Sorry – I couldn't resist that one.
OK, now you know I'm no francophile here, but I must say that the news of the Dancers of the Great Snail coming to Korea is certainly welcome in my book.
Frankly, I'm not an artsy kind of guy, and prefer my entertainment bombastic and on some form of recordable media. My thrills usually come on a disk in a plastic case.
Having said that, I do clearly remember my friends forcing me to go with them to see a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas, on one of my little trips there a few years ago. I was a bit salty, because plunking down more than $100 as a grad student to see, from what I gleaned from their descriptions, French people in colorful tights dancing around a giant snail – was not my idea of fun. I was irritated that my friends were on my ass to go with them and not miss the best thing since sliced baguette – see, I was gonna go drink cocktails in one of the lounges I had spied and live out a Vegas fantasy – and they weren't even footing the bill. Grrrr, I thought.
Well, needless to say, I was completely wrong, as it was worth every red cent. I even took a picture of that disturbing snail balloon on the way out. Cirque du Soleil is da shit. It may sound trite and like a Midwestern boy who doesn't know high art from low fart, but whatever; like I said, I'm the kind of guy who looks forward to "new release Tuesdays" and worries about the compression rate of new DVD transfers of movies I already own. The re-release of Predator 2 as a Special Edition was a day that will forever live on in my memory. That's the kind of guy I am.
I hate to fit the stereotype of the bourgeois American, but then again, it can't be much worse than French people in colorful tights actually dancing around a giant balloon shaped like a snail. It could only get more stereotypical French if mimes in white face makeup riding unicycles came out with red berets while throwing croissants to the audience.
Hey, so maybe I connect with that kind of triteness. But just tell me you hate Cirque du Soleil after having seen them perform in person.
And I think they'll be a massive hit when they come to Korea in March.
