Flying circus

An evening with the spectacular Le Vorris & Vox.

By Asher Klein, '11

Some students tutor high schoolers. Some of us write for the newspaper. Some play with fire, stand on their friends' shoulders, and dance suspended in air on two long ribbons.

These are the performers of Le Vorris & Vox, the University's circus/masque, leaping through Rockefeller Chapel Thursday, dramatizing the struggle of life, love, pain, and death. Their ringleader narrated a tragicomic trip through the underworld, where it seemed ghouls and the souls of those who died in love bounced around forever searching for some kind of resolution, dancing tangos when meeting old flames and building human pyramids for...some reason I didn't quite catch. With its inventive costumes, sultry lighting and music, and interest in the movement of the human form, Le Vorris & Vox is more interested in aesthetics than simple storytelling.

Its blend of clowning, metaphysical storytelling, and acrobatics is most familiar in Cirque du Soleil, though the group traces its roots to a more local source—a 2002 class with Malynne Sternstein on the circus through the years. Le Vorris & Vox feel like a work in progress, not too polished but the fun is catching. While the themes were perhaps a little mature for the children in the audience, they oohed and aahed through the whole thing.

March 4, 2011