To enter the world of Cirque Plume is to fall into a magical wonderland of fairies and otherworldly creatures – a musical universe where artists flit around the stage, sometimes in slow motion.
Poetry, and specifically the idea of a “poem in action”, is the signature of this French circus company, which is based in the eastern city of Besançon, near the Swiss border.
But after more than 30 years and 2,500 shows in Europe and around the world, including New York and Sao Paulo – and as La Perle by Dragone is getting set to open in Dubai later this year – the dream is ending.
Cirque Plume has just embarked on its farewell tour with The Last Season, a "show that moves through seasons the way we move through ages", confronting the reality of climate change along the way.
The circus was created in 1984 by brothers Bernard and Pierre Kudlak, and seven friends.
“A Cirque Plume show is made by the living for the living,” says Bernard on the company’s website. “It’s joyful, colourful, profound, poetic, messy, rough and ready and precise. It’s like life.”
In the final production, under decorated skies that depict autumn, winter, spring and summer, performers act out everyday life and even get down on all fours to transform into animals.
They dance, sing, scream, play instruments and twist their bodies as they engage in acrobatic feats on a stage resembling an enchanted, mythical forest.
“I wanted this show to be a poem with lights, with shadows of tree branches and snows of feathers,” says Bernard, who serves as the company’s director. “A poem to share, one last time.”
After The Last Season moves through the four seasons, the show hints at a fifth, "threatened to be the last", on a planet crippled by pollution and its reliance on plastic, says Bernard.
More than just a series of daring high-wire acts
Both he and Pierre will be in their mid-60s by the time the curtain falls on their company for the last time.
They will pack up their materials and manuscripts, dismantle the bright-yellow Cirque Plume tents and send company notes and archives to France’s National Library.
But for a successful tour company that started as a gangly group of impoverished street performers 33 years ago, the ride has been more than worth it.
“We were all plebes from outside the traditional circus world, which gave us total freedom,” says Pierre, a clown and musician. “We weren’t held to any standard. We could create our circus in our image.”
The group’s “image” turned out to revolutionise what circus was at that time, and what it could potentially be – expanding the medium into more than just a series of beautiful and daring high-wire acts. Where traditional circus dictated that the entertainment be placed in the centre of a “big top”, on a circular stage with the audience surrounding it, the group opted for the half-moon shape of a theatre stage with a facing audience.
Extraordinary adventure
Every production by Cirque Plume employed an entirely new cast – unlike other established companies, which often have a permanent cast of performers.
They have played to audiences totalling more than two million people worldwide.
The last three shows – Plic Ploc in 2004, The Artist's Studio in 2009 and Tempus Fugit in 2013 – were seen by more than 300,000 people. But the Kudlak brothers say this definitely will be their final production. The show started in France and will tour worldwide, ending its run in 2020 when the circus act folds.
The brothers described the three-decade run of Cirque Plume as the “adventure of a huge vessel set to dock” after “having lived an extraordinary human and artistic adventure”.
* Agence France-Presse
