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vileart · 7 years

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Human Dramaturgy: Yaron Lifchitz @ Edfringe 2017

Circa: Humans

Presented by Underbelly and Circa

Underbelly Circus Hub (Lafayette), The Meadows, Edinburgh, EH9 9EX

Friday 4th – Saturday 26th August 2017 (not 9th, 14th, 21st), 19:00

After taking Sydney Festival by storm earlier this year, the world-renowned Circa (Beyond, Wunderkammer, Closer) return to the Edinburgh Fringe with a striking new show - a stirring journey of what it means to be human, and how our bodies, connections and aspirations all form part of who we are.

Here, ten acrobats question how much we can take as humans, exploring the physical limits of their bodies as they are pushed to the extreme. How much weight can we carry? Who can we trust to support our load? They lead us to reflect on our lives, our loved ones, the burdens we carry and the physical and emotional strength it takes to overcome them.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Donald Hall said ‘a poem is a human inside talking to a human inside’. I think that was the starting point. Who are we inside, what makes our work able to communicate clear emotions and states of being without being obvious or rational? How can we make our acrobatics more and more human – about us, rather than despite us.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

It could be but not the performance I make. The ideas sit behind the show, the show itself is an organic thing – I am much more interested in its humanity, its truth and its feeling than its ideas.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I am naturally curious. And when I went to the theatre I felt it was an amazing place – we all gather, anything is possible. Theatre is absolutely my favourite place on the planet. And then the lights come up and people start saying lines and I fall asleep. So I was curious to find out what would keep me awake? What would make theatre a place of electricity, of connection and of vitality rather than of plays.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Start with doubt, eat your own intestines, become convinced you will never work again, try not to show it, keep working, spot a glimmer of something you don’t hate, polish it and grow it, make more mistakes, repeat above processes until it’s time to stop.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

In some ways yes - it is stripped back, acrobatically strong and full of great performances. But it is also looking for quite a new style – based on groove, on heartbeat and movement. Something that I hope is more alive. In Humans, ten acrobats question how much we can take as humans, exploring the physical limits of their bodies as they are pushed to the extreme. We’re exploring ideas around how much weight can we carry and who can we trust to support our load.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I want them to feel the show in their heart and their guts. I want their breath to stop. I want them to cry.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

For me, it doesn’t work that way. I never focus on the audience. I try to make the best art I can and I believe that people who come with open eyes and hearts and minds will discover something powerful in encountering authentic work. This is art, not entertainment.

Created by Yaron Lifschitz, Circa’s Artistic Director, the stage is stripped bare as the vulnerability of a team of highly skilled acrobats is exposed. With incredible strength and integrity they connect each moment seamlessly with the next in a thrilling and heart-stopping performance. Glimpse their humanity as they as they find redemptive power in strength and celebrate what it means to be fiercely human.

Circa's reputation for fearless, boundary-pushing new circus is borne out in every one of their shows, which combine physical virtuosity with an expressive humanism.

Underbelly director Ed Bartlam comments, We’re delighted to be welcoming Circa back to Underbelly with Humans, following its premiere at Sydney Festival, as part of our varied Circus Hub programme which continues to bring the best in international circus to the Fringe. Underbelly have been working with Circa in Edinburgh since 2012 and Circa's commitment to creating original, challenging and striking contemporary circus is something that we’re thrilled to be able to bring to an Edinburgh audience once more.

Humans by Circa is commissioned by MA scène nationale - Pays de Montbéliard.

Circa acknowledges the assistance of the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Ministry for the Arts' Catalyst—Australian Arts and Culture Fund.

Circa: Humans

Performance Dates Friday 4th – Saturday 26th August (not 9th, 14th, 21st), 19:00

Running time 60 minutes

Underbelly Circus Hub (Lafayette), The Meadows, Edinburgh, EH9 9EX

Previews: £11.50 (£10.50) Weekday: £17.50 (£16.50) Weekend: £19.50 (£18.50)

Director Yaron Lifschitz Technical Director Jason Organ Costume Design Libby McDonnell

Performers Caroline Baillon Nathan Boyle

Marty Evans Keaton Hentoff-Killian Bridie Hooper Nathan Knowles Todd Kilby Cecilia Martin Daniel O’Brien Kimberley O’Brien

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thewidowstanton · 7 years

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Elliana Grace, aerial hoop and hula hoop artist, Circus Harmony

Elliana Grace is a multi-skilled circus artist from St Louis, Missouri, who specialises in aerial hoop and hula hoops. She was born into a circus family and started in the ring at just two weeks old. Her mother is former trapeze artist Jessica Hentoff, who founded and runs the non-profit social circus performance troupe St Louis Arches and Circus Harmony, where Elliana trained. She is the older sister of our recent interviewee Keaton Hentoff-Killian and of the juggler Kellin Quinn.

Elliana has performed and taught from a young age, both across America and internationally, and had further training at the École de Cirque de Québec. Her credits include Circus Flora, Circus Harmony, Cirquantique, Amazing Grace Circus and Lighthouse Entertainment. In 2013, when she was 20, she became Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey’s youngest-ever female human cannonball in its show Built to Amaze. Elliana is taking a break from bareback riding in a tour with Circus Zoppé and will be performing her one-woman show Heartbreak, Humor and Hoops! at Circus Harmony’s City Museum, St Louis, until the end of 2017. She chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: What was your first experience in a circus ring? Elliana Grace: At two weeks I played the baby sitting on the back of an elephant. [Laughs] I was really typecast, you know. Then I did my first trick when I was about six months and I’ve been in the ring pretty much since then, doing everything.

What was the trick? We call it the ‘baby balance’. When babies are pretty young they lock their knees out automatically and you can balance them on your hand. The clown was Nino Zoppé and I’ve just been on his show again now.

Keaton said the same; he played the baby… In the circus it’s very normal if there’s a baby lying around you put it in the show, kind of the cute factor. Everyone when they’re old enough pretty much goes in the show. I was two weeks because that was the length of my mum’s maternity leave.

Did you ever see your mum perform? Sure, and I actually performed with her, which is something I cherish. When I was very young we did a double trapeze act, like two times, for some sort of special event. I was six or seven… I still have the costume!

Tell us a bit about your life growing up in the circus. When I was young my mum was still travelling a very little bit but by the time Keaton was born we’d stopped. We settled down in St Louis, which is where my dad is from as well. My mum settled here because it was the centre of the States so it was easy to travel places. When I was growing up we were based down at the City Museum. We started there when my other brother, Kellin, was a baby, so we’ve been there almost 21 years. I started performing and teaching for my mum when I was about eight. I would get put into a class and my job was to make sure that the kids who didn’t listen paid attention. Also it was a form of training me in skills; I was learning the same things over and over again, as well as leaning how to teach them, and about crowd control.

My first real aerial act was a Spanish web act [a vertical rope, with a loop at the top] very, very simple. My mum started me on that that when I was about six. I kind of went back and forth for a long time between that and the trapeze. I would play around with the big kids a lot but I was always really drawn to aerial work. I liked trapeze mostly because that’s what my mum did professionally and taught mostly. I ended up with a partner, her married name is Claire Wallenda, and we did aerial stuff. We started doing duo trapeze when we were seven or eight and then developed a duo lyra act later on. We worked together until we were about 18 when she graduated and went to college so I became more of a soloist. That was my favourite, performing with her. She’s my best friend. She’s performing with her husband’s family now, The Flying Wallendas.

I saw them in Monte Carlo. The seven-man pyramid was so beautiful and emotional. That’s what we aim to do; make it emotional and for people to feel what we’re expressing. So somebody was doing their job!

When did you graduate from Quebec? I didn’t graduate, I only did a year there. I did their prep programme and then I actually didn’t make it into their three-year programme, because I was American and a girl and an aerialist. They are limited with the number of foreign students they are able to take and still have government funding, and being an aerialist didn't help since the discipline is already over-saturated with girls. Surprisingly though, three months after I came home I got offered a job with Ringling Bros because I was American, female and an aerialist, so it kind of worked out.

You have so many skills, why did you choose your specialities? I focus mainly on lyra or aerial hoop because I love to spin. [Laughs] I always wanted to be the pretty one on the flying trapeze, ever since I was itty bitty. It’s always been that I wanted to just be sparkly and in the air. I kind of stuck with it. Some would call me… I like the idea of doing something that hurts a little bit and has results. It doesn’t always come easy, you have to really… it takes blood, sweat and tears for it to work. There’s something so satisfying about that. That’s why I’ve stuck with aerials, for sure.

And hula hoops… When I picked aerial as my first discipline, my mum said… it’s an old-school thing, that if you did an aerial act you had to have a ground act, and I fought her tooth and nail about it. But eventually I learnt hula hoops, and now my hula hoop act is almost a vaudevillian comedy thing, which I love to do. I lipsync the entire thing and just have a lot of fun with it. I want to explore it more and have been in the process of seeing where it takes me.

Any particular advice you’d give to someone starting aerials? Don’t give up. [We both laugh]. It’s gonna hurt a lot at the beginning. Circus hurts in general, you know, you’re making your body do extraordinary things. You have to have some sort of tenacity and a lot of persistence to get where you wanna go, but it’s totally possible. It is so totally possible and worth every second of it. Really… a little hurt goes a long way.

Let’s go through some of your other skills. You could perform a whole circus on your own… [Laughs] I’ve dabbled a lot… But things like upside-down loop-walking… how hard is that? I learnt it in the traditional way without any gimmicks, so I was barefoot when I did it and it’s really hard. I mean, once you get it, it’s just a pain-tolerance thing. There’s a lot of timing and technique that goes into it but once you start to learn that, it’s more overcoming the fact that your ankles are going to be [cracked] open the whole time. They don’t ever heal really… fully, so you’re a mess and… you use lots of Band-Aids.

And the bareback riding! I first learnt bareback riding through a programme with Circus Flora. They wanted a youth bareback act. So they brought in a coach. I would have been about 14 and did it until I was maybe 17. Keaton did that for a little bit, too. He plays down a lot of the things he’s done. He’s done some cool stuff, too. Just recently I was invited to to learn some more bareback stuff and I jumped at the opportunity.

Have you also had dance training? In the programme at Circus Harmony my mum stresses a dance element now. I’ve always had fun with it so I took quite a few ballet classes growing up and jazz and swing, I did ballroom dancing when I was younger for fun, because I was that kind of nerd. [Laughs] I like to learn new things.

That brings us on to the human cannonball. How did you even begin to learn it? That’s the job I got right after I didn’t make it into school. Somebody called my mum looking for a girl to do it. My mum goes: “You should try out for that.” I go, ‘Oh ma, I’m so bad at math’, because one of my coaches used to be shot out of a cannon in the seventies, like forever ago. Back then there were a lot of calculations involved, so I thought to do it, I would have to do math and I was horrible at math in school, just horrible.

But I got talked into going and for the audition they do high falls. So you stand up on this crane kind of thing and you jump into the airbag to kind of simulate how you land. They couldn’t actually shoot you out of a cannon until you signed the contract, that’s how crazy this was. I signed without ever having been shot out. You start with short and low shots, so the first one I did was only about 20 feet in length and you just gradually raise the angle and go farther and higher. In the act I went about 75 feet lengthwise and 40-45 feet high.

Was the sensation wonderful? Oh, the flying! I have never experienced a similar adrenaline rush… ever. It’s kind of a hard high to top. I would come off the air bag and my hands would literally be shaking because I had so much adrenaline going through my system.

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So tell us about your solo show.  I was really resistant to putting together a one-woman show. My brother Kellin has his own show and he has a show with Keaton, when he’s home. I never thought I had enough material to do it. I was doing a show with a friend, who is with Circus Monti right now with their dinner theatre. She was going for that contract and we still had shows left on the calendar so I ended up putting my show together to fill those spots and realised I did have enough material. It’s kind of centred around me and an empty chair… the waiting for somebody to fill that chair, whether that be a boyfriend, a husband or a parent, whatever audience members connect to that. For me it changes daily. The show’s very different when I’m in a relationship personally, or if somebody’s passed away it changes quite a bit emotionally. The acts don’t change but what I’m expressing as a performer has so much to do with my personal life. I put it together and it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

I do a comedy bit, so I pull a guy out of the audience and we lipsync an entire song together. For me that’s always fun because I get to interact with the audience. It’s always different. You never know who you’re gonna get; if he’s gonna sing, if he’s gonna sit there embarrassed. I had a guy come up and he was deaf and I didn’t realise it. His wife or girlfriend was in the audience signing the entire song to him. It was so incredible and he wrote to me on Facebook later thanking me. So that was really cool. A few months ago I got a guy who’d just beaten cancer. I picked this guy and his daughter told me afterwards that they were out celebrating. It was fantastic. To hear those stories and to be able to touch lives is incredible. It’s something I will never be able to get over.

Which of your many, many skills are in the show? I do a hula-hoop act, a static trapeze act and my lyra act, and a sort of dance routine-thing – it’s like a movement piece essentially – and I do some comedy.

What are your hopes for your future? I would love to take this show on tour around some theatres in the States and Europe. I’m always interested in going different places and teaching. I find that really rewarding. I’d love to work on a company; 7 Fingers and Eloize are two of my favourites. Circa is a little more contemporary than I where I am professionally. It suits Keaton very well but it’s just not cup of tea. So, yeah, I would love to travel some more. The highest priority on my list right now is just to see the world and to share my art with as many people as I possibly can.

Was there ever any other career you had in mind? In 25 years, I’ve taken two years off circus. One was for an injury when I was 15 and then again after I got off Ringling, I was burnt out and I stopped. I worked a lot of regular jobs; in a restaurant… I was the assistant to the director of the Psychoanalytic Institute. But the thing that really interests me, which is so weird in a weird way is that I really like forensic pathology. I don’t think I’d ever go into it because I love what I’m doing so much but, you know, the study of dead people and the diseases that take their lives and figuring out how somebody was killed, I find that stuff very fascinating.

Can you pick out a couple of career highlights? Oh, that’s a hard one. One would be performing at the Spoleto Festival with my partner, Claire, when I was 15. It was the same festival my mum had performed at with her partner. That was really amazing. Going to Israel with a group of children, we did a partnership there, that was incredible. Getting shot out of the cannon and getting to ride the elephants was another highlight. There are so many, but for me the biggest thing is that I’ve gotten to perform with my family and my friends and I really feel that I’ve brought joy to so many people. I know that sounds so clichéd but to bring some sort of escape to somebody is really what I want to be able to do and to offer them an experience that they can’t get anywhere else, or even if they do come and see the show again I hope it will be a different experience. That’s the highlight for me.

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Elliana Grace performs at Circus Hamony’s City Museum on various dates until the end of 2017. For show dates and times click here

Elliana Grace’s website and Instagram

Twitter: @circusharmony

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

#elliana grace #circus artist #interview #aerial hoop #hula hoop #circus harmony #ringling bros. and barnum & bailey circus #keaton hentoff-killian #kellin quinn

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