The Madison Circus Space’s banana-oriented “Bizarre Bazaar” shows took viewers through a whirlwind of local performance acts, including contortion, aerial silks, lyra, hoops, dance numbers and Cyr wheel on March 27 and 28.
Each separate act showed the circus skill of Madison Circus Space’s performers — the venue, located on Winnebago Street, offers classes and clubs accessible to many skill levels aimed at raising awareness and appreciation of the circus arts — and told a story of its own. But the banana mime interludes, while funny and masterful, didn’t always fit into a coherent emotional piece with the acts.
Upon entering the large brick building, a smiling woman in a yellow Starfleet jumpsuit checked me in. I found the two-act program online by scanning a QR code taped to a banana-costumed actor. I would be seeing a lot of these banana mimes throughout the show: cartwheeling, dancing the macarena, juggling, swordfighting and taking selfies in small skits between each act, always to the increasingly repetitive tune of “Orpheus and the Underworld.”
After an episode of banana mad libs, Act I kicked off with “Blood Countess,” an aerial silks and dance performance with performer Emily Shelton playing a countess who uses young women’s blood to obtain eternal youth. Dancing around the silks, Shelton does the best she can to rid the audience of lingering banana malaise, though the seriousness of this act also suffered from the color of the silk: tie-dye blue, green and purple. Later in the performance, Shelton swings up onto a second, newly unveiled red silk which I wonder why they didn’t use that the whole time.
Shelton’s act was followed (after the banana interlude) by “The Fallow Season,” with performer Sarah-Louise Rillard striking in a bob and gauzy white costume on the lyra, a large ring. Rillard, who had shoulder surgery in 2022, rose and fell on the ring with grace, spinning to cheers from the audience.
Then came “The Birds,” an act on the dance trapeze with performer Elise Swenson in a sparkling black jumpsuit. A spoken word recording recalls a prehistoric bird in a land with “only birds and air,” with no Earth or a place to land and “circling around and around.” When bird-Swenson’s lark-father dies, there is no land to bury him, so she buries him in the back of her head, discovering the concept of memory. Swenson is a perfect bird, spinning at first gracefully, then with crazy desperation on the trapeze, finally lying still as it rotates around her.
The 8-member dance number “Pablo Picasso” is the first piece whose tone didn’t immediately contrast the bananas’ interlude zaniness. Set to “Pablow the Blowfish” by Miley Cyrus, the number involved synchronized sea creatures, including a shining jellyfish, two fish in green-and-purple garb and Pablow himself, an actor wearing a plush blue fish head who is eventually cast into an oven on stage as Cyrus croons, “Pablow the blowfish/I miss you so bad.”
In “The Last Waltz of the Faerie King,” Chris Roberson plays a majestic king who wields a spinning orange hoop, called a Cyr wheel. The performer first dances with a mortal (Stina Alvarez) as the hoop spins on its own, then, when she leaves, uses the negative space of the hoop, now at a skew, to waltz alone around the space it touches. As the hoop loses momentum and twists closer and closer to the ground, the king crumples along with it.
In “The Frizz,” Amberlee James, cosplaying Ms. Frizzle with a dress and an orange wig as bright as her kilowatt smile, balances and throws around a small hoop to the theme of “The Magic School Bus” set to a trap beat. The lightheartedness and James’s knack for performing made this my favorite piece.
The last act before intermission, “The Dead Dance,” follows a cast of Addams family characters, including someone dancing in a head-to-toe green hairy costume with pink sunglasses and a character I nicknamed the skele-boob because the costume consisted of a tan skinsuit with two skeleton hands clutching the breast areas. Within this cast, Morticia and Gomez have a romantic moment that works, twisted together on a rising swing with Gomez clutching a rose in his teeth.
After an episode of “cannibananabalism” and a 10-minute intermission, the “Bizarre Bazaar” resumed.
In “Control,” twins Cassy Smithies and Lizzy Kirkland performed on the duo lyra, dressed inversely in red and white. Their friendship darkened into a fight for control on the lyra, ending in one twin strangling the other, who fell dramatically off the ring in a remarkable display of acrobatics.
The most egregious banana interruption happened during the next act, “Nocturnes Pas de Deux.” Grand orchestral music and AnnMarie Liesch Kivi and Anna Tiffey’s performance as spinning white angels on the duo sling came to a grating halt for a mid-act rickroll. It was at that point that my mild annoyance at the bananas turned into rage.
In “For the Birds,” Bri Marvell plays a roadrunner-esque squirrel clawing dramatically, and hilariously, up a lyra to get to a birdhouse at the top.
Following Marvell’s excellent squirrel acting, William Rapisand takes to aerial silks in “Goodbye,” playing a wounded warrior ascending slowly on the silks to dramatic music that crescendos as he rips off his shirt, revealing deep bruises.
In “An Ophidian Voyage,” Rachel Sanderson and Shea Weidenkopf, contortionists fully dressed in slithering cobra suits, seemed to have as few bones in their backs as the animals they imitated. They crawled themselves over a playpen and up a series of straps, bending themselves into splits and excruciating legs-over-head positions, sometimes winding so close to each other that they appeared to be a single unit.
The bazaar ended with a skit. “A Dog and Pony Show” left me with sympathy both for the pony and the man playing the pony, who spent the majority of the skit galloping around the stage with a cardboard pony mask covering his eyes, neighing pitifully. A black-clad narrator on the side told the story: a showmaster is hoping to put on a dog and pony show, but while the dog is wonderful, the pony consistently underperforms and the showmaster has to literally and figuratively lower the bar. Eventually, the showmaster buys a new pony and boards a train with the dog and new pony, leaving the old pony behind. “Ohhh, pony,” the narrator says sardonically as the pony lets out a sorrowful whinny.
“Bizarre Bazaar” demonstrated impressive feats of acrobatic intensity by local performers, and the banana mimes between skits showed that same talent, whether juggling, stacking themselves up into a banana pyramid or jumping into back handsprings. I especially enjoyed three acts: the energetic “The Frizz”, “For the Birds,” whose roadrunner story made me laugh and the unnerving choreography of “An Ophidian Voyage.” All three of these acts teemed with the bizarreness I’d expected to witness as soon as I saw the banana costumes. My only gripes were the odd note struck by the ending of “A Dog and Pony Show” and my desire for a stronger emotional throughline connecting lighthearted pieces to the serious ones.
The acts that matched the out-there hilarity of the bananas gained energy from these intermissions, but the more solemn acts hit with lower emotional depth as a result.
