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Our fictional central character Monsieur Cyrano La Lune, is a wildly imaginative poet and inventor whose head is filled with a maelstrom of fragmented thoughts and ideas. A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowd into his imagination. Today he is inspired with a rousing passion to travel to the moon using the magnificently strange and battered mechanical contraption that is his home. Cyrano gathers his fugitive thoughts like a ship's captain mustering his crew - each chosen for their special skills that will help him to realise his dream. In an audio babble of preparations and instructions he commands his four bewildered assistants with baffling fragments of words (originally written by the real Cyrano de Bergerac) inspired by the theme - "He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free." |
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Monsieur La Lune's crew are extremely skilled, courageous and willing but they are forever being distracted by their own sense of fun and anarchic playfulness on swinging trapeze, swinging cloudswing, Korean Cradle and Aerial Tin Bath or by turning silks to airship sails to ascend to the heavens using the grueling medium of Trance Travel! In the same way that de Bergerac was inspired by Prometheus who, 'once went to the heavens to steal fire' we follow the story of Monsieur La Lune and his crew as they strive to make his impossible vision become fantastically possible. Their mission: to reach the moon - a world where the imagination can be free. |
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I'm Cyrano and this is my ship, a small masterpiece that will take me to her... that elusive moon ...
Circus Skills: La Balade de Bergerac is primarily a show featuring three circus performers. We take pleasure in aerial acrobatics intermixing group techniques to invent new things and play with everything we can find!
Our main circus techniques: Korean cradle - cloud swing - hula hoop - hand to hand - handstands - group acrobatics - Juggling
Theatre: Movement, physical theatre, comedy and textual fragments are used to build up strong characters and relationships, which drive the narrative. La Balade is a classic adventure journey with all its comedy and tragedy. Poetic imagery is used in a cinematic style, linked with absurd characters and situations, to create a sense of humanity and playful imagination.
Music and Sound: specially composed live and pre-recorded accordion, saxophone, violin, keyboard, singing and looping pedals. The musician is a main character with other performers playing live and the whole ensemble vocalising fragments of the original de Bergerac text.
Visual and Design:The aesthetics of the show create a dream world all our own. Uniting comedy, tragedy and the absurd with, steampunk , romance and circus spectacles.
Our costumes, portique, and Monsier La Lune's house / flying machine, are inspired by the steampunk aesthetic and pre-modern science mechanical experiments. A clockwork mechanism will transform the flying machine into the Korean Cradle.
Our machine will be a key part of the parade into the space and will gradually be pulled apart and transformed as the show moves on. The machine is also a key element of the music and soundscape of the show, and creates the audio world which we inhabit
Format: La Balade De Bergerac is an outdoor show designed for festivals (with an indoor version to follow). There will be two versions of the show.
For 2012 the the show will begin with a 20 minute walkabout parade using the flying machine to house acrobatics, hula hoops, audience and character interaction and live music. Once this structure arrives in the performance space the show will begin!
This will be a 25-30min show where the characters begin their full scale interactions and skills and the machine really comes to life.
For the tour of 2013 the 50min version will be presented which will have a shorter parade through the crowd to lead into the beginning of the show.
La Balade De Bergerac is also available as a walkabout only.
You can download the technical specification of the show here
Photos by Anne Wagner
