Thursday, May 26, 2011

Cirque du Holy Crap

One of the nice things about becoming an adult is being able to do the nicer things in life.  My weekend excursion to Seoul last weekend is one of those.  Being a teacher in Korea provides for a semi-comfortable life, provided you don't have kids and aren't running around pretending you make tons of money. This past weekend my friend Gisela and I decided to go to Cirque Du Soleil.  Now as my friends and I have gotten older I dare to say that our tastes have gotten a little more sophisticated.  No longer is it the 10 dollar handle of whiskey.  It is now the 50 dollar bottle of scotch.  I would not be surprised if in fifteen years it is no longer the punk concert, but the classical recital we are all attending.  Ok, maybe I'm getting a little ridiculous here but it's all in good fun.

To this point, I think the main difference is not that our tastes have changed, but we finally have the disposable income to be able to afford to do all these awesome things.  I have had several friends in the past few years attend a show and all of them have come away seriously impressed.  Knowing this, I went in with high expectations.  I was not let down.

The show here was about an alien who crash landed somewhere and was experiencing the local customs and life.  However, the plot line really seems to be secondary to the ridiculous gymnastics.  It's surprising when one of the least spectacular things you see on the stage is a contortionist.  The lady seriously was standing on one leg with the other leg fully extended behind her head.  If that wasn't scary enough, she then kept going to the point where her foot was next to her ear, the ear on the other side of her body.  Like I said though, this was possibly one of the least impressive feats.  Most of the things that I found seriously impressive took huge amounts of timing, body control.  I don't even want to know how bumped and bruised these guys got during practice. 

An excellent example of the body control and timing was in the final act.  People were flying across the stage left right and center, but nobody hit each other.  In fact there were several times where people went flying across the stage, and were caught, but not caught like a firefighter catching a falling baby, caught like a cheerleader going up for a stunt.  It was honestly ridiculous.  See the attached video at about 3 minutes in to see what I'm talking about.  The show was spectacular and when I walked out of the show I felt like it had been money well spent.