`THE WORDS ARE THE MOVEMENT'; CIRQUE DU SOLEIL TELLS A NEW STORY WITH `DRALION'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

After 15 years of creating shows with more allegorical layers and surreal visual effects than a Fellini film festival, Cirque du Soleil is getting back to some big-top basics.

Cute kids. Exotic creatures. Breathtaking feats of hand and, um, feet. Clowns that actually make you laugh, instead of making you feel you've stumbled into one of those German expressionist paintings where something bad is about to happen.

Since Cirque du Soleil's 1984 inception, the French-Canadian ensemble has been internationally praised for expunging many of the corny conventions that clung to mainstream circuses like the smell of old popcorn.

But, having gained a worldwide reputation for its high-concept spectacles, the fanciful troupe whose name translates as ``Sunshine Circus'' wants to bring its act down to earth a bit.

When Cirque unveils ``Dralion,'' its 13th full production, Thursday under the blue-and-yellow Big Top next to the Santa Monica Pier, its creators say audiences can expect a show that's closer in mood to Barnum & Bailey than Ingmar Bergman.

``Cirque du Soleil, they said at the beginning that we reinvent the circus. We don't reinvent nothing. We're just using what was there and all the other circuses never used. Because, I'm sorry, we are a circus! We present circus acts,'' says ``Dralion'' director Guy Caron, speaking in his guttural Quebecois accent.

By now, tens of thousands of Southern Californians are as familiar with Cirque's signature mix of acrobats, clowns, contortionists and aerial artists as they are with Mickey and Goofy. (Thursday's opening will mark Cirque's eighth L.A.-area visit in the past dozen years.)

And with companies performing from Biloxi to Berlin and Hong Kong, Cirque is busily assembling a global marketing empire to rival Disney's.

After starting out as a gaggle of Montreal street jugglers and stilt-walkers nearly 20 years ago, Cirque today has a $30 million Montreal headquarters housing 350 permanent employees, plus regional headquarters in Asia, Europe and Las Vegas.

What apparently keeps customers coming back is Cirque's ability to fuse simple, emotionally resonant story lines and art-crowd production values with family-friendly entertainment - a strategy that other circuses have been scrambling to imitate. Cirque offers avant-garde theater for the masses in a hip but non-threatening package.

``What we're using from theater is the way to present one act,'' Caron says, ``because (the) circus is a lot of acts. It's not a story. It's a little story, a story line, that's for sure. But it doesn't have words. The words are the movement.

``But what we do, to try to link all that stuff, is to create in each act, in each performance, something with a dramatic orientation, to start and to finish it. And this is the way you can link a show.

It's totally confused if you see just a jumping-board act, a hand-stand act, a clown. You know, it's not (logical). The only way that you can link it altogether is with your costumes, the music, the set, all that stuff, to try to create a show.''

With an environmental set designed by Stephane Roy, a rising star in Canada's dance, film and theater worlds, ``Dralion'' is set in the kind of sensuous, metaphor-laden dreamscape that is Cirque's trademark.

But its centerpiece is a muscular troupe of 35 elite acrobats from the People's Republic of China, nearly half of them children. Caron says he wanted ``Dralion'' to emphasize above all the technical marvels of the human body by serving as a showcase for the acrobats' preternatural grace and quicksilver athleticism.

``It was our old dream, and the dream come true,'' says Caron, who was Cirque's first artistic director and is directing his first show with the company since 1987. In recent years, he has served as general manager of Le Centre National Des Arts Du Cirque in France and has directed circus shows in Europe and the 20th-anniversary production of the Big Apple Circus.

``What is the dream?'' Caron continues. ``The dream was to try to take a troupe of 35 Chinese acrobats - I don't say acrobat-actors, because the (Chinese), they are just acrobats, OK, in the way they present their thing - and try to integrate it to the world of the Cirque du Soleil and the imaginative world of the Cirque du Soleil.

And this is why we are coming back more to the basic(s) of the circus, because the Chinese are more acrobat than they are actor or stage performer.''

The idea for ``Dralion'' had been bouncing around in Cirque's collective unconscious for a dozen years or so, Caron says, before he and Cirque's current artistic director, Guy Laliberte, began fleshing out the concept about two years ago.

Its name comes from fusing the words ``dragon'' and ``lion,'' two beasts that symbolize, respectively, China and France and, by extension, East and West.

At first, Caron and Laliberte conceived ``Dralion'' as a piece dealing with the interplay between Oriental and Occidental sensibilities.

That idea has since been scrapped in favor of a story line about the blending together of four different color-coded families, each representing one of the four primeval elements: earth, air, fire and water.

As the show evolves, the four families exchange members and gradually fuse together.

``The impression you get at the end of the show is, we start with four families, and at the end it's one family - and that's the story of the world,'' says designer Roy.

The harmonious mood of ``Dralion'' contrasts sharply with the ominous tone of ``Quidam,'' which visited Los Angeles in 1996.

In ``Quidam,'' a young girl escapes from her oblivious parents into an eerie world of headless, bowler-hatted men, chilly techno music and spooky blue-green lighting.

The more spiritually uptempo ``Dralion'' utilizes world-beat music and large, rotating wheels to represent the orbit of the sun and the passage of time. Other design elements suggest analogies both with the human body and the body of a giant animal, the mythical Dralion.

A massive cable running inside the Big Top suggests the beast's central nervous system. The Dralion's eye and claw are represented by an enormous overhead projector connected to huge, cantilevered steel-and-aluminum hooks, nicknamed the Grip. The Grip scoops up the performers while the projector-eye simultaneously observes them with its anthropomorphic beam.

The child acrobats encounter the Dralion and begin to play with it, just as children would play with a pet or a new toy, Caron says.

``We decided to create a show on the bonheur, the happiness of life,'' Caron explains. ``And what is really the happiness of life is (a) child, hmm? What is child? Child is the future. For me, it was so important. And they are there to preserve their world, their imaginations. And it's why we have 17, not (children), but kids (performers) on this show, out of 35 artists.''

Roy says his design was inspired in part by see-through contemporary Japanese architecture, in which a building's mechanical guts are exposed, revealing what he calls ``the melodic structure.''

``With Japanese architecture, you walk in and ... you see the elevators, the cables, you see everything, the air conditioning, the tubes, everything,'' Roy says. ``It's like taking off the skin of an arm, and you see everything - how it works, why. It looks high-tech, but in fact the response is low-tech. It's human all the way.''

The challenge with ``Dralion,'' Roy says, was creating something fantastic and mysterious while letting audiences glimpse the reality behind the illusion.

``The art of the circus is to see,'' he stresses, ``and it's something fantastic to see how it's being done. It's not a magical trick inside a theater where you don't see anything, you don't know how that person flies. It's the magic of knowing at the same time - being surprised, but knowing how it's being done.''

While ``Dralion'' marks a homecoming of sorts for Caron, it also provides Cirque du Soleil with a chance to take stock artistically of its first 15 years.

Like the rest of the planet, Cirque spent part of the late 1990s anxiously pondering the coming millennium. When ``Quidam'' opened three years ago, its director, Franco Dragone, said that the show ``casts light on our frailty and angst at the dawn of a new century.''

For now, frailty and angst are, as Caron might say, passe.

``At the beginning of this new millennium, everybody's saying, `Oh, with this new millennium, what's going to happen?' '' Caron says. ``For me, the world's going to turn like it's turned for I don't know how many years. The people are waiting for something.

Me, I say, `No way! We are alive! And the world never stop. The world will turn and don't stop. Why don't we create a show to just be happy and have fun?' ''

THE FACTS

What: Cirque du Soleil presents ``Dralion.''

Where: Under the Big Top next to the Santa Monica Pier.

When: Thursday through Nov. 7. Performances 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday and thereafter at 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 5:30 and 9:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 5 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: Adults $34 to $55; children $23.75 to $38.50. Call [phone]; on the Web at www.admission.com; or at the on-site box office.

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) AT THE HEART OF `DRALION'

Unique beauty of Cirque du Soleil returns to Santa Monica

(2--Color) The Dralion - part dragon and part lion - is the centerpiece of Cirque du Soleil's new show in Santa Monica.

(3--Color) Hoop diving is part of ``Dralion,'' the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil's 13th full production.

(4--Color) ``Dralion'' includes such familiar skills as juggling: ``Cirque du Soleil, they said at the beginning that we reinvent the circus. We don't reinvent nothing ... We present circus acts,'' says director Guy Caron.

(5--Color) The acrobat-heavy Cirque includes performers from all over the globe. Also, ``Dralion'' is a much brighter show than Cirque's previous effort, ``Quidam.''

(6--Color) Skipping rope takes on a whole new meaning in the world of ``Dralion.''

(7--Color) Cirque Du Soleil set designer Stephane Roy, left, and director Guy Caron, tell a story of four families - and four primeval elements - that become one in ``Dralion.''

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer