Turning athleticism into artistry
By Stephanie Merry
Friday, Aug. 10, 2012

After all the anticipation and celebration (thanks to some shiny medals), the end of Olympics gymnastics competition can trigger a hole in hearts, if not in schedules. But those going through withdrawal might find some relief at National Harbor, where feats of flexibility and aerial artistry will be on view in the Cirque du Soleil show “Totem.”

The man behind the traveling show is writer-director Robert Lepage, perhaps best known as the boundary-pushing Canadian artist who mounted a controversial, visually daring reinvention of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” for the Metropolitan Opera. “Totem” draws inspiration from creation myths and evolution and marks Lepage’s second entry into the Cirque compendium; he also concocted “Ka,” which has a permanent home in Las Vegas. High-brow opera and circus shows might seem like two very different beasts, but Lepage sees a number of commonalities, which made crossing over that much easier.

“An acrobat and an opera singer are pretty similar in the sense that what they do is larger than life,” Lepage says by phone before heading into rehearsals for an opera version of “The Tempest” in Quebec. “They don’t move or sing or speak in a regular fashion. It’s very extreme, very Olympian.”

In some ways, the reasons people love to watch opera and Cirque shows may have something to do with why so many camp out in front of the television every fourth August. It’s a way for mere mortals to stare in awe at demigods capable of seemingly superhuman achievements.

“That’s what the circus is also about,” Lepage says. “You see regular people onstage, but because of their physical abilities and because of the extreme nature of what they do, they can only play larger-than-life characters.

“We see divers, and for a short moment there, they look like birds. Or people go faster than a human being is supposed to go. So that whole extremity, I think, is actually very similar.”

The work process at Cirque du Soleil also is similar to Lepage’s work at the Met, not to mention at the multidisciplinary company Ex Machina, where Lepage is artistic director. The biggest difference -- and challenge -- is the creative freedom.

“Usually when you want to pitch an idea for a film or a TV series, you would always refer to something that already exists to assure the producers or the presenters that what you’re doing is not too avant garde and you’re not taking too many risks,” he says. “But at Cirque, they despise that, they hate that. They don’t want you to say it’s a cross between this and that. They just want to do something that’s never been done . . . it’s a very different approach.”

With that in mind, the director dreamt up “Totem.” The show was crafted around the time of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, but Lepage says the production wasn’t designed to make a statement about evolution vs. creationism. Rather, he looked at origin myths from around the world, blending them with artistic vignettes meant to mimic a human’s progression from the tadpolelike state of conception to our compulsion for flight. But in the end, traveling “soft circus” shows (as opposed to permanent “hard circus” varieties, such as “Ka”) are less about a concept or narrative. The main event is beautiful movement.

“Whatever the story, it’s really about giving the best performance possible,” Le­page says. “So you get really in­cred­ible moving machines, these incredible athletes. And a lot of the people that are hired on the soft circus, the people we present in the shows on tour very often -- I’d say at least half of the cast -- are not from an artistic background. They’re from an Olympian background. . . . It’s really about athletes meeting up with poetry.”