BRATTLEBORO — A new show by Cirque Us flips through the pages of the troupe’s favorite stories to deliver what is billed as “a touching, thrilling narrative about community and identity.”
“Interweaving a collection of folktales, classic literature, children’s stories, modern fiction, and more, this show jumps off the page with twists, flips, rewrites, and retellings of stories you’ll love,” an event announcement states. “The show features aerialists, jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, clowns, and more, all ready to fly off the shelf and straight to you.”
Cirque Us will be performing “Cirque Us Stories,” presented by Wizbang Circus Theatre, at New England Center for Circus Arts at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 6. Pre-show performances by NECCA students are planned. Tickets range from $17 to $37 and can be purchased by visiting thecirqueus.com.
Since 2016, Cirque Us has been creating and touring shows.
“We wanted to do something new and different, specifically about community engagement and collaboration and partnership,” said Doug Stewart, founder and director.
Stewart said the show is targeted toward young performers, with material and content for a young audience. With a focus on reading and literature, the company has partnered with libraries and schools for the tour.
Stewart said the goal is to make the show as accessible as possible and expose students to the world of performing arts, as more and more schools are cutting such programming.
“We want to bring high level entertainment that combines athleticism and art and storytelling,” he said.
NECCA was selected as a stop on the tour, as the show will be rehearsed in Vermont and Brattleboro is largely considered a hometown crowd. Performers in the company have attended the circus school, and current students and staff tend to appreciate the troupe’s shows. Stewart graduated from NECCA in 2015.
Two graduates from the school’s ProTrack Program June class are in the show, marking their first professional contracts.
For the first time in the troupe’s history, a show will include aerial chair, duo bounce juggling and rolla bolla acts. This marks the third tour for the show, and features new acts and performers.
“We performed this show at NECCA last fall,” Stewart said. “It was our closing show so it will be fun to open the new tour where we closed out the last one.”
Steward said the troupe is going strong and has expanded to be more national than regional, gaining bigger and bigger audiences along the way.
“It’s been really awesome to see the growth we’ve had over the last few years,” he said.
Current troupe members include Esther van de Lagemaat, who’s from Colorado and graduated from the ProTrack Program in June. She said she grew up doing horsing and performing in rodeos. While attending Colorado State University, she decided she wanted to prioritize circus arts. She holds a chemistry and math degree.
“[D]oing circus and performing is just a dream that I’ve had since I was little,” she said. “I started circus as an extracurricular to move my body, stay in shape and work through emotions in college then kind of realized it was something I could actually make a career out of.”
van de Lagemaat said she can return to science after “my body doesn’t want me to do circus anymore.” Having performed in the company’s show last year, she’s taken on a new role in the new tour.
She said the show involves three children, who are “very focused on their books.”
“As they go, there’s book spirits that help bring stories to life,” she said. “Throughout the course of the show, the kids learn that it’s actually really important to read each other’s stories and stories that you may not have read beforehand.”
van de Lagemaat said the show seeks to demonstrate that “reading is fun” and it’s important to learn about the world.
“It brings me so much joy to embody these characters onstage and be able to feel the impact it brings to the audience,” she said.
She described being “really, really excited” to start the tour at NECCA, where she “lived for two years.”
“It’s really sweet that we get to jump off there and and I get to have all my friends from circus school get to come see the show,” she said. “They know just how hard some of the tricks in the show are.”
Her plan is to move to Europe in the fall after the tour. She said she’s scheduling auditions there for circus gigs.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.reformer.com ’
