Cirque du Soleil has come to Miami with no elephants but lots of surrealism
Mauro Mozzani, the Italian starring as a possibly dead clown in Corteo, the Cirque du Soleil production opening Thursday at Bayfront Park, finished rehearsal one recent morning and retired to the dressing room he shares with Russian acrobats and at least one seven-foot clown colleague.
Mozzani wore no makeup; his rhinestone-studded harlequin suit hung on a rack with the other costumes. He is 47, with a middle-aged man’s drooping eyes and a paunch. ”The character is very close to me,” Mozzani said. “In some situations I speak about my own life.”
Corteo follows the memories of a dead clown looking back on his life, or a living clown having a very long, Fellini-esque dream — it isn’t clear which — over 18 acts. Some are conventional circus fare, like strap dancing and juggling. One relies on the skills of a professional whistler from Oklahoma; in another, a midget clown flies, kept aloft by giant helium balloons.
The Quebec-based Cirque organization drew close to 10 million spectators last year. This year it’s running 18 shows on four continents and developing other projects like Cirque-themed restaurants and bars.
Corteo — parade, in Italian — is as lavish as all the other Cirque shows, traveling with more than 3,500 costumes, one massive railed steel arch for moving scenery and personnel above the stage and one on-stage labyrinth which ”exactly reproduces the proportions and size of the classic design on the floor of the aisle in Chartres Cathedral,” according to the show’s publicity materials.
The publicity materials also have some of the greatest circus-related Zen koans of all time, like this one from the show’s creator, Daniele Finzi Pasca: “The labyrinth is a great voyage: To find yourself you have to lose yourself.”
In the course of finding himself, Mozzani’s character gets around more than you’d suppose a possibly dead clown would. He appears on stage for the better part of two hours to watch his own funeral, juggle a soccer ball, ride a flying bed and direct midget actors in a mightily abridged Romeo and Juliet.
”I see all my life,” he said. “There are nice, beautiful things: friends, lovers, colleagues, memories from when I was a child . . . It is a good nostalgia, a nostalgia that gives energy.”
Mozzani came to clowning when he was 24; a good age, he thinks, because by then a man has had a bit of living but isn’t yet grown up.
He doesn’t go in much for clown slapstick, the big-shoed bumbling, colliding and falling that most people associate with the circus.
For the first decade of his career, he practiced the method of Jacques Lecoq, a French mime, but turned toward what he called a ”new philosophy of the clown” after meeting Daniele Finzi Pasca, director of Corteo. It is, he said, “more intimate, bringing the clown closer to the actor, and the actor closer to the clown.
”You have to have a very big — strong — ego, because being on stage is very difficult,” he said. ‘I remember the first time my teacher put the red nose on me. `Go, make people laugh,’ he said; I try everything and people don’t laugh. But you become naked, up there, and at this moment people start to laugh.”
The original source of this article can be found at:
www.miamiherald.com / Thu, Nov. 13, 2008
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