GTA leaps into the circus scene
Event offers window into Toronto’s version of acrobatic display
Say the words “Canadian circus” and most people will think of the esthetically dazzling, astonishingly successful productions by Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil.
Spurred on by Cirque du Soleil’s success from the mid-1980s onwards, Montreal has become the global hub of circus, home of the National Circus School; other internationally successful troupes including 7 Fingers and Cirque Éloize; and an annual international festival, Montreal Completèment Cirque.
But Toronto has its own circus scene — smaller and less developed, to be sure, but also less constrained by expectations of corporate-level polish. An event this weekend at Harbourfront Centre offers a privileged window on the GTA’s version of contemporary circus.
Holly Treddenick, artistic director of the Toronto company Les Femmes de Feu and an aerialist, dreamt up Circus Sessions after attending 2012’s Completèment Cirque, which included talkbacks, seminars and networking events. “I came back here and was like, OK, we need to bring the community together in Toronto and have an event,” Treddenick says. Harbourfront has hosted each of the four Circus Sessions since 2014.
Toronto circus “is still at the beginning of something,” says Nadia Drouin, until recently the head of circus programming at Tohu, the Montreal venue that produces Completèment Cirque. Circus Sessions is playing an important role, in Drouin’s view, in “bringing attention to the discipline of circus, so that programmers might come along and say, how can I do that in my venue?”
The core of Circus Sessions is a weeklong workshop for circus artists with a mentor based outside of Canada — “to try and create a bigger networking opportunity and liaisons,” Treddenick explains. The workshop is free to participants and local lodging is provided. Among this year’s 17 participants, 10 are from Canada, four from the U.S., two from the U.K. and one from Germany — the most international cohort thus far.
The workshop ends with public showings on Friday and Saturday evenings, not framed as a finished production but rather as work in development. When I attended Circus Sessions 2016, the mood of playful open- ness was infectious: I had the sense of being invited into a privileged space of experimentation and strikingly virtuosic circus acts.
This spirit remains at the heart of the project, says MarieAndrée Robitaille, the Quebecborn, Stockholm-based circus artist and educator who is this year’s Sessions mentor. “In this world where everything is sped-up and spectacular, there is a group of people here that are trying to find alternative relations to the audience,” she says, adding “you will still have the entertaining factor of seeing bodies in extreme physical display.”
When I visited the workshop this week, Robitaille was leading the group in a deceptively simple exercise — walking closely together and navigating their way through the space, without any one person being identified as the leader. This promotes awareness of group dynamics, she later explained, which was then taken a step further when they broke off into smaller groups. Almost immediately, one group started doing handstands, propping their legs on each other’s backs, while another group passed tangerines from one of their heads to the next. In the third, a person jumped into the air and was lift- ed higher by the others, provoking bursts of laughter from the person doing the flying.
A final group looked on, planning their contribution to the Sessions, new this year: live audio description, which aims not just to recount what is happening in literal terms, but include a level of creative interpretation. As I watched, an idea was mooted to have the three audio describers sit in a multi-level silk hammock suspended from the ceiling so that they can speak directly to the audience in the stacked tiers of seating in the Harbourfront Theatre. The Toronto-based actor and dramaturg Alex Bulmer, who is blind, is advising on this experiment in increased accessibility for circus performance.
In contrast to the male-dominated field of contemporary circus, there are 15 women and two men in this year’s Sessions ensemble. Treddenick and Robitaille suspect that awareness of their own practices may have contributed to this: Les Femmes de Feu is female-led, and Robitaille is well known for breaking down gender barriers in circus. In the late ’90s and early 2000s with Stockholm’s Circus Cirkor, she debuted acts on the Chinese pole, a circus discipline that was previously performed only by men; and she is currently the director of an international Women in Circus network.
Diversity in circus has a lot farther to go in terms of “people of colour, Indigenous people, and diverse bodies,” Treddenick says, but both women believe in the creative potential of challenging gendered and other norms in circus.
Circus Sessions plays at the Harbourfront Theatre at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. harbourfrontcentre.com and 416-973-4000 ext. 1.