Enter a topsy-turvy world in 'Aurelia'

We first meet the heroine of "Aurelia's Oratorio" - the cirque nouveau-inspired show playing at the Berlind Theatre - as she is emerging, inexplicably, from a chest of drawers. The world Aurelia enters, limb by limb, is an inverted one, where mice hunt cats, kites fly people and babies are nursed with cigarettes. The unexpected becomes the norm - nothing is how we believe it should be.

The show - created and directed by Victoria Thierree Chaplin and starring her daughter Aurelia Thierree in the title role - challenges traditional theatrical concepts and plays with the idea that a production be framed around the absence of character, that costumes can wear people, and that the stage perhaps performs on the actors. In the dreamlike world on stage, human bodies are disfigured, kidnapped, and manipulated to explore questions of where and how we fit in our clothes, our relationships, our reality, our dreams and our nightmares.

Don't expect easy answers - Aurelia is all about dismantling our expectations. The first expectation is that there's going to be a plot and structure: Aurelia, extracting herself from the dresser, seems to be preparing herself for a date. On an answering machine, the impatient voice of a man says in French, "I know you're there, pick up." However, any trace of narrative quickly disappears as the heroine slips into a wonderland of loosely connected scenes, dances and acrobatics. The show does not strive for cohesive narrative, but for emotional resonance and piquing audience curiosity.

In a production shaped by the absence of character and plot, objects are cleverly brought to the forefront so that an article of clothing or a velvet stage curtain can elicit sympathy from the audience. Problems arise, however, when the human actors are asked to compete with objects. A man dances with an empty dress and fights with an overcoat, a toy train speeds through a hole in Aurelia's torso, a dress consumes its wearer - the objects, not the people, are in control here.

Indeed, the most genuine moments of emotional depth occur when there is a distinct lack of human communication on stage. When Aurelia is reunited with the man who has been searching for her, the scene is not as moving as when he danced alone with her empty shoes, or when the proscenium curtains touched in a tender, brocade embrace.

The production's fresh take on stage magic is crucial to its exploration of the perpetual search for human connection. Inspired by a series of medieval drawings depicting the world upside down, McCarter's first show of the season is sure not to disappoint those who hanker for a completely innovative perspective on circus, comedy, and ruminations on the human condition. Aurelia, coping in a world upside down, questions how we fit in to our own world, supposedly right-side up.

4 Paws

Pros: Stunning visuals; highly innovative and thought-provoking.