The Na’vis are colonizing the Taipei Arena.
The Montreal-based performance behemoth, Cirque du Soleil, is returning to Taipei, this time bringing with it the Pandora world of US director James Cameron’s film Avatar.
Well, technically, the world of Pandora thousands of years before the events depicted in the 2009 movie.
Photo Courtesy of Cirque du Soleil
It has been a few years since Taipei hosted a Cirque du Soleil production. The company first brought its multimedia highwire acrobatic show to Taiwan in 2009, when a 56-show run of Alegria sold out months in advance. Varekai in 2011 and Ovo, which opened in November 2013, proved just as popular, as did the less “circus-like” Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, which came in June 2013.
Cirque’s new touring show, Toruk — The First Flight (阿凡達前傳), will be in Taipei for a much shorter period than its predecessors, but looks likely to be equally popular despite the eye-watering ticket prices.
Featuring international casts, massive sets and even bigger production values that seem to expand exponentially with each new show, Cirque’s productions are, after all, expensive to create and to tour.
Photo Courtesy of Cirque du Soleil
Toruk opens on Thursday for 18 shows, but tickets have been moving fast, especially the cheaper ones.
The show is among Cirque du Soleil’s more ambitious productions. It is so large that the company’s usual facilities in Montreal could not accommodate it, so the production team and cast had to relocate to Bossier City, a suburb of Shreveport, Louisiana, for several months of rehearsals before it premiered in Montreal on Dec. 21, 2015.
Toruk began its Asia/Oceania tour last week in the Philippines and will be in New Zealand in September and Australia in October.
Photo Courtesy of Cirque du Soleil
Toruk was written and directed by musician and multimedia artist Michel Lemieux and theater designer and photographer Victor Pilon, who have been producing shows under the aegis of their company, Lemieux Pilon 4D Art, for 27 years.
They previously worked with Cirque du Soleil on the 2006 show Delirium.
To design the sets and props, Lemieux and Pilon hired well-known Quebec-based theater, opera and circus set designer Carl Fillion, while music for the show was composed by veteran Cirque collaborators Bob & Bill, otherwise known as composers and arrangers Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard. Neilson Vignola provided theatrical direction.
While most of the main creative team are Quebecers, Australian Kym Barrett, whose resume includes the Matrix films, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, was tapped to create the costumes and make-up, while the Vietnamese duo of Tuan Le and Tan Loc took care of the choreography.
Unlike previous Cirque shows, Toruk has a story to tell: of the Na’vi tribes and their bid to save their planet from natural disaster and themselves from extinction.
The basic premise is that a massive volcanic eruption threatens to destroy the Tree of Souls, which featured prominently in Avatar. However, such an event has been foretold in Na’vi mythology, as well as a solution: A warrior must collect a talisman from each of the five tribes of the Na’vi and then be able to ride the predatory leonopteryx rex, a creature from the movie also known as a toruk, or “last shadow” in the Na’vi language, to save the tree. No Na’vi has ever been able to ride one.
Two teenage friends, Ralu and Entu, decide that they will save Pandora and are later joined on the quest by a young girl, Tsyal.
Another key performer is the Storyteller, whose job is to keep the audience on track about the action and where the plot is headed.
The show has been praised as a multimedia spectacle of one stunning tableau after another, thanks to Fillion’s massive set, 40 video projectors, huge kites and Patrick Martel’s giant puppet creatures.
An innovative feature of the show is that its lighting design is, to a certain extent, audience dependent. An app that can be downloaded onto smartphones the start of the show sends texts telling the audience members what to do with their phones and when.
The critical consensus is that Toruk’s storyline is nowhere close to being polished or even comprehensible, but then again, the same can be said for the majority of Hollywood blockbusters produced over the past two decades — including Avatar — as directors rely on massive explosions, endless chase or fight scenes and thundering soundtracks to try to hide plot holes big enough to sail the Titanic through.
The lack of the dazzling highwire acts that have been the staple of Cirque shows was also a repeated complaint in the reviews.
However, none of that criticism has deterred the legions of Cirque fans worldwide from thronging to see the Na’vi in action.
Toruk runs about 125 minutes, with an 25-minute intermission. Doors open 30 minutes before showtime.
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