| Traces Through Sunday, March 4 Segerstrom Hall Segerstrom Center for the Arts Tickets: $20-$70 :: scfta.org |
A young man and woman dance closely and delicately together under a spotlight as the five other members of their ensemble watch and slowly gravitate into positions that will soon be an explosion of movement.
The moment is fleeting but note-perfect in what it conveys and how it works within the framework of a larger piece. They are not Astaire and Rogers, nor is there any attempt to be. This is instead, in fact, the circus.
In Traces, a new production by the performance company 7 Fingers, a group of young performers – we shouldn’t call them dancers and they’re certainly more than acrobats – attempt to leave some final statement or “trace” of themselves inside a makeshift urban bunker while something unseen and unpleasant happens outside.
That thin reed of a storyline shouldn’t really concern you. It serves only to showcase the amazing work of the ensemble over a fast and sweaty 90-minute triumph that is more original and more entertaining than either of the two worlds the production generates from.
In fact, Traces is described as a “new circus experience” in which the performers are bare-faced, simply clad and projecting themselves as much as their talents. The result is nothing as showy and lavish as Cirque du Soleil productions or as superficial or illogical as most musicals tend to ring.
The show and its seven performers (Mason Ames, Valerie Benoit-Charbonneau, Mathieu Cloutier, Bradley Henderson, Philippe Normand-Jenny, Xia Zhengqi, and Jonathan Casabon) harness a charm and variety that keep things interesting. The use of various performing styles like acrobatics, modern and avant-garde dance and juggling crash into different and mostly modern musical forms like electronica, hip-hop, French acoustic pop, acid jazz, pop standard “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and even a Radiohead song thrown in for good measure and it’s often hard not to say, “Wow.”
Wrapped in a multimedia presentation, Traces frequently feels more like a rock concert in the way the artists feed off the audience and ultimately create an edgy modernity and athleticism that thumps, spins, rolls, and somersaults into a supreme cool.
