Criss Cross Circus

[juldea]

I just got home from seeing the Criss Cross Circus perform in Inman Square, and it was so much fun!

I heard about them for the first time earlier this week from rigel, who knows one of the performers and was pondering going to the show. I had no clue who they were or anything about their show, but ever since siderea posted the awesome hand-to-hand circus act video a month or so ago, I've thought that going to see a circus would be neat. This one was actually going on late enough in the evening that I could go after work, plus it was walkable from my house, so I went!

The performance space was approximately the size of my living room, with higher ceilings, and that was the whole performance space, including space for the drum set, speakers, and other assorted equipment. The actual tumbling/acrobatic/juggling/etc space was somewhere around 10x10. Not, I'm sure, their ideal space, but they made do with it. There was music, dance, drama, acrobatics (mostly in the form of bendiness and handstands and hand-to-hand work, due to space limitations), juggling, clowning, stilt-walking, poi spinning, and probably more I'm forgetting.

The theme of the show was the year is 2056, 58 years after John McCain stole the election, and of course we all know what happened after that: war, famine, apocalypse, people living in bunkers, etc. They're a group of survivors who have formed a traveling circus to go among the disparate peoples in what used to be the United States of America and try to connect groups of people. There were bits and pieces of hardcore social-change mongering in the performance, but not too much - I was left feeling like I had gained a few pieces of information as a side effect of watching a really neat circus troupe. A lot of acts were played off as things people did in their traveling camp to pass the time, some had siller explanations (the woman with an antenna searching for signals of other survivors found that she caught a better signal the more juggling was going on), some were told as stories (One man's story of how he came to the circus: after leaving the bunker as a child, he roamed the lands. First he came across a group of people living among rubber trees, where he learned the properties of rubber [insert eco-friendly rubber stories here] and how to manipulate it [insert balloon animals here]. Then he came across a group of people who lived near a huge gorge with only a rickety bridge crossing it that didn't carry much weight, so they taught him how to toss his belongings in the air so that he wouldn't weigh too much at any time and break the bridge [insert juggling here]. Then he met a group of people who lived in a flooded area who walked around on sticks to keep out of the water [insert stilt-walking].), and some were incomprehensible (I still don't know what the last act with the crank was supposed to represent, but it involved a lot of neat acrobatics and was pretty.)

Outside of the circus bits, the show was very nostalgic for me. I feel like gaea_spore (my college band; homepage no longer :( working) would've been able to set up behind the acts and start playing seamlessly into their show. One of the performers, in fact the one that rigel knew, looked like a smaller, scrawnier form of withlyn with a closer-cut beard, but the hair, mannerisms, and style of dress was right on. Oh hey, picture. Another of the performers looked like a redder-haired eustacia42. It makes me want to go put on the Laundrospore video. (Which reminds me that the Parkview laundromat doesn't even EXIST anymore. Yar.)

So yeah. Amateur circus was fun. Gave them money. Hope to catch again sometime.