“BêTes De ScèNe”: Robert Lepage's Totem, Circus, and the Freakish Human Animal

Abstract

The 2010 première of Cirque du Soleil's Totem immediately sparked comments about the human animal at the heart of the show. With his mise-en-scène tracking an evolutionary journey from the beginnings of life to human development of flight, Robert Lepage expressly calls attention to the animal in the human. This article traces particular moments of the spectacle that underscore a reading in which limits are disturbed and where the ordinary and the extraordinary, the human and the animal, mark and inform each other. Such an analysis occasions an interrogation of meanings assigned to performing bodies in the circus, where the “freak” has never been far from normal. As we revisit reactions to this exceptional performing body, including Cocteau's embrace of le cirque's category-destroying aesthetics, we uncover discourses that still carry meaning a decade into the twenty-first century. Totem and other Montreal performances of a cirque nouveau are shown to draw on a richly layered past as they stage ambiguous bodies of the human animal.