Circus at APAP: Acrobatic Conundrum (Seattle), Company Oktobre (Paris)

Dance, theater, performance folks, scoot over a bit, won't you? Circus has arrived, taking its place among the city's vast APAP-related offerings. The mission? To make visionary, contemporary circus as thriving an artform in the US as it is abroad. For the second year, Circus Now--the community's support and advocacy organization--has partnered with NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The festival features six troupes and runs for three nights.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 opened last evening at Skirball with performances by Acrobatic Conundrum, a Seattle ensemble founded in 2012, and Company Oktobre, an accomplished trio of Parisian performers. Essentially two shows in one, the program ran over two hours. If you're going to program like that, I question the need to have festival MC Sxip Shirey--a musician and veteran of circus--consume time delivering two circus-boosting intros, each with its musical performance. One wild-haired man, his toys and his electronics can sound like a party in full throwdown, but a little of this goes a long way. Next time: One and done.

Acrobatic Conundrum's piece, The Language of Chance, frustrated me. The clear talents of the company--most notably, amiable and multi-skilled Ty Vennewitz--were not matched by signs that anyone grasped the potential dynamism of activating the entire stage space, not just filling it with decor, and the importance of pacing and smooth transitions. Performers often simply crouched or lurked within the set like deadweight while one or another person performed in the center. Contemporary circus can offer a more holistic, integrated stage with people and things cleverly interconnected and interacting. Done right, that makes for truly magical, unforgettable experiences in the theater. Acrobatic Conundrum has produced five shows and made it to this prestigious festival but, by evidence of The Language of Chance, it needs to step up its game.

After Acrobatic Conundrum, intermission, and Shirey Part II, I would have liked to come to Company Oktobre with something approaching freshness of eye and ear.  But that was not to be, which I regret because the sophisticated Oktobre--created by its performers, Eva Ordonez-Benedetto, Jonathan Frau and Yann Frisch and director Florent Bergal--deserves better attention. When you're presenting farce, your technique and timing must be razor-sharp. You have to quickly get your audience invested in your people--total strangers, usually--with their weird and tickling idiosyncrasies, their little sleight of hand tricks and struggles with props. In the case of Oktobre, you're asking watchers to toggle between baffling behavior and English supertitles that only deepen the absurdity. In all things, Company Oktobre is completely on point, and I look forward to any chance to see them again.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 continues tonight and concludes tomorrow night. Here's the lineup:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 8pm

Water on Mars (Sweden)
Andréane Leclerc/Nadère arts vivants (Canada) — Whore of Babylon
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

Aloft (US) — Dinner of our Discontent
Water on Mars (Sweden)
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

For complete festival information and tickets, click here.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts 
566 LaGuardia Place (south of Washington Square Park), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Arts journalists, critics invited to "Speaking Circus": contemporary circus in perspective

You’re fluent in theater and dance. You speak Beckett, Pinter, Graham and Ailey. But what about circus? Is the only circus-ease in your vocabulary “clown” and “three-ring”?

Circus Now 

invites you to

SPEAKING CIRCUS

An exploration of ways to think about the contemporary circus.

Inspired by Unpack the Arts (the European Residency Programme for Cultural Journalists), Speaking Circus will follow a contemporary circus performance with discussions and presentations about contemporary circus history, disciplines and influences.  The primary focus of this event is a half-day long seminar. You are encouraged to view the performance the previous evening, as it will be referenced in some of the panels.

PRESENTERS

Joe Melillo (Executive Producer at BAM), Duncan Wall (author of The Ordinary Acrobat), Karen Fricker (theater critic and professor at Brock University), Mary Rose Lloyd (Director of Artistic Programming at The New Victory Theater), Monique Martin (Director of Family Programming at City Parks Foundation), Lotta Vaulo (Managing Director of Circus Info Finland), members of the Race Horse Company and Suzi Winson (founder of Circus Warehouse).

WHEN AND WHERE

Presentations, discussion and lunch

Wednesday, August 21, 10am-3pm

New 42nd Street® Studios building
229 West 42nd Street, LuEsther T. Mertz Board Room, 9th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

***

Performances by Race Horse Company, AcroArts, FAQ, Bindlestiff Family Cirkus andHybrid Movement Company

Tuesday, August 20, 7pm

Wednesday, August 21, 7pm

Marcus Garvey Park
Madison Ave, East 120th Street to East 124 Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

***

WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY CIRCUS?

Contemporary Circus refers to any performance that uses traditional circus skills to emotionally, intellectually and viscerally engage audiences. It is extremely popular in Europe, Canada and Australia - and now the U.S. is catching up. We haven’t seen this much enthusiasm and innovation in American circuses since the Ringling Brothers started traveling by train. A massive scene is happening right under America’s feet and Circus Now wants to give you the scoop.

Unpacking contemporary circus in Europe: A call for writers

Unpack the Arts is a European project that provides residencies for cultural journalists in the context of twelve major festivals programming contemporary circus. The goal of the project is to facilitate the circulation of knowledge and experience, to develop the critical discourses of its participants, and to further the role of the media within the circus arts and contemporary society. Cultural journalists, critics and chief editors from any form of media can apply for the project. 

For comprehensive information, click here.

Application deadline: August 23

Circus in extremis

Circa--featuring acrobatic dancers based in Brisbane, Australia--presents hyper-edgy New Circus stripped to abstraction. Forget fanciful story lines. Forget expensive, dazzling sets and shimmering costumes. Lighting effects aggressively sculpt the stage; harsh, blaring music comes on like a tsunami. But other than that, Circa is all about gravity and quirky movement--catnip for pure dance-lovers, genuinely mind-blowing. Why, it looks ten times as dangerous as Spider-Man at a fraction of the cost!

Artistic director Yaron Lifschitz's 80-minute production, now having its US premiere at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, twists and splays and pulls and pushes and propels the bodies of seven outlandishly skillful men and women to punishing extremes. It often makes them look desperately manic and self-destructive or at least absurd. Anything to force our hearts into our mouths. And the strategy works: Skirball's audience gasped and shrieked and chuckled and rose in ovation.

I felt somewhat more ambivalent. On the one hand, Circa's overall weirdness, the tension they create, their hip hop attitude and their frequent elements of surprise can't be topped. Circus really is kind of strange, and these performers absolutely rule by being as strange--and as strained--as they want to be.

The performers incorporates within their own behavior suggestions of what traditional circus usually offers--"animal acts," "clown acts," maybe even "freak side shows" distilled to their most abstract dynamics and rolled out in way that makes them effective both as circus and as dance. One diverting solo evolves from an audience-interactive finger-snap-along to a display of how to be funny with just your hands or your dangling feet. Pluck the gorgeously crafted and interpreted choreography from its context, and it could be a brilliant, award-worthy dance in and of itself. Similarly, aerial ribbon dance and terrestrial multiple hula hoop numbers strengthen the impression of these performers as supremely focused with a measure of grace to go along with their guts.

But I cared less for watching women frequently tossed and flung about like rag dolls or stuffed sacks. While the male performers--a couple of them quite buff--sometimes allow themselves to look ridiculous, the women take the brunt most of the time. A little more imagination--and respect--please. Okay, well, there is that one long segment in which a woman wearing glittering cherry-red stilletos--at last, a dazzling costume detail!--climbs all over one guy's bare skin. Sweet revenge, perhaps.

Last two performances: tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm. Information and tickets

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), Manhattan
(directions)

A visit with "Raoul"

James Thiérrée performing Raoul 

at the Barbican, London

James Thiérrée's audience at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater gathers before a stage that resembles an old sailing ship run aground, once proud sails collapsed upon themselves. In a sense, this first impression is true. Thiérrée's Raoul--a solo work from the brilliant leader and star of the renowned Compagnie du Hanneton--introduces a man who lives a shipwrecked life, castaway in a world of his own. Over the next 80 minutes, we're drawn into the fortified hut Raoul has built for himself. We become privy to its magic and its vulnerabilities.

Having first witnessed Thiérrée and his troupe in their 2005 BAM debut (Bright Abyss), I count myself among his fervent New York fans. I eagerly anticipated a work promising a focus on Thiérrée. Rest assured, for this year's Next Wave Festival, the man has packed his show with nearly everything he knows how to do. Given his multifaceted authority--as director, actor, dancer, mime, clown, acrobat, trapeze artist, magician and musician--that's quite a lot.

With gentle, stately music, houselights start to dim. A sunset glow drifts behind one "sail" and flows across another. Soon, fabric whips away, revealing a dark, looming structure of metal pipes draped in what could be a giant, dense and very dusty cobweb. A bearded, bedraggled fellow also appears--our Raoul. Or is it?

As Thiérrée storms the structure, crying hoarsely and mounting and dangling from it with his feet treading open air, some of the heavy poles begin to give way, dropping to the ground with a frightening jolt. You cringe and want to say, "James, are you sure?"

Raoul's trouble is that there's at least one other "Raoul" lurking, invading what he once believed to be a well-constructed reality. Thiérrée's skill at misdirecting our attention helps this annoying, not easily contained "double" seem to appear, like a magician's shiny coin, where we least expect him.

The hut, itself, is a kind of Raoul, harboring outdated but dearly loved things such as a gleaming Victrola and scratchy records. The two beings--man and armored home--are closely attuned to each other. They communicate. Now and then, Raoul grumbles something at the hut. When he rattles his shoulders and arms, it responds with a noisy metallic quivering of its own. It can also shift parts of its structure at will. Even the air answers to Raoul's movements with gusts of musical sounds. But the air, too, has a stubborn will, and the loner finds himself batting away these chords as if they were big, invisible flies.

The disheveled, often frenzied Raoul is, without question, a diagnosable refugee from the abyss. We are left to guess the source of his damage and his reason for isolating himself. He attempts to hold himself together as best he can, but his body wages war on itself. Other "Raouls"--not all of them of the human species--continually fire his nerve endings and seep through his pores. For instance, and for no detectable reason, Thiérrée channels a high-spirited horse with such exacting, exhausting and finally convincing physical detail that he thoroughly deserves that feedbag he straps on near the passage's conclusion.

Over time, certain external Others attempt to engage Raoul, and these creatures are absolutely beguiling, thanks to designs and fabrications by Thiérrée's mother and mentor, Victoria Thiérrée. (She is the daughter of Charlie Chaplin, sister of Geraldine Chaplin, and wife of Jean Baptiste Thiérrée with whom she founded traveling New Circus troupes that included their kids, James and Aurélia.) Since I expect you to try to see Raoul, I will not spoil surprises by describing Mme. Thiérrée's handiwork. I will say, however, that her contributions perfectly resonate with the whimsy, beauty and melancholy entwined in her son's artistry.

Raoul's dark underpinning is inextricable from its humor. If you go, you might notice some audience members chuckling at certain things that you do not find funny, and vice versa. Or you might feel sensitive to the grief floating beneath the playful illusions. Thiérrée connects with each of us and reconnects us with something vulnerable within ourselves.

Remaining shows November 9, 10, 12, 13 at 7:30pm and November 14 at 3pm

BAM Next Wave Festival

BAM Harvey Theater

651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn (directions)