At Cirque Eloize, ‘the Special Effects Are the Artists’

The troupe hails from the province of Quebec. It delivers a sassy, new kind of circus that none of us grew up with. It has a French Canadian name.

But that name is not Cirque du Soleil. It’s Cirque Eloize.

Eloize performs in theaters, not under a big top. Eloize has seven members, compared with Cirque du Soleil’s seventysomething. And Eloize weaves magic without exotic costumes, elaborate makeup, lasers or wind machines.

“The special effects,” says Serge Poupart, the company’s lighting technician, “are the artists.”

In fact, it’s the absence of dazzling, high-tech trappings, along with the company’s size, that members say makes Eloize a more “personal,” intimate circus experience that allows each performer’s “soul” to shine.

“When the audience looks at the artists, they can see them smiling,” says general manager Claudette Morin. “They can see the light in their eyes.”

Eloize (pronounced el-WAHS ) will appear as the Imagination Celebration’s finale in two shows May 7 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The show kicks off the 2-year-old Montreal-based troupe’s first U.S. tour.

Troy Botello, who booked Eloize after seeing a Philadelphia performance for presenters in February, agreed that the company has an exceptional ability to relate to the audience.

“They’re just an extremely accessible troupe,” said Botello, the center’s education coordinator. “A lot of their personalities come out. And they’re tremendously proficient acrobats and jugglers.”

Five of Eloize’s members have performed with Cirque du Soleil. Also, everybody in Eloize studied at the Ecole Nationale de Cirque in Montreal, the innovative national circus school that spawned Cirque du Soleil.

Both troupes shun the old-fashioned Barnum & Bailey routine to take an avant-garde approach, more in sync with a younger generation that seeks greater titillation of the mind, imagination and emotions. Astonishing physical feats, while still de rigueur, aren’t enough anymore; neither troupe has animal acts.

“Ecole Nationale students have to take dance and theater class in addition to circus class,” says Eloize artistic director Jeannot Painchaud. “That’s how we come up with a new approach” that incorporates other disciplines.

“Many people have not really a good opinion of the circus,” he said. “They think it’s cheap and just for children. We try to say you can do more. Circus can really be an art.”

Painchaud, who cut his teeth as a busker on the streets of Quebec and Europe and toured Japan with Cirque du Soleil, described the “art” of Eloize’s action-packed, hourlong program in a recent telephone interview from his Quebec office.

A one-man ladder act becomes a fluid pas de deux when acrobatics combine with choreography to make it “more like a dance,” he said with interpreting help from Morin. Three velvet-clad men execute a lyrical, hand-to-hand balancing act, five jugglers with 15 clubs go “a little bit crazy and run around and do strange moves,” he said, and “small and fast” clowns evoke silent movies with speedy antics.

The entire company climbs onto a single circling bicycle for tricks on wheels, which is Painchaud’s forte. He won a 1992 bronze medal at the 15th World Festival of the Circus of Tomorrow in Paris. (Members of the troupe’s balancing act won a silver medal there.)

Each of eight acts, accompanied by rap, rock and New Age strains, builds dramatically to a finale, an acrobatic blowout involving human pyramids and tumbling galore, some of it with trampoline propulsion.

By design, Eloize performs no aerials, no high wire or trapeze. Most indoor stage areas aren’t high enough for such acts, which also take more time to set up. Touring with a big top would solve part of the problem, but it’s less intimate and more expensive, and many small towns can’t accommodate the large apparatus.

“The original production was conceived in order to respond to a maximum number of presenters,” Morin said. Eloize audiences, she added, “see so much on the ground, they don’t even notice there is no aerial act.”

The name Eloize, a French Canadian term meaning lightning, was chosen to symbolize the troupe’s “electric,” “youthful” energy, said Painchaud, who founded the company with Marin and fellow performer and Cirque du Soleil alumnus Daniel Cyr, who dances with ladders.

The troupe’s original members (six men, one woman) grew up together on the small Iles-de-la-Madeleine off Quebec. They were reunited at the Ecole Nationale and decided to return to their childhood home in 1991 to entertain.

“In the very beginning,” Painchaud said, “the idea was not to form a company, just to do a show, to have fun.”

Two years later, however, the loose-knit group returned to the island and 10,000 people attended their encore, Morin said. Friends urged the group to get serious. Painchaud had been wanting to create something that would showcase the “energy, the soul” of each artist better than a large, autocratically run troupe could, he said.

“Cirque du Soleil is really big, and when you work with between 40 and 70 people, you can’t really work together. Here, everyone gives their personal ideas about what we want to do and what we feel inside, and we brainstorm. It’s more creatively satisfying.”

Performing in theaters lends itself to the refined artistic expression the company prefers, as well as enabling a year-round season, Painchaud said. So far, it has appeared around Quebec and in Japan, parts of Europe and at a few East Coast venues.

“We don’t want to do just a technical demonstration, like gymnastics,” the 29-year-old performer said, “and on a stage, we have to be more than physical. So we try, like an actor developing a character who gives emotion to his words, to give emotion to our movements.

“For example, I chose to do my bicycle act to Flamenco music, and I dance with the bicycle to show the public that it’s not a bicycle anymore, to make the object alive. It can be done with the bicycle, a ladder, whatever. It’s a kind of communication.”

“As long as I enjoy what I’m doing, the audience feels the same way,” added Roch Jutras, an acrobat and clown. “We’re not stars; we’re people who like what we do and do it really well, we do the best we can. For me, that’s the secret of going somewhere with something.”

* What: Cirque Eloize.

* When: Sunday, May 7, at 3:30 and 5:30 p.m.

* Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street, and exit north. Turn right from Bristol onto Town Center Drive.

* Wherewithal: $6.

* Where to call: (714) 556-2122.