Circo de Bakuza give Just for Laughs an alternate reality check by Rupert Bottenberg Photos by Maxime Côté Attention, astral travelers. Please report to the point of departure, at the corner of Ontario and St-Denis. Have your boarding passes ready--you're about to find yourself on another plane of existence. Your destination (should you choose to accept it) is Circo de Bakuza. "Basically," says local artist/sculptor/ designer/bohemian Carlito Dalceggio, "the Circo de Bakuza is a tropical island, somewhere on this planet, that we have created. It exists in the secret part of the soul of everyone who refuses to believe in reality. All these enlightened people who are different, and want to go further and deeper into new experiences. They go 'poof!' and they appear on that island."
"It's like a big painting," says Ducros, "but it's living. Some parts are Arabic, some pop culture, some torture, some erotic. It's a freedom ceremony, where people can feel free to do what they want, to experiment." Everyone into lotus position now, please--this is where shit gets, like, heavy. "You'll have an S&M artist over here," Ducros continues, "and beside him an opera singer, and both are deeply into their paths. The paths don't necessarily connect, though. We make them connect with the concept, the idea that everybody involved has deserted their wheel of destiny to come to this island." "It's about creating a myth," says Dalceggio, "something that doesn't exist, and then being surprised that, suddenly, it does. It's like creating a god, and then believing in it."
Destabilizing Joe Sixpack At this time last year, the pair were doing the Mystic Supermarket, also part of Just For Laughs. In many respects, it was a sort of dry run for Circo de Bakuza, with its market stalls, DJs, bodypainting and so on. "It was in an alley," recalls Ducros, "and not very large. This year it's in a big square with way more characters. We've gone way further, I think." "Also," notes Dalceggio, "the Mystic Supermarket was much more sarcastic, destroying all the ideas of religion and the consumer society. With Circo, we're not mocking or destroying, we're creating. There's no place for negativity." That may be, but there's no accounting for taste. Remember, Circo de Bakuza is a public installation. The crowd wandering in won't be as specific as, say, the freaks drawn to the Free Bamboo Butterfly nights that Dalceggio has been doing at Sona since his days as half of the Organic Fresh Heroes art squad. "Doing shows in a controlled space, where you invite people, is totally different. Because people know your world and your work, and to some extent they know what to expect. But when you do a big happening outside, a lot of people who've never heard of you, straight people who are not terribly open-minded, who watch TV five nights a week, might show up. They come in and they see this gathering around them, and they never expected to see anything like it." Rapid-fire religion, candy-coloured erotica, sensurround surrealism--daily bread for Ducros and Dalceggio, but a potential psychic irritant for Joe Sixpack, who might not cotton to such overstimulation. Dalceggio insists he's ready for such contingencies. "We provoke, in a way, and then we charm. We provoke to destabilize, and when the person is fragile, we charm them."
Citizens of the Freedom Empire
No, once one has crossed that line, they've become a citizen in good standing of the Circo nation. Ducros and Dalceggio present the Circo as just that: a self-contained imaginary country. "We have the official logos," says Dalceggio, "the official suits, official van, even the official Bakuza TV station. We play it like we're the Freedom Empire." Ducros clears his throat for a contracted roll call of Circo de Bakuza's denizens. "We've got a bodybuilder who'll be painted with tribal patterns, doing tacky poses, wearing a sash that says 'Miss Bakuza.' We have a fakir who'll be lying on a bed of nails, we've got André Tremblay, who does precision whip tricks. We've got drag kings, who might be doing some cowboy tapdancing. We've got Mexican mariachis and Moroccan trance music." "We've got this guy Jules Allaire, who really brings an aesthetic to sado-masochism. One thing he does is he puts on this metal bra, and he takes a grinder to it which makes huge blossoms of sparks. It's really beautiful to see." There's also the DJs (Ram, Nivoc, Arkin Allen, One Percent Free), the graffiti artist and video installations, haircuts and henna tattoos, jewellers and jugglers, acrobats and fire charmers and masseurs, yes sir. Rumour has it that Quebec's own high priest of UFOlogy, Raël, may make an appearance on July 24. That's Just for Laughs' Twin Day, and on that theme, Raël's been asked to speak about cloning.
Panda-monium Another Circo citizen is Elvis impersonator Vetlano Mascall. "Get him started on Elvis," says Ducros, "and he'll talk about him until the sun comes up. He's got theories that Elvis is still alive, and he can prove it." This particular Elvis, though, will be done up in Hindu deity blueface, walking on water while he belts out the king-sized classics. "We use Elvis as a god. We use all the gods, like the Virgin Mary. She'll be at the entrance with a vibrator, ejaculating holy water on people as they come in. We have Vishnu, we have Ganesh with the big gold elephant head. We even have our own god, a panda. It's a mascot, a big teddy bear. We made it into a horny teddy bear with nine breasts and a big dildo. And we're going to prostrate ourselves before it." A ludicrous image, sure, but that's something that the world's religions have always been a healthy source of. "Have you seen the temples in India?" says Dalceggio. "They'll have a sculpture of a guy sodomizing a horse, and everbody's praying to it! But you know, it's funny. People want to pray. They don't care what the god is, they just want to do the rituals. It's good to have rituals, to go down inside yourself and explore your own values, but you don't have to have a dogma and all of that. What we're saying is, make your own god."
At the corner of St-Denis and Ontario, July 15 to 25, 6:30pm to 11pm |
Now the "island" has gone "poof!" and popped up smack dab in the heart of Montreal. It's the weirdest of the weirdness at Just for Laughs' outdoor free foolishness in the Quartier Latin. Dalceggio and his co-conspirator Philippe Ducros, an actor, playwright and theater director, have transformed a plain square parking lot into (take a deep breath) a polytheistic-pop art-sex magic-carnival-marketplace-freak show-cabaret-temple. A kaleidoscopic cultural cartoon, a symbolist smorgasbord, an eye-candy overdose, a great big cosmic joke. Ducros and Dalceggio have rounded up a small army of their "enlightened people"--performers, artists, musicians, craftspeople, nutbars and livestock--to make their pipe dream a potent, pulsating reality.
Tuning the nine-to-fivers in is not enough, though. Ducros and Dalceggio want to turn them on and convert them to the cause. "We want no spectators," says Dalceggio, "only participants. I remember last year, when we were doing the Free Bamboo Butterfly nights, which is sort of the birth of Circo, we were doing a lot of bodypainting. It's weird how someone can be perfectly normal, and then you do bodypainting on them and they fuckin' lose their mind. It's like a mask, they feel part of the tribe now. They're not alone anymore."