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An Egg!

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

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