CIRCUS FROM DOWN UNDER
Acrobats, musicians together onstage
If the term new Australian circus evokes visions of Crocodile Dundee in a cage match with a kangaroo while koalas do high wire tricks, think again.
Circa — “circus that moves the heart, mind and soul” — is coming to town.
The Brisbane-based troupe was founded by director Yaron Lifschitz in 1987. For more than 30 years its unique approach to presenting circus arts alongside high concept design has left audiences stunned.
Opus, the production currently touring North America, unites the spectacular athletes in Circa with France’s acclaimed Debussy String Quartet. As acrobats fly through the air, the musicians perform Russian pianist and composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s driving, complicated quartets.
“What actually attracted me to the ‘nouveau circus’ is how utterly singular it is,” said Lifschitz.
“I’m not a natural director. What I do well is pull together groups of people and get them to think, move and express themselves in powerful ways that can’t quite be explained.”
To attempt to draw out reason from those non-narrative but highly charged moments, the director had the idea of incorporating the live musicians to offer up a kind of linear continuity in the performance.
The result could easily be mistaken for a hyper-charged modern dance performance of the physical sort choreographers such as Crystal Pite, Holy Body Tattoo or La La La Human Steps’ Edouard Lock create or a less youth oriented Cirque du Soleil.
Lifschitz says he really is coming at Circa’s art from the big top and not the ballroom.
“The difference in circus is that where dance is a kind of esthetic expression of a kind of a stylized world, circus is very real,” he said.
“Those jumps through the air and those landings are incredibly actual, and the thing that the body does is activated in a kind of hyper way — not without a genuine sense of danger. Audiences often come up at the end of a show and tell me that they were on the edge of their seats holding their breath a lot of the time, and dance and theatre aren’t really that way.”
Lifschitz is in no way disparaging of other disciplines; he confesses he borrows liberally from them to come up with ideas. But his performers possess very distinct and different skill sets from actors or dancers. It takes a certain kind of person to run away and join the circus.
Bridie Hooper caught the circus bug at age 11 when she checked out a show by Spaghetti Circus. The Australian circus school and performance company proclaims “dare to dream, learn to fly, make your mark” on its vision statement.
Hooper heard the call loud and clear. By age 16 she had joined the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, where you find “ordinary kids doing extraordinary things.”
“Once I started taking classes, it quickly went from the joy and fun of jumping around to this incredible passion for what would become my career; I couldn’t stop,” said Hooper.
“From Flying Fruit Fly, I went on to the Montreal National Circus School, and even wound up performing as an aerialist at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Opening Ceremony. After I graduated in 2012, I toured with a few different Quebec circuses before heading back home to work with Circa.”
The new circus company movement seems to have spread well outside its Canadian roots.
“It really has, and it’s pretty incredible how, in recent years, it’s blown up in Australia,” Hooper said.
“Circa really has been key in that development, with its use of different physical elements and expressive languages to bring in something where you don’t always get caught but sometimes wind up in a heap on the floor. It’s not always pre-planned in performance, and we work with improvisation a lot which keeps the work exciting and challenging.”
Having the Debussy String Quartet performing live onstage with the acrobats brings an element of improvisation into the show, too. Rather than being to one side out of the way of bodies being flung about with reckless abandon, the musicians are frequently in the middle of the action.
Hooper says she can’t believe how they keep focused on the complicated Shostakovich score while she and her Circa-mates do their thing.
“It’s just one more thing that has blown my head open working with this company, because I really didn’t understand much about classical music coming into it and had to learn about it, learn to feel it and perform to it,” Hooper said.
“In six years with the company, Opus is definitely the most immense show with 14 acrobats at once on stage, live music, and being aware that you are performing with you feet flying around at high speeds within inches of someone’s 350-year-old cello. I’m
in awe of the quartet every time we do it.”
The Debussy Quartet — violinists Christophe Collette and Marc Vieillefon, violist Vincent Deprecq and cellist Cédric Conchon — is based in Lyon. Founded in 1980, the group has released 25 albums, mainly concentrating on the work of French composers such as its namesake, Fauré and Ravel. Touring the world, the quartet has had many of classical music’s top honours bestowed upon it.
They hardly sound like the sort of group you would see on stage barefoot being moved about by acrobats and — this is crazy — blindfolded for portions of Opus, playing from memory. This came about after the players accepted Lifschitz’s challenge to learn the 8th quartet by heart. The director figured once they had done this, they could perform blindfolded.
Lifschitz says years of study of the music in the show was key in producing the end result.
“Shostakovich’s music does two things that we draw from in Opus,” he said.
“He had this complicated personal life, with massive swings of fortune working as a composer under Stalin and he was an extremely formal, disciplined artist who was able to bring a clarity and depth and emotional sensibility to his music. We keep this conflict going in the show to make it really compelling.”
Opus is Circa doing its thing on a number of levels. Depending on your taste, you can approach the work on multiple levels. But whether you prefer to take it in as a collection of “ooh” and “ah” routines or a more philosophical treatise on the internal portrait of the artist as a complex balance of body and soul, Hooper and Lifschitz both admit there is one key element that emerges: It’s really fun.