But doesn’t everyone after going to see one? Especially Cirque Berzerk, it is dark, twisted, extraordinary. It turns you on like a flame. You are in hell, amongst the dead, and as I have often imagined, the dead are fascinating and deeply sexy. They rebel against the world as it is, they embrace difference, and they wear great clothes.

And I have so many ideas. And an even greater appreciation for the benefits of flexibility, so I have taken up the quest to achieve a back walk-over once more. Especially now my arm has alllmost completely healed from the bike accident.

But I know I will never approach the effortless mastery and beauty of what I saw tonight. I loved most the two men, the courtship, the push and pull, the yes I want you no I don’t as they danced and then flew…impossible grace and power evenly matched, and long aching lines of desire spun out in geometric shapes of pure muscled strength and the sensuous curves of yielding. Limbs twining together high in the air, breaking free, and the empty space between them as beautiful as their bodies linked together in defiance of gravity.

And trampolines! They had trampolines! Two of them with a large wall in between, and four brothers flipping, falling, somersaulting in bewildering and marvelously choreographed fashion from trampoline to wall to trampoline to right over the wall to trampoline. I hardly knew which to watch and my stomach clenched in the spectacular confusion of it all, sure that such glorious madness could not continue indefinitely…

And then the skeletons, in goth dress, white porcelain masks like dolls. Their bodies moved with the jerking movements of marionettes, bones animated and dancing, skulls bobbing with their steps, moving from graceful skill to skillful awkwardness, all of it requiring an incredible control over every part of the body that was breathtaking.

There were cross-dressing caberet dancers who put on a hell of a show, and all of the dancers were phenomenal. Normally I hate clowns, but the fire breathing drunk in the dirty suit and cross face and conical hat, I loved him. He went from iconic figure of shabby Victorian fantasy on stilts, to clunky shoes and an intoxicated stumble, and pulled a hat out of a rabbit. There was a woman who did the most extraordinary things while in handstand position on…stilts as well I suppose, I have no idea what to call them! The trapeze artist was gorgeous, and the woman who wrapped and unwrapped herself in two pieces of red silk  high above the ground, also gorgeous. A man who balanced on barrels and boards and towers of multiple moving parts…a couple who went through the kama sutra in ways only impossibly gifted gymnasts can, and the three in hoops high in the air at the very end when the woman in red comes into her own. And there was a midget in drag with an unforgettable face and a bad temper, and whoever put the music together for this approaches genius. And those playing the music as well. And if I am forgetting anything it is only because it is late. But my eyes were wide, my lips parted, and my breath caught for the duration, there was nothing that wasn’t spectacular and I haven’t enjoyed a performance so much in ages.

So go.