Living the Life Luminous - published in Pasatiempo

Living the Life Luminous

by Robert Nott
Published in Pasatiempo, the Friday arts supplement to the Santa Fe New Mexican
 

When it comes to Circus Luminous — now celebrating its seventh year of eclectic performances at the Lensic Performing Arts Center — keep in mind that plot is rarely more than a laundry line on which to hang a series of circus-art antics. Clowns, jugglers, aerialists, acrobats, animal impersonators, contortionists, musicians, puppets, stilt-walkers, and people who swing from the curtains all pass through the dream lives of the protagonists on the Luminous frontier.

With this year's show, for instance, we have the story of a woman — played by Wise Fool New Mexico veteran Sarah-Jane Moody — who is the ultimate consumer. Dressed like a secondhand Christmas tree that somehow uprooted itself to go on a shopping spree, she's a woman who buys and hoards everything she can get her mitts on. Too much is never enough for this gaudy dame, and in terms of financing her fancies, well, she's wearing a belt made out of credit cards.

But while embarking on yet another buying binge, our lady in dis-dress encounters a series of characters who have no use for material goods and who readily drop their inhibitions as they fly through the air with the greatesta of tease. Whereas our heroine relies on her bank-account balance, these circus characters rely on one another for balance. After all, you can't be on one end of a 100-foot-long rope-and-pulley rig without having someone else on the other end to keep you from falling. These characters' goal is not to teach our shopping sweetie to buy less but rather to love more. How the shtick involving a woman who is chased across mountaintops by a cartoon bear fits into this equation is another matter, but that's show business for you.

Circus Luminous, spearheaded by the Lensic Performing Arts Center and Wise Fool New Mexico and involving the talents of various local theater artists, opens on Friday, Nov. 27, at the Lensic. Bring your sense of humor, your imagination, and your children, and leave the iPods and cellphones at home.

Based on a recent rehearsal, the show is a blast. Roughly 30 performers were crammed into the Wise Fool Studio space on Agua Fría Street when Pasatiempo popped by. Director Amy Christian, another Wise Fool veteran, put the ensemble through its paces for the first act. The Circus Luminous Orchestra, led by Jeremy Bleich, provided live original music.

Christian said she came up with the concept for the show after hearing the results of two national polls on National Public Radio. One poll measured personal happiness since the 1950s, while the other measured the amount of merchandise that people have bought since that time. The happiness meter went down over the past few decades while the commodity meter went up, she said.

"What lies in that space between our happiness and how much stuff we own?" Christian asked. "How much time and effort do we put into buying that stuff, storing that stuff, maintaining that stuff, and upgrading that stuff, and how little time is left to spend time with those we love?"

And so Moody's character slowly learns to love the circus folk who stand on their heads on chairs; hang from suspended ropes, wires, and pulleys like extras in a Keystone Kops comedy; and let their imaginations soar as they will themselves into an animated movie (that's where the bear comes in, and it's a pretty amazing sequence). Some of them run across stage on stilts while others break dance with Jackie Chan-like acrobatics. Six aerial-ladder ladies (ranging in age from about 10 to 15) clamber around the rungs like trained monkeys that have burst out of their barrel to infect the world with fun. And there's a bit of shadow puppetry involving a deep-sea diver who comes across an unusual treasure in the form of an ATM machine on the ocean floor.

Since 2000, Wise Fool New Mexico has taught the circus arts primarily to women and young people in Northern New Mexico. The ensemble's shows, held in Santa Fe and at the company's theater in Peñasco, employ these arts to tell serious stories about migration, prejudice, and greed. In Shakespeare's day, the fool was the one who amused the royal court by telling the sordid truth via humor, but an 8-year-old doesn't have to get all the sociopolitical stuff in a Circus Luminous production, Christian stressed. "It's magic."

Circus Luminous debuted at the Lensic in 2003, helmed by members of Wise Fool, Moving People Dance, and the musical ensemble Bing. Over time it has evolved: sometimes Circus Luminous has played out like a series of variety-show acts, but in recent years Wise Fool has begun anchoring the event, building the various acts around something akin to a message-driven theme.

Wise Fool aims to move from its Agua Fría Street studio by spring. The ensemble is outgrowing its space. The group needs about 2,000 square feet of space, 25-foot-high ceilings (with supports for trapeze bars and such), and an atmosphere charged with play. In short, they're looking for room to create a three-ring carnival.

details
Circus Luminous
7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 27, 2 & 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 28, 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 29
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.
$10-$25, children 12 & younger half-price; 988-1234
Donations of nonperishable food items accepted in the lobby; benefits The Food Depot