Big night last night. Lots of heart, and feelings, and tears, and laughter, and joy. My old circus - Circus Contraption - disbanded back in 2009. Our last show - The Show To End All Shows - ran for two years, and during the last week of the last run we did a 3-camera video shoot of the whole show, with the intent to release a DVD. And then Things Happened, and hard disks with the video files on them were put in the back of a closet, and everyone went their ways and built new careers for themselves. The video was largely forgotten about. A myth that Circus fans told each other, hoping it was true, but never really believing they'd ever see it. Until last month. When someone excavated the old drives, got the data off them, slapped together a (very) rough edit of the full show. And last night, we rented out theater 1 at the Northwest Film Forum and showed the movie. Two shows. SRO. Most of the artists were able to be there, and this was the FIRST TIME any of them had seen the whole show from the audience's perspective! You don't think about it while you are watching the people currently on stage, but the other performers are back stage changing costumes, or running lines and pulleys making things on stage happen, or are simply fixing their costume/makeup before their next moment on stage. Maybe you are the juggler, and during someone else's act, when you hear the person on stage say, "Oh my! I wasn't expecting THAT!", you pull a rope. Then you hear the audience roar with laughter. Then you re-secure that rope, and go back to put on the hat you wear in the next scene. But you never see what the audience sees, or the result of your actions! Well, the performers finally got to see the show the way all of us had always seen it. And we all sang along with the tunes, and mourned the circus members who were killed a few years ago, and celebrated their memories with their happy on-stage antics, and ... it was a reunion. And it was wonderful. And I cried. Many times. sigh.
Thanks for the interest, my friend. They did give us all a DVD of the edit they showed, but I'm not sure it would make a lot of sense to someone who didn't know the whole story. The show is essentially a musical, featuring all kind of circus human stunts (like aerial work, juggling, clowning, etc), but it is also a full story and every character has their story arc. The edit - due to data loss reasons, technical snafus, performance problems, etc - jumps around a bit. One act takes place largely in darkness, with the juggler working with glowing juggling balls... that are all but invisible on the video, so it was entirely cut. In short, I am not sure the performers would let it out into the wild. It is not evidence of their finest work, and these people were serious perfectionists. (Hence the reason the video has been "lost" for 8 years...) Here's a clip of the first season's big finale. Shot by the sound engineer, it seems! (The basic idea is that the world ended earlier, all the debris and the stage falling apart, and it's taken over by cockroaches... umm... sexy cockroaches... who do a kick-line. Yeah.) And this is after the mermaid gets "corrupted" by man, and becomes... well... a stripper. (Shot by a fan in the crowd on a 2007-era cell phone, sadly.) And this... well... we were known for doing songs entirely played on bottles. People always asked for us to do Bohemian Rhapsody... so after close to a year of practice (on and off), the gang did a special show and played it. This particular song was not a part of the regular show (we did a different song during the show), but I think this may be the only video of our attempt. And this is a documentary film made in 2002 about Circus Contraption, when the circus was going through a particularly rough time, and almost broke up. So there's some stuff to keep you entertained for a bit...! :-)