If you ever wondered what the Wild West would have been like if pioneers and gauchos, railroad workers and gold prospectors, and cowboys and saloon dancers had been circus artists, Cirque Éloize has your answer.
Hailing from Montreal, Quebec, Cirque Éloize (serk el-wahz) has been leading the reinvention of circus arts since its founding in 1993.
The ensemble turned their French Canadian eyes to the open range in “Saloon,” the most recent of their 11 productions, which UCSB Arts & Lectures presented at the Granada Theatre in an early, school-night performance last week.
Opening with a trio singing around an imaginatively lit campfire, the company captured the Old West in an uninterrupted 80-minute performance set to a jubilee of live bluegrass and acoustic country-western music with rich vocals, guitar, banjo, harmonica, drum, piano and fiddle.
From heartachey “I’m the Only One There Is to Blame” to iconic tunes such as Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” to a moving all-cast a cappella rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Éloize taps into our most romantic notions about life in the west.
Breathtaking derring-do began with a set of look-ma-no-hands pole work that had the crowd gasping and cheering when a performer leaped from a second-story platform to catch himself by his legs on the pole with his head only inches from the stage.
Complicated juggling and sleight-of-hand hat tricks were like Olympic skating events. Feats that were amazing, difficult and beautiful became too easy to criticize when the third time was the charm for successful completion.
Still, you couldn’t help getting caught up in wonder at what people can do.
A saloon dancer froze time in a one-armed handstand atop a three-high stack of acrobats.
She and a female cowhand made swirling, entangled aerial-rustic art while hanging, often by only one hand, from a spinning chandelier.
Pairs of men — very tall men — paused all breathing in the theater when they launched each other from a springy seesaw and flipped upside down and all around 15 feet in the air. Serious gasping. Nervous giggling. (That was me.)
Super human feats aside, my very favorite moments were when a single artist had the stage to themselves and one particular skill or theme was featured throughout an entire segment.
While a vocalist sang Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a woman in a giant hoop rolled and swirled and spun on the floor. For the entire song. The theater was dark. The audience was rapt. Her movement was fluid, and her balance was astonishing.
Later, one man — with voice effects, evocative posture and gestures, a pair of ropes and upper body strength to spare — told the story of his horse. You could see reigns and gallops, and feel flight, freedom and loss. I’m not a horse-y person, but I sure wanted to be after that transcendent piece of circus theater.
Vigorous, precision dance numbers wove the acts together.
A rough-hewn, two-story set transformed from the interior of the bar of the title to a railroad to a mineshaft to the façade of a western town.
Props, sound and lighting blended imaginatively to create vivid cinematic scenes. A single glaring headlight and a rolling spinet piano each depicted trains moving across the stage; a handcar became the launching device; and two actors on crates with conveyor belts acted out a train-top chase scene.
No doubt the next morning saw many kids, inspired by the physical magic they saw in “Saloon,” jumping on beds, cartwheeling on grass, spinning on swingsets and hanging upside down from monkey bars, imagining they’re in the American west.
— Local arts critic Judith Smith-Meyer is a round-the-clock appreciator of the creative act. She can be reached at news@noozhawk.com. The opinions expressed are her own.