FORGIVE THE MIMES

By RICHARD CORLISS /SANTA MONICA

The time is ripe to dump on Cirque du Soleil. This Montreal-based troupe has been an item of import chic since 1987, when it began touring the U.S. with a show called Le Cirque Reinvente. The Cirque style--circus acts (no animals, just humans) with the gloss of stage magic and a mysterioso musical score--is no longer an automatic astonishment; form has congealed into formula. Putting one of its extravaganzas, Mystere, in a Las Vegas casino and planning new shows in Vegas and Walt Disney World are moves that rob Cirque of its old street-theater purity. Then there are all the mimes: twee kitsch for which no enterprise can be forgiven. So with its fifth international touring show, Quidam, now in its U.S. premiere in Santa Monica, California, we should probably say so long to Soleil.

Well, we can't. Cirque still works, magnificently. From its first moments under the yellow-and-blue big top on the Santa Monica Pier, Quidam (which means "anybody" in Latin) pulls the audience out of domesticity into the ethereum of its wizardly wit. A man and a woman sit in metal chairs, he reading a paper, she knitting. A child sits before them. Then through a door comes a large figure out of a Magritte painting: long overcoat, umbrella, bowler hat, no head. The child takes the creature's magic hat, puts it on--and dreams the three-hour show. The chairs, the door rise into the air. Benoit Jutras' New Agey music soars with them. A menagerie of demons and sprites glides on stage, primed to amaze. Once again, Cirque has reinvented itself.

In circuses around the world the Cirque brain trust finds the most inventive acts, then retools them to fit into director Franco Dragone's grand and elaborate design. Each show is identifiably Cirque, yet as distinct as a new Robert Wilson opera production. Like other Cirque shows, Quidam has a dozen or so main acts. As the featured artists parade the genius of their bodies in stunts of strength and grace, Cirque's menagerie (Edvard Munch's silent screamer, Clive Barker's Pinhead and dozens of other glamorous mutants) capers around them like bit players in an amiable madman's reverie. Ballerina-contortionists flex gaily; Pierrots bodysurf across the stage on skateboards; the man with the newspaper floats in midair. Dragone exhausts the laws of geometry, while the performers bend the laws of physics.

No one should take a wild ride inside an 8-ft. "German wheel" that looks like a huge skeletal snare drum, but Chris Lashua does somersaults and daredevil revolutions within the wheel as he steers it almost into the laps of the first-row spectators. Men are not supposed to be springboards, yet the Ukrainian and Russian acrobats in the "banquine" perform high-dive triple twists from the top of a four-man pyramid. Humans aren't built for the gorgeous torture to which Yves Decoste and Marie-Laure Mesnage submit themselves in their "hand-to-hand" body sculpture. Caked with white makeup and executing exquisitely slow convolutions, they could be Prometheus and Promethea--an Adam and Eve into whom homo sapiens might hope to evolve.

Dragone loves birth and evolution metaphors; they are at the heart of Mystere, still the apex of Cirque sorcery. In Quidam's most enthralling solo turn, a red sash stretches like a birth canal from roof to floor, and Isabelle Vaudelle wriggles and pirouettes artfully in it, a child willing itself to be born. In the spirit of the best Cirque routines, this is wordless drama; it transforms motion into emotion.

So what about the mimes? A trio of French clowns, Les Macloma, is tiresome in its first two appearances, beguiling in its third (a snatch of music played on two balloons and a one-string violin). But John Gilkey, Quidam's emcee, is a gawky delight, especially in a dance routine with a hat rack. Gilkey knows that the body is a deft comic instrument, even as the charming Chinese girls who do the "diabolos" routine (spinning a toy on a string while prancing nonstop in short skirts and Tin Woodman hats) know how to make this precision aerobic workout seem like schoolyard fun.

Quidam tours California for the next year before heading to Denver, Dallas, Houston, New York City, Chicago and Atlanta. More buoyant than the 1994 Alegria, less self-consciously surreal than the '92 Saltimbanco, Quidam is prime, mature Cirque. It is beyond circus, beyond theater; it makes the incredible visible.