by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Circus Luminous is a dream come true - literally.
"The whole show is this imaginary dream life of a clown," said Acushla Bastible, the show's director. "She imagines she becomes part of this big circus, and she's able to do all these tricks."
The central figure onstage is a girl named Loca, who has a dog named Chango, the only animal in the show.
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"She dresses like a man," Bastible said. "She meets this dog and they build a relationship in the show. It's very simple but generally people adore him because he's very cute and people respond very favorably to animals onstage. He's been a big success with the show."
Circus Luminous is a cross-pollination of Wise Fool New Mexico, Moving People Dance Theatre and musical troupe BING, all based in Santa Fe. This year marks the first time the circus will tour outside Santa Fe.
Bastible said they're taking the show on the road because the collaboration is at the most profound level it has ever been.
"There are times when you don't really know who's a dancer and who's a circus performer," she said. "We wanted to make them bleed together so it wouldn't be a showcase of each of the companies but more of collaboration."
Bastible's background is in visual art, as well as training from the Jacque Lecoq School of Physical Theatre in Paris. She said she composes the stage as if making a piece of art.
"I create very visually, so each picture onstage is like a composition," she said. "So they're moving images because it's live."
Alessandra Ogren is a member of Wise Fool. She performs trapeze, stilt acrobatics and the Spanish Web.
"It's a rope that people spin really fast on," Ogren said. "There's also an original aerial apparatus we call the birdcage."
She said it's definitely not a traditional American circus.
"We have some giant puppets, and those are very surreal," she said.
Chris Jonas, a saxophonist and conductor for BING, said the music is the jet fuel of the circus. BING plays straight through the performance, influenced by music from all over the world. When not playing circus music, they play live accompaniment for silent films, he said.
"With this particular circus, there's more integration besides traditional accompaniment," he said. "Everyone finds themselves onstage doing various things."
The circus is promoted as a family event, he said, but it's not dumbed down.
"There's a lot of depth to the circus - a lot of beauty and abstraction," he said. "We're not Barnum & Bailey. It's much more about acrobatics and color and sound and motion. It really gives the music a physicality and a body."
Jonas said the band's name fell right into place.
"Our bass player and my wife opened up the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Bs was BING," he said. "It's the name of a sound, and it has a bunch of pop culture - bing cherries, Bing Crosby."
It also means a pile of something, he said.
"It hit its notoriety meaning a pile of bodies stricken by the plague," he said.
He said while it has a place in pop culture, it has a darkness to it.
"It's apropos for our music, the circus and the times nowadays," Jonas said.
