The circus comes to town: Cirque Mechanics at New Victory

Battulga Battogtokh of Cirque Mechanics
in 42 Ft.--A Menagerie of Mechanical Marvels

42 Ft.--A Menagerie of Mechanical Marvels
by Cirque Mechanics
The New Victory Theater
December 6-January 5

Hailing from Las Vegas, Chris Lashua and Aloysia Gavre's Cirque Mechanics troupe has arrived at our city's family-friendly New Victory Theater with a production called 42 Ft.--A Menagerie of Mechanical Marvels. (The measurement refers to the standard diameter of a circus ring.) Retrograde and wholesome, the show is a modest affair though, at nearly two hours with intermission, it might stretch beyond what most young kids would happily sit through, even some adults. Despite my own occasional squirming, I was charmed through most of the show and re-energized by fright at some of the dexterous aerial and slack wire work.

Impersonating a 1930s touring group named Circus Magnificus, the company eliminates the frills we might have come to expect from contemporary circus and just goes for feel-good basics, all the old-school sights and nostalgic sounds, but not without imagination. One of my favorite acts involved Tatiana Vasilenko dreamily juggling numerous balls while perched atop a wheeled chariot slowly "drawn" around the stage by a fetching cut-out horse--just one, and certainly the most benign, of the mechanical apparatuses alluded to the show's title and the company's name and reputation.

Justin Therrien combines low-key demeanor with exquisite physical skill as a wandering clown the troupe will eventually adopt. Mongolian strongman Battulga Battogtokh makes a believer out of the toughest skeptic when he handles weighty props with gusto and unexpected grace. There's even a lion tamer of sorts, though, in the blessed absence of trained animals, we must imagine a lion we will never see while Austin Bradley takes center stage, flourishing a stool and bullwhip. The show's only Black performer, Bradley otherwise has a minor presence in the lineup of acts. I was jarred by the crack of the bullwhip and the sight of it snapping and wrapping around his own body.

42 Ft.: A Menagerie of Mechanical Marvels is recommended for ages 5 and up and continues through January 5 on a diverse time schedule. For information and tickets, click here.

The New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (Times Square), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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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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HyperISH: Taking it from street to stage

Who's afraid?

These two words are the first uttered in HyperISH, an hour of power presented by the Amsterdam-based troupe ISH at The New Victory Theater, now through May 18. Dancers begin by creeping out under hazy light, wobbling atop a row of drab, ungainly platforms to woozy music--the first and last time you'll believe that any of these seven rambunctious men and women have ever suffered a moment of fear.

Founded in 1999 by Marco Gerris, ISH draws from diverse sources--hip hop, club dancing, acrobatics, ballet, Kathak, capoeira and other martial arts. A choreographic collision for sure, but you'll be happy to know that it works, thanks to Gerris's imagination and the outlandish talent and charisma of dancers like Micka Karlsson, Shailesh Bahoran and especially the unbelievable Martin Barnes. What does not work so well is Gerris's well-intentioned concept, a mess of dramaturgidity obviously aimed at young audiences.

When it is not just about fantastic dancing, HyperISH is sort of about alienation, about finding one's True Self despite the distractions and pressures of conformist, consumerist society, about our obsession with cyber-connectedness and being liked and...Liked. And so forth. The Catcher in the Rye has been cited as an inspiration. It tries way too hard.

But let the dancing help you forget all that. Don't overthink this show. Just go and watch what happens.

HyperISH runs through May 18. For program and ticket information, click here.

New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (Times Square), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Cirque Éloize's "Cirkopolis" rises at Skirball

Members of Cirque Éloize
perform a banquine act in Cirkopolis
photo (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Right before the curtain rises on Montreal's Cirque Éloize--now at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts through January 5--discordant music starts grinding and growling. Houselights flash; the curtain swirls with blobs of light, and whatever lies behind that veil could be radioactive. A startled audience gives up its first flurry of applause. And when that curtain lifts, watch out!

Cirkopolis, featuring a gifted, versatile troupe from Montreal, is what Fritz Lang (of Metropolis fame) might whip up from a big heap of contemporary circus acts, a dollop of music-theater choreography and a dash of Magritte. Instead of Lang, though, we have Cirque Éloize's Jeannot Painchaud and co-director/ choreographer Dave St-Pierre mischief-making with Robert Massicotte (sets/video), Alexis Laurence (video), Nicolas Descoteaux (lighting) and Stefan Boucher (music), just to name a few of the numerous co-conspirators responsible for this spectacle. Together, they have constructed an impressive, if also menacing, vision of urban life with views of towering, zooming architecture, a mass of mechanical gears that endlessly churn, and business men and women as soulless in their workaday existence as their yard-high stacks of paperwork. But that's not all.

Somewhere beneath this city of driving energy lies a more magical, more seductive one, no less driven. A city of expressive freedom, of romance, where men and women of cultivated power and skill display not only physical daring but also sensitivity and whimsy. In other words, a city of circus.

Cirque Éloize in the juggling pins scene of Cirkopolis
photos (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Over the course of 80 minutes, Painchaud and St-Pierre offer no straightforward narrative but utilize "big number" stagings--like a wildy imaginative ensemble dance with juggling pins--as context and lightbox for circus acts like trapeze work, banquine, contortion and clowning. The pace is variable but mostly lively, with only Lauren Herley's scarily-good but overextended corde lisse (aerial rope act) dragging out longer than necessary. From the sheer poetry of Angelica Bongiovonni's intricate twirling with and within a life-like Cyr wheel--I believe she can fly!--to the more macho posturing of a male sextet slipping around inside the German wheel, Cirkopolis is a nearly overwhelming thrill. Make time for Cirque Éloize this season!

Performed by Maude Arseneault, Angelica Bongiovonni, Dominique Bouchard, Mikael Bruyere-L’Abbe, Ashley Carr, Samuel Charlton, Myriam Deraiche, Lauren Herley, Reuben Hosler, Ugo Laffolay, Yann LeBlanc, Frederic Lemieux-Cormier and Francois Saussus (alternating with Carr in the clown act)

Through January 5. For complete schedule details and tickets, click here.

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

Kimmel Center for University Life

New York University (at Washington Square)

566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan

(map/directions)

WOW! Hey! It's Zimmerman & de Perrot at BAM!

Now that I have seen Zimmermann & de Perrot--and, by that, I mean these two Swiss guys, their whole award-winning team and their production of Hans was Heiri at the BAM Harvey Theater--I never want to not see them.

Look at these guys!

Fellow on the right is Dimitri de Perrot, a composer and DJ. From what I could tell, as the opening night audience assembled, he stealth-recorded our discordant chatter, amplified it to a grating roar, sampled it and mixed it with electronic melodies to play as an overture to the evening. He had us from gggggrrrr!!!

Fellow on the left is Martin Zimmermann, the troupe's choreographer. Why I love him is because his performing reminded me of my tuxedo cat (who has been ailing), from his character's sly, wily personality and lithe acrobatics to his black, open-toed footwear with the paw-like white socks showing. I don't know if he intended to look and behave like a tuxedo cat, but he did.

"We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word," the partners write in their wonderful manifesto, "Our Theater."* This phenomenon combines theater, dance, circus and music, blending it all to a rich consistency presented with panache. They came to my attention when I became interested in learning more about contemporary circus--a performance genre that is all about dissolving boundaries between artistic disciplines and blowing minds.

The troupe is so good--particularly in their acrobatic and contortion skills, but also in the freedom with which they establish their individual, endearing characters and present scenarios that make sense in their fantastical senselessness because they have disarmed us.

Scenes from Hans was Heiri
top, left: Tarek Halaby
top, right: Mélissa von Vépy
with Martin Zimmermann
(photos by Mario del Curto/Strates)

In the central showpiece of Hans was Heiri, the cast occupies a quartet of room-like boxes that fit together, open side facing us. This structure frequently tilts and turns at varying speeds, challenging its human cargo. You know how you discover just how much nerve and muscular specificity it takes to merely walk from one side of a room to the other if you slooooooowww down every movement? Imagine the extraordinary fluidity and agility these performers must have, the precise adjustments they must make when they're sloshing around inside this contraption or poetically dangling from it or acting like they're just sitting around at a table as the box bucks upward or moving through doors in the walls as if they're right at home. Throw in a terrifying power yoga class with the cast stuffed into one of the "rooms" by an out-of-control instructor who has worked with Miguel Gutierrez (that would be American ex-pat Tarek Halaby), and you get a sense of why the creative spunk of this troupe is completely irresistible.

With performances by Dimitri de Perrot, Martin Zimmermann, Tarek Halaby, Dimitri Jourde, Gaël Santisteva, Mélissa von Vépy, Methinee Wongtrakoon

Hans was Heiri continues at BAM Harvey Theater through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Click here for more information and ticketing.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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*OUR THEATER

We build our pieces from little things, everyday things, things that happen when a person feels unobserved—we hunt them out and gather them together. And that’s where we go to discover characters, spaces, sounds—a small gasp, a moment of distractedness, a constriction of the heart.

For our pieces we use everything that comes our way, and let it work its way through the meat grinder.

We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word.

We like distortion, we turn everything upside down.

We seek the possible in the impossible.

We risk and we fail.

We like little things. For us, objects are living beings.

We are little wannabe greats who are suddenly in over our heads.

We fool around at the edge of the abyss.

We laugh our heads off and are deadly serious.

We ride roughshod over physical pain.

We are extremely diligent and quite painstaking.

We let it rip.

Sweat and tears, good luck and bad.

Dimitri de Perrot and Martin Zimmermann 
from program notes for BAM Next Wave Festival production of Hans was Heiri

An ordinary acrobat's extraordinary tale

I've just finished Duncan Wall's The Ordinary Acrobat (Random House, 2013), which interweaves two engrossing narratives: the often elusive history of circus and this young American's sojourn to France to explore contemporary circus as an increasingly enamored student, scholar and advocate. (Wall currently serves as National Director of Circus Now, the American advocacy organization, and teaches circus history and criticism at the National Circus School of Montreal.) While some of Wall's swings between past and present, personal and historical, might dizzy a few readers, I hung on for the whole vicarious, mental ride, coming away with a thirst for seeing more contemporary/interdisciplinary--and even traditional--circus and turning my skills as an arts writer to this stimulating challenge. If you think you know everything that circus is and can be--Ringling Bros. over here; Cirque du Soleil over there--this book will give you a peek at unexpected possibilities and may inspire you to search out more. Good stories, good ideas, good company.

And on Thursday, October 24 (6pm), meet Duncan Wall at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Hillman Studio for a talk on the rise of contemporary circus and the state of the art today. This event is presented as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival in conjunction with the American premiere of Hans was Heiri by Swiss circus innovators, Zimmerman & de Perrot.

For complete information and tickets for Wall's talk, click here.

BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

STREB ascending

If STREB Extreme Action could hold onto the Park Avenue Armory indefinitely, the troupe's new show could easily keep running for years on the strength of New York's tourist trade alone. Oh, yes. STREB: Kiss the Air! is that kind of show and a world-class triumph for the mad genius (MacArthur-certified) Elizabeth Streb ("action architect and choreographer," according to her current self-labeling), her company of "action engineers" (not just dancers, thank you) and a regiment of technical and artistic collaborators. Forget Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and whatever Julie Taymor thought she was doing.  STREB: Kiss the Air! happens to be the real thing.

The visionary Elizabeth Streb steps up to the challenge of the Armory's enormous drill hall, filling it, from one end to the other, with lighting, huge video projections (including live videocam footage), massive scaffolding and equipment, a large, shallow pool of water, big sound and the formidable energy of her tribe of action heroes. She has developed and shown various components of STREB: Kiss the Air! over time, clearly honing and enhancing the choreography and risk-taking until it all stands before us like a mainstream-friendly hybrid of nouveau cirque, movie stunt work and the Olympics cranked up, like that Spinal Tap amp, to 11.

STREB DJ/MC Zaire Baptiste, wearing a row of lights up each leg of his pants, gets the action rolling by instructing us to disregard the standard theater announcement we just heard. "We want you to take out your cellphones, your iPhones! Take photos! Take videos! Upload them to Facebook...!"

How refreshing!

And for the audience--heavy on families with small kids--STREB: Kiss the Air! is refreshing indeed. The souped-up hybridization of everything Americans love--from extreme sports to action hero animations on big screen TVs--works because the discipline and skill necessary to pull it off are so much in evidence. Which makes me wonder if the reason most folks aren't drawn to just-plain-dance is because the actual skill and discipline it takes are not as nakedly obvious unless--as with certain big ballet companies or the Ailey troupe, for instance--it absolutely is. Dance, possibly, might not seem sufficiently hardcore. STREB? Now that's hardcore.

Hardcore and entertaining, not at all averse to showing its audience a good time, even if a good time means sitting there with your heart in your mouth because, at any moment, something could go wrong and someone could get seriously hurt. Elizabeth Streb herself might have started off in the rarified, purist territory of early post-modern experimentation, but today's STREB machine is built for people who love race cars, high-speed car chase scenes and Philippe Petit. It's built for the masses.

The 70-minute, multi-sectioned Armory program opens with harnessed performers, one after another, zooming over the heads of the audience and smacking into big square pads. They move on to Swing, in which bodies hurl--one at a time or in duets or trios--at and swing by two huge hoops dangling from metal scaffolding. Their movements on and around the swings grow more elaborate, their attack more daring, their cries, on impact and landing, more bloodcurdling. And if you somehow forget that these "action engineers" are, in Streb's mind, not just dancers but athletes--or military on maneuvers, even--they get an official break for re-hydration before moving on to a "pop action" drill lead by Associate Artistic Director Fabio Tavares Da Silva. As for that drill, think of it as an edgy kind of aerobics or yoga for action heroes, if repeatedly falling flat on your back were a kind of yoga.

In the daredevil world of STREB, weight and gravity are your frenemies. They make everything at once frustrating, thrilling and terrifying. Hence, the excitement of pulling or dropping away from bungee cords, slamming into mats or into one another, fine-tuning the velocity of a revolving metal ladder, and standing just millimeters away from the end of that ladder as it spins. For the audience, seated along either side of the long expanse of the Armory's drill hall, being close to all this action is a constant source of tension and rush.

Towards the latter part of the show, it can also be a frequent source of hydration--and I don't mean hydration of the healthful kind. Audience members in the mid-range of the hall are (imperfectly) shielded by Plexiglas and rain ponchos for good reason. All the belly flops and backflips in the pool kick up quite a lot of water, and a fair amount of it clears those Plexiglas walls. Hilarious fun to watch from a distance!

Not as much fun to watch at a distance--but still lovely, in its way--is Streb's Human Fountain section where the performers repeatedly climb up and leap from three levels of scaffolding to mats below in rhythmic patterns. This scaffolding is set up at the far end of the space. So if you happen to be closer to the hall's entrance, as my wife and I were, the action looks and feels remote--almost as if you were seated towards the back of a big, conventional theater. That's the only downside to the way Streb has arranged and utilized this great gift of space.

There is absolutely no downside to Elizabeth Streb's courageous Action Engineers: Sarah Callan, Jackie Carlson, Leonardo Giron Torres, Felix Hess, Samantha Jakus, Cassandra Joseph, John Kasten, Daniel Rysak, and Fabio Tavares Da Silva, with additional performers Tyler Ashley, Uys Du Buisson, Jessica Kreuger, CaCa Macedo, Mercedes Searer, McCurry Sherman, Ashley Caroline Walters.

Original music and sound design by David Van Tieghem
Lighting design by Robert Wierzel
Costume design by Andrea Lauer
Projection design by Erik Pearson
Set and installation design by Elizabeth Streb and Hudson Scenic

STREB: Kiss the Air! continues through Thursday, December 22. For complete schedule and ticketing, click here.

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Extreme ladder action

All photos (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

STREB Extreme Action Company performing Ascension, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, on July 9. Location: Gansevoort Plaza, Manhattan

More information on Ascension 
More information on STREB

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)

Check out this swan!

When Dancing on Pointe Isn't Hard Enough
by Stephanie Goodman, The New York Times, November 17, 2010

Walk it like Petit

Learning to Walk in the Slippers of a High-Wire Artist
by Emily B. Hager, The New York Times, August 12, 2010

The House of Yes

Nocturnalist | Aerial Acrobatics

by Sarah Maslin Nir, The New York Times, July 23, 2010

Run away and join the circus

Learning Acrobatics at New York Circus Arts Academy
by Nida Najar, The New York Times, November 22, 2009

LAVA's HANDSTAND-A-THON

LAVA will host its annual HANDSTAND-A-THON beginning May 17 at 5pm at LAVA Studio (524 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY between 6th Avenue and Carlton, near the 2, 3, B, Q trains). The event is a fundraiser for the LAVA Studio scholarship fund as well as LAVA's community
programming.

Handstand experts as well as first-timers young and old are invited to come to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to log seconds and minutes with their feet off the floor. Handstanders can use the wall, a spotter, or several spotters. Their handstand times will be added to a collective handstand pool. The goal for the total time of people with their feet raised is 3 hours.

Handstanders are encouraged to download pledge sheet and enlist sponsors for each second they stand on their hands. Or donors can offer contributions based on special challenges such as $1 for every "first-timer" or $100 for 25 people in a simultaneous 30-second handstand. The event will be enlived by performances by students from the LAVA Studio's current roster of classes. Local vendors including a taco truck, Italian ices, beer, wine, and Fizzy Lizzy soft drinks, will be on hand throughout the event.

LAVA's community programs include 2 days a week of Open Workout, offered free to kids ages 5 to 15 throughout the LAVA Studio's 3 10-week sessions. The studio also hosts free community performance nights called Night of Renegades, which has included trapeze, poetry, theater, dance, acrobatics, and clowning performed by kids, adults, students and professionals in a festive, supportive, and extremely diverse atmosphere. In addition, LAVA's community programs include a partnership with Public School 9 through which dozens of students from P.S. 9 learn acrobatics from LAVA company members.

LAVA is a performance troupe based in Brooklyn dedicated to creating original, empowering, boundary-breaking performances based in dance and acrobatics. The LAVA Studio is their home base where they rehearse, train, offer classes to kids and adults, and host several community programs. For more info including photos and video footage of the company as well as last year's HANDSTAND-A-THON, click here or call 718-399-3161.