INTERVIEW: Montreal circus company brings delicious feast to NYU Skirball
New York City audiences have known the work of The 7 Fingers (Les 7 Doigts) for a few years now. The Montreal-based company was responsible for Traces, a successful off-Broadway circus show, and the high-flying theatrics of Pippin on Broadway. This coming week, they’re back with a new show that seems both delicious and awe-inspiring.
The company, which has seven artistic directors, will present Cuisine & Confessions April 11-16 at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The show combines circus elements with theater and a live cooking show for a spectacle that will have audience members both satisfied artistically and nutritionally.
At the helm of the production, which is presented as part of the Tilt Kids Festival, are co-directors Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila.
“Well, it’s a mix of acrobatics and theater and dance and storytelling and also, in this case, cooking,” Carroll said in a recent phone interview. “Not only will the performers tell these personal stories of their childhood and their ancestry through food memories and cooking on stage, [but] the audience gets to taste the food and take part in the prep of the food.”
Soldevila and Carroll chose the individual cast members for the show and brainstormed ideas for the narrative. They actually were in a kitchen at the time of this planning stage, so the connections to cuisine and cooking were almost immediate.
Soldevila is “particularly passionate about cooking and food,” Carroll said. “His grandmother was a chef, and it’s a huge part of his life. So why don’t we do a cooking show about the kitchen, about food?”
Carroll, who is co-founding artistic director of The 7 Fingers, said it’s important to choose subject matter that is close to the heart and that the creators are passionate about, and food seemed to fit the bill. Carroll has been greatly influenced by cuisine her entire life. Her grandmother even wrote a book that was part memoir, part cookbook.
“There would be an anecdote and an accompanying recipe,” she said. “So I thought that could be an interesting format in a way or inspiration for our show, since a lot of what we do we tend to gravitate toward these autobiographical shows where performers use the circus elements almost in a monologue-like way to reveal something personal. And so it seemed like a nice combination to have, and so we began with that notion. And then from there we had our cast. … They sat there with the microphone on stage telling stories of the entire biography of their mother, their father, their grandmother and just relating that to food and all of the various food memories. And then we kind of extracted sometimes just a sliver of one particular story.”
The performers from The 7 Fingers had to take cooking classes in addition to their normal circus training. Once a week they would go into the kitchen of a restaurant and learn a new skill, like how to chop properly.
“There’s one number where we cook an omelet on stage, and it’s just one audience member who is given the omelet,” said Carroll, who also directed the circus elements of off-Broadway’s Queen of the Night. “We have a banana bread that we cook and divvy out as well as a pasta dish at the end of the show, so it’s fairly small portions. But people can each get a taste, and they have to go get up there to the edge of the stage. But, yes, the audience gets a taste as well.”
The circus company has become an international force of theatrical offerings. Carroll and Soldevila led the efforts on this show at the same time that the company was touring other productions. They stayed in touch with the rest of The 7 Fingers through weekly meetings.
“We have weekly meetings where we’ll return to the other fingers and say this is what we have in mind,” said Carroll, who has choreographed for Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour and Iris. “Most of the time, we just kind of get a thumbs up unless there’s some red flag or someone says, ‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’ But really we tend to divvy out the projects, so we’re really leading them and making all the decisions around them. In terms of the casting, what we tend to do with our shows is really just start out by casting people we really think are extraordinary and want to work with. Maybe it’s someone we just worked with, and, say, we really want to continue working with this person. They were so great and had so much to offer. Some of them are right out of circus school and graduating and incredibly talented, so we tend to cast the show before we necessarily write it because it’s almost more critical that we have the right cast. Our shows tend to be these hybrid shows where we want them to be able to act and speak on stage, to dance well and not just be multitalented in that sense … but also be willing to do all this stuff on stage and not just want to do their act their way. Traditionally circus and cabarets and things, you have your act, and that’s what you perform. So we were really looking for a particular kind of artist that wants to do something innovative and branch out.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cuisine & Confessions, presented by The 7 Fingers (Les 7 Doigts), will play April 11-16 at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Click here for more information and tickets.
