Roving reporter Chris Unitt travelled to Boston for a behind-the-scenes look at Cirque Eloize, ahead of their visit to the Grand Opera House from Wednesday 19 - Saturday 22 October. Chris met CEO and Artistic Director Jeannot Painchaud, and had a close encounter with a mountain bike!
Cirque Eloize is leading the new wave of circus – a movement that deftly blends circus skills, theatre and dance. It’s as thrillingly exciting as it is hard to pin down.
iD, as the name suggests, is a show about identity and self-expression; a Romeo and Juliet-esque story of feuding gangs and forbidden romance. It just so happens that the characters in this story are capable of almost superhuman physical feats.
In this circus there’s no room for performing animals or mustachioed ringmasters in top hats. Rather than taking place in a sawdust filled big top the show has been made for the theatre stage and features an energetic urban style.
There’s still plenty to recognise – bounce juggling, an elastic-jointed contortionist and acrobats. The 16 skilled artists in this show also include an inline skater, a bike rider and breakdancers and their routines play out across urban settings conjured by cutting-edge visuals.
Jeannot Painchaud, Cirque Eloize’s artistic director, says that for this show he wanted to work with a younger cast to create something ‘energetic, fast, mindblowing and energetic’. He saw breakdancing as integral to that vision: ‘I like that attitude that comes with breakdancing; the attitude, the self-expression and wanting to change the world’
‘My goal is to bring different people to the circus world with their own vision and way of moving, whether that be theatre directors, contemporary dance choreographers or breakdancers. By bringing people together in this way you can make something different and new, and that’s the part of my job I like the most’.
While the performers are defying physics on the stage, there’s some wizardry going on backstage where the light show is being triggered. Instead of painted backdrops, the projected visuals set the scene but also move to complement the artists.
Painchaud says that the style of video projection in iD is something that he’s wanted to do for a while: ‘I really like the aesthetic of movies that mix animation with live action’.
It starts subtly, with silhouetted figures walking across the back of the stage. The cityscape is then etched in outline across the backdrop. At one point you’re looking down on the city with people seemingly perched on the edge of the skyscrapers and the finale is a riot of motion that matches the bodies falling and flipping past each other.