Cecile Delepiere

Aliens from planet Cirque

​Christmas, 1963. At 20 minutes before 8 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, weather watchers observe several explosions of incandescent hydrogen gas, occurring at regular intervals on a planet called Cirque. The gas begins moving with enormous velocity toward the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

The invasion of Sin City by Cirque citizens, desperate to glean the secrets of American variety entertainment, has begun. Thirty performers and 99 captive audience members touch down to seek out and capture Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in order to steal their talent sources and return to the planet Cirque, where they will analyze their findings. Thirty years later, the aliens will synthesize their research into an all-new entertainment concept that will reinvade Vegas and take over every venue.

The Actors' Gang, with Cirque du Soleil comic act designer Stefan Haves and his entourage of Cirque aerialists, puppets, jugglers, vocalists and tap dancers, is re-enacting these fateful (fictional) events in a show called Atomic Holiday Free-Fall. Among the performers are Godfrey Daniels, a clown and mime, and Michael Carbonaro, the world's top shaving-cream-on-face sculptor, who has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and at the Magic Castle.

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Mistress of the Shattered Path

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The circus came to Venice on Saturday night, where an almost exclusively female coterie of performers enchanted a small crowd under the stars with a bill of sultry music, inspired clowning and acts of derring-do.

An accordion-heavy array of Bulgarian drinking songs performed by the trio Demonite Na Khaosa set the otherworldly tone of the evening, which unfolded in an Abbot Kinney lot transformed by sculptor and Mistress of Cermonies Robin Murez into the moonlit fairyland of Robin's Sculpture Garden, an intimate performance space where the organic and the industrial collide to great effect.

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Courtesy of Assouline

Guy, on the bottom row, second from left, with the rest of his crew in space.

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Guy Laliberté has had many lives -- he's gone from fire-breathing street performer to poker shark to the multimillionaire head of Cirque du Soleil. In his latest incarnation, he's become a "space clown" and philanthropist. He headed into space in 2009 on the Soyuz spacecraft as a tourist on a mission to raise people's consciousness about global water use for his charity, One Drop.

So far, so good. What happened in space, however, was a little more unexpected. Laliberté was on TV shows, talking to people back on Earth, and videoconferenced into a giant event held in 14 cities for his charity -- all according to plan. However, he didn't expect the pictures that he was snapping quietly on the side to amount to anything apart from tourist snapshots. Instead, he found himself with thousands of beautiful, abstract prints on his return.

Now, he is publishing his pictures with Assouline press in Gaia, a luxury art book whose profits will go to support his water charity, One Drop. While you can't really fault Laliberté's philanthropic ambitions, his particularly high-scale, high-handed way of raising funds is certainly odd, and in many ways, speaks more to his own privileges than to the water scarcity he's trying to address. At any rate, we're still left with a pretty cool book.

Yesterday, LA Weekly sat down to talk to him about his adventures in space, and his plans for the future.

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Zachary Pincus-Roth

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The most striking aspect of the press preview of Cirque Du Soleil's upcoming film-themed L.A. show Iris yesterday was the timeliness show's aesthetic: the costumes and production design generally were strikingly similar to that of Tim Burton, whose exhibit at LACMA just opened.

Top hats abounded. An Alice and Wonderland-like character in a blue dress was especially conspicuous, and a girl wearing a tutu that looked like a film reel showed a bit of Beetlejuice-esque black and white stripes. The aesthetic is taken from the late-Victorian era of early film, which a century later is back in vogue, as the designers are no doubt aware. Not to mention the fact that frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman is the composer.

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