Kurios by Cirque de Soleil make the common fascinating

People can be divided into two groups, those who have seen a Cirque de Soleil show and those who haven’t. For those who haven’t it; a show from Cirque de Soleil is an entertaining, fabulous ensemble of acrobatics, stunts and precision that will make active, in shape people seem like wooden planks of bacon grease. Kurios is the latest traveling show from Cirque and it’s in Atlanta through Sunday, May 8.

For the other group, those that have seen a Cirque show you roughly know the drill. Kurios is the 35^th production from Cirque de Soleil, features 46 performing artists from 15 different countries and manages to shake up the formula. Sure, they’ve ‘shaken up’, the Cirque formula before and the results, while fresh and original, have also felt familiar. There was the show that only had female performers and the equestrian shows; both of which were entertaining, but does not measure on the same shake up scale as Kurios.

Kurios manages to be an entertaining Cirque de Soleil show for those that have seen many productions, as well as, the first timer attendees.

For us what makes a Cirque show engaging is how they fill the small areas. Show me something that I haven’t seen before and show me things that I might have seen, but up the ante. Kurios excels on the first part of our request and manages to amaze us on the second half of it.

The two acrobatic acts that filled the latter half of our bill was Upside Down World and Russian Cradle Duo. Duo consists of many of the go-to elements of Cirque, a trapeze, lots of summersaults, danger and beauty all 13 feet off the ground. It’s flawless, seemingly simple and utterly dangerous.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Upside Down World starts out with a chair stacking stunt. Sure there are probably poles in the chairs, but it’s a stunt and acrobatic work that twists my mind. The stunt and athleticism alone make my mind spin-and then things in the act get freaky. It’s the jaw dropping, “oh no, they can’t do that”, thought that one utters a couple of times during a Cirque show. We said that more times during this show than we did at any previous one.

Certainly the show choreographers have a plot in Kurios, but I couldn’t figure it out, but that is OK. They entertained the audience with a circus that had nothing. It was used with audio tricks, wires and acting-and the crowed loved it. In Rola Bola they have an acrobat fly down and engage the crowd in dangerous stunts with only a series of plastic cylinders and planks to balance on.

The entertainment gets more obscure and offbeat with a performance called Theater of Hands that is just that, finger puppets. Using close up cameras, skilled performers, lighting and a couple unwilling audience members they managed to make two digits, OK, sometimes four, into an act that made the crowd laugh, all the while shaking their head that they were enjoying something that they use as a device to make their children eat dinner.

Kurios has the elements that one expects from a Cirque show. The very pleasant curve ball is that it has so many more aspects that make the show simple, fun, relatable and funny. They continue to make the average entertaining and the possibly mundane exceptional. Kurios has a 25 minute intermission and runs 2.5 hours. We took our 6 year old and he thoroughly enjoyed the show, although he was a little scared during the Invisible Circus act when he thought that a tiger was loose in the tent. The giveaway is for four tickets to the Thursday, March 24^th show at 4:30PM.