Leo
At the Cultch until Dec. 15
Tickets: 604-251-1363, thecultch.com
Heres a recipe for totally awesome: take one fabulous, Belgian-trained acrobat/performer (Tobias Wegner), add one director (Daniel Brière, from Montreals Nouvelle Theâtre Experimental) and a fantastic design team (sound, set, light, animation, video, choreography) and you might get some idea of Leo, produced by Circle of Eleven from Berlin.
Put Wegner in a small room with three walls (the fourth being open to the audience). One wall is bright red; the floor and the other walls are blue. Adjacent to the room, mount a screen thats about 50 per cent larger than the room. Add some unseen cameras, rotate them and pour on the music and the lights.
What you see in the small room is not what you get on the screen. The red wall in one becomes a red floor in the other and suddenly Leo is amazing himself by defying gravity: scrambling up walls, hanging upside down.
And just when you think, Well, this is fun but 75 minutes of it? it starts to get really interesting. Leo is all alone and after the novelty has worn off at what he finds himself suddenly capable of doing, he starts getting really inventive. You have to tear your eyes off the screen to look at what Wegner is actually doing; but the image of airborne Leo is too much and your eyes constantly shift back to the screen and not without some guilt: a video image over a real live performer? For shame.
Leo gets more and more charming before he begins to fragment. Multiple images of him appear; he can look back at himself just before his past self like a doppelganger merges with him.
Its wonderful, its whimsical and it hints at the multiplicity of selves. Leo feels like Freud met Kafka and then the two of them picked Chaplin up along the way. What a recipe for fun.
