10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘Passengers' Retooled After a Performer's Injury
The 7 Fingers company was about to begin performances of its multidisciplinary, train travel-themed show 'Passengers,' and it was in a big pickle: A cast member was injured while practicing an especially tricky segment. It was anticlimactic — initially nothing seemed askew at the Tuesday evening rehearsal I had been observing — but the consequences were weighing on everybody. The first preview, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, was a mere two days away.
The troupe, which specializes in a hybrid of circus and theater incorporating dance and music, had been running through part of a hand-to-trapeze segment. That discipline combines ground and aerial acrobatics, and is a signature number of the director and choreographer Shana Carroll. She had developed it for the Cirque du Soleil show 'Paramour,' then took it to the 7 Fingers, the Montreal-based collective she helped found in 2002.
Like many circus acts, hand-to-trap (as it's commonly referred to), is spectacular but also dangerous. A flyer is catapulted up or dropped down by porters on the floor and one on a trapeze. There is no net or mat underneath the trapeze, because that's where the floor team stands.
'My safety mat becomes my porters, my colleagues,' said Marie-Christine Fournier, who is this production's flyer.
At one point on Tuesday, Fournier was in the air, dangling from the wrists of Eduardo De Azevedo Grillo, a porter who was hanging upside down, batlike, from a trapeze. He released her and she gracefully dove into the arms of seven company members who were waiting underneath them.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
