Varekai

Eventually, you run out of applause. "Wow" becomes meaningless. You understand kineticism as a language unto itself, even if you haven't been exposed to a single second of ballet. You start to listen in other languages, see in other cultures. Your brain races to assemble the nonsense and the chaos, since it all has some kind of meaning. And before you know it, there's this elation that results, an epiphany that all the colors and sounds and impossibly lithe humans up on stage is a screaming-yes to some optimistic vision of the future where humanity has given up junk food for art, anger for love, speaks through song and motion, and generally look like they've left behind racism, sexism, homophobia, militant faith...you know, the entire Republican Party...and got their groove in the most bootylicious, karmatasic way possible.

The second epiphany that marches its way across your brain comes when you wonder why there isn't more art like this, celebrating the wonder and the happy-lust of live instead of having your emotions blenderized from screaming talk show hosts, blood-n-sex nightly news, Jack Bauer finding new ways to cause pain in "24", that lingering feeling that everything in Washington is corrupt and no one there cares. Nearly everything about a Cirque du Soleil show is soaking in hope and wonder. From the moment you walk in, the ushers are smiling and polite, laughing, as if they want to be here, cheerfully sharing in the experience with you. You have to draw back for a second, scanning for the typical rude-shit behavior common with customer service these days. You look around. No one is shoving to go to the bathroom. Kids are playing near the entrance before the show begins. Everyone makes way for someone else, and we all swerve in polite arcs as we file to our seats, where more polite ushers direct us to our seats. There's color everywhere, as if you have been beamed straight into a Dale Chihuly glass flower. You see some of the ushers aren't ushers, but performers in disguise, revealing their clownish ways with members of the audience, who take it all in with good nature. They too are disarmed from the outside world, leaving behind their road-rage and terror alerts for the Cirque vibe.

And that's how the show is preceded. No ads. No countless movie trailers for cookie-cutter romantic comedies or cartoons with ourageous in-your-face animals who will be pimping biggie burger meals at a fast-food chain. The performers emerge in their lizard costumes, their fire costunmes, one of them looks like Bergman's chess-playing Death, another is Pan. Icarus descends from the ceiling in a crash. It's all too large, colorful, hypnotic and captivating. It's Dr. Seuss doing a Neil Gaiman-flavored acid with Hayao Miyazaki icing. There is no plot, or is there, as you watch as a wingless Icarus figures out the beauty and raw sensuality of the earth through experincing the elements of air, water, land, and fire until he means what I could only fathom as a sex goddess, whom he marries and they become rulers of the elements Icarus transcends the need to conquer the sky and just be in all places at once through his contentment and erotic awesomeness with his wife. If that's not a pro-marriage message, I don't know what is.

Or not. I don't know. That's the grand beauty of every Cirque Du Soleil show. It could mean whatever you want it to mena, or it could be nothing than seeing fit and funny humans in wild costumes bend in ways that require no magic yet make you believe in a kind of magic from start to finish. But it makes you want more. It makes you want to go on a diet, listen to opera, read the works of philosophers, contemplate silence, take up tantra sex, wash all of your petty rage away, and smile. It makes you want to strip your soul down and lose all the baggage that keeps you from leaping and soaring. You see a better world when you get in touch with something like Cirque's visual serotonin. There's very few things in live that gives you that organic high. And it makes you see what's important, what touches the soul, what should remain at the end of all things.

And if that's not art, I don't know what is.