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Cirque Alfonse swinging by Key City Theatre
Cirque Alfonse is a young circus company from Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez in the province of Quebec, established in 2005.
Its founding members have all worked with some of the most renowned “nouveau cirque” companies around the world. This young company is comprised of a team of professional acrobats graduated from the École nationale de cirque de Montréal, as well as a professional dancer, an ex-skiing champion and three talented and versatile musicians. This brave and creative group of young performers is blazing a creative path that no one has yet dared to explore, blending the arts and techniques of the circus and infusing them with the most picturesque facets of traditional Quebec folklore.
The story started in 2005 when the Cirque Alfonse project was created and first took shape. In 2006, the company launched its first show La Brunante. The show was of short duration but it served as a very successful first experience. It later became the foundation for Timber! After La Brunante, the members of the company each pursued their own solo careers with Montreal’s Les 7 doigts de la main, the Cirque du Soleil, Cirkus Cirkör of Sweden, the Cirque Starlight of Switzerland and the Montreal dance company Bouge de là, before starting work in 2010 on their second creative project, a new show called Timber!
You can almost smell the fresh-cut pine logs and the sweat of lumberjacks as you watch them jiving to a traditional folk soundtrack. The young circus troupe hails from a small town called Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez and they have clearly drawn upon their country roots to find inspiration and energy for this unique creative project. Timber!, is clearly off the beaten track. The show’s creators designed unusual acrobatic apparatus inspired directly from the forestry resources available on their real-life family farm. The experience feels and smells authentic. The artists perform incredible feats of aerial acrobatics that are directly inspired by the natural raw materials of the forest and the equipment used on the farm. The atmosphere is hyper-festive. The talented acrobats and musicians create a colourful, energetic scene where we can witness epic feats of agility and strength, inspired by the exploits of the first North-American lumberjacks, loggers and farmers.
“We present a show that talks about our traditions and our Quebec roots. There really is a festive spirit in the show.” said the acrobat Rifleman Antoine Lépine, who has worked with Cirque Éloize and Les 7 doigts de la main before creating Cirque Alfonse with her sister, her step-brother and father. “We also relied on traditional music, which inevitably makes us think of Quebec.”
“My sister Julie and I have evolved in the arts: in the circus, with dance in it. We decided to put on a show as a gift to our father’s 60th. We wanted to thank him for supporting us in our careers. This was one of his dreams to go on stage, we gave him that chance. Then we decided to start our own company.”
More artists have joined forces with Julie, Jonathan, acrobat Casaubon, and their good friend Guillaume Saladin. The director of the show, Alain Francoeur, had previously worked with Cirque Éloize Antoine. In short, all the artisans involved in the creation of Timber! are as close in life as on stage. Among the members of the troupe Timber! there are also musicians Josianne Laporte, André Gagné and David Baker.
“There is no narrative in the show. We are really setting the mood of the logging camp with kind of ways you could live there. We use the tools that the loggers would use. That’s how we got the idea to juggle axes. We wanted to work with raw elements.
“The acrobat explains that this desire for authenticity greatly complicated the creation of the show.; “We had to adapt and research to put aside the real circus equipment.”
You don’t want to miss Timber!, April 2 at Key City Theatre. Electrifying entertainment for the whole family.
Tickets are $35; $29 for Big Ticket Members; $20 for students and children. Tickets are available at the Key City Theatre Box Office 250-426-7006 and online at www.keycitytheatre.com
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