Live Streaming: Cirkus Cirkör

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I'm a fan of Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör, as evidenced by these two previous posts, and I'm sorry I'll be out of town and miss their return this June to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was, however, delighted to see that my favorite British newspaper, the Guardian, did a live stream of their show Undermän when it was featured at the London Roundhouse as part of their 2012 CircusFest. Better yet, you can still see the full 74-minute piece for free online — full-screen, high-rez!

Undermän means understander, the base of an acrobatic "pyramid" act, and this is not a full-scale Cirkus Cirkör ensemble production, but rather an intimate piece of circus-theatre about three burly guys who lose their partners but find themselves. Yeah, not exactly physical comedy, but a sweet piece of work filled with some dazzling skills. Here's the official promo blurb:


Undermän is the true story of three male pair acrobats who lost their partners, and consequently their careers and dreams as well. They have lived a life supporting, balancing, lifting and saving their cherished ones. But who is there to support an abandoned underman?
In a quest to regain their zest for life, they decide to create something completely new. Together with the well-worn musician Andreas, they throw themselves into a performance full of truths, hidden talents, male strength, kettlebell choreography, live music, failure, an austere sense of humour and an important story to tell. They break all the rules by letting the stronghold outshine the embellishment and making sensitivity as important as strength. With raw strength, fragility, defiance, melancholy, cockiness and a need for revenge they now take a big step into the limelight to meet audiences as well as themselves in a surprising performance that is sure to move you to the core.

First here's a preview:

And here's the full-length piece, very well captured in a multi-camera shoot; click on icon bottom-right for full screen.

Guest Post: Hovey Burgess on Cirkus Cirkör

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Hovey Burgess is a circus performer, educator, and historian no doubt known to many of you. American performers mining the circus/commedia  tradition who do not hail from traditional circus families can usually trace some portion of their training directly or indirectly to Hovey's classes, myself included. Author of the how-to guide, Circus Techniques, Hovey is also one of the top authorities on the history of the circus. He was an indispensable resource for me when I was writing Clowns back in the 70s, and has continued to be so today in the writing of this blog. It is therefore a great honor to have him share his erudition with my readers as an example of the kind of writing and research the art of circus truly deserves.

Back in November 2009, I wrote a blog post on Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör when they appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I tried to limit myself to covering some physical comedy elements that I thought worth reporting, but I could not help but take issue with a negative review of the show that had appeared in The New York Times.  Because I found their critic to be uninformed and therefore unqualified, I wrote the following:  "It's perfectly fine for someone not to have liked this show. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of serious circus criticism, but I think the "paper of record" might want to apply the same standards to all circuses, and find a writer with real expertise in the area. As my friend Dave Carlyon pointed out, if you're going to write about opera, it's not enough just to know about the performing arts, you actually have to know about music. Likewise... well, you get the point. Hmm... maybe the Times should hire Hovey as their circus reviewer."

Well, guess what? The Times still hasn't hired Hovey but Ernest Albrecht, editor of the excellent quarterly journal of circus, Spectacle, and author of The New American Circus, did get Hovey to review this very same show, and to me his review should serve as a model for well-informed circus criticism. My special thanks to Mr. Albrecht for his kind permission to reprint this article from the pages of Spectacle. — jt

But first some links:
Other posts to this blog involving Hovey
Hovey's commedia workshops with Stanley Allan Sherman
Spectacle magazine
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Cirkus Cirkör

Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkör made its American début, in an edition entitled “Inside Out,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 12-15, 2009 (five performances). The cast consisted of eight circus performers: Anna Lagerkvist, André Farstad, Jens Engman, Jay Gillian, Mirja Jauhiainen, Sanna Kopra, Angela Wand and Fefe Deijfen, backed up by Irya’s Playground, a live rock band: Irya Gmeyner (vocals), Pange Öberg (bass), Erik Nilsson (drums), Ludvig Rylander (keyboard) and Jon Bergström (guitar). The show was directed by Tilde Björfors, who founded the company in 1995.

The meaning of Cirkus is fairly obvious. It means “Circus” in Swedish (and in Danish as well). The meaning of Cirkör is somewhat more obscure. It comes from the French word “Cirque”, which also means “Circus” and the French word “Coeur”, which means “Heart”. Through the miracle of elision then, “Cirk” (Cirque) plus “Kör” (Coeur) gives us “Cirkör”, which still means “Circus Heart” in French, but with Swedish orthography, and fewer letters. The Swedish word for “Heart” is “Hjärta”.

Before we return to issues of the “Heart”, there is another word that Swedish culture has given us: “smörgåsbord.” Smörgåsbord might well be used, metaphorically, to describe the multi-flavored Cirkus Cirkör. It puts so much on one’s plate that there could well be some things not to like.

One course has little to do, technically, with true traditional circus, but may appeal to five-year-olds. There is a bicycle that “generates” electricity to run the stage lighting, and a rocking horse that goes through the motions of a liberty horse. One sees the most rudimentary rolling globe and some single hula-hoop action that does not seem much of a challenge, but the presentation is done with the most positive energy and styling imaginable.

1) Another course is on the cutting edge of circus technique and seems calculated to appeal to the most diligent of circus aficionados and to be appreciated by the most exacting of circus connoisseurs. Three examples in this category could knock your socks off:1.) Swedish-born Anna Lagerkvist offers a delightfully amazing, and as far as I know unprecedented, female solo Chinese pole act. Her skills are of the highest order of magnitude that I have ever seen in this, usually male, genre.



2) Ohio-born Jay Gilligan has come up with a novel format of presenting some remarkable numbers juggling—manipulating as many as six (6) clubs; seven (7) balls or nine (9) rings. Backed up by a very vocal percussionist and two able male assistants, Jay is even more the master of the plan B approach than he is of juggling. He pushes the envelope to the maximum, and if he succeeds it is simply incredible, but it is also incredible if he should miss, because a miss can become, according to his whim and fate, a smooth transition into a new routine, a “this-is-so-difficult-it-takes-several-tries” trick, or a comedy of errors. The sequence of tricks is subject to change, and no two performances are the same.

3) There are a number of remarkable all-female double trapeze acts around these days, and one of them is decidedly the Finnish-born team of Mirja Tuulinkki Jauhiainen (Miku, for short) and Sanna Kopra. They have been working together for over a decade and their transitions are as smooth as can be. They finish (no pun intended) with a somersault (hands-to-hands).

In between is a middle-ground course of work that represents neither a send-up of circus nor a state-of-the-art stretch: Pagoda of Chairs, Cyr Wheel, Lyra, Pommel Hand-Balancing, and Teeterboard. Note, however, that some of the teeterboard work is in the Korean teeterboard tradition (swing-time somersaults at both ends) and is impressively done with a regulation–sized teeterboard, not the oversized teeterboard used by Cirque du Soleil a few years back.

So what are we to make of all this? Is it a show padded and peppered with dross and clap-trap? The great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) made two films that dealt with itinerant circus performers: Gycklarnas afton/Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night (1953) and Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal (1957).

When asked the intention of his films, Bergman always endeavored to reply as evasively as possible. The name of one of the characters in Cirkus Cirkör is Julia P. It seems that Cirkus Cirkör exhibits the same adversity to spelling things out for us.

There are clues. The character Julia P. (played by Angela Wand) has a beard and is an accomplished dancer. That might point to Julia Pastrana (1834-1860), the most famous bearded woman in history. There are also red herrings. The character Julia P. is a hunchback, a sort of “Quasimoda of Notre Dame”, if you will, and adept at balancing on bottles. This is a skill rarely seen today, but it was a specialty of the clown Jean-Baptiste Auriol (ca. 1800-1881), who appeared at Franconi’s Cirque Olympique in Paris, and whose lifetime eclipsed that of Julia Pastrana.

In life, Julia Pastrana was exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. In the motion picture La donna scimmia/Le Mari de la femme á barbe/The Ape Woman (1964) the role of “Maria”, played by Annie Giradoux, is obviously based on the life of Julia Pastrana.

After her death in Moscow in 1860, Julia Pastrana was embalmed and mummified and continued to be exhibited, as in life. She was exhibited in the United States as late as 1971. She was exhibited, as a mummy, in Sweden (Yes, in Sweden.) as early as 1864, and as late as 1973, when authorities shut down the exhibit. Banned as an exhibit practically everywhere, she was put in storage in Norway, never to be seen in public again.

Julia Pastrana did, however, make scientific headline news in May of 2009, when Chinese medical researchers identified her extremely rare condition (congenital generalized hypertrichosis terminalis) as a genomic disorder and mapped the specific genes in the 17th human chromosome that are responsible.

Let us now return to the issues of the “Heart”. Julia Pastrana was of Native American Indian stock, born in Mexico, the land of the Aztecs, best known, perhaps, for their human sacrifices in which a priest would cut living hearts from the chests of the sacrificial victims, captured in war for that very purpose.

In the course of Cirkus Cirkör, Julia P. reaches inside the chest of the variously-named character (Saga, Stephanie, Stacey...) played by Anna Lagerkvist, and pulls out her heart. Somehow she survives the ordeal, and her heart becomes a considerable burden to her as it grows to mammoth proportions.

I must say that I find myself intrigued by these potentially off-putting constructs of allusion and symbol, much the way some people are drawn to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi (1943). Cirkus Cirkör begins to take on some of the magical proportions of Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935). Cirkus Cirkör leaves so much to the imagination, to research, to be “smoked out”, that, if these intrigues be valid, it could be argued that Cirkus Cirkör has accomplished something that no other circus has ever done before.

Performance Report: Cirkus Cirkör & the Delayed Gag

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This is a physical comedy blog, not a circus blog, which means my main focus is on how physical comedy works rather than on reviewing circuses. However, before I get to my little piece on the delayed gag, a few words on Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör, where I saw this really nice delayed gag and so much more Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

I loved this show. No, it wasn't perfect, and yes it's quite sentimental — two "civilians" get drafted into the world of the circus and discover it's all about heart — but for me it was that rare instance of circus and theatre actually working together. I'm glad not to have read the negative NY Times review until the next day. To tell you the truth, it was odd seeing the Times being critical of a circus at all, since in the past most if not all of their circus reviews have been fluff pieces. ("Golly gee, the circus is in town and ain't that just terrific.")

Cirkör had the bad luck to be picked on by a critic, Jason Zinoman, out to prove them just a pale imitation of Cirque du Soleil. Zinoman's argument is that Cirkör's technical expertise is no match for that of their more famous counterparts: "Cirque serves up this kind of thing as an appetizer, not the main course." Zinoman's own expertise would carry more weight if — here's an idea! — he knew what he was talking about. Take his last paragraph, the only nice thing he had to say about the show: "The one true heart-pounding moment is when a woman climbs a rope in a few bounds and then, from the height of the stage, drops, plummeting almost to her death at an incomprehensible speed. No matter how many times you’ve seen that performed, your jaw still drops."

The only problem is that it wasn't a rope, but a rigid pole, a traditional Chinese pole act. And no, it wasn't some 10-second stunt that went by so fast that such a mistake would be understandable, but a complete act, some 5 to 7 minutes long! Hovey Burgess, who was in the audience that night and in fact for four out of the five performances, commented that it was "the only time I have ever seen this genre performed solo by a woman." He also points out that Zinoman refers to juggling clubs as juggling pins.

And while it's true that the typical Soleil show may have more in the way of technically advanced acts (though not by much), I often find the theatre half of a Soleil show to be very "theatrical" without necessarily being good theatre; glitzy but jejune. With Cirkör, the character interactions and storyline actually made sense. Imagine that!

Here are just a few of the things I liked about Cirkör:
• The troupe is small — eight circus performers and five musicians — and their roles in the production are very clear.
• Most or all of them have been working together for a decade, and it shows in the seamless flow of everything they do. Mirja Tuulikki Jauhiainen and Sanna Kopra perform a really nice stationary trapeze act with transitions that are as smooth as silk, not surprising since they've been working together since 1998.
• Although there are in fact individual acts from time to time, much of what happens is just part of this general flow and is not constrained by traditional variety structure.
• Their use of stage magic and of rear-screen video projection actually worked well with the overall mise-en-scène.
• The band, Irya’s Playground, which the Times only mentions in passing, was not only excellent, but tightly integrated into the performance. You know how the typical juggling act is performed to set music with a few dramatic drum rolls thrown in right before the big tricks? Here there was some terrific interaction between juggler Jay Gilligan (incredible, though from Ohio, not Sweden) and percussionist Erik Nilsson, whose drumming, human sound effects, and scat singing played off of every juggling move to great effect.
• They performed an act walking on bottles that I had never seen live and had only read about being done by the French grotesque Jean-Baptiste Auriol (1806–1881): "He could run along the tops of a row of bottles without knocking them over and then balance in a free headstand atop the last bottle while playing the trumpet." In Cirkör, the performer walks across the tops of a row of bottles on a table. The walk is slow and measured, as the shifts in weight have to be precise to avoid upsetting the bottles, which makes each step more precarious and dramatic than those taken on a tightwire. I'm a bit skeptical of the description of Auriol — c'mon, did he really run across them and do a headstand on one, and were they really free-standing bottles?? — even if that description does come from my book Clowns (p.164). Another nice thing about the Cirkör version was that the table was already there, had been used for other purposes, and the bottles were placed down in order by the "diners" as the equilibrist approached.
















All that being said, it's perfectly fine for someone not to have liked this show. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of serious circus criticism, but I think the "paper of record" might want to apply the same standards to all circuses, and find a writer with real expertise in the area. As my friend Dave Carlyon pointed out, if you're going to write about opera, it's not enough just to know about the performing arts, you actually have to know about music. Likewise... well, you get the point.

Hmm... maybe the Times should hire Hovey as their circus reviewer.

Final salvo: I've been to shows where I was not impressed yet the audience gave them standing ovations, so it's all a matter of opinion, but I still can't resist mentioning that the sold-out crowd at BAM Saturday night gave Cirkör a prolonged, rousing, (mostly) standing ovation.

End of Rant. Here's Cirkör's promo video, which gives you a taste of it all, though without capturing any of the beautiful moments that make it such a strong performance.






Hey, that was more than a few words... no more delays getting to that delayed gag!

For starters, here's what I wrote about the delayed gag in my Yale Theater essay on physical comedy:

Surprise being essential to comedy, the smart performer may play with the cadence of the 1-2-3 gag by initiating the third part either sooner or later than the gag's rhythm would lead us to expect. Most common is the delayed gag. Especially useful in a play or a longer performance piece, it allows a lapse of time between parts two and three. In the interim, the main action of the piece continues. Just when the audience has begun to forget about the gag, the payoff comes, often with doubled effect.

The legendary Swiss clown, Grock, was famous for a heartwarming delayed gag involving his violin bow. After finishing a short flourish on the violin, he tacks on a slight embellishment, flipping the bow up into the air and attempting to catch it back in his hand — unsuccessfully. Embarrassed, he hides himself behind a screen and practices his bow juggling. We see the bow soar repeatedly above the top of the screen. It is clear he has mastered the technique. But back in front of the audience, he again fails. He holds a second rehearsal behind the screen, but when he returns he is beset by new mishaps and soon forgets about the bow.

It is several minutes and one violin later (the first one having been pulverized beneath a Grock pratfall) and he is finally finishing off his tune on the violin. Now comes the payoff. Without thinking about it, he casually tosses the bow up into the air and catches it. Realizing what has happened, he is eager to duplicate his success. He starts to toss the bow up again, but before he can release it he assesses the probable risk, thinks better of it, and decides to leave well enough alone.

By accomplishing without thinking what had been impossible when he tried so hard, Grock creates a splendid clown moment. The delay has heightened the comedic impact, at the same time enriching Grock's characterization.

Got it? So here's the one I loved in Cirkör. It's a bit involved, but I hope worth following. At the very beginning of the show, an audience member is drafted to come onstage and ride a stationary bicycle, which is rigged to generate electricity to power the main spotlight. (Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! He's actually an audience plant, though not an obvious one.) If he doesn't pedal, the stage goes dark. He resumes pedaling, the spot comes on (and they sneak on some other lights as well, but you get the joke.) There's a bunch of business with this, but after a while you forget about it and tune in to the rest of the show. At a certain point you might notice that he's stopped pedaling but the lights are still on, though presumably he's generated enough power to last awhile. Meanwhile, you're captivated by the whitefaced performer who's attempting to balance in a handstand high atop a tall stack of chairs. I'm guessing we were now 20-30 minutes into the show. Just as he goes into his riskiest trick, far above the stage, the lights go out! There is a panicked shout and the cyclist has to pedal furiously to restore the lights as our acrobat barely manages to regain his bearings.

It deservedly got a big laugh, all the stronger because we knew we had been tricked into forgetting about it.