OVO - Royal Albert Hall ★★★★★

The Royal Albert Hall rises out of Kensington like some engorged stone big top, and so it seems fitting that Canadian circus production company Cirque du Soleil should choose to perform its show here during the winter, giving us an antidote to the cold winds and driving rain that swirl around SW7. It has reimagined its nature-themed 2009 show, OVO, and its creators want the audience to enjoy a display full of energy and movement based on the romance and diversity of insect life found in Brazil. Can we expect to be dazzled on a dark night by this bold creation set within such a microcosm? Well, yes, we can with this spectacular array of clowns, jugglers, contortionists, musicians, and aerial artistes, who have added more life, more noise, more fun, and more jeopardy to the original production.

Award-winning Brazilian contemporary dancer Deborah Colker has written, directed, and choreographed this playful and accomplished show. She enables the performers to convey their vibrant world as they simulate fluttering, crawling, eating, working, and enjoying being alive. She brings to it bags of energy and some much-needed joy as she mashes up circus and dance for the Royal Albert Hall’s family spectators. The egg theme and the circle of life are central to this piece. An enormous egg sits at the heart of the hall, and set designer Gringo Cardia has created a simple habitat for the bugs, with giant tropical flowers hanging from the domed ceiling, outsized flowers springing from the floor, and a palette of reds, greens, pinks, and purples. The audience is placed around three-quarters of the raised stage that is built onto the arena floor, and the sound of the rainforest fills the hall as people take their seats. Gradually the performers take to the stage, emerging from aisles, nooks, and flower heads, and immediately start interacting with the crowd in their insect personas. As the forest wakes up, the musicians, dressed amusingly as cockroaches, stroll around with the clowns led by Mateo Amieva as Master Flipo, the apparent leader of the community. During this ‘OVOture’, each animal character is established through carefully choreographed movement and the astonishingly beautiful and well-designed costumes brought to the stage by Liz Vandal.

Using a series of world-class circus acts, accompanied by the music of Brazil, we are immersed into the lives of all the creatures of this forest. Firstly, there are foot-juggling red ants (Yue Zhao, Baoyu Zhu, Lulu Zhang, Xingjie Pei, and Xin Pei), who deftly spin kiwi fruit and corn props on their feet and jiggle their heads from side to side to mimic the movement of the real things. Then we get a hand-balancing dragonfly, performed by Cooper Yarosloski, twisting powerfully yet delicately around a huge stem-like structure beside a lily pond. Now we are introduced to the romantic storyline as the clowns take over the stage with chirps, strange languages, and exaggerated mannerisms. It is this budding relationship between an awkward and slapstick visitor fly (The Voyager, animatedly executed by Robin Beer), who arrives in the neighbourhood with a mysterious egg on his back and is enthralled by a confident ladybug played by Neiva Nascimento. The clowning punctuates the other acts to reinforce the message of the importance of diversity, love and understanding, whilst allowing the stage to be reset by the unseen technicians.

Cables suddenly emerge from the floor and rise into the gods, carrying a cocoon containing Svetlana Delous, who writhes sinuously above the audience’s heads as she emerges from the gossamer sheath, and then she is replaced by a stunningly good duo straps performance from the butterflies of Caitlin Quinn and Ernesto Lea Place, demonstrating immense strength and agility as they whirl about the sky. The next act is a mesmerising Diabolo performed in near darkness by Eisuke Saito, whose Chinese yoyos glow in the gloom like bioluminescent glowworms, continuously spinning and orbiting him as he uses his whole body to control the illusion. After some more clowning, the final act before the interval is the one that elicits the gasps of the audience as the safety net rises and the aerial cradlers (Nansy Damianova, Nina Kartseva, Inna Rudenko, Olivia Kapitany, Lola Pintos, Maly Arantes Franca, Camille Santerre-Gervais, Joseane Martins Costa, Denys Dyky, Nikolay Karyachkin, Gui Figur Fortes, Tamas Fuleman, Victor Huusko and Dmytro Rybkin), dressed as beetles, skilfully work through their shapes, throws and twists high above the stage.

The second half brings more wow moments as we are treated to seamless and precise balancing, contortion and acrobatics. The fleas (Charlotte Fallu, Jesse Harris, Esteban Immer, Simon Lemire, Brooke Locke and Gabriel Olivera de Paula Costa) work their magic on the Chinese Poles. A vision of reds and golds, moving deftly up and down the bars with gravity-defying fluidity and then dropping headlong towards the earth, just stopping in time before the inevitable crash. After another bit of love farce between the clowns, there is an astonishing slackwire performance by Silver Spider Qiu Jiangming. He delivers this on a wire that is strung across an enormous half-moon cradle which rotates towards the end of his act in order to demonstrate his amazing strength and balance skills. Emir Erdogan takes on the dizzying Roue Cyr, a large hoop that moves gyroscopically around the stage, using his body to subtly shift around the space, creating flips and spins around the ring in time to the music. Then Nyamgerel Gankhuyag takes to the stage as the White Spider to deliver a controlled and nature-defying contortion mimicking the movements of her arachnid. She is hypermobile and uses her body to bend and knot into shapes that seem impossible to those of us who are less flexibly gifted. Her dramatic party piece is being able to hold her entire body weight by her mouth.

As the show builds to its finale, there is virtuoso tumbling and TrampoWall by the crickets (Wellington Lima, Dmitrii Mikitin, Nathan Shuh, Nathan Rivera Drydak, Sergiy Rysenko, Weiliang Wu, Zander Biewenga, Ben Van Overberghe, Kilian Mongey, Mikhail Kostianov, Oleg Kuzmin, Jorn De Laendar, Christoffer Sogaard and Ramarni Levena), joined on the wall at the back of the stage by a bendy, fearless Red Spider (Danielle Maloney). The crickets fly up and down the vertical wall face in tight formation with the aid of trampolines at the bottom, just as others in the group tumble along mats with increasing ferocity. After all this excitement, it concludes with ensemble music, dance and hearty audience clapping.

This polished, amazing spectacle of a show takes its family audience into the exciting and daring world of insects. With OVO, every sense is stimulated by the immersive colours, sounds and activities this biodome has to offer, and Cirque du Soleil has once again provided an awe-inspiring, egg-cellent and memorable evening for all.