Rankin File: ** Cirque Dreams Illumination

The Fox Cities P.A.C. featured Cirque Dreams Illumination this weekend with the billing that the ordinary would be transformed into the extraordinary. There is nothing ordinary about the skill of the company’s participants including a wirewalker, magician, cube aerialists chair climber, people hanging by their feet, a strap flyer, hand balancers, dancers, vaudevillian, all accompanied by a saxophonist and singer.

The performances; “Drenched” (the bathtub scene) with the strap flyer & dancer as well as the performance “Daily Trash & Grind” with shredded waist paper clothed hand balancers, delivered the promise of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Although all the performances were extraordinary in skill the premise of transforming everyday life into something extraordinary didn’t really come across in most other cases. This was after all the kind of entertainment that has been around for hundreds of years and whose emphasis was on the skill of the performers and not the atmosphere in which it is performed. The entire show with the exception of the vignette that included people in the audience was accompanied by music that was in the vain that could best be described as a cross between hip hop, burlesque and the stuff that would accompany the dish twirlers during the Ed Sullivan show 50 years ago, and always a bit too loud.