January 1, 2003

By Robert Avila

CANADA TOOK HEAT from the Bush administration recently for allocating only 1 percent of its gross national product for defense spending – a weak military being, in this day and age, a social problem as grave as the "moron" remark recently directed at the American commander-in-chief by a harried aide to Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien. Nevertheless, when one considers the amount of the GNP Canada spends on circuses, it's no wonder there's little left for the arms race.

The evidence was all over the Bay Area in 2002. Cirque du Soleil, the French-Canadian megacircus, brought its latest production, Varekai, to a parking lot behind Pac Bell Park in November; earlier in the year, compatriots Cirque Eloise debuted their gypsy-themed dance-theater piece Nomade for audiences at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall; and the New Pickle Family Circus, which originated in San Francisco but is now based in Montreal, just unveiled Circumstance at Fort Mason in December.

Internationally, the circus has enjoyed a renaissance since a low point in the 1980s, when public indifference was compounded by a growing concern for animal rights. Contributing to the comeback have been the exclusively people-centered extravaganzas pioneered by the Pickles and taken to unprecedented heights by Cirque du Soleil. These narrative-driven shows combine music, dance, and other theatrical elements with risky, demanding stunts that make the circus such an immediate and visceral entertainment.

Varekai, for example, featured a menagerie of exotic humanoids (the inspired costumes were by renowned designer Eiko Ishioka), slithering, bouncing, crawling, flapping, or swinging their way through its musically enhanced story line, a fairy tale set in an enchanted Euro-pop forest. The ensemble at times brought to mind the freakishly romantic aesthetic and spastic humor of filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet, while the audacious, gravity-flouting acts were, as always, mind-boggling. With such productions the expanding empire that is Cirque du Soleil (comprising 2,100 employees who last year staged eight concurrent productions on four continents) stands as an art-world rival to the far less entertaining United States Armed Forces.

Do the Canadians know something we don't? Might the United States be on the wrong track to global supremacy? Is there a clown gap?

The answer to the first two questions is obviously yes, but I'm not so sure about the third one. Even more remarkable than the resurgence of the circus per se, or the amount of resources the Canadian state allocates to contortionists, was the prevalence of circus themes this theater season. In addition to the dinner-theater spectacle Teatro Zinzanni, happily ensconced under its spiegeltent on the Embarcadero, A Traveling Jewish Theater's original Chanukah family show Moonwatcher had a strong circus element to it and featured in the title role the suave Moshe Cohen, known professionally around town as Mr. Yoohoo – when he's not off doing charitable gigs with Clowns Without Borders. And last April at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Flying Karamazov Brothers (with the help of MIT's Media Lab) expanded their universe while explaining our own in the inventive L'Universe, a high-tech spin on the mesmerizing but decidedly low-tech art of juggling.

By defying the limits normally ascribed to human beings, the circus performer puts the previously unimaginable within reach of all, at least theoretically. This potential grows from the circus's alternative model of community, where each member is free to cultivate personal excellence, where all eccentricities are not just "put up with" but celebrated. A roundly inclusive form of family, the circus points beyond the merely tolerant society to one that is truly cosmopolitan.

This ideal was the explicit theme in the New Pickle Family Circus's Circumstance, built around the story of a socially marginalized young woman who finds a home, along with the full realization of her dreams and capacities, under the big top. The story was developed by artistic director Gypsy Snider and Shana Carroll, both of whom are veterans of Cirque du Soleil as well as the original Pickle Family Circus, founded by Snider's mother and stepfather.

A similar theme surfaced in Sara Moore's zany Show Ho at Theatre Rhinoceros, a one-woman tour de force loosely based on her experiences working as a Ringling Brothers clown. For Moore's excruciatingly nervous, gender ambiguous alter ego, Rhonda Hammerstein, the circus was where she could find herself, and find acceptance, without losing all her neuroses (a clown's bread and butter). Of course, in her impressive array of characterizations, Moore revealed more than just the super society of the circus where all are accepted. Much of the show's fun came from Moore's acting out the petty competitions and jealousies among a host of misfits, as well as the indignities show business inevitably entails – if the circus is salvation to the marginalized, it's also a business.

And then there's the circus as racket, a microcosm of the same old, same old, rather than a model of the new – taken to its extreme by likable locals Killing My Lobster's most recent sketch comedy opus, Circus of Failure. The show, buoyed by the rowdy jazz energy of Andrew Epstein and the KML Orchestra, was only sporadically successful. Still, it kicked off with a brilliant Keaton-esque moment, perfectly underscoring its theme of hopeless yearning and hokey deception as the entire set literally collapsed around the hapless huckster at the door of a two-bit traveling circus. The rest of the show takes place on the "ruins" of Paul Gelinas and Erik Flatmo's wonderfully entropic creation.

If these high jinks provided an unconventional and yet somewhat ubiquitous avenue to serious themes, much of it had to do with the larger uncertainty of the times and the heightened sensitivity that comes with that territory. Clowns are not morons. The science of jollification is a serious business, with an important social dimension. That's what I learned at the circus this year.

In crucial moments like these, art's striving for relevance becomes more acute all around. Many companies put on plays that had an unmistakable immediacy, offering the kind of answers many of us were hungry for. American Conservatory Theater artistic director Carey Perloff, for instance, had purportedly considered reviving Tom Stoppard's Night and Day for some time, but the sudden context provided by world events reinforced the decision to go ahead with what proved a successful production of a play that, while not one of Stoppard's best, amounted to a captivating dissection of the relation of the press to power. In the smaller houses, companies like the East Bay's Shotgun Players spoke even more explicitly to the times, perhaps because, as schooners as opposed to freight ships, they can move more quickly with the times; or because the edge of sustainability already makes them more attuned to the vicissitudes of social and economic realities, as well as more daring with material; or simply because their audiences want it.

Whatever the reasons, these relatively modest productions were responsible for some of the more striking theatrical moments this year. I've more or less forgotten Baz Luhrmann's La Bohème, but Crowded Fire's production of Liz Duffy Adams's Train Play (subtitled "The Reckless Ruthless Brutal Charge of It") left me with a resonant final image: American Manifest Destiny as the irrepressible enthusiasm of a prepubescent girl whose comic book alter ego gleefully leads a charge of startled immigrants (and two natives, an effete writer and a guilt-ridden scientist) from their train's final berth out into the postapocalyptic unknown. I took over the Bay Guardian theater beat relatively recently, which prevents me from mentioning every worthy show of last year. But I'll end by mentioning at least two exceptional productions that probably didn't get the attention they deserved.

At the premiere last November of Onion, by Shinichi Momo Kogo and inkBoat (the dance-theater company he founded in 1994), the scene before the assembling audience offered a Beckett-like tableau. On a dusty landscape atop a raised platform stage, a narcoleptic man (Koga) and woman (Yuko Kaseki) in peasant dress repose in something like mute bewilderment or exhaustion. The woman blankly stares outward, sitting on a foldout chair strapped to the back of her companion, who is initially obscured, doubled over and facing the other direction. As the audience settles in its seats, the man slowly rises and lumbers around under the strain of his load, while the woman remains limp and oblivious in her chair. They proceed to act out a series of scenarios beneath an enormous tower, crowned by a mumbling writer (Sten Rudstroem) in a bird's nest, alternately clicking away at his typewriter and peering at the scene below – sometimes influencing the action with typewritten pages flung down a wire into the earth, other times only observing – while an arm (Haruko Nishimura) pushes onions, a radio, and a kettle through trapdoors in the floor, further spurring the man and woman on through a continuum of contortions and confrontations. In this existential landscape, the dancers, with an exacting and flawless technique, effectively limn ineffable states of consciousness with precise gestures and flashes of genuine humor that catch one completely off guard.

Part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' "Bay Area Now" series, Onion marked the Berkeley-based inkBoat's most ambitious effort to date. Culminating Koga's term as their Wattis Artist in Residence, the piece included an exquisite and elaborate stage and sound design that took supreme advantage of the Center for the Arts' sizable auditorium. Onion combines various performance techniques, including Butoh and improvisation, in a deceptively simple, thematically rich narrative advanced largely through movement and the lush ambient score by Carla Kilstedt and Dan Rathbun (two members of the East Bay's avant-garde music group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). A vivid yet nearly wordless work of unusual subtlety and force, Onion will tour the United States and Europe late this year.

Onion's half trembling, half laughing affirmation of self in the embrace of history and mortality makes it akin to another world premiere last year, an equally impressive collaborative work in honor of the Mexican Day of the Dead. Playwright Octavio Solis and ShadowLight Theater's Seven Visions of Encarnación is a simple but compelling allegory of mission-era California and the birth of a mestizo identity in the person of an orphan named Encarnación (Luis Cortes), all of it played out in shadows cast on an enormous screen at Brava Theater. ShadowLight artistic director Larry Reed's unique theatrical technique blends silhouette puppets, physical and voice actors, musicians, lights, and assorted props into a live shadow collage with strikingly sophisticated cinematic qualities. It must have been extremely challenging to get right, though the end result came off without a hitch and looked effortless.