The 7 Fingers contemporary-circus troupe imagines a world without the arts in Out of Order
The virtual show, streaming via the Cultch, features pandemic-era acrobatics and the beauty of the flawed
The 7 Fingers is a contemporary-circus troupe that’s nothing like Cirque du Soleil. Photo by Antoine Seychal
The Cultch presents Out of Order by the 7 Fingers March 18 to 20 at 7:30 pm PST and March 21 at 12 pm PST online.
EVERYONE CAN PINPOINT the precise moment when the gravity of COVID-19 hit them. Not everyone was performing acrobatics on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic when the world shut down.
That’s where Gypsy Snider, co-founder and co-artistic director of The 7 Fingers, a contemporary-circus troupe out of Montreal, found herself. Along with fellow members of the ensemble and other performers from all over the globe, she was travelling from the UK—after having just been in Italy (think about that from March 2020)—to New York City, for three days of shows and parties. The ship’s CEO came on over the PA system to tell passengers that everything was cancelled and they were heading to Miami instead. “You could almost feel the hull moving toward the left as we headed south,” Snider tells Stir.
For someone who grew up in the arts and whose mother and stepfather were leading political-theatre performers and circus artists, “the show must go on” was more than a saying; it was Snider’s daily reality. That the pandemic could cause venues to go dark was unfathomable. What crossed her mind wasn’t simply that this was a grave situation indeed. “It was ‘Is this the end of the world?’” Snider says. “We work in an industry that goes on no matter what. I was listening to an interview with Rachel Bay Jones on CNN….She was talking about how many times there’s been a blizzard outside and everything shuts down except the Broadways shows.”
Snider was back home in Montreal fairly soon after docking in Florida, though others on the ship weren’t so lucky and were stranded much longer. She recalls questioning whether she should find a new profession.
Then she started creating.
“I’m a very deeply positive person, and I am constantly creating—creating in my mind, creating on paper—and producing,” says Snider, a colon-cancer survivor and former Cirque du Soleil performer. “In a compromised situation you really have the choice to go ‘what can I learn from this moment?’ And since cancer that has been the second time in my life that I’ve thought, this is an opportunity to slow down and look at who we are and where we’re going and what we as people and a planet need. I did see opportunity in this whole insanity.”
Over the last rollercoaster of a year, the 7 Fingers produced a video series called Creative in Quarantine with other organizations throughout Quebec, as well as summertime socially distanced outdoor performances. The troupe also created a show called En Panne—Out of Order. Directed by Snider and Isabelle Chassé, the virtual production will have its North American premiere when the Cultch presents the 7 Fingers March 18 to 21. Out of Order is a film adaption of what was to be a live performance at TOHU in Montreal, North America’s only circular theatre.
The 7 Fingers’ Tuedon Ariri. Photo by Sébastien Lozé
If you associate circus with Cirque du Soleil, however, think again. The 7 Fingers is nothing like it. Snider, who studied musical theatre in Switzerland, toured with Cirque throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and the U.S. for several years, during which time she met the other six “Fingers”. She wanted to start making her own work, and, like her fellow troupe founders, hoped to create a company where they could create collectively but also evolve individually as directors, choreographers, writers, and producers. She describes the work the 7 Fingers does as being almost the exact opposite of Cirque.
“Cirque du Soleil is a spectacle, a beautiful, poetic, visual spectacle,” she says. “We are interested in the intimate conversations about empathetic challenges that we as humans on this planet face. We’re not inclined to go into the fantastical; we are not inclined to go into perfection and untouchable beauty. We’re more interested in the beauty of the flawed and the distraught, how as humans we create joy together between the audience and what happens on stage. No matter how joyful we can be, we can also be fraught and we can also celebrate that and raise each other up.
“In so many ways I think we’re the antithesis of Cirque du Soleil and yet the joy that circus provides in its essence…is what makes us exactly like Cirque du Soleil,” Snider says. “Circus is what I like to call a death-defying life-affirming art from.”
The pitfall with the label “circus”, she says, is when people perceive the form this way: “let me do a trick for you, and you will applaud”. “For the 7 Fingers, we love doing tricks, we love acrobatics, and we love flying through the air, but for us the applause isn’t about that,” she says. “The applause is the audience recognizing themselves and the challenges that we all face and overcoming them. Circus is a metaphor for that.”
Anna Kichtchenko. Photo by Sébastien Lozé
All sorts of challenges led to the streaming production Out of Order.
For the live show the group had planned, there were no bleachers inside the circus tent; to ensure physical distancing, the team had put down different sized Persian rugs for viewers within their own small bubbles to sit and have a picnic on. Two weeks before it was set to open, complete with original music and choreography, a production member’s partner came down with COVID-19, and everyone had to isolate for two weeks. On the last day of quarantine, Montreal became a red zone, and the city shut down. The show could not go on.
Snider wasn’t about to let all that work and creativity go to waste. The 7 Fingers found a film crew, rewrote the show, and performed the adapted version with full COVID-19 safety policies in place, turning what was to be a live event into a film, a work of art in itself. Set in a post-apocalyptic world with a cast of 10 gloved and masked characters, Out of Order is not about the pandemic per se but rather imagines a place where the arts don’t have any prominence, appreciation, or even presence.
“It’s about a troupe that is existing in a world where culture is nonessential and forbidden, where culture is not allowed anymore,” Snider says. “It’s about what happens to this troupe that loses their livelihood, this meta plotline talking about…the importance and the impact of culture.
“Hopefully it will ring true to its audience now in the sense that it’s not just that we can’t go to shows anymore, but that we can’t be together, that we can’t find communion around a table or around art or around conversation or around emotion. All of the numbers explore those themes, and what you’ll notice is that the performance is filmed in such a way that the camera is as acrobatic as acrobats themselves—on the stage, under, over, everywhere, and, as 7 Fingers always do, tries to break that fourth wall. The characters are so desperate to find their audience and to share this experience.”
Snider notes that it’s extremely challenging to make a circus-inspired show when you can’t touch other people; it’s just as tough to do acrobatics while wearing masks and gloves. With health and safety as the team’s priority, everyone pushed through. She also says that the team filmed the performance without knowing what kind of life, if any, it would have; there were no plans for it to be part of any other theatre’s season. Then the Cultch called.
“If you’re able to do the thing you love doing, it’s a life force; it’s like food when you’re starving, drinking when you’re thirsty,” Snider says. “Working on this revitalized me and got me excited again and got my endorphins going and adrenaline going also showed me if you’re positive and creative you can always find a way to move forward.
“The fact that the Cultch decided to put it in their season without having seen the full thing, the fact that they invested in presenting something for people, was so unbelievably heart-warming; it was like this beautiful, pleasant surprise and vote of confidence,” she adds. “What I’m feeling right now in the arts in general is a deep desire for us all to support each other and to collaborate much more across the entire country. We are almost at opposite ends, and to feel that kind of love and support is one of the most precious things you could feel right now.”
For more information, visit the Cultch.
Related Articles
