As the curtain rises, the sound of jackhammers, car horns, sirens, and other street noises blast through the theater. On stage, a selection of city-dwellers are rushing to work. An office worker bumps into another one, a romance quickly blossoms leading to a lovely hand-balancing routine. Back to city life, and any sense of romance is dashed as two gangs face off against each other, theatrically a la West Side Story.
The storyline of iD, Cirque Éloize’s award winning circus show, is loosely based around the idea of tribal identity in the contemporary metropolis, from gangs to construction workers, and it fuses urban dance moves like break-dancing to hip-hop, with acrobatics and contemporary circus acts.
Though the show has been running since 2009, it still feels fresh with plenty of engaging derring-do – a high hand-balancing act atop a stack of eight chairs, a bicycle-rider bunny hopping up ledges on a six-meter high wall or around an audience member convinced to lie on the stage, a headfirst free-fall down a pole, a final wall trampolines sequences – and interesting twists on well-known apparatuses like a contortionist on aerial silk or in a love story with a B-Boy, a juggler lying down bouncing balls off a clear plastic board behind his head.
Directed by Cirque Éloize co-founder Jeannot Painchaud, the show has a slick and cool contemporary edge thanks to the throbbing electronic music and impressive video projections of graffiti art and 3D effects.
Cirque Éloize’s iD runs until March 6 at the MasterCard Theatres at Marina Bay Sands.
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