An Acrobat Embodies the Weightless Beauty Before a Fall
The Brooklyn Academy of Music presented French acrobat Yoann Bourgeois’s nouveau cirque Minuit for the first time in the United States.
Yoann Bourgeois’s nouveau cirque company strives for moments when gravity seems absent. The American debut of the Grenoble-born acrobat and his production Minuit (“midnight,” en français) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) this past weekend was an elegant and often astounding series of vertiginous vignettes.
Upon entering the black-box theater, most of the objects with which the trio of performers would soon interact were on view, although it wasn’t clear what the solitary staircase or towering metal contraption would become. Joining them was harpist Laure Brisa, who layered atmospheric strings over her own airy vocals. For a little more than an hour, Marie Fonte soared against a counterweight on a sort of one-sided seesaw, Jörg Müller juggled suspended chimes in dizzying patterns, and Bourgeois himself used a trampoline and his own momentum to vault onto a staircase, from which he seemed to endlessly fall to the plinking notes of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis Two.”
Minuit is part of the newly launched Brooklyn/Paris Exchange between BAM and the Théâtre de la Ville (if you missed it at BAM and happen to be France-bound, the production is opening next June in Paris). The idea is to share some of the groundbreaking theater happening in each city’s thriving scene. The next chapter of the series — playing at BAM this coming weekend — is Monchichi, a dance-theater piece by Company Wang Ramirez that merges martial arts, dance, and hip-hop.
The circus arts aren’t absent from New York City, but they’re definitely not as prominent in our local culture as they are in France. (And when they do appear, many writers still can’t resist the “forget elephants” trope, as if Cirque du Soleil hasn’t been around for decades.) BAM presents more of this “physical theater” than most of the city’s institutions, and the productions are often among the most astounding of their seasons. I’m still haunted by the 2012 Sans Objet, in which performers Olivier Alenda and Olivier Boyer interacted with a huge, industrial robotic arm, their acrobatics emphasizing both the strength and fragility of the human body against the colossal machine.
Minuit, named for that limbo time between night and day, one day and the next, has no narrative other than its constant surprises of suspension; at one point, Müller scaled the very walls of the theater. As Bourgeois wrote in a post on the BAM blog:
For a juggler, the suspension point is that brief moment when an object thrown in the air arrives at the summit of its arc before it falls. That’s what I’m looking for: the absolute present of that moment. It’s the ideal place — the peak before the fall, that moment of weightlessness, the moment when everything is possible.
The intimacy of BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space definitely increased the tension, but I hope if Bourgeois returns, he gets to take on the bigger stages of BAM’s Harvey Theater or Gilman Opera House. There’s some incredibly inventive movement happening in his work, and it feels like it’s on the precipice of something more — showing how acrobatics, juggling, dance, and music can all collide and still feel weightless.
Minuit took place October 5–8 at BAM Fisher ( 321 Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn).
