Cirque Du Soleil dreams up some new surprises for 'Corteo'

The poster image for Cirque du Soleil's "Corteo" features a clown in profile, his mouth curled up in a smile, while from his eye a tear falls.

This mixture of moods is a key to "Corteo," a show that Line Tremblay, its director of creation, calls different from all of its predecessors in Cirque's unbroken series of hits.

"Corteo" is the Italian word for cortege, or funeral procession. A funeral seems an odd subject for a circus, but Tremblay explains that "Corteo" began when its director, Daniele Finzi Pasca, had a dream about his own funeral, wondering who would be there, what they would say - "a very human thing to do," Tremblay says. From this it was only a step to the idea of a clown imagining his own funeral, full of people and circus acts from his past, while guardian angels circle benevolently overhead. The idea, Tremblay says, is like some films by Federico Fellini, "very Italian in look and feeling."

There are 18 circus acts in "Corteo," bound together by the clown and his memories — and he remains a clown even in his imagined death, struggling to fly with his new angel wings. Some of these acts are traditional: hand-balancing, juggling, tight wire. Some were created by Cirque especially for this show. A tumbling act takes place on a pair of 600-pound bouncing beds, for example; the acrobats are like children leaping around while their grandparents are away.

An aerial acrobatic ballet by the clown's former girlfriends takes place on three chandeliers that rise and fall and spin. "Very sensuous," Tremblay says, with a smile.

In a climax of the show, called "Paradise," "Corteo" combines traditional trapeze and trampoline acts: A net serves as a trampoline for whirling and tumbling acrobats, while the throwers and catchers are strapped to a metal framework above.

Tremblay is an elegant and intelligent figure, and one can easily picture her as a famous professor of French literature at a major university. But she seems to have found her true milieu in Cirque, where her job is to help cast the performers and to make sure the entire creative team is working in synergistic harmony.

Tremblay has been involved with Cirque du Soleil since it got started in 1984, first through her earlier career as an assistant director at Radio-Canada. "We were always doing stories about Cirque when it was getting started," she says.

She ran away to join Cirque in 1992, working most often as assistant to director Franco Dragone on such shows as "Mystere," "Alegria," and "Quidam." She was asked to be director of production for "Corteo" in 2002 — the first woman to hold this position in a Cirque show. "By that time I was ready, and it was time to entrust this job to a woman," she says. "If you have two men working on a project, they won't come up with the same thing as a man working with a woman. Men and women are different from each other, thank goodness."

Part of the goal of "Corteo" is "to make the ordinary seem extraordinary, to make an imaginary world seem real," Tremblay says. "This show is more realistic than surrealistic, and one place you can see it is in the costuming. It has a '30s feel to it, but these costumes take off from what people might actually wear."

Tremblay obviously has a lot of fun in her job. She tells of a memorable trip to Jerusalem at Christmastime to find a circus with a cast of little people; director Finzi Pasca wanted some little people in "Corteo" because they had figured in his dream.

They found a couple with a brilliant act featuring trained cats, but Cirque never features animals in its shows. So the cats went home to Russia, and Grigor Pahlevanyan and Valentyna Pahlevanyan perform an adagio duet of hand balancing and contortion that Tremblay describes as "very beautiful."

And, as it happens, there are "animals" in "Corteo," including pantomime horses, two performers inside each costume.

"Circus is like opera," Tremblay says. "It is a place where all the arts converge. But it is more popular than opera; you don't have to know anything about music to understand it. You just have to be able to recognize humanity."