LIFE IS A BALANCING ACT
Cirque clans juggle showbiz and family
While Julie Dionne spins through the air, her boyfriend, Jeremie Robert, slides through a round band on the stage below. Talk about making a lover jump through hoops.
It’s anything but a conventional relationship, but welcome to Cirque du Soleil, where acrobatic storytelling is a family affair.
Aerial hoop performers Dionne and Robert have a 2½-year-old son. The three represent just one of four families that perform for the high-flying circus.
Dionne, 36, met her boyfriend of six years on the set of the Cirque show “Corteo.” They now share the stage in “Zarkana,” Cirque’s acrobatic rock opera, which runs through Sept. 2 at Radio City Music Hall.
“Our proximity in life helps us perform better because we know each
other so well,” Dionne says. “If we had different contracts on different shows, then we would never see each other, because both shows would be traveling. “So we’re actually really lucky.” Indeed, the couple, based in Montreal, is rarely apart. They work together, travel together and live together when not performing — an experience Dionne describes as “intense.” “But that’s our reality,” she says. In “Zarkana,” Dionne and Robert, a 28-year-old Parisian, play “movers,” characters who perform acrobatic feats to support the show’s story line.
While women spin as fast as possible in aerial hoops, other acrobats perform choreography in metal wheels on the ground.
“All of that can be linked with the girls, so when they fly up, we do wheels under them to create a big general image,” Robert says. “It’s a lot of spinning and jumping in the wheel and seeing how many positions you can do and how far you can go without falling.”
Even their relationship required some creative maneuvering. When the couple first met in 2004, both were dating other people. It took two years for their romance to blossom.
And blossom it has. Dionne and Robert are now teaching their son basic acrobatics, just in case he wants to become a performer like Mom and Dad.
“Watching my kid grow up has made me a better character and a better performer,” Dionne says. “He has so much imagination.”
Dionne and Robert are not alone. The Besschetnaya family also considers “Zarkana” a family affair.
Aerial hoop performer Kristina Besschetnaya, a 22-year-old from Volgograd, Russia, and her father, Konstantin Besschetnyy, a 49-year-old banquine acrobatics coach and artist, both perform in the show. Kristina’s mother, Irina Besschetnaya, 49, is the show’s production coordinator.
The acrobatic act Besschetnyy created for his team of approximately 16 performers uses no equipment.
“We’re throwing bodies, catching bodies, we’re doing handstands, we’re making pyramids,” he says.
The younger Besschetnaya says many performers her age tell her she’s lucky her parents are with her on the road.
“They always say, ‘It’s good that you have your parents here. You have someone to share all this with,’ ” she says.
Unlike Dionne and Robert, who spend most of their time together, Besschetnaya and her parents don’t always see each other at work. Mom spends her days in the show’s office, while father and daughter perform in different acts.
But the family is satisfied with distancing their work lives from their home lives.
“At work, we’re working partners, and at home, we’re family,” the daughter says. “You kind of need to separate both.”
The family members have adapted to the challenges of life on the road, like living out of suitcases and bags that are too heavy for airplanes.
“I guess we got used to it in the past 16 years,” Kristina Besschetnaya says. “This is the only life we know.” Dionne agrees. “I don’t know what it is to have a 9-to5 job and come home,” she says. “They talk about the office, I guess, and we talk about what happened in the show.”