Spiegeltent, we are given a numbered ticket. The Parisians smile and head to the bar for a complimentary punch. But the numbered entry is no drink voucher – in fact, it’s an admission to ”purgatory”, the realm of the show we are about to experience. Punch in hand, nevertheless, we take a booth seat and a rather slick man in a suit approaches. ”Bienvenue. Are you be ready to perform your act?” We look at each other and back to him. Who is he, what does he know and why is he talking to us? As we begin to respond, a slight girl in a hospital gown screams and runs by, a DJ at the on-stage bar turns up the mix and a master of ceremonies begins a roll-call. We are all dead, he tells us, we just don’t realise it yet.
And so by the time La Vie begins, we are already well in the grasp of the 7 Fingered hand of this famous French-Canadian modern circus company. And there we stay for the rest of the night between breathtaking acts of hand balance, aerial, diabolo, tango, beatbox and lashings of black humour.
“We want to make people feel they are alive.”

”La Vie is our only show so far created on request,” says Samuel Tetreault, one of the seven co-creators and performers. ”Australian producer [of New York’s Spiegelworld Festival] Ross Mollison approached us in 2007. He asked us to come up with a cabaret show for late-night New York audiences. It had to be a bit adult-oriented – quirky, edgy or daring. The only thing he imposed on us really was the title, La Vie [Life]”.
La Vie at Spiegeltent in Feb 2012.
La Vie might sound cool for an anglophone audience but these francophones from Montreal found it slightly cheesy, Tetreault says. ”But nevertheless we decided that we were going to create that show. It appealed a lot for us to take the traditional cabaret as a base but somehow make it ‘7 Fingers’ like.” And after an initial brainstorm, they realised that if they went against the obviousness of the title, it was actually an interesting launch pad.
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”We soon decided, ‘Well, let’s talk about life but let’s, in fact, talk about death.’ And maybe that is actually the best way to actually talk about life. Too often, human beings tend to realise the value of what they hold only when they are about to lose it: a friendship, a love story, a house … or life. So many people after a near-death experience realise they have so much more to see and do that they become filled with this vital energy.
”That’s a little bit of what we’re trying to do – create a show that is very surprising and provocative.”
La Vie at Spiegeltent in Feb 2012.
Strong in the rehearsal process was the idea of the collective creation that has been the philosophy of the company since its 2002 inception when this band of Cirque du Soleil performers decided to create their own work.
”I think that [creating collectively] allows a great stirring of ideas,” Tetreault says. ”It’s a mix of individual ideas that quickly get confronted with the group and because of that dynamic way of sharing ideas, each gets richened by the vision of the others. I believe that this collective process allows for a show that is eclectic with many different styles – slapstick, poetic or dramatic – and if it were only one director, it might not have been so diverse.”
The show presents the judgments of archetypal characters who have arrived in purgatory. We learn about their lives and their deaths through dazzling acts of acrobatics, dance and circus arts. There is the master of ceremonies (Sebastien Soldevila), the femme fatale (Mimi, Emile Bonnavaud), mentally troubled woman (Isabelle Chasse), the regular guy (usually Patrick Leonard but in Melbourne the role will be played by Adam Kuchler), the stewardess (Krin Haglund), businessman (Tetreault) and the ”regular” woman (Faon Shane).
”For me the show is also about breaking taboos,” says Chasse, whose role as the ”crazy girl” involves an extraordinary straitjacket contortion routine and a powerful and funny knotted bed-sheet escape tissue act. ”So when the public comes into the house, I’m talking to myself and being really creepy – like one of those crazy people you see on the street that makes you want to change sides. And then, with the tissue number, you realise that [my character] is actually quite tender and funny and quirky, and the whole story unfolds that she wasn’t always crazy but she was locked in an insane asylum for 10 years and that’s when she became crazy. It’s about not judging so quickly.”
For Chasse, a highly respected circus performer the world over, the difference between a good performance and a great one is ”the amount of energy that you have behind your movement, and the amount of sensitivity and presence that you have”.
So what does La Vie reveal about la vie?
”You can’t cheat when you’re on stage performing circus acrobatics and I think, ultimately, you cannot cheat with life. It comes back to you,” Tetreault says. ”You have to be real. If you’re not true to the moment, to your emotions, then you end up unhappy, in a way. So performing requires of you that presence, that engagement, that intensity. You can feel some nights when you’re off or when you’re really on and present and that’s the greatest feeling.”
They want the audience to feel the same: ”We want to shake people a little bit. This is a live performance. People are sweating for you, people may fall and break their neck, you might get [hit by] a flying diabolo if the juggler drops it. So we want to make them feel that they are in that moment – like they are alive.”
The best thing about the show is a simple message that is true and universal, Chasse says: ”That we should love and feel and dream and fly and do things while we can, because life is shorter than we think it is. And I think that is a good reminder. To live passionately and take advantage of it while you can.”
Which, one can assume, involves more circus, more tango and more cabaret .. with a 7 Fingered grasp.
Read online here