#eric bates

Alexandra Royer, who comes from Quebec City, was inspired to take up circus after watching companies such as Cirque Eloize and Cirque du Soleil. Later, after living in Morocco, she trained at the Quebec Circus School and was approached by Cirque du Soleil to join its show Quidam on an aerial hoop contract when she was just 16. In 2008, Alex chose instead to further her studies at Montreal’s National Circus School. There she met her two American Russian bar bases, Eric Bates and Tristan Nielsen, and on graduating they began to perform worldwide with leading companies including The 7 Fingers, Cirque Eloize, Cirque du Soleil and La Soirée.

The trio were joined by Eve Bigel of Compagnie XY, and as Barcode Circus Company they have performed in Olympic ceremonies, on TV shows and at corporate events and cabarets, also in street and contemporary dance shows, as well as full-length circus creations. They have also won numerous awards, including silver and bronze medals at 2018’s Cirque de Demain Festival in Paris. Alex is now taking part in Barcode’s first full-length production, Sweat and Ink (De Sueur et d’Encre), which headlines at Hand to Hand: A FringeArts Circus Festival in Philadelphia, USA. The show runs from 31 May – 2 June 2018. She chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: How old were you when you first became aware of circus? Alexandra Royer: Quite young. In Quebec City we were surrounded by Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Eloize… and I can’t remember exactly when I asked about it but I wanted to go to the circus. I wasn’t doing circus yet but I asked my parents to take me.

Do any shows stand out? I totally remember Nomade by Cirque Eloize. It was wonderful… Anton Carabinier was in it. He was, I think, 18 then and I had a big crush on him… and I wanted to do circus after seeing it. Guillaume Saladin was in it too, and he is so nice, just so nice. And also Cirque Eos, which was a circus from Quebec City. A lot of artists from Eos still do circus even though it was like, 20 years ago. Erika Lemay is like the queen of circus; she has long legs and she’s beautiful; she does handstands. She was with them.

Were you always an active kid? In school my mum registered me for theatre and dance classes but I was actually really, really shy so going onstage was never an option. But when I was seven we found a little class in a circus school. It was only half an hour a week but it was really fun.

Is anyone else in your family in showbusiness? I found out later on that I had some distant cousins – something like my grandparents were cousins of their grandparents – and they were also in Nomade. My cousin, Marie Michèle Faber, is beautiful and she sings and does aerial hoop and silks in Cirque du Soleil. Her brother is Jean-François Faber, and he does acrobatic bike, like, trial bike, manipulations and acrobatics. But they are not why I went into circus; they didn’t influence me.

Who or what did inspire you? After the year of circus I did when I was seven, my family moved to Morocco and I did horseback riding there. Once, the trapeze company Les Arts Sauts brought a huge show, Kayassine, to Marrakech. I was talking about circus then but I don’t remember why it affected me so much because I couldn’t do any acrobatics. My dad had bought a trampoline just to ease the move to another country but actually I was super happy to go. It was really nice to have a trampoline in the backyard but I was only doing simple moves… front drop, back drop… My mum is from France and she knows Danielle Le Pierrès’ sister really well. Danielle is the founder of Le P’tit Cirk, and when Les Arts Sauts came my mum’s friend was there to babysit Danielle’s young children.

My mum, of course, saw her friend, so we had a private visit to the tent. We climbed into the safety net, we saw the show, it was gorgeous – one of the best memories of a show I have. I think I was about nine. Then a lot of the cast came to our backyard for a barbecue. We had some wild boar in the freezer – a hunter had given us so much meat – so my mum was like: “Oh perfect, bring the whole cast.” Everybody was there and the trampoline was there, so some of the porters made people do backflips and I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is really fun. I want to join in with them’.

I think it was the first time I realised that I really wanted to do circus, not because of the show so much, but more because of the feeling backstage. It was really great; a great afternoon where we had fun and talked to the artists. After they left I carried on with my life in Morocco without circus but when we came back to Canada I went to the school in Quebec.

Why did you then choose aerial? Um… good question. To get into the school in Quebec I did a trapeze act. Jade Dussault, who is in FlipFabriQue, was my coach. I think she was 12 years old and I was ten. [Laughs] It’s really funny; I wasn’t ready to enter the programme so much but they were looking for people because it was a rather new programme. They said: “Oh, she’s super small and kind of strong and flexible,” so I did trapeze. I can still remember how stressed I was before doing my act. I couldn’t remember the music; I only had a CD and the guy said: “What is your music?” And I said, ‘I don’t know. My teacher is not here…’, or, ‘My teacher is 12 years old…’. but finally I did something and I was accepted. I was alone at home when they told me and I asked, ‘Is this person and this person also coming? I’ll come if they’re coming’. I had also been thinking of going to horseback riding school but I decided to do circus because I had so much fun in the audition and met lots of people.

How difficult a decision was it to turn down Cirque du Soleil’s offer? What’s interesting in Quebec you learn to do everything, and we were training quite hard. I saw The 7 Fingers’ show Traces, and we were all so pumped up when we came back, we wanted the school to open up, but it was the middle of the night; everybody was on a high. I was doing trampoline at the time… swinging trapeze, aerials, hand to hand, everything, and my aerial hoop coach was Marie-Eve Bisson from the hoop trio in Quidam. She was 27 and I was 16. I had about ten classes with her and she really showed me everything on hoop. She could spin so fast. She was the one I’d watched on the Quidam video.

But when I got the offer, I didn’t have many options. My mum just said: “No.” I did the audition at the National Circus School in Montreal and was accepted. The crew and vibe of our year was amazing. I also wanted to learn something else; I didn’t want to have just one act. I had the feeling that if I went to Quidam, I’d go to Montreal for six months, go on tour and then never be talked about again. It’s a bit like that in Cirque du Soleil; you just become a number. They take good care of you but at that age it was nice to keep learning stuff. My trampoline coach said: “Do you wanna be really good, or like, medium good?” I said, ‘I want to be really good’. So he said: “Go to the school.” They’d accepted me for aerial and acrobatics, so that was interesting. In Quebec I could change my schedule; I could ask for Cyr wheel or whatever but in Montreal, once you get your schedule it’s quite hard to change it. 

What made you add Russian bar to your skills? There was a Russian bar trio in Quebec City, and they made me try it. They were so chilled, like: “You really should do it.” They put the idea into my head and it’s something not so many people do. That was the idea behind it.

How much trust is needed between you and your bases? I was a bit unaware of how important the relationship with the porters is. I didn’t consider myself a flyer at all; I was doing aerial hoop as a specialist. But when I started to work with Eric and Tristan, we were really laughing a lot. They had their own specialties as well, so it was a good match because none of us were putting all our eggs in one basket. From the beginning, and it’s still the deal we have, that whenever it stops being fun, or one of us gets hurt, or we don’t believe in it, we won’t do it any more, because it’s quite dangerous.

What advice would you give to someone thinking of taking it up? A good level in trampoline is a good thing, even though I haven’t done it for years now because it’s really hard. The partners you work with are really important, because that’s how you could get hurt. You can learn on Russian bar quite fast but the relationship of trust afterwards becomes a bit complicated. You do the trick once and that’s great, but you have to keep doing it. We stopped for a while after Cirque de Demain because we had so many things to do but I needed to take myself in hand and say, ‘OK, let’s go; we’re doing it again’. For myself, I would not do it at all, but because we have this trio energy, we have to do it. It’s easier as well because we go through it together and have fun, and then we can travel so much with the Russian bar, because it’s such a rare discipline. If I’d only done aerial hoop, I would probably have done some flying thing but the Russian bar is special enough to make you a bit privileged with the contracts you have. So, that’s quite fun.

How wide is the bar and does it hurt your feet when you land? It’s maybe 15cm, but your body knows at some point… and the guys are so precise. That’s why it’s so important to choose your bases carefully. We pad it with a little bit of camping mat. Tristan is our Russian-bar maker, so he takes care of it.

You’ve brought some innovative moves to the discipline; how did that come about? We were watching other Russian bar acts when we started to make our acts, thinking: “Oh, we don’t like it when she has the moments of preparation; it’s too much, too long, too stiff and it’s only about the trick.” Also Eric and Tristan can handle being alone onstage; they don’t need the bar. Often the Russian bar porters only do Russian bar, so when we made one of our first acts the goal was, ‘What can we do that is not Russian bar-like?’. I think the act we did at Cirque de Demain was, ‘What can do that we’d like to see on Russian bar?’.  

So that was maybe the difference. And the fact that I’m not a crazy acrobat. I’m more like a mover in general; we use that. Especially when we were with The 7 Fingers, Shana Carroll was the instigator of the way I moved on the bar because before we did their show Sequence 8, we had never done a real Russian bar act; it was our minor discipline. I remember she put the music on and said: “Let yourself go.” We were working on that base of movement and then transferred it to the bar. It was really natural. It’s a strange movement that it gives you and I’m lucky to have boys who are good enough to catch me during that strange bit.

It’s almost like a rag doll; it’s lovely. I love your costumes as well. Who designed them? Camille Thibaud. We met her through The 7 Fingers. She really helped us a lot with the style. We didn’t really know what we wanted because we were creating the act at the same time. She was very open and at some point I realised that we needed movement in the costumes. I wanted something that flowed, but it was super challenging for a costume maker because there are so many technical requirements in making a Russian-bar costume that isn’t going to be dangerous. We worked with her last summer. I wanted rich fabrics, so it’s all silk, pure cotton or linen. She really understood what I was looking for, but you can’t just take linen and bend you legs so much, or take silk that will have to stretch, so she made it look like it’s good fabric but there are also stretchy parts that she made invisible. The costumes are really intelligently made. Camille Thibaud is a name to remember, I think.

What can you tell us about Sweat and Ink? Basically it has all the disciplines we do: aerial hoop, Russian bar, cigar-box juggling, hand to hand, and Eve is also a specialist in small teeterboard, when you land in columns and hand-to-hand positions. So the three of us are learning that right now. It’s quite fun for the four of us to do something acrobatically, and I catch in a three high; like, I’m a porter also [laughs]. It’s really good.

How long have you been working on the show? We started to work seriously on it last summer. We did a show together and it was really for Eve and Tristan to make sure they wanted to keep working together because their association was rather new. They didn’t want to rush anything so we did a summer contract to see, if they both liked it, then we’d do a quartet and make a show. But we were talking about it before that. Eve just arrived in Montreal in April last year and we pitched her the idea. Basically we wanted to talk about books, we wanted to talk about writing and that led to the topic of memory and oblivion. There were some readings I’d done that were addressing the questions, ‘What’s the duty of memory and what right do we have to forget things?’. It touched me a lot so I told the idea to the others and it brought up a lot of conversation, so we decided it could be a starting point of the creation.

It has been quite long and, I don’t want to say painful, but we’re not administrators; we want to be onstage, so for us it’s harder. Also we were preparing for Cirque de Demain. And in Canada if you’re not working, there’s no intermittance, you’re just spending money, so you need to work whenever you have free time. But I like that life. It’s quite hectic and crazy but that’s how it is right now… and we travel a lot so it’s really exciting.

You were very successful in Paris, did it bring you lots of opportunities? Yes, so many emails. Oh, my god! The goal in going to Paris was to have something that the four of us had done together. And because it went well for all of us at the same time, that has helped us a lot. With all the press we got we can ask for visas, that’s really helpful and so is having established something with the four of us, because we’d only done corpos or the show last summer with The 7 Fingers.

It wasn’t that stressful in the end and it was a small victory because I was always thinking, ‘If I go to a festival and do the Russian bar, I’m gonna do something wrong, for sure’. So most important was that we didn’t hurt ourselves. We were more stressed than usual so the first performance was a bit shaky. Russian bar needs to be super settled down and calm, so for me that was my medal. We did it and technically I was good. My coach, André St-Jean, was there too, and he’s somebody very important in our lives, so to see him happy was really nice. He’s the master of acrobatics in Montreal and teaches all the guys from teeterboard.

Can you pick out a few highlights from your career so far? The first time I left Montreal by myself and I went to do a circus festival, SOLyCirco in Germany, in 2011. I was doing my hoop act. There was a bunch of friends and it was all new for us. There were some well-known names taking part and I was like, ‘This is so awesome’. Finally I won the gold medal. There’s a picture of me when they said my name and I’m like… I still don’t realise it. I won because there was a storm at the same time as I was doing my act.

The act was about the Sisyphus myth. The music was by the Kronos Quartet and the composer was Peter Sculthorpe; it was super-contemporary. We’d felt the storm coming the whole day, the energy of the sky was super low and it was warm and had this windy thing. I started my act and the storm starts, but for real. The tent was shaking and the wind was everywhere, people had the shivers and I was just doing my act in the middle like a crazy horse; the movement was inspired a lot by horses. So, I was performing but honestly I had special effects doing my act. [Laughs] That was a great moment. I remember before I started I was, like, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve forgotten the act, I’ve forgotten the act’. [Laughs] It’s one of the best moments onstage I’ve had. It’s such a shame that festival doesn’t exist any more.

Afterwards I did Russian bar with Eric and Tristan at Flic Flac Circus, and that was also a great highlight because we had to do everything ourselves. It was traditional circus; nobody’s gonna check to see if I’ve rigged my hoop well, nobody’s gonna tell you: “Stand by.” There’s a clock so you should be on time. We learned a lot over there and that’s where we met the guys from XY. But whenever I work with friends it’s the best. After we did Sequence 8 with our best friends for three years – that was just a blast – we keep choosing projects on whatever they bring us artistically and who’s in the cast.

Alex appears in Barcode’s first full-length production, Sweat and Ink (De Sueur et d’Encre), which headlines at Hand to Hand: A FringeArts Circus Festival in Philadelphia, USA. The show runs from 31 May – 2 June 2018.

Picture credits: Caroline Dostie; Meredith Mullins; Sebastien Lozé

Barcode’s website and Facebook

Twitter: @FringeArts

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Here we are back at Cirque de Demain after a gap of 11 years. Oh, how we hated Cirque Phénix’s sports hall venue when we first came, with its raised lip around the ring that you couldn’t see over – nothing like the festival’s exquisite former setting of the historic Cirque d’Hiver. But, huzzah, things are so much better now, with tiers of seating screened off to make the arena more like a circus tent, and the audience arranged around a square raised stage. It also has a live orchestra and glitzy showbiz lighting. This is what we thought of it… By Liz Arratoon

BEST ACT: Barcode Company’s Russian bar. Oooh, this was so good. A really fresh approach to the discipline, with every aspect considered and stunning pinpoint somersaults from flyer Alexandra Royer. The bases are Eric Bates and Tristan Nielsen. This act has the same wow factor as when we first saw The White Crow.

BEST GUEST ACT: American Eric Bates with his cigar box juggling. Read our archive interview with him.

BEST ARTIST: Eric Bates, not only an amazing Russian bar base, but a world-class cigar-box juggler. How does he have the time?

MOST EXCITING ACT: Lukas and Aaron on Korean plank. Thrilling self-propelled somersaults, cleverly choreographed to give themselves a rest in-between moves.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT: Lazuz Company; a juggler and an acrobat interacting rather nicely.

MOST STYLISH ACT: Sasha Harrington and Andrew Adams of The Silhouette on straps, performing with a red umbrella.

MOST WELCOME RETURN FROM INJURY: Andrew Adams. Find out more in our interview.

MOST DARING ACT: Viivi R and Fragan G Duo, who performed bewildering ‘trust’ moves – such as holding each other feet to feet – on corde lisse; very high, no lunge, no crash mat. Yikes! But they also get the…

STRANGEST START: A burning rope that blazed like a lit dynamite fuse, and sparkly costumes that fell away to reveal their grey outfits.

BEST ‘GASP’ ACT: The B-Boys of Art Core, whose moves, such as jumping on one forearm, were unbelievable.

MOST ELEGANT ACT: Germany’s Lea Hinz on aerial hoop (part of Art Core, pictured below).

BEST PROP: Walking stick used by American Timber Brown on his mini aerial hoop.

WEIRDEST EQUIPMENT: Martin Riedel’s ugly, monolithic robotic arm, which blocked the sight of much of his act… and it must have cost tens of thousands…

HAPPIEST ACT: Frenchman Thomas Mangin, on straps, beamed all through his performance, which was backed by a fun sort of calypso beat. Also, he wore gold and red, not grey.

MOST UNNECESSARY PROP: Thomas Mangin’s small red ball. What was it doing there?

BEST GROUP ACT: Well, um, it would have to be Cirque Eloize’s intro number with seven men, manhandling one amazing woman acrobat/contortionist. 

BEST DUO: Hard to choose between hand-to-hand duos Julius and César (pictured below) and Tristan and Eve (also from Barcode Company).

BEST MUSIC: Barcode, whose track about ‘falling’ matched some of their intended moves.

WORST MUSIC: Taiwan diabolo troupe Diabolism. For us it ruined the act but the jury didn’t seem to mind it.

MOST FEATURED DISCIPLINES: Hand to hand – three; diabolo – three; straps – three.

BEST COSTUMES: Barcode Company, who had stylish individual outfits. Also Xander and Mélanie on static trapeze, who had coordinating black and red-wine coloured athletic wear. Really a beautifully choreographed number with lots of wonderful casting and catching tricks.

BEST TECHNICAL SKILLS: China’s Hong Haitao. It was clear he would get the jury’s gold, having performed two technically perfect acts: hand-balancing and strength moves on a high pole, including breathtaking slo-mo planches. He executed similar poses on an incredibly high column of chairs. Bloody hell!

MOST USED COSTUME COLOUR: Grey. Hmmm.

MOST OVERUSED FEATURE: Beards! Hmmm.

MOST UNDERUSED FEATURE: Women! Hmmm.

MOST OVERUSED TREND: Casual scruffy jeans, chinos and T-shirts. Get some costumes!

MOST MISSED FROM FINAL: Hand-to-hand pair Gonçalo Roque and Kinga Grzeskow of Duo Destiny, who performed a lovely number on a park bench. We think she was meant to be his ‘dream’ girl….

AGE LIMIT: What age limit?

JURY M/F IMBALANCE: Male – eight; female – two! Not good enough.

COMPETING ARTISTS M/F IMBALANCE: Male – 31; female – seven!!

ALWAYS THERE, ALWAYS BRILLIANT: Our friend, Monsieur Loyal Calixte de Nigremont. Read our archive interview with him.

The 39th Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain was held at Cirque Phénix in Paris and ran from 1-4 Feburary 2018.

MAIN AWARD WINNERS:

Gold: Kong Haitao/Jinan Troupe

Silver: Barcode Company Tim Kriegler, straps Lukas and Aaron

#TNREditorTalks: Michael Eric Dyson in conversation & book signing Monday, April at 7pm / FREE

Join @thenewrepublic editor Eric Bates and Michael Eric Dyson, author, Georgetown professor and New Republic contributing editor, in conversation about Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America—Dyson's urgent, heartfelt, and eloquent new book on race relations in the United States. Complementary beverages will be available generously sponsored by the New Republic, as well as free tote bags.

American Eric Bates grew up in Vermont and is a graduate of the National Circus School in Montreal. He is considered to be one of the best cigar box jugglers in the world and also specialises as a Russian bar porter. He won a bronze medal at Cirque de Demain in 2012 and has appeared on the prestigious France2 TV show Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde. Eric has recently finished a three-year tour with the 7 Fingers in Sequence 8 and also performed in its show Queen of the Night. Based in Montreal, he is now in London as a guest artist in Throwback, which is staged by the British company Silver Lining and runs at Jacksons Lane as part of its 40th-anniversary celebrations. He tells Liz Arratoon about his career so far.

The Widow Stanton: What inspired you to start circus? Eric Bates: I was always doing it as a hobby, just juggling. There’s a big supportive network of circus in Vermont because there’s this thing called Circus Smirkus, who have a summer camp and residency programmes. I’m sure someone came into my school when I was very little and taught me to juggle and stuff. Then I did the summer camp and part of the camp tours old folk’s homes and nurseries or whatever and afterwards they have the actual tour that you have to audition for, which is 80 shows all around New England, travelling and setting up the tent and stuff, so I did that as part of my summer vacation in high school.

How old were you when you started juggling? I don’t remember learning to juggle but I’ve got a picture of myself juggling torches in 5th grade, so I was ten or so. I remember duct-taping gloves on to my hands, which we decided was the safest way to do it.

I reviewed Sequence 8 and said your act was “extraordinary”! Why did you choose cigar boxes? Well, when I was in Smirkus there was anther fellow called Jacob Sharpe who does diabolo and at the time people weren’t really doing diabolo that much, like three diabolos was a really big deal back in 2006. He came back the next summer and he was just riding the front of this wave; technically he was amazing. And I loved that idea of uncharted waters in terms of juggling. I remember growing up I had all the VHS tapes of all the cool jugglers and it always like, ‘If I train my whole life I’m barely gonna catch up to these guys and they’ll already have gone far into the future of juggling’. I also had cigar boxes and it was completely untapped. I learned the basics the day I got them and no one had ever gone beyond that. I liked the idea of being a frontrunner in a discipline. That was something I already enjoyed and came somewhat naturally to me. I liked having a blank canvas and decided to really push it and see if I could do the same thing with boxes that Jacob was doing with diabolo.

Everything about cigar boxes being uncharted territory made it beautiful and exciting. Having seen lots of people do the same basic moves but never anything different made me fairly certain that that was all that had been found collectively, so I could go into the metaphorical woods and make my own paths without worrying that I was bushwhacking while there was an already well established trail right next to me. There's this photographer, Robert Adams, whose work I love who also wrote a book called Beauty in Photography, in which he says: "For a picture to be beautiful it does not have to be shocking, but it must in some significant respect be unlike what has preceded it." That is what's exciting about exploring a new discipline; that you can be certain that your work won't be redundant. That alone gives creative energy, and that was my impetus to take on a discipline that I quickly realised was difficult, tiring and not inherently fluid, and probably why so few people did it.

Your style is quite balletic. Have you done any dance? No, no, except at circus school in Montreal where everyone has dance classes. Traditionally it’s quite ugly how people do boxes, like, it’s very staccato and up and down and stationary but part of what appealed to me… take diabolo, for example, it’s very fluid and moves around and part of what’s beautiful is how the performer moves. I thought that was really interesting to try to take something very square and right-angled and make it more fluid, because there’s that whole other branch involving inertia and swinging and stuff that’s a lot more rounded but no one works on that because it’s… really hard.

Yes, I was going to say you make it look very easy but has it just been years and years of practice and hard work? Well, I’m 27 now and I got my first set when I was 12. I auditioned for the circus school in Montreal with cigar boxes when I was 20. I was just starting to dabble with four boxes around then. So it was two hours a day for the next three years.

Your routine in Sequence 8 involved other cast members; is that something the 7 Fingers introduced for that show? No, that was something I’d been playing with for the last three years in circus school before that. I hadn’t really performed cigar boxes that much, you know, just here and there, but it was something we started doing… I’d worked with the 7 Fingers in first year as well. We did a project in Old Port and I loved the possibilities, and how to integrate other people; throwing stuff all over the place I thought was pretty cool. So I’ve used that in almost every act I’ve done with them in school and since then.

How did you cope with such a long tour? Did you mind doing the same thing over and over and over? Artistically that was one of the harder challenges. We did have breaks in the tour so I managed to do Cirque de Demain, I worked on Queen of the Night for a month, and I had quite a few other gigs here and there that kept it interesting. We had signed for two years, but the original cast all did three years. We definitely tired of doing the same thing over and over but that said it did evolve. We played in South America… we did the show in over five languages… every country the humour is really different and we were constantly on our toes with that, so I was surprised it didn’t get old right away. We managed to keep surprising ourselves and we ended up re-signing because we got along very well with the company, with our cast, and then anything we wanted to change in order to make us happier and stay they gladly did. We finished in New York at the New York City Center, which was also great because it was just a huge stage and opportunity and very close to our families; all of our families were there and a lot of friends from Montreal came down and it felt like a good natural high point to end on.

Was that your best moment on tour? Well, I’d say the strongest memory on tour was the first time we ever did the show because we played in Lyon at the Nuits de Fourvière in an old Roman amphitheatre: a 4,000-seat outdoor stone theatre. You’re out under the stars, it’s a beautiful night and we were completely full. The first time we’d ever performed this show… our minds were exploding. At the end, the tradition is that if they like show all these people stand up and the cushions that they hand out to sit on the rocks, they throw at the stage! So we were bowing for like, four minutes with pillows raining down on us… we were having pillow fights with the audience… and you just can’t top that.

What was it like being on Le Plus Grand Cabaret? I love that show! Well, you know what, it was a hoot because it was literally the day after Cirque de Demain. I’m not even joking, I just drank a lot and then went and did that the next day. I got two takes, so we filmed one in the morning with everyone, and then we got do one at night, so there was so much less pressure than the thing I’d done the night before. We had a blast. 

You are also, and I mean this is a bit weird for a juggler, a Russian bar base. How did you get into that? Usually jugglers juggle… Well, you hit 6’3 and people don’t let you be just a juggler any more. [Laughs] My sensitive hands, huh? [Laughs] I don’t know… I played rugby in high school and just love being physical and I got to circus school and one of my buddies from Circus Smirkus was in the same year and he was looking for a banquine porter so we started doing that together from day one. We just had a blast and then oddly enough, two of the guys who we were in Sequence 8 with later were learning to ‘port’ Russian bar and we thought, ‘Oh man, these guys from San Francisco, they can just do everything, you know, hoop-diving, pole, there’s no way they get to be good bases, too’. So we literally pushed them out of the way, took the Russian bar and started doing it. [Laughs] But growing up the style of show that really influenced me and my generation were things like Traces and Rain; these shows with smaller casts who did a lot of things.

So not Cirque du Soleil? I watched Viktor Kee growing up and he tagged me on Facebook in a picture of Cirque de Demain and that was a huge highlight for me, but what I liked were these more intimate, personal shows where the whole cast is just all over the place so that’s also always been part of it, doing a lot of acts. You know in Smirkus everyone does everything, so that’s also been a part of who I wanted to be in the circus.

How did you come to guest with Silver Lining in Throwback? I’m trying to remember exactly. Everyone knows everyone in the circus… we played here for a month with 7 Fingers and met some of them when we were performing in London. It’s just a lot of overlap and they’re all buddies. Coming out of Sequence 8 I’m really excited to do new projects. This is really different. We had a four- or five-month creation with the 7 Fingers and they obviously know just what’s going on. Even if we had a blank page to make that show it was still with directors and a whole network. That said it was still a very intimate experience creating with them. But this is just eight of us and then we’ve had an outside eye coming in this last week. So it feels like we’re on our own, which is scary but also very energising.

Can you tell us anything about the show? Well, not giving anything away, the flyer says “explosive circus performances, honest stories and a lot of fun”. I’ve been surprised seeing some of the other acts in the show. There are some cool numbers that I’ve never seen before and I think it is just what the poster says, cool circus and a lot of fun from people who have known each other for a very long time. Hopefully the show reflects that. I’m doing the box juggling and some acrobatics and what have you with the rest of the team. Jacksons Lane is a really intimate theatre; we’re often onstage during the show supporting each other. They have been really supportive of us, too, giving us access to anything we need.

What’s next for you? Throwback runs until 11th July and I fly out on 12th to do some projects back in Montreal and Chicago. I’m going to be with Midnight Circus in Chicago until mid-October. It’s kind of similar to Smirkus in that it’s a benefit to support all the parks in Chicago. They drop a circus tent in a new park in Chicago every weekend… people come back from school and there’s circus tent in their back yard, basically. It’s just a great family tented show. It’s a blast. The two directors – Jeff and Julie Jenkins – actually directed Smirkus when I was in it. They’ve got 50% old Smirkus people and 50% people from the circus school in Montreal who saw them and got excited about their show and wanted to work for them. So they’ve got quite a skilled and fun cast.

Silver Lining’s show Throwback runs at Jacksons Lane in London from 30 June-11 July 2015 as part of the venue’s 40th-anniversary celebrations.

Tickets: http://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/book-tickets/19252/

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Twitter: @SilverLiningCo @jacksons_lane

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We're catching bullets in our teeth And though it's easy if you know how it's done They split the secret up six ways before they gave it to us just before dawn And now we don't remember Our blood and guts are out We spread our bones across the table at night We cut our fingers off To give ourselves those little extra insights

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