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Lori Shyba MFA PhD, Presentation Notes

“Layers of Performativity in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo”

John Douglas Taylor Conference. “Iconography of Death”

Sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies,

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

October 25, 2008

Slide 1. “I dreamt of my funeral. You were all there. I was lying dead in the centre of the stage. I could open my eyes. And even talk. It was a dream. And it started like a play. Monsieur Royal announced on the microphone. Welcome to the world of Corteo.”

(From the opening of the show).

Show clip

You are about to see the funeral procession scene in Corteo. In this clip we experience the Iconography of Death in multitextual splendor. We connect with the mise en scene of the visual text and its rich symbolism. We hear the minor keys of the dirge of the aural text. We get a sense of the physical text as the performers and the camera move through time as well as space and hear the oration of the verbal text. What kind of emotional response do you have?

Slide 2. Refer to video clip.

Slide 3 In this presentation I aim to identify the seven layers of performativity in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo. Inspiration. The Industry. The Spectacle. The Sacred Sphere. Transformation. Doubling and Duality. Omnipotence.

Screen 4. Starting as always, with the inspiration. At the kernel of the experience is the auteur ... an artist, perhaps Guy Laliberte or one of the other Cirque creative directors, who has an interest in what ? ... Clearly, a fascination with carnival under the big top but also in this case … death, dying and the mystery and beauty of it all. As Julia Cameron says in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, read screen. “At the heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity.  Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as the creator but seldom see creator as the literal term for artist.”

Screen 5. Read Screen. “Linguist philosophers J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle distinguished between two kinds of utterances: ‘constantives’ or statements, and ‘performatives’ like 
“I bless you” that perform an act in their being said.”

Taking the auteurial nugget of creative inspiration and getting it produced for the stage is clearly an action of performativity, in the linguistic sense and in the substantive sense. Often taking place in boardrooms with CEOs of sponsoring organizations, more recently in the United Arab Emerates, this act of performativity takes the shape of “Let’s get the money together and make it happen!”

** (working on this) As seen in the layer of the kernal of the experience, exploring the theme of Death and Dying as entertainment is unusual, even a "breach" from the norm.

Screen 6. The layer of Spectacle is where performers of high wire acts and contortionists and gymnasts, musicians, actors, dancers all respond to the call of their own creative muse. Here we see the traditional orientation of performance as being the “pretending” and acting on stage. Pretending to be someone other than oneself.

Screen 8. After the curtain opens, we are drawn into the ritual of sacred play that emerges through the implementation of imagination through dramatization. As audience participants, we see the curtain rise on the stage et viola it’s more than that. There’s another audience on the other side. They are players -- we are all in this together. Johan Huizinga, who is renowned as a scholar of the play element in culture maintains that ritual and human play reside in a sacred sphere that holds significance as a cultural function satisfying communal ideals and that “in the sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage” (Huizinga: 9).   Incidentally, following this same theme, Marshall McLuhan felt that the twentieth century encounter with the electronic faces of culture created a “return to the Africa within,” or a global village of space resonant with tribal drums — a primitive ritualistic audile-tactile sensorium (McLuhan, 1962: 59). In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Victor Turner describes ritual’s liminal phase as being “a time and place where cognitive schemata that give sense and order to everyday life no longer apply … and room for play abounds” (Turner, 1982: 84-85). 

Screen 9. The sacred sphere of play echoes and extends through the community.

Screen 10. Now that the stage is set, we are ready to confront Corteo’s theme of the death of a clown and his transformation from the realm of life to the realm of death.

We have already talked about the transformation of actor into character through the performative act of pretend. Further to that Richard Schechner talks about social drama and ritual as providing “transformance.”  Firstly he refers to a kind of transformation of real behaviour into symbolic behaviour. Secondly Schechner defines “rite of passage” as a transformance that actualizes change of status within the valence of relationship and identity.  In Corteo, this rite of passage is the transformation of the human soul. As Cirque describes in its own promotional material this transformational terrain is situated in the mysterious space between heaven and earth.

Slide 11: Marvin Carlson furthers this idea by saying that “Central to this phenomenon is the sense of an action carried out for someone, an action involved in the peculiar doubling that comes with consciousness and with the elusive “other” that performance is not but it constantly struggles in vain to embody. The difference between doing and performing is framed in the attitude that when we think about them, observe them, it gives actions a quality of performance. In the mise en scene of Corteo the clown looks down from his perch aloft, observing this action. Undergoing the transformation, this duality of body and soul gives him the perspective of observer. Omnipotent observer? Not quite. There’s our last and most ethereal layer.

Slide 12: Show final bicycle scene from Corteo.

Slide 13: Looking at these final scenes of Corteo ask yourself these questions ...


 Who or what does the camera represent in this scene?

 How does its pervasiveness ramify into our culture and social fabric?

 Is the camera you? Is it a higher power? How can it be both?

Screen 14. End.