cineTREK 3: CANTINA

Being a city that is overflowing with historical sources, royal affairs, global relations, and tasteful art, London would be the city that has something for everyone.  My personal favorite thing about London is the urban culture that is substantially represented in South Bank.  South Bank is the home to leading trends in film, art, as well as performing arts.  It is where one can experience the sensational show, CANTINA.  CANTINA is a performance that is one like no other due to entertainment pushing past limits, and also to its imposing mechanics of stage performance.  Allow me to document some of its more memorable provocations in the following.

Keeping you at the edge of your seat, CANTINA is like a performance that was born from Cirque Du Soleil meeting Chippendales, and traveling back to the Vaudeville era.  Your eyes would stay peeled open just so you wouldn’t want to miss one second of the exceptionally dangerous acrobatic acts.  Furthermore, the show fabulously depicted the evolution of struggles experienced in an intimate relationship.  From the very beginning, CANTINA opens up with a man and a woman walking on a tight rope.  It is very representative of the difficult balance that must be maintained between lovers.

Though the acts and rendition of gender roles were nothing but magnificent, the overall production and execution from the cast members were what was most impressive.  CANTINA had a main cast of five performers who were extremely dependent of each other.  If you thought teamwork did not exist in theater, the details observed in CANTINA would certainly prove you wrong.  For example, most of the time, all performers were on stage at the same time watching each other, even when only one person was currently in the spotlight.  Though it may seem like they are there to set the setting, the extra performers are watching for caution. 

A moment when caution was cleverly disguised was when one of the female performers were walking across the tips of wine bottles and the musician was playing his ukulele.  The music may have appeared as simultaneous live entertainment, but really, he was prepping the woman for her stunt to not only increase intensity for the audience, but also to set her performance pace.  He did so by playing the music and concurrently watching her position on the bottles.  The effects of teamwork were present in that particular skit because the woman fell on her first attempt to cross the bottles.  However, her mistake was recovered because the music continued.  At first, the music had lyrics for the man to sing, but because the woman took longer than usual, he whistled the rest of the song until she came to the end of her stunt.  Had the music been a pre-recorded soundtrack, each stunt would have to be exact in accordance to time. 

Overall, CANTINA is a mind-blowing experience for its extraordinary performance, mechanics, and brilliant interpretation of modern relationships.

-Pamela Peredo