April 21, 2014
Arts Culture & Entertainment
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 11
Cirque du Soleil’s silly, spectacular Totem
By Ian Blazina
The Asian Reporter
he title of Cirque du Soleil’s extrav-
agant carnival show, Totem, carries
an air of the mythic. From an
Algonquian word for “group” or “family,” a
totem is a family symbol that reminds of
ancestors and creation stories.
From this starting place, the show aims
to portray “the evolution of mankind,” or
something. Through a series of mis-
matched scenes that vaguely and
haphazardly appropriate from cultures all
over the world (a Native American
character dancing with hula hoops, frat
boy characters incongruously floor rocking
to a Bollywood beat, a sleazy Italian in a
tiny swimsuit), Totem’s theme is a fragile
vehicle connecting the individual acts of
stunning physicality and technical skill.
What the show, which runs through
May 4, lacks in thematic coherence, it
makes up in imaginative set and costume
design and pure acrobatic spectacle.
After the Cirque clowns finish inter-
acting with the crowd, Totem opens with a
parallel bar act in which performers
resembling amphibians launch from a
trampoline set in the stage and interact
with a structure in the shape of a turtle
shell, spinning on the bars in frighteningly
tight quarters. A character garbed like a
humanoid disco ball (the Crystal Man)
descends from the ceiling among the
froglike gymnasts, working them into an
acrobatic frenzy. Among the frog charac-
ters are four outstanding gymnasts,
Umihiko Miya, Caoliang Wang (who also
plays the Crystal Man in rotation), Riki
Fujimaki, and Jonathan Buese.
Miya is a Tokyo-born gymnast who
trained at the famous Tsukahara Gymnas-
tics Center, named after five-time Olympic
gold medallist Mitsuo Tsukahara. He
taught gymnastics in Panama as part of a
program run by the Japan International
Cooperation Agency, which promotes eco-
nomic and social development throughout
the world, and also taught gymnastics in
San Francisco before joining Cirque du
T
STUNNING SPECTACLE. Cirque du Soleil’s Totem show is in Portland through May 4. The production
features unicyclists with bowls (left photo), parallel bars (right photo), manipulation, Russian bars, foot juggling,
and more performed by artists from China, Japan, the U.S, and elsewhere. (AR Photos/Jan Landis)
Soleil in 2010. Since leaving Japan, Miya
has become fluent in Spanish and English,
a feat he attributes in part to the universal
appeal of gymnastics.
“We were communicating with sounds
and movements,” Miya said about his work
as a cross-cultural gymnastics instructor.
“The body language of gymnastics is
international. My students taught me the
language which helped me a lot.”
Wang started gymnastics training at
age five with his twin brother, and joined a
gymnastics school at age eight with the
hope of becoming an Olympic gymnast.
After competing at the national level in
China for 10 years, he taught gymnastics
in China and Kuwait before joining Cirque
du Soleil in 2009. While he has an
opportunity to return to China for a few
weeks each year, Wang says he also enjoys
travelling with his friends from the show.
“Sometimes I prefer to travel around the
world and go see where my Totem friends
come from and spend time with their
friends and family,” remarked Wang. “It is
a great way for me to learn about other
cultures.”
In addition to the strong performances
on the parallel bars, Totem also features a
mind-boggling act in which five Chinese
unicyclists descend a ramp and
synchronously pedal their seven-foot-tall
cycles around the stage while juggling
metal bowls, tossing the bowls with their
feet and catching them on their heads
without using their hands. Seeing this
maneuver once is awe inspiring; the entire
act, involving perhaps 50 throws, often at
moving targets, is hard to believe.
The performers — Jie Zhang, Jie Yang,
Xue Wang, XiangJie Bai, and Rina Su —
trained since childhood at the Inner
Mongolia Acrobatic Troupe of China. They
joined the Totem show in February 2013.
With such gifted athletes performing
stunning displays of physical prowess and
the inventive set design that doubles as
setting and interactive equipment, the
peculiar way in which the supposed lofty
theme of Totem clashes with its low-brow
humor and culture-vulture aesthetic is
easily overlooked. It is a circus after all,
and the spectacle is engrossing.
Totem premiered in Canada and toured
in Europe before arriving in the United
States. The show runs through May 4 at
the Grand Chapiteau in the lower parking
lot of the Portland Expo Center, located at
2060 N. Marine Drive in Portland. For
more information, including showtimes, or
to buy tickets, call 1-800-450-1480 or visit
<www.cirquedusoleil.com>.
More service. Less crowding.
TriMet’s proposed budget
TriMet’s proposed 2014/2015 budget calls for more frequent service, better
schedule reliability and less overcrowding. Here are some highlights:
• More Frequent Service: We plan to add weekday evening trips on
Frequent Service bus lines and MAX to get back to 15-minute (or better)
frequency throughout the day
• Better schedule reliability: Schedules will change on Lines 20, 71 and 72
to improve reliability.
• Less crowding: We’re adding buses to Lines 4, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 33, 44, 76,
94 and 99 to relieve overcrowding.
• More new buses: 64 new buses will join the fleet this year, for a total of
249 buses replaced since 2012.
• No fare increase: Once again this year, riders will not see a fare increase.
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