Crystal: ice instead of sawdust

8 Dec 2023 - Photos by Matt Baker and Oliver Brajon

Whoever conceived the idea of fusing circus acts with ice skating was a mad genius. And probably a proud Canadian. Cirque du Soleil's Crystal is a big extravagant explosion of the best of both worlds with a hefty dose of all the mythology and sensibility that Canadians cherish. Crystal is held together by a straightforward, at least straightforward for Cirque, narrative. Our heroine, Crystal is a redhead in homage to the greatest of all Canadian heroines (and so that she can be instantly identified when played by different artists in different disciplines). She is also an outsider and a dreamer, as one of the many voiceovers chides, "Crystal you're so strange. What's wrong with you?" Nothing that a near death experience can't cure. Crystal goes skating to clear her head and the ice beneath her cracks dramatically, plunging her into a bizarro world that reflects her own. And ours.

Fortunately this world is filled not only with the initially menacing shadow people, but also with incredible acrobats, and ice and figure skaters. The world below the ice is also more closely aligned with traditional circus than a usual Cirque du Soleil show. The addition of sharp blades adds the element of imminent danger that is sometimes missing, and those who created the show use a constant sleight of hand blending of the art forms to keep the narrative flowing in an organic manner. Skaters casually flinging off what look like multiple axels mask the moving of props and equipment, gracefully subbing in for an army of clowns. At one point during the first act, Crystal meets the reflection version of her '50s-ish family who morph into Lynchian contortionists in their suburban living room. They are joined by a playground full of children doing acrobatics on a swingset. The ice castle backdrop bursts into projections introducing yet another narrative thread, as ice skating business people flood the rink. It is a traditional three-ring circus with one's eyes being drawn everywhere at once, inducing an overload of awe.

Of course that is topped by the first act climax when Crystal realizes that the pen she has been given can be used to alter reality, "I can write my own joy!" Fortunately for the audience, Crystal's strangeness creates a celtic music mixed with heavy metal guitar driven pinball game, using hockey players as extreme skateboarders. Somehow the mixed metaphors, Crystal donning an Oshawa Generals jersey elicits cheers that almost rip off the roof, gel into something so exhilarating and overwhelming that I had tears of joy in my eyes. And I was not alone. Yes, the narrative is dream-like in construction and full of platitudes that aren't earned, but it doesn't interfere with the flow of acts and manages to culminate in a breaking free of the ice/breaking free of social constraints moment that is truly affecting. Besides, since when is a circus, or a figure skating routine, logical? The wonderful elastic-faced clown, opens the show with a bucket of snowballs that snowballs into much comedy and a metaphor for skating and winter/the great white north itself. His showcase act, filled with enough pratfalls and splats on the ice to worry about his well-being, starts with a Zamboni crash, turns into a romance with an inanimate but luminous object, then morphs into a tap dance on skates. Logic be damned.

 It is a bit jarring to have English narration and pop vocals mixed into circus magic, but it almost earns Crystal/Crystal's cri de coeur of "Fight for air. Fight for love. I want to go back. Above," before the arena explodes yet again. The avalanche of exuberant acts—a juggler on skates who creates imagery out of the balls' trajectories, a trio of preening competitive figure skating businessmen, pole dancers on pendulums, typewriter percussion transforming into a visibly wobbling tower of chairs crowned with an acrobat contortionist, breathtakingly romantic figure skating duos swirling spectacularly around an ice piano, and a bare-chested (an erotic relief after all the sweaters, scarves and toques) Guillaume Blais descending from the heavens for a breathtaking trapeze act, and so much more. As well as the individual acts and the compelling cohesiveness of the flow, the individual components need to be lauded, I just wish I had all the names but in this case Crystal, and Cirque du Soleil, are the stars. The costumes by Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt are colourful and vibrant with dashes of wit. The boxheads who appear only once are haunting and the pages of writing that attach to the shadow people as they glide by are more evocative than the narration.

The technical demands are seamless and more than impressive. The ice castle, which is also a launching ramp for the daredevil hockey rats, fades into the background until it is needed to loom with projections that nuclearize the otherwise wintry colour scheme. The sonics echo with extra rear speakers providing a heft to that echo lag that is the exclusive nostalgic province of hockey arenas. The musicians continually astonish with various solos. All the more so as they are competing with the pop music pre-recorded tracks and vocals. It is a mash-up that has no right to work but does. Most importantly, the circus acts are first rate and while I have no standard by which to judge the skating, the accent on athleticism is impressive, the more so when it dials back to the sheer beauty of a body flying over the ice. The similarity to a body soaring on aerial straps is a tidy, sweet metaphor with the Canadian element being down to earth (down to frozen water?). Cirque du Soleil, the circus as an artform itself, is in a continual process of evolution and reinvention. From the many show I saw before, through Alegria, Corteo, Volta, Luzia, Toruk, Kurios, Totem, Quidam, Michael Jackson: The Immortal Tour, Alegria, Zumanity and Kooza, Cirque has tried many variations on the circus formula, turns out putting it all on ice works as well as sawdust.