Troupe Vertigo

Cirque Returns – Millennium Park – August 9, 2023

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Cirque (specifically Troupe Vertigo) returned (this year performing to classical music, not Hollywood film scores), and so did I, although this time I sat in the cheap seats (read free) as opposed to the choral balcony behind the stage where I sat last year.

Also, this time I went early to check out the Family Fun in the Chase Promenade North Tent prior to the show, where I hoped to learn, from CircEsteem, how to juggle, spin plates and do hand stands with the other children in attendance. I’m proud to say that, quick study that I am, I can now juggle one ball, with the prospect of two looming in the near future.

I don’t know if it was my new vantage point or familiarity breeding indifference, but I wasn’t as enthralled by the theatrics as I was last year, not to say that there wasn’t great skill on display. But I concentrated more on the beautiful music and also found myself mesmerized by the coordinated movements of the crew working the ropes for the aerialists. To each his own.

Cirque Goes to Hollywood – Millennium Park – July 6, 2022

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Hoorah for Hollywood, whose music the Grant Park Orchestra played as the backdrop for Troupe Vertigo, a dizzying group that creates an atmosphere, its website says, “where reality bends, expectations twist and the body embraces the imagination.”

I’ve given up on reality, as I hear it’s not so great, and try not to have any expectations, so as to avoid being disappointed, but I assure you that the manner in which the cirque performers’ bodies were bent and twisted into dangerous and sometimes painful looking positions, while hanging above the stage dangling from ropes or doing handstands on gymnastic equipment, transcended anything I routinely imagine.

The feats executed during the theme from Mission Impossible fit that bill. but, when three performers came out wearing horse heads while performing to the theme from The Magnificent Seven, I thought they should have done so for the prior number, the theme from The Godfather. I wonder if they were asked to do so but found the courage to refuse.

A little over three years ago I wrote about the Chicago Philharmonic playing classical music to accompany the Cirque de la Symphonie. How many more combinations like this do I need to see to complete a full cirque[it]?