Performing Arts Review: ECHO by Cirque du Soleil

Cirque du Soleil ECHO

Writer and Director: Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar
Creation Director: Chantal Tremblay
Original Idea; Set and Props Designer: Es Devlin
Production Director: Serge Côté

May 24, 2026: Under the Big Top, Old Port of Montreal, Quebec

Last week while visiting Montreal, I enjoyed the opportunity to see the Cirque du Soleil performance Echo under a big top on the St. Lawrence River waterfront. The show centers around a giant Cube that moves around the stage, serves as a screen for remarkable projections, and a various times is taken apart by the performers to reveal new surprises before being rebuilt by the end of the show. The central character is FUTURE (Louana Seclet-Monchot), a young woman who like Alice and Clara before her explores a fanciful world and it’s unique and talented beings. FUTURE is accompanied by her faithful companion Ewai “the Dog” (Philippe Dupuis) who is also a skilled juggler.  A pair of clowns known as Double Trouble (Clément Malin and Thomas Gaskin) tie together the various pieces of the show with a lot of crowd interaction and their specialty of balancing large stacks of cardboard boxes (a whole lot more interesting than it sounds!).

View this post on Instagram

There’s a whole story in the program about how this show explores our connection with nature and animals and “how our actions can shape the world around us.”  But for me it was mostly a series of acts the fed my childlike sense of wonder and whimsy.  Acts include performers dressed as paper animals performing a vertical ballet along the sides of the Cube, the Fireflies (Alma Danira Quintanar and Penelope Elena Scheidler) who performed acrobatics while suspended by their hair, acrobatics dancing around flying poles, and a finale on a triple set of teeterboards.  FUTURE also does a lovely performance on the Washington trapeze, where she balances on her head while suspended high within the big top.  A live band and vocalists accompany the entire performance.

I first saw Cirque du Soleil way back in 1991 when they performed Nouvelle Expérience under a big top in Battery Park in New York City.  I loved that performance with the new twists on circus arts, the amazing things that humans could do with their bodies, and the fact that they did not include animals in their performance.  I always wanted to see Cirque du Soleil again but time and circumstances prevented me until this visit to their home base in Montreal.  The circus has grown into a huge company with residencies at several prominent tourist destinations.  But I still feel that the show is grounded in exploring possibility and wonder with a team of creative artists.  Hopefully, I will not wait 35 years to see them again.

ECHO continues in Montreal through August 16, 2026 and then will make three stops on a tour in Mexico later in the year.

 

#Acrobatics #Ballet #CirqueDuSoleil #Contortionist #Juggling #PerformingArtsReviews #Slackwire #Teeterboards #Trapeze