If the idea of seeing the circus sounds like a nice diversion from modern life, "Traces" is not for you.
The thrilling off-Broadway show that opened Monday at the Union Square Theatre is more likely to leave you with a delicious sense of dread. Send in the clowns? More like send in the goons.
The mood is set from the beginning when an offstage voice subverts the traditional warning to turn off all cell phones with the encouragement to keep them on. Why? You never know who may be trying to call. We are also told to note the locations of the emergency exits because "something terrible could happen at any moment."
Indeed it could. With the performers so close in this intimate, 499-seat theater, the creators — the Montreal-based collective known as 7 Fingers — have found a perfect location for this kinetic, beautifully sinister, urban "circus on a human scale."
The 90-minute hip-hop-flavored show mixes high-risk acrobatics, music and dance with the thrill of street performance. The seven-member ensemble goes from traditional eye-popping stunts such as spinning inside a 6-foot whirling ring to leaping through hoops to whipping around a basketball to doing skateboard tricks.
The acts are interestingly — though not always flawlessly — connected by a post-apocalyptic feel. It all takes place in a makeshift shelter made from tarps and seems to get kicked off by an explosion or a car crash, thrusting the seven together. A projector occasionally beams images from above the stage to a back screen, furthering the sense of paranoia by adding a touch of surveillance.
The threat of violence is always around the corner: The hand-balancer's act using chairs begins as a police interrogation, the teeterboard section starts as a gang assault and the pole act seems to originate in a prison. Police lights sometimes flash and chalk outlines are made of each acrobat, which doubles as a clever way of applying the chalk needed to decrease friction on equipment.
Directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, the pace is breathless and electric. The seven performers — six guys and one woman all dressed in pants and jackets — sweat and puff and step forward to reveal intimate details of themselves.
One was born in 1986. Another weighs 160 pounds. One says his mother and father were both physiologists. One confesses to being clumsy, another inflexible (ha!). One says he's a romantic. By the end, they are more than just performers, something Cirque du Soleil can't accomplish.
The music veers from whimsical — the acrobats dance with their boards as if in a Busby Berkeley musical to the song "It's Only a Paper Moon" — to songs by Radiohead, Blackalicious and John Zorn. The performers also play piano on stage, an odd but touching requirement from the creators.
The acrobats — Mason Ames, Valerie Benoit-Charbonneau, Mathieu Cloutier, Bradley Henderson, Phillipe Normand-Jenny, Xia Zhengqi and Florian Zumkehr — both threaten each other and joke around, often simultaneously. After hand-balancer Zumkehr has delivered a thrilling, high-octane act and appears spent, one of his colleagues hands him a guitar and insists he then sing a song. "Nice job, romantic boy," he is told. Zumkehr dutifully obliges.
Carroll, Snider and their five other collaborators — all ex-Cirque du Soleil members — founded 7 Fingers in 2002 and have created shows including "Loft," "La Vie," "Psy" and "Patinoire."
"Traces" has existed in one form or another for five years and is on tour, but might consider a permanent home in Union Square, a young, hipster, slightly crazed part of town that also houses De La Guarda's "Fuerza Bruta: Look Up."
Hectic and scary? Slightly paranoid? Oddly biographical? Very, very cool? Welcome to New York, folks. You'll fit in fine.
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Online:
http://tracesusa.com/
http://7doigts.com/en
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Mark Kennedy can be reached at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits