Cirque Eloize fiery hot with ‘Excentricus’ show

Last year, when Cirque Eloize performed at the Maine Center for the Arts, the audience knew it was in the presence of true circus talent. This was not an animal circus; the magic came from acrobatics and other physical feats that caused gasps of excitement and awe. In the tradition of its name, which is a local expression for “heat lightning,” the show was dazzling.

This weekend, Cirque Eloize (pronounced el-was) returned to the MCA stage with a new show called “Excentricus,” which delighted and tickled kiddies of all ages. Although the original touring production was fiery and bright, “Excentricus” turned up the heat and exploded with the hottest show yet out of this young company, which began in 1993 in the Magdalen Islands off Quebec.

As with Cirque de Soleil, Cirque Eloize has a distinctly European feel to it. No matter where you look, something is taking place — a small spat between performers, a love scene or an acrobat spinning upside down on her head. There is a central action, but there are also the sidelines, and it makes for a dense theatrical experience much in the style of magic realism. The stage is simply crawling with human figures whose oddities of movement and grace somehow invite us to come strangely closer to human experience.

But forget the philosophical aesthetic for a moment. Cirque Eloize also has a joyfulness that is completely its own, and just hearing the outright laughter of children in the audience attested to that.

Everyone laughed at the boyishness of the male performers as they piled onto a bicycle, or tossed 15 clubs among five guys, or tripped and tossed each other in slapstick routines. The female performers could likewise be spokeswomen for girl power — the kind that allows them to flip or walk on their hands or dance while suspended on a trapeze and then skip off giggling. And when the group all came together — for instance, in an eight-person tableau on a whirling bike — it was a party of clever acuity. These folks give a whole new twist — literally — to the game of leapfrog.

As an ensemble, Cirque Eloize is a model troupe that is as spontaneously fascinated by itself as it is fascinating to an audience. A half-dozen musicians — which are a new and brilliant addition to the act — support the performers but also participate in the show as characters in this dreamy and bizarre slice of life. Not only is their musicianship moodily skillful, but their attentiveness to the action onstage is total and flawless. As with the lighting design, they help create the humor of the silent clowns (which got the audience working as a rhythm section of grunts and shouts) as well as the intensity of a jam session of floor acrobatics.

Cirque Eloize offers an audience a chance to laugh and marvel at the dexterity of the human body working in extraordinary consort with its imagination. But it also shows a tragic side, such as when a vertical rope climber nearly hanged himself in a noose when he was rejected by a playground of performers.

At its best, Cirque Eloize is like a painting by Marc Chagall. It has flight and fancy and a seriousness of purpose. It both entertains us and makes us realize that life is like a juggling skit — sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes dropped, but always worth the motion.