Madame Pain’s Boudoir Circus
Shows = 5
ER visits = 3*
Audience members = ~450
Money raised = TBD
Lives changed forever = 40
We did it. We actually pulled it off. Many of us students from Aircraft Circus performed in a real-life circus show for the first time ever this past weekend in London. A full-fledged production with lights, fog machine, winches, trusses, confetti bombs and FIRE.
Our director, Alex Frith, started a performance class in February for us to begin building a show around Chrysalis’ freak show act. We worked on a shoestring budget in order to raise money to insulate our space, which is wicked cold in the winter time. Many of the aerial students were also pivotal in making the show a reality. Elizabeth Schuch, hoop artist extraordinaire, designed an incredible set using salvaged props, old sets and scaffolding. Here’s an early look at her design, and you can read more here.
:
Poppy Flint was a genius in creating the costumes. My favorite were the can-can dancers corsets and skirts. So much frill and lace.
And from all of this, Madame Pain’s Boudoir Circus was born. The show featured swinging trapeze, silks, hoop, static trapeze, doubles & triples trapeze, dance trapeze, vertical rope, pole dancing, acrobalancing, fire swallowing and so much more.
Here are videos from our two routines – Nadia and I were conjoined twins who were so desperate to be free from Madame Pain’s exploitation that we separated ourselves.
The first routine is my favorite because, as a base, I get to do a lot more than sit and go to catchers, which is what I mainly do in the second routine. The first routine was really challenging to choreograph and it took us ages to figure out how to get from point A to point B (especially in corsets), but I love what we ended up with. We spent most of our time working on that routine because the second one was just the rest of our doubles trick repertoire, and while the audience seemed to like it a lot, it was very traditional doubles moves and not particularly creative.
Overall, I’m ecstatic about what we accomplished. We pushed ourselves to the absolute maximum on these routines and only had one major error during our first show (which was 100% my fault) and we recovered brilliantly. The only thing I abhor is that damn red jumpsuit. It’s diabolical, but there was no time to think of an alternative.
And here are a couple fabulous posed photos before our last show that Ryan took:
I’m still lacking the words to describe this experience with these brave, creative and stoopid-talented individuals. I love and thank you people. And am honored to have been a part of this life-changing experience.
*Thankfully, none of the injuries were serious. Whip lash, a torn pectoral and bruised fingers were the extent of them.
