It took nine months of working as a fire-dancer at festivals overseas for Chris Murdoch to realize he was a circus performer.
“I didn’t even realize that what I was doing was part of the circus until I went to Australia and was put in some larger festivals, and they were like, ‘You’re in circus-artist camping with the rest of the circus-artist people,’” the Calgary-born artist recalls, with a laugh. “Then I started to discover the larger umbrella of circus – [juggling, acrobatics, aerial arts, etc.] – and all of a sudden I went ‘Okay, I guess circus is what I do.’”
It would turn out to be a life-changing epiphany: Murdoch, now one of the West Coast’s most accomplished contact jugglers, is part of a dedicated troupe of artists helping to root the world’s red-hot contemporary circus movement – made mainstream by companies like Seven Fingers of the Hand and Gravity and Other Myths – in Vancouver. And those looking to get in on the action can catch his show, The New Conformity, from May 17-22 as part of rEvolver Festival – Vancouver’s annual showcase of emerging and independent theatre talent, presented by Up In The Air Theatre.
Inspired by modern circus behemoth Cirque du Soleil but not an imitation of it, Murdoch explains that the circus of his generation doesn’t need a Big Top to present physical theatre at its finest.
“[Contemporary circus] has stripped away so much of the production value that Cirque du Soleil involves,” he explains, on break from making costumes at CircusWest, where he works as a coach. “And [companies like Seven Fingers] are doing such amazing tricks that now it’s not spectacle. [Circus] can tell a story, it can be emotionally expressive… Especially Seven Fingers. They’ve stripped a lot of it down to just street clothes.”
So, as Murdoch sees it, rather than the Romeo and Juliet-sized love stories and elaborate mythologies of Cirque, contemporary circus has emerged as creating stories on a human scale.
“[Cirque] is telling mythology and fairy tales like Avatar, and stuff like that,” says Murdoch, “and contemporary circus is telling much smaller, human stories, in the same way that modern dance and contemporary dance do.”
Case and point? His company’s dazzling juggling masterclass, The New Conformity. In the capable hands of Murdoch and co., the very act of juggling fades away, and The New Conformity becomes a wordless celebration of the possibilities of physical storytelling, disguised as compelling social commentary.
“Our story is sort of on the theme of trends in society. It’s basically three guys who are going through their daily routine. You could interpret us as coworkers – we’re just in plain grey suits,” says Murdoch. “We do our normal routine, and one of us starts to get sick of it. That’s me. I just don’t want to juggle ‘boring’ anymore. I want to juggle interestingly and I want to have some fun. I want to take my jacket off and be a little bit different, and the other guys do not want me to do that.”
Reviews hail the 2014 Victoria and 2015 Vancouver Fringe hit as “breathtaking” and ingenious, blending high-level circus concepts with elements of contemporary dance and hip hop culture.
Originally created by a gaggle of jugglers, this more intimate incarnation will feature just Murdoch, Ryan Mellors and Yuki Ueda, under the banner of Cause & Effect Circus, as they make magic out of thin air.
PULLING THE STRINGS
Capitalizing on its reputation as an incubator for emerging Canadian talent, this year rising local puppeteer Randi Edmundson is using rEvolver to expand on a simmering story idea – a whimsical puppet show called Kolejka, inspired almost entirely by a Soviet-era board game of the same name.
“[Originally], I wanted to create a show for a fundraiser for the Troika Collective,” says Edmundson, referring to a Vancouver theatre company that specializes in Eastern European storytelling, “and also at the same time I was playing this board game called Kolejka, which is about communism in 1970s, 1980s Poland, standing in bread-lines trying to complete our shopping list before the other people you’re playing against.
“It’s really fun,” she continues, “and you really get into it in a sort of fun, competitive way, but it also just reminds you about how crappy that would have been, to be in that situation. And the intention behind the makers of this board game was to keep that story alive.”
(In an interesting turn, the Polish best-seller, referred to colloquially as “communist Monopoly” was just banned in Russia in March for being excessively critical of the government.)
Current events aside, though, Edmundson adds excitedly that rEvolver is also a chance to showcase skills she and some of the team at star star theatre picked up from Alberta-based puppetry legends the Old Trouts (with whom Vancouver audiences are likely very familiar, thanks to five-star shows like Famous Puppet Death Scenes passing through The Cultch) at their Banff Centre workshop two years ago.
“We learned a bunch of building techniques, we learned about devising puppet shows in collectives, we learned about manipulation,” Edmundson recalls. “And I think what’s exciting about Kolejkais we are finally getting to use a lot of the more Old Trout-type puppet styles in a show.”
In Kolejka– one of seven shows created or directed by women at the festival – an elderly Polish woman named Babushka is searching for human connection in a lonely world. It’s a simple premise for a puppet show for grown-ups, but this moving and magical fantasy manages to be full of surprise – told through physically demanding rod and shadow puppetry in the bunraku or multi-handler style, and set to rollicking gypsy-punk music.
For Babushka’s mainstage debut, Edmundson and her colleagues have added more to the story, padding out the quirky adventure from its original six-and-a-half-minute format into a full, 50-minute production, running May 11-22 at The Cultch.
“Babushka just seemed so alive and so interesting, and I felt I just had to do more,” Edmundson explains. “So, I applied to rEvolver and we fleshed out the story a little bit, and there we go! We kind of took that first six minutes as a launching point to find more of the story and more of the world.”
• rEvolver Festival runs May 11-22 at The Cultch (1895 Venables). Tickets from $17; for tickets and full lineup head to UpInTheAirTheatre.com
