“I wanted to keep flipping and performing but not competing.”
April 21, 2018 6:28 PM   Subscribe

 
Thanks, Etrigan. I love Cirque, and have enjoyed watching women's gymnastics just about as long as I can remember. I had no idea there was such a pipeline between sport and performance!
posted by lhauser at 7:03 PM on April 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


This was a very interesting read, as someone who has done circus and physical theatre but with zero gymnastics experience. (I’ve learned acro and some aerials but oh boy they are definitely not my strong points!)

I would disagree heavily though about mistakes not happening in performance. Fuck-ups happen all the time (Hell I had a performance last week and fucked up a couple of times!). The thing with performance is that the audience doesn’t usually know what’s coming (even with established works like Shakespeare the execution can be wildly different) - so if you fuck up, the audience isn’t necessarily going to realise it’s a fuck-up. So you just roll with it, maybe incorporate it into your act as if you meant it. You as the performer will likely be beating yourself up over it (I know I do) but the audience will still get something out of it!
posted by divabat at 8:01 PM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


this is interesting tying into the Nassar case and what we now know about the culture of gymnastics in general. one of the ex-elite NCAA gymnasts said in light of that that NCAA is the reward, the place where they learn to love gymnastics again, and I guess cirque extends that in a way by shifting the focus of the sport away from a purely quantitative success or failure, D/E score.
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 12:11 AM on April 22, 2018


If you're interested in this article, you might want to see if you can't find Cirque du Soleil: Fire Within somewhere. It's a reality TV show that follows the development of Varekai, and includes as one of the main subjects Canadian gymnast Stella Umeh who joined the cast and had to learn how to be a cirque performer instead of a competitive gymnast. My recollection from having watched it years ago is that it's a pretty interesting, not overly salacious show -- more about the natural conflicts between people and the very hard things they have to do than between people and other people.

It looks like it's available on Hulu, but since Hulu isn't available in Canada, I can't confirm.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:34 AM on April 22, 2018


Not a bad article about two domains quite opaque to most folks experience. I'd love a follow on discussing the methods Cirque uses to analyse the elements that work in performances.
posted by sammyo at 3:32 PM on April 22, 2018


This post comes at the perfect time for me as I'm still trying to process all of my feelings from the NCAA women's gymnastics championship yesterday.

(ALL of the feelings, people. I was literally screaming out loud. I haven't recovered yet. The world is not worthy of Peng-Peng Lee.)

The hardest part of the end of the college year is knowing that you're watching some amazing seniors do their best work for the very last time. It makes it slightly better that those who are interested in pursuing further artistry have something like Cirque, if they choose. I actually had no idea that Kristen Maloney was involved for a couple of years post-college.
posted by Salieri at 4:43 PM on April 22, 2018


The one time I saw a Cirque show (Nouba in Florida), folks would just redo the thing again when they missed or screwed up. And then people would clap even harder.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:52 PM on April 22, 2018


Salieri, I'm still processing it too. UCLA & OU are probably the teams whose gymnasts are most prepared to go into Cirque --- so much attention to detail and craft. Love that they are the top two.
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 4:08 AM on April 23, 2018


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