My daughter dreamed of Crystal last night.
She's six, and the Cirque du Soleil performance she saw was so powerful, her mind was still blown the next morning when she woke up talking about it.
Her older brother got just as much wow out of it, and so did their agog father. I've now seen this show twice, and I'm still overwhelmed with the feats of speed and height I can't believe I just witnessed. The human mechanics are almost impossible to comprehend. And on ice - on ice!
We have to talk about the machinery of this production - the human kind and the constructed kind - but what struck me most about Crystal was the character herself. This, more than any other Cirque show I've heard of, has a tactile narrative. A youth, on the brink of adulthood, feels alienated and painfully unique, lone and apart, from her family and her peers.
Sound familiar? Feel familiar?
Crystal falls through the ice on the wintery pond and plunges into the frigid water.
With the use of music, lights, projected imagery (so good at times it bordered on sorcery), and a collection of people dressed in white/grey mottled hoodies (they always came when we needed to be reminded that she was thrashing for her life in dark waters), we submerged with her, violently taken to the brink of drowning.
Who knows how long a dream takes? Or how much hallucination you can have in the blink of an eye? Crystal starts to have these subconscious visions, and we get to be in there - in the water and in her head - to see what she sees. She flashes forward to the toils and obligations of career, the loneliness of big city life, the possibilities of relationships, and most importantly the different sides of herself that push and pull at who she might become.
There is sadness, sexiness, indifference, joy, fun, discovery, fear, laughter, a whole constellation of possibilities she must skate through - and always she is skating.
These scenes have no dialogue. There is no narrator (although there are recorded voices and constant music). The story is told through that thing Cirque does peerlessly - dance, trapeze, juggling, aerial ropes, impossible balance, even some things invented just for this show like 20-foot pendulums used to climb and launch performers to shocking heights without safety lines (there are often safety lines for the airborne action, however, this is not a show that puts its actors into wanton danger). The story is told through spectacular human movement, wrapped in fascinating costumes, buttressed with jaw-dropping sets and props (frozen plastic skating ramps chief among them), bathed in music, and bedazzled in special effects.
None of this is trickery. It's theatrical, but it's not a night of illusions. Real people are doing amazing performances few other people on Earth could accomplish. And like never before, it is done on ice. This is no garden-variety figure skating show. This is different, with elements of darkness and mechanics that have never been attempted before. In all likelihood, a new genre has been born for ice shows.
A new hero has also been born. Crystal might be clouded by the waters threatening to kill her, but this is all symbolic. She fights, she thinks, she transcends, she allows herself to be fascinated, she finds a stronger self within her previous self, and she triumphs.
I hope they make a narrative film out of this, or at least a Crystal picture book for kids, because she is a protagonist worth knowing, for all ages.
She's cut of the same cloth as Alice in Wonderland or Hermione Granger. She's not remarkable "for a girl," she is remarkable full stop.
A man could play the part and lose none of the power of the narrative. Crystal is who my six-year-old daughter can look up to, and so can her older brother.
