July 29--"We move onstage and they say we're not dancers. We speak onstage and they say they we are not actors." There is no more eloquent defender of the men and women of the circus than Gypsy Snider.
"I am just trying to get people to stop thinking we're a bunch of talented monkeys doing tricks," she said. "It's not the tricks; it's the people behind the tricks."
I first wrote about Snider, part of the Montreal-based company Les 7 Doigts de la Main, back in 2010 when her show "Traces" bowed in Chicago. This was, to my mind, a highly innovative show that was the first to really introduce the circus performer -- to identify him or her as a person with dreams, passion and obstacles, and to allow those performers to communicate directly with an audience. As themselves.
This was a wholesale departure from circus tradition.
In the traditional big top circuses of old, the performer was expected to do his or her thing, bow and then promptly disappear at the crack of the ringmaster's authoritarian whip.
In the new circuses that grew up in the 1990s, such as the Cirque du Soleil (which arrives back in Chicago next week), the performers were subjugated to heavy directorial concepts and obliged to appear in eccentric costumes. At Cirque, they became known as the "house troupe," a moniker that subjugated individual identity into the brand of the circus itself. Headliners had more autonomy, sure, but you still could see many of these new circuses and leave without really having much sense of who you saw. "Traces" was an attempt to change all that.
There is, of course, a counterargument to Snider. Historically, many circus performers have not spoken enough English to want to talk to an audience. They are not trained as actors. They often have preferred to do their thing and exit the ring.
"I acknowledge that," Snider said, when we spoke last week. "Actors are trained to play Romeo in one show and then Hamlet in another show. Circus performers are not. They do not instinctively know how to move a scene forward in the way that an actor does. They prefer to do what they do best. Often, I have found, a circus performer will have an incredible idea, but will not know how to get out of that idea."
So over the last couple of years, Snider has positioned herself as a kind of liaison between the world of the circus and the world of the legitimate theater, which often wants to steal from the circus without fully understanding the distinctiveness of that culture. You can see Snider's work in the Broadway revival of "Pippin," now playing in a touring production at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago.
Snider is justly proud of the show, but she speaks with a frankness that you don't usually find in the cautious world of Broadway interviews. Clearly, the melding of the cultures was a struggle.
"I really had to try and stop that whole musical-theater machine," she said. "In the circus, the way we try and attack a problem is so different. I'd have to take the acrobats out in the lobby. Nobody understood. As a circus performer, when you don't yet know your partner or your moves, it takes a lot longer than theater people realize to make something beautiful or sexy. I constantly kept trying to stop the process and say you can't use the musical-theater playbook."
Take, for example, the issue of predictability. Most musical productions are set up as "100 percent no-fail," which means that the same thing is supposed to happen every night. Otherwise, for example, the orchestra does not know what to play. That's not true in the circus, where tricks can and do fail with some regularity. To actually build that into a legit show like "Pippin," Snider said, took an enormous amount of persuasive work.
But she prevailed. There is a moment in "Pippin" where a difficult trick often fails. If it does so, the Leading Player (a character in the show) tells the performer to try again. If it works on the second try, it elicits a much bigger response from the audience. That is something circus people understand, but that does not mean they do not prefer to get it right the first time. Theater people tend to gravitate to the reaction.
"They asked me, 'Can it fail on the first try every time?'" Snider said of her "Pippin" partners. "I told them no. When it happens, it happens."
That's the kind of language that makes Broadway people very nervous, and that makes Snider something of a maverick.
But she's on to something important in this era of social-media dominance when millennials never stop sharing their personal stories and expect others to do the same.
"Circus people can talk Facebook language," she says. "And if their voice sounds fragile, or not like the voice of an actor, that only makes everything more real."
"Pippin" plays through Aug. 9 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; 800-775-2000 and broadwayinchicago.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
jones5@tribpub.com
