r seven dealers, to be precise, known to their customers as Les 7 Doigts de la Main (or 7 Fingers). These people have more natural spring than a taut trampoline. And when they first rush the stage of the Union Square Theater in the opening minutes of “Traces,” the appealing show that opened on Monday night, you feel that mad, pulse-raising magic that you associate with cool, busy nights in big cities.
Except imagine that effect magnified and poeticized, with urban chaos turned rhythmic and graceful. Making their entrance amid what seems like a blare of horns and blaze of headlights, the seven acrobats vault, roll, spiral and (I would swear) levitate over and around one another, creating the illusion that they’re dodging traffic in the way you do only in your dreams. O for the wings of a Finger.
The mission of 7 Fingers, a Montreal team founded in 2002, is to bring the sort of derring-do associated with super circuses down to street level, where earthbound lugs like you and me can identify with, and even get to know, the folks who fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Though five of the cast members have performed with Cirque du Soleil, what they’re doing in “Traces,” directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, is far more intimate and driven more by specifics of personality than by collective spectacle.
Think of it as cirque du cabaret, in which a group of distinct talents get to show off the physical equivalents of individual song stylings. (The title “Traces” refers to the human traces that each person leaves in his or her wake.) The members of this corps de cirque take time to introduce themselves, one by one, to the audience, with the sort of stats and personal descriptions found on Facebook pages. (They are Mason Ames, Valerié Benôit-Charbonneau, Mathieu Cloutier, Bradley Henderson, Philippe Normand-Jenny, Xia Zhengoi and Florian Zumkehr.)
So we learn their heights, weights, birth dates and places of origin, and that they are, variously, flirtatious, humble, romantic, affectionate, easygoing and, in one self-declared case, clumsy. (These details are conveyed orally, as the performers speak through a roving microphone that dangles from the ceiling, and via back-wall projections.) Sometimes one or another of them will play the piano or sing snatches of song, karaoke-style, which means not too well.
In other words, we are meant to think, “Genius acrobats: They’re just like us!” Except that they can dive through really high hoops that are barely bigger than their body circumferences and do single handstands atop teetering stacks of chairs and project themselves perpendicularly, midair, from the sides of tall poles. And how they handle a skateboard or a basketball is on a level usually not encountered in Central Park.
The vocabulary in which these feats are accomplished is tastily varied, and includes an apache-dance-style pas de deux, Busby Berkeley-like configurations and a punch-fest that suggests what ordinary roughhousing among pals would be like if those pals happened to be, say, the X-Men.
Though there is inevitably a sensuality in a show that involves lithe-bodied young people, erotic content is kept to a minimum, probably for the best, since the team consists of six men and one woman. This is not in the vein of the steamy circus cabarets practiced farther downtown by Spiegelworld in recent years.
The boys and girl of “Traces” exude a playful, puppyish androgyny. And moms and dads in search of family outings can be assured that while one of the most exciting set pieces here might be classified as pole dancing, it is like nothing you would come across in a gentlemen’s club.
Some of the getting-to-know-you stuff in “Traces” is a little twee for my tastes, too self-consciously charming. (Be warned: Baby pictures of the cast figure prominently.) But there’s no question that you wind up feeling more personally invested than you usually do when you watch acrobats risk injury and possibly their necks.
The last sequence — it’s the one involving hoops that are stacked ever higher — is wittily accompanied by the projection of an EKG-style pulse line, with accompanying beeps. That could be your heartbeat that’s being tracked up there. Vicarious thrills have an extra, blood-pressure-raising kick when the people providing them seem like your next-door neighbors.
TRACES
Directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider; creative direction by Les 7 Doigts de la Main/7 Fingers; general manager, 321 Theatrical Management; lighting by Nol van Genuchten; costumes by Manon Desmarais; original set and prop design by Flavia Hevia, adapted by Les 7 Doigts de la Main/7 Fingers; music and video by Les 7 Doigts de la Main/7 Fingers. Produced for Fox Theatricals by Kristin Caskey and Mike Isaacson. A 7 Fingers production, presented by Fox Theatricals, Tom Gabbard, Amanda DuBois, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Nassib El-Husseini and Tom Lightburn. At the Union Square Theater, 100 East 17th Street, Manhattan; (800) 982-2787, ticketmaster.com. Through Oct. 9. Running time : 1 hour 30 minutes.
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