Think of acrobats, jugglers and clowns in Eastern Europe and the image that comes to mind is the Moscow State Circus.
However, there is a show coming to London which uses traditional circus skills in a new context — a unique cultural fusion called Circus Klezmer. The performers use circus tricks to tell the story of a wedding in an Eastern European shtetl, to the accompaniment of klezmer music. And if all that is not culturally fused enough, all the parts and instruments are played by a cast from the Spanish Catalan region.
The inspiration for the show, part of the London International Mime Festival, is Adrian Schvarstein, whose own background is as eclectic as his production. Born in Argentina and bought up in Italy and Spain, he studied archaeology in Jerusalem before working in street theatre. In 2004 he had an idea for the show, for which he gained funding from the Catalan Centre for Circus Art.
Schvarstein says: “I wrote a script about a Jewish wedding and I wanted to do it with circus skills. The contemporary thing is to tell a story with circus skills. Everyone loved the story and there was audience participation and a lot of interaction between the characters. The challenge was not only to use circus skills, but to build the characters. Many of the actors had to adapt what they do — this is not about how good you are as a juggler, but whether you can tell the story of a marriage.”
There was also the challenge of educating a completely non-Jewish cast about life in a shtetl, which turned out to be easier than one might imagine. “One of the actors said to me that Catalan village life was not so different from the shtetl — he could tell the same stories about his grandmother and his family. Perhaps they didn’t have a mezuzah on the door but they did have the same style of life. I invited them to learn about the culture, the folklore and the traditions of the shtetl and they did it very happily. Now the Catalans are more Yiddish than some of the original shtetl people.”
Schvarstein is happy that the show is coming back to the London festival a year after it won critical and popular approval. “It’s not very common that a show comes back only the year after but I think the public wanted it. It’s a very nice surprise for me.”
In fact, Schvarstein is doubly pleased that Circus Klezmer has been in a hit in London because that is where he found the inspiration to create it.
“The first time I had the idea was when I visited the Imperial War Museum. On the Holocaust floor, the most impressive thing for me was at the beginning of the display where there were some videos — the first was about the everyday life of the shtetl, the life of the Jews in Europe before the war. There were people playing in the streets, the markets. It was such a normal culture and it was stamped out. We can’t recreate it in life but I thought I could do it in a show so that, although there was a memory of a sadness, it could also be a happy thing.”
The set is designed, says Schvarstein to appear reminiscent of Marc Chagall’s paintings of the shtetl and the characters are “very Shalom Aleichem”.
In the five years since the show was devised audiences have reacted well, Schvarstein says. Wherever it has played around the world, whether in Andorra or Japan or in rural Italy, people enjoy it in a similar way. “Perhaps Japanese people are a little bit more shy, but they all laugh at the same things,” he says. This is important because the audience is an integral part of the show.
“There is no wall between the stage and the audience — we are all in the same shtetl,” he adds.
“This gives us solidarity, because if we don’t have the public we can’t go on.”
