Cirque Berzerk!

Ladies and Gentlemen! Now appearing in Downtown LA until the end of August under its own big top is Cirque Berserk, Los Angeles’ very own circus. And Cirque Berzerk is just that with the modus operandi being “berserk” and “berserk” being the applicable word for the entire evening…but in a good way — a really, really good way. It’s sort of a Pre-Raphaelite Circus based on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld with Beelzebub/Death as the ringmaster mixed with the movie Bedazzled mixed with the ’30s decadence of “Cabaret” mixed with the Marx Brothers’ esoteric humor, and then all this mixed metaphorically with a just a hot swallow of absinthe. Just think of it — an entire evening of The 7 Deadly Sins (with these definitely being of the Mortal category) which requires contrition…but only after you’ve watched the show.

With the concept of setting being defined as “time and location,” it’s an important element in this event. Your evening starts by driving to the Los Angeles State Historic Park downtown, which spans 32 acres (otherwise known as “The Cornfield”), and seeing in the distance a huge red and white striped big-top looming surrealistically on the outskirts of Downtown’s Chinatown. As you get closer, besides the big-top, you see adjacent a charmingly lit beer garden and unique vendors accompanied by intermittent explosions of fireballs into the sky. You’ve arrived. Cirque Berzerk enticingly beckons you to participate (only as a viewer/voyeur) in witnessing the struggle between the under/overworld which creates a sort of netherworld.

Cirque Berzerk, which debuted its new show on June 18th, presents a twisted Big Top experience. The tight-knit “family” troupe created by Kevin Bourque and Suzanne Bernel at Burning Man, now features a death-defying double trampoline act, a bone-bending, sensuous acrobatic dance, operatic sopranos, Olympic gymnasts, prima ballerinas, mind-melting bungee acts and an aerial performance by co-artistic director/co-choreographer Neal Everett and dancer Tavi Stutz that makes hearts throb. All this and even more: jaw-dropping acrobatics; stunning male and female aerialists; sexy, fiery burlesque dancers; gothic stilt walkers and punk rock clowns; psychedelic vaudevillian tomfoolery, and even one very voluptuous contortionist.

Once inside, you realize the dimensions of the upcoming experience. Even the ushers and other staff are part of the cast. They charmingly involve you from the moment they show you to your seat. Once seated, as you look around, everything seems slightly…skewed. As creator Suzanne Bernal likes to say, “There is something here for every reveler!” Away we go!

The four musicians situated high up in the back of the tent overlooking the stage, who have been playing this strange sort of techno-klezmer music minus the clarinet, suddenly switch into intro music, and three bizarre singers on the stage tell us to get ready for the show to begin by introducing our host for evening. Can you spell phantasmagorical? That’s our host — Death as the Grand Poobah of the lower depths of Eternity, the chief curator of merriment in his self-styled debaucherous arena, gathering souls, keeping his Mephistophelian soiree interesting. Looking like a sort of Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows who hasn’t changed clothes in about two decades, he’s grotesquely seductive in a sort of “never take candy from strangers” sort of way. We’re told that he keeps one eye on the party and a second trained eye on Earth, looking to engage and recruit the tired, willing souls who seek a permanent, more carnal change of pace. Get the picture? I know. Me too. I immediately thought, “Count me in.”

The embodiments creating the evening are of Lust, Death, Fire, Siren, Debonair, Skin, Evil and Flight, all which propel our main character of one woman on an unexpected journey of self-exploration. Can she soar above the clouds without being brought down in a tangled past of tragedies and regret? Can she ascend above conflict, or will she wallow in the mire of her own self-pity, attempting flight without wind? Finally, when the sand completely empties from her metaphoric hourglass, she truly then takes flight, absorbing the long view — reflecting on what was, is and will be.

Lust, always present in some form throughout the evening, delights itself in taunting one’s spirit. Here, lust embodies itself in the form of beautiful burlesque dancers “whose grace and fluidity reminds us all of the tepidity of life.”

Of course, we have Fire in this evening. Across centuries and eons, man’s ascent has been directly tied to his ability to control “the flame.” It heats you, it feeds you, it wards off evil, and it can consume you. When your eternal abode is in the lower depths, you have plenty of time on your hands to master fire itself. The keepers of the flame in this evening “blow it into the flight and extinguish it with their mouths.”

The Siren, Tigre, is the mistress of the microphone, the torch singer of this underworld cabaret, a rathskeller existing on the perimeter of the stage where the deceased congregate to toast the good fortune of their mortality as we all watch the show together.

Next we move on to blindfolds and restraints and the “Debonair miscreant.” There’s one in every crowd. The androgynous tease who swaggers into the room, turning heads, parting crowds and entrancing all within earshot with every last syllable that crosses his lips. His bravado reeks of seduction and eventually evolves into an Apache Dance between himself and the other man.

There is Skin as the embodiment of the breathtaking journey that follows the melding of two people’s hearts and souls — equal parts of the sensual and sinewy, rapturous and remorseful. And the ever-present clown, but this clown resembles a Parisian clochard/street person whose attitude does not evoke sympathy or empathy — just a sense of unease; not unlike the unease that is created by four men with two invisible trampolines separated by an enormous wall that they keep landing on top of, only to be airborne again in one direction or the other. Their attire looks as though they just stepped out of the movie Gangs of New York, with that same threatening menace of those gangs in lower Manhattan at the turn of the 19^th century, with their perpetual movement of always being on guard and also putting the spectator on guard since it’s a case of “always expect the unexpected.”

The end, of course, is the fire of Eternity, of which everyone is a part in some way, as the stage is engulfed in forms of fire that you’d never imagine let alone see. Cirque Berzerk claims that “inside our bizarro big top world is a netherworld filled with phantasmagoric visions that will grope at your senses, and oddities that are bound to scorch the very tips of your soul, if you have the testicular fortitude for the succulent taste of the decadent delirium of this fete.”

Knowing this, I just want to add going in that, besides it being good (I won’t say “virtuous”) to be familiar with the list of the 7 Deadly Sins, you might want to also know the “Seven Virtues,” just in case. Here they are made up of the old “cardinal” virtues adapted from a list by Plato: Fortitude, Prudence, Justice, and Temperance, combined with the three “theological” virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity.

Bon voyage and ora pro nobis.