In the Tent of Enchantment

Audience members have been captivated for years by the Cirque du Soleil. This year, though, some actually get kidnapped.

The Montreal-based theatrical, emotional, animal-free international circus has returned with a new show, “Quidam,” having its American premiere under the big top at the Santa Monica Pier. While the audience is still finding its seats, the emcee (a Kramer-esque John Gilkey) selects a victim from the crowd, who is immediately whisked away by a group of white-coveralled assistants to a backstage destination. When next we see our missing audience member, moments later, he is also white-suited, and following cues as to how to act from his captors, who are busy picking a new victim out of the crowd.

It’s a brilliant case of using the audience as found art, with additional built-in “1984”-ish points about assimilation and social control. This is Cirque humor at its best, spontaneous, surprising and serious all at once.

“Quidam” is Latin for an unknown or anonymous person, but the show’s characters are actually less obscure than the impenetrable bird-people seen in “Alegria,” the troupe’s last outing here, two years ago. Bouncing back from the pretension-overload of that show, “Quidam” offers a clear view of the Cirque’s unique chemistry, made from atmospheric lighting, fantastic novelty acts from around the world, impassioned and often haunting pop music with flecks of North African, Italian and French influences, and amazing acrobatics. In the hands of director Franco Dragone, every action is perfumed in an aura of intense mystery.

A clown act breaks up the show between the more serious “artistes.” The Cirque has searched the world and never found a clown to match the American David Shiner, whose audience-participation segments in 1990 were small masterpieces of performance art. The three clowns here (called Les Macloma) come from a more prescribed European tradition. Though they fiddled a lot with balloons, they lacked an essential lightness. The main clown, looking like Salvadore Dali in a blue tutu, persuaded an audience member to carry a precious violin to another clown, and then broke it and blamed the audience member for breaking it. He got nary a smile from his quarry.

Some of the novelty acts are so novel you may not even know what the performers are doing. You do know, however, they are doing it well. Four Chinese girls wearing upside-down silver funnel hats (a la the Tin Man) perform the most astonishing wooden spool act you will ever see. One girl tosses one way up into the air, does two backward flips and the splits and then catches her own spool plus someone else’s on a string.

Performer Chris Lashua rides inside an 8-foot wheel by using his stretched-out body as a spoke, performing acrobatics simultaneously. When he balances the wheel on its rim in what seems like slow motion, he seems to defy several laws of nature. A man and a woman (Yves Decoste and Marie-Laure Mesnage) perform “Main a Main,” a hand-balancing act in which they use their almost naked bodies as sculpture, hanging from each other and meticulously building shapes that seem to be achieved only through super-hero strength. Apocalyptic music invites us to view them as Adam and Eve, or Man and Woman. No one will ever accuse the Cirque of taking its artists lightly.

“Quidam” hangs its virtuosity on a framing device, a little story told without dialogue. A young girl, whose parents are lost in their own worlds, becomes bewitched by the arrival of a man with a bowler hat and an umbrella, but no head. When she takes his hat, a Magritte-ish talisman for adventure, her parents are whisked away and she enters the world of enchantment--the acts of the Cirque du Soleil. The sight of this family searching for each other throughout the evening injects a note of melancholy. The girl (Audrey Brisson-Jutras), daughter of the show’s composer, Benoi^t Jutras, sings periodically in the unclouded soprano of a young boy destined for the castratti.

Finally, the house troupe of 14 performs “banquine”--a complex acrobatic routine that beautifully combines Olympic-quality gymnastics with a choreographic sensibility (Debra Brown). Dressed as iconographic war refugees (the understated fanciful costumes are by Dominique Lemieux), the troupe easily builds four-people-tall towers even as they form piles of human missile launchers, sending somersaulting human missiles landing onto other human piles.

The Cirque provides a densely theatrical atmosphere that asks the audience to view unusual mastery as metaphor, to seek and to find the mystery and the meaning in all of this derring-do. As in most nonlinear art, the specific emotion is left up to you.

* “Quidam,” Cirque du Soleil at the Santa Monica Pier, Tue.-Thur., 8 p.m.; Fri., 6 and 9:30 p.m.; Sat., 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 and 5 p.m. Through Nov. 24. $8.25-$45.50. (800) 678-5440. Running time: 3 hours. The show moves to the Orange County Fairgrounds Jan. 29 through March 3, 88 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. (800) 678-5440.