Turning the act of, for example, swinging someone by their ankles from a physical feat into a rich emotional experience is the challenge that faces contemporary circus artists, and over the past 19 years, Montreal group the 7 Fingers has mastered it better than most. Formed as a breakaway from Cirque du Soleil, the troupe is a more human-scale experience than Cirque, the indie film rather than the spectacular action blockbuster.
Their latest show, Passagers, takes train travel as its theme, a palette of wistful goodbyes and new beginnings, setting out for adventure but not yet having arrived, being in motion but also in limbo – which is much like circus itself, always moving but in a place where normality is suspended.
We watch the black and white view out of a train window, landscape blurring by, and the mood is thoughtful, reflective, dreamy, occasionally silly. Instead of a series of disparate routines, there’s an effective throughline, and one act is absorbed into the next, from the woman spinning hula hoops to the acrobats who jump through them. The gaps are filled with dance, the group carried on a wave of movement.
There’s an amusing interlude on quantum mechanics, time travel and an Einstein theory involving trains (the performers’ theatrical timing is spot on) and the wow moments come when time does seem to glitch: a woman thrown in the air and caught by another, who is herself hanging upside down from a trapeze. There’s a split second where time almost stretches, as if it stops to take a breath. Perhaps it’s down to the exact point in the parabola where the flying woman is caught – is it as she’s still rising or just as she starts to descend? It’s art and physics in cahoots.
You think at first the show’s travels through whimsy and melancholy could wear thin, but instead, the mood seeps under the skin, and by the time two men perform the climactic Russian cradle act (the aforementioned swinging by the ankles, somersaulting at great height) it has become something highly charged, an illustration of grace, freedom, moments of wonder and leaps of faith.
