Nebbia

This circus triumph by Daniele Finzi Pasca is poetic rather than athletic. As with its predecessor, Nomade, presented by the Canadian-based Cirque Eloize in Milan in 2005, the Italian-Swiss director brings us the appeasing power of movement, the down-home humanity of Amarcord and the irony of a fakir’s hyper-articulated body, while exploring a dimension of the soul that is as immaterial as an oneiric journey. Finzi Pasca echoes Shakespeare’s belief that we are made out of the substance of our dreams; we are adrift in a world without reference points. The fantasy is released by the impending fog, which plunges us into a hallucinatory haze: circus melds with theatre, dance merges with photography, street music mingles with Commedia dell’arte. Fellini and Chagall are evoked but the flavour is unpretentious. The songs are expressed in the director’s Ticino dialect, the memories are grandmotherly, and the costumes, with full skirts and overcoats, are fr om the early 20th Century. We are immediately reminded of the purity of Strehler’s La Cerisaie, or sel ect productions by Dodin, but, between the clown transitions in the foreground and acrobatic numbers, our eye is soon drawn to an evocation of contemporary dance fr om central Europe . Welcome to a miniature, ancient world, wh ere players with extraordinary talent frolic with the village idiot, tissues in hand, while the captivated audience returns the gesture by waving their own.