The Cirque du Soleil is in Halifax this weekend with Corteo, a show of breathtaking physicality and passionate beauty with intense theatricality in music and design.

If you loved Baz Luhrmann’s movie Moulin Rouge you’ll love this show; the time period is the same – around 1900. The mood is an historic European one charged with emotion and familiar design elements – baroque, Art Nouveau, Victorian costume, a nod to Commedia dell’arte, modern references; lighting that is gorgeous and recalls Old Masters paintings.

Corteo, first produced in 2005 and created by director Daniele Finzi Pasca , is a joyous parade of life as a lead character, who has just died, looks over his past in visions of boyhood pillow fights with trampoline beds to lost love in achingly beautiful aerial ballet to the wonderful, joie de vivre of street carnivals, populated by his circus friends including a giant and two petite performers, muscular tumblers, a Mozart-whistling maestro and beautiful young ladies.

Apart from acrobatics and aerial ballet by amazingly skilled performers, Corteo is poetry in motion about love and loss, life and death. However, there are lots of comic elements and convivial warmth in a fast-paced show that lifts an ordinary day into the sublime through the power of music, movement and design.

(I remember when I first took my daughter to Cirque du Soleil she started spontaneously singing with the classical female vocalist; on Thursday night a little girl on the walk home was spinning herself around street sign poles imitating an amazingly agile and romantic pole dancer.)

In a first for Cirque du Soleil set designer Jean Rabasse has split the arena in two with a central rotating stage based on the floor in the aisle of Chartres Cathedral; each half of the audience faces the other, sometimes visible, sometimes not.

This design creates the illusion of a proscenium theatre and a feeling of intimacy. The stage design includes fantastic water-coloured, baroque curtains, inspired by a 19^th century French painting, and musicians’ pits that recall art nouveau subway station entries with enticing metal twists and circular street lamps.

Corteo has all the stupendous and sometimes death-defying physical feats expected in a Cirque show: men inside spinning hoops that come perilously close to the ground but never veer out of control; stunning and skillful aerial dance; tumbling on trampolines, swinging on highbars, women flying through the air grabbed by shirtless men in Sinbad pants taking them back to a safe aerial perch (Thank God).

There are some unusual comic and sweet features in Corteo: a petite woman, the Little Clowness, in an historic gown suspended by giant helium balloons who floats out over the audience and needs to be pushed back up in the air; a man on a ladder trying to reach up to the angels in an amazing, at times frightening, performance; and just one tiny moment when the giant clown dances with the Little Clowness on a round platform while an angel sprinkles them with snow turning them into a magical snow globe.

The angels constantly sweeping in from overhead in exquisite costumes are a lovely presence. The opening sequence of aerial dancers swinging from giant chandeliers as they fly up and down is gorgeous and immediately sets the over-the-top theatrical, sensually-charged mood. And then the ending works beautifully with the full cast back in period costume and male gymnasts swinging in spelling binding patterns form bars as the dead clown cycles in the sky towards heaven. The show on Thursday got a much deserved standing ovation.

The language in Corteo is a mix of English and Italian with a wonderful Spanish song about lost love; the music is a fabulous mix of classical song, upbeat march and dance music; even a bit of bagpipes for a comic Scottish golfing scene. There’s a wonderful duelling duet between a whistling maestro and a virtuosic violinist.

Tickets are pricey but with a Cirque show you get your money’s worth. Corteo is on today, 3 and 7 p.m.; Sunday, 1 and 5 p.m.

Fast Facts (taken from Corteo publicity material):

Corteo first premiered in Montreal in 2005 and has visited more than 60 cities in 19 different countries as a Big Top show before transforming in an arena show in 2016.

More than 9 million people around the world have seen the show

The cast represents more than 18 nationalities. Performers are from Argentina, Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, United Kingdom, Ukraine, United States and Uzbekistan.

To create over 260 costumes for Corteo’s cast, costume designer Dominique Lemieux used over 100 different fabrics and trims, concentrating on a subtle colour palette that includes blues, pinks, fuchsia and gold with appliquéd spangles and jewels. Most of the fabrics were dyed, sublimated and silk screen printed to give them a patina of age.

For the numerous angels, on average, each angel dress requires 25 metres of fabric which translates to over 500 meters of material (the approximate length of five football fields) appearing on stage each night.

The smallest shoe size in the show is a children’s size 3 and the largest is an 18 EEE.

The centre stage labyrinth incorporates an eight-inch Moebius strip painted at its center as a symbol of infinity and continuity

The two baroque style “Roll Drop” (58 feet wide and almost 40 feet high) curtains and sideways opening Italian style curtains were inspired by designer Rabasse’s visit to the National Art Gallery of Canada to see the exhibit, The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown. He was specifically inspired by French painter Adolphe Willette’s fantasy Parisian bohemian scene Parc Domine (1885).

More than 9,000 images were used in the R&D phase of the set design to blend many visual styles and influences, from the baroque to the modern.

• Letitia Fraser spreads her wings
• The Amazing World of Alan Syliboy at Dalhousie Art Gallery to Aug. 11

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: circus, cirque-du-soleil, entertainment, music, theatre