Cirque du Soleil’s Beauty Leaves Him Perfectly Dazzled

The Romantic poets would know what I’m trying to say here. What I want to say belongs in an ode, not a newspaper column. The poets understood that aesthetic beauty in whatever form had a power that went beyond a momentary treat for the eyes. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Keats wrote, and I wish I could write a line to capture my thoughts after attending Cirque du Soleil this week.

Yes, the show was aesthetically pleasing, but beyond that, beyond the 2 1/2-hour cavalcade of color and sound and athleticism was something else even more awesome.

As best I can put it, that thing is the power of perfection. It’s the difference between watching something adequately done and something done so perfectly, with such supreme and unique talent, that the mere ability to do it is as wondrous as the creation itself.

I don’t blame you if you’re scratching your heads now and saying, “Huh?”

But if you’ll bear with me, I have a starting point. And that starting point is contemporary society and the immense number of pretenders, wannabes, frauds, mediocre talents and under-achieving practitioners that seem to dominate the popular culture. They literally litter the landscape--from the arts to sports to the business world.

Allowing for variations on the theme, our standard refrains are, “How did those people get where they are? Is that what passes for quality?”

True merit is so routinely devalued in contemporary life that the sad-sack Oakland Raiders football team, nothing more than also-rans for years, uses the phrase, “Commitment to Excellence” and apparently isn’t the least bit self-conscious about it. Talk-show guests are described routinely as “brilliant.” So-so film comedies are “hilarious.” Rum-dum athletes become “heroes.” Hear enough of this kind of stuff over time, and you just get numb. We begin accepting the average as exceptional, the inconsequential as significant.

Or, you get cynical and begin thinking nothing measures up.

Into this maddening maw of tiny talents, see-through superstars and lackluster legends comes the Cirque du Soleil troupe. Although this is its third biennial stop in Orange County, I had never seen the show until Tuesday night.

On an aesthetic level, it was terrific. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I pondered what it was about the show that seemed to go beyond subjectivity. Why was my enjoyment so strong, and why did it seem to grow rather than diminish the day after?

The word that kept surfacing was, perfection. Not perfection in the sense of no missteps, although I spotted only one. Rather, it was the perfection that came from a thing--in this case, the performers’ ability--fully realized and not subject to doubt.

Finally, I said to myself, here is supremacy of talent. Here is supremacy of execution. Here is supremacy of performance under pressure. Here is something real. Here is something as good as advertised. In a world of junk bonds, here were blue-chippers.

So rare is a sighting that I wanted to find out all I could about the people behind it. Cirque spokesman Lance Taylor said most of the performers are in their early 20s. Right now, they’re in the second year of a three-year tour and will do 320 shows in 1997. Last year, they did 250.

“How do they get to that level?” he said, repeating my question to him about their perfect talent. “Most of them have been doing whatever they’re doing for the better part of their lives. . . . Certainly, there is a level of talent or, for lack of a better word, perfection, that is demanded of them. But it’s nothing that is written in stone. It’s really the attitude around here, which is, how can we make it better? It was a good show last night, but how can we make it better tonight?”

At evening’s end after the show, back out in the cool night air, it seemed inadequate merely to say I’d been entertained. Seeing that kind of grace and aesthetic beauty, how could anyone not be. But there was something more, something I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.

Even more than being entertained, I felt energized.

Energized by celebrating the presence of astonishing talent and not having to settle for the conventional standard of mediocrity. The joy that comes from watching someone who says they can do something actually doing it.

I can’t tell you how heartening it is to know this level of human attainment still exists. A society that seems so content with middling success suddenly took on whole new possibilities. Ah, so this is what human achievement can be!

Lest you wonder, I paid for my Cirque tickets, so I’m not shilling for the show.

With that said, here’s my suggestion:

See the show. Feel the power that perfection unleashes.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.