L’Oratorio d’Aurélia
the following is a pastiche of reviews of a show i dearly wanted to see on my birthday a few years ago.
Creator and performer Aurélia Thierrée, the inimitable Aurelia Thierree, has performed as actress and illusionist and dancer since early childhood. She is not so much playing a single character or characters but a woman intoxicated by wild dreams, who climbs curtains, dangles by her ankles from scary heights and creates scene after scene of gentle irony, coupled with her fine-featured face and the eyes of a 1920s screen siren. Her pale and lovely countenance seems to have been peeled from a vintage poster. Her confident and fearless corde lisse is quite breath-taking. Her luminous eyes and cheeks fill the frame of a miniature proscenium. She also happens to be the great-grand-daughter of Eugene O'Neill.
The family pedigree is clearly visible in the sumptuously rich artistry on display. Her mother, Victoria Thierree Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin, created and directed this dazzling, ethereal and sensual, solemn and mischievous, profound and absurd. Quiet and gentle (the intimate encounter, the duet, the mimed interior monologue), enchantingly nightmarish, most inventive, clever and downright entertaining French circus spectacle performance. an absolute spellbinder. A magical ravishing whirl of visual illusions and theatrical trickery, a ceaseless string of vignettes, tableaux and dances that stretch the imagination with some odd macabre moments when the puppets take over. A brilliant display of acrobatics and dazzling stage invention in the twisted tradition of Shockheaded Peter, Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Chaplin's world is as white and black as snow on earth - and as red as blood.
Finding inspiration in European circuses and medieval drawings, by the magic of the music hall, variety show and circus to create an intoxicating concoction of illusion and fantasy, upside-down and inside-out worlds, Ms. Thierrée has populated her Oratorio with Salvador Dali-esque clocks, dancing dresses, disappearing time, and people that seem to exist in altered states. The illusion- and surreal-ism-filled vignettes of scenes are tentatively drawn together by the theme of a world in disarray. a beguiling evening of dreamlike sketches begins with her delicately beautiful visage appearing from an open dresser-drawer (followed soon after by her limbs, in a variety of reality-defying angles). Very much like a waking dream, in which a world of impossibilities and opposites reigns. Shadows walks across the stage casting human beings in their wake.
Simply treat after treat: visual wit, chills and thrills, frothy sight-gags, complicated costume changes, impossible entrances and exits, delightfully sinister glove puppets, a suicidal puppet, and a smoking baby, a cascading waterfall of white lace curtains, an elaborate lace creature (she produces a pair of knitting needles and knits her lace leg back together), a 'stage within a stage' sequence that provides the most exquisite snow effects seen in Wellington since Slava's Snowshow. A touch of magic, the legacy of the circus, childhood whimsy and surprises!
Welcome to the topsy turvey world of Aurelia and friends where they sunbathe in the snow and the mouse catches the cat. If Salvador Dalí or Lewis Carroll's white rabbit hurried by, either would be perfectly at home here. People have dangerous relationships to the inanimate objects. Props have personalities, mundane items throb with life. Furniture has a mind of its own, trains go through people and, at times, the puppets are in charge. the kite flies the girl. a trenchcoat tussles with its owner, the red velvet curtains framing the proscenium become a central character in the magical, mostly wordless show, and remarkable things happen in their folds and lofty reaches. Aurélia Thierrée rides the blood-colored drapery like a blonde, silken djinn, slipping into and out of their embrace with an acrobatic élan. It seems a dream world set to accordions, percussion, chamber music, haunting ambient music, gypsy jazz, cabaret, classical and more, she fuses herself to the model train's track.
Near the end of the show, Thierrée becomes an hourglass with her body's sandy essence running out the bottom. Purely delighted a sold-out audience so stuffed the Pope couldn’t score a seat with a pocketful of C-notes and indulgences.
