The Finishing Touch
In early Greek theatre, men played all the parts and the defining accoutrement was the costume. Today, an audience wants more. If it's a man playing a woman (Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie"), they want him to look like a woman; if it's a dancer in "Cats," they want more than pointed ears and a tail. The character, facially, must be consistent. The finishing touch, therefore, is the makeup and nowadays, no one does that better than Cirque du Soleil.
Part of Cirque's allure is the untraditional way they use everything from theatre space to music, costumes to lighting and - not by accident - makeup. You'd be hard pressed to find a character in a Cirque show that gets by with red lips, pink cheeks and black mascara'd eyes.
Case in point? "Mystère" at Treasure Island in Las Vegas. The first Cirque show to have a theatre built to its specifications, it dazzled Las Vegas and set
a new standard for presenting characters like Yanelis Brooks-Sánchez's white bird. Her makeup completes her transformation; it's as much a part of her character as costume and choreography.
Yanelis, a petite beauty, grew up in Cuba and started dancing when she was 8 years old. She left Cuba at the age of 20 to see the world - dancing in Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Spain. It was an audition in Barcelona that brought her into the Cirque family and to Las Vegas.
But never, she conceded, was she asked to spend over an hour every night putting on makeup. The process is almost as long as the show. So explicit are the directions that she was given a book detailing each step in the application and blending of her character's unique look.
Kathleen Price, the Makeup Supervisor for the Resident Shows Division in Las Vegas, said, "The makeup is designed in layers. It has to do with how the makeup reads under the theatrical lights...It has to do with giving it some durability and longevity and each step kind of works off of the step that comes before it."
"We have a really interesting population of artists and one of the things that unifies that very diverse demographic is that Cirque has a very unique look. One of the things that I think is so interesting about the four shows here is that all four shows are very different from each other...and yet they all carry a thumbprint that is absolutely Cirque. And a big part of that is the impact of the makeup and the costumes, the visual that the people present...The makeup is of equal caliber to the physical performance."
The makeup training for Yanelis began during rehearsals in Montreal. The first two or three times, a professional makeup artist applied her look. Very slowly, Yanelis took over. The makeup professional would apply half of her face and then she was asked to match it. Her first solo attempt took two hours. "I think it's difficult because you need to mix very good the colors...I like to be perfect so I used my book for one year."
No longer. Today, she is quick and precise. Yanelis dons her headpiece and uses it as a guideline. She daubs the white contours and carefully sketches in deep blue definitions to meet the headpiece, where the color scheme continues into the costume. Then she works outward from these base lines until she has a layer in place - midnight blues, cherry reds and startling whites. She powders and sets the crèmes, dusts off her face and moves on to blending.
Kathleen said, "It does several things. The farther away you get, when we're working on blends, if the blending isn't quite complete, the colors look like stripes. The more the blending can be finessed, the end result is that it creates volume and shape rather than looking like stickers laying on the face."
Although not every artist has such intricate makeup, no one gets by with rouge and lipstick. And for male athletes, that can be challenging. "You know, seventy-five percent of our artists come to us as elite athletes...And for acrobats who've spent their entire lives learning to do everything with their wrists locked, this is very, very difficult." That doesn't, however, get them off the hook. "Even if it's hard, even if you don't understand it, just do it and do it and do it and one day you'll discover that your hands have become intelligent."
"Don't be afraid of makeup...It's not a tattoo; it'll all come off...You can practice on your hand. I like to practice on my knee because it has curves like a face and it's easy to reach." And the average cost per "face?" Somewhere between $75-$150.
Yanelis is a beautiful example of the role makeup plays in the overall concept of a show and in the development of a character. With Cirque du Soleil's perfect blend of lighting, costume, choreography and makeup, Yanelis suspends belief. She truly is a white bird.