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South China Morning Post

Cirque du Soleil's Kooza comes to Hong Kong

It's a rare sunny afternoon in Seattle, in the United States, and Angelo Lyerzkysky Rodriguez is parked on the pavement in a camping chair, shirt off, eyes half-closed behind sunglasses, peacefully soaking up the warmth. It's a striking contrast to how I saw the 37-year-old Colombian circus performer the night before: also shirtless, but mid-flight, hurtling through the air to great dramatic effect as part of Kooza's Wheel of Death – a high-stakes, high-speed act that elicits gasps of disbelief from the audience. Advertisement The Wheel is one of several acts in Cirque du Soleil's Kooza , a production that trades the Canadian circus company's signature dreamlike abstraction for physical thrills. 'Kooza is an homage. It's a nod to traditional circus,' says artistic director Jamieson Lindenberg. 'We're definitely known for death-defying acts.' That includes balancing towers of chairs seven metres high, bicycles on tightropes, and teeterboards that launch performers in perfect arcs across the stage – all set to live music and slapstick clowning. Cirque du Soleil's Kooza in Seattle, in the United States. Photo: Jocelyn Tam We're catching the tail end of the show's US run, spending two days behind the scenes with the cast and crew before Kooza heads to Hong Kong. It will be the show's first international stop since its post-pandemic relaunch, and its first time back in the city since its 2018 Hong Kong debut Behind the spectacle are the people who bring Kooza to life every night. Many come from a long line of circus performers, such as Rodriguez, who is fifth-generation, while others are following a childhood dream, like aerialist Mizuki Shinagawa. There's 63-year-old Vicente Quirós and his 55-year-old brother, Roberto, both high-wire veterans, and New Yorker Mark Gindick, a film student turned clown. Offstage in the wardrobe department, Alexandra Mancini helps maintain the show's 175 handmade looks. Here are their stories. Vicente Quirós, high-wire act Vicente and Roberto Quirós performing as part of the high-wire act. Photo: Jocelyn Tam My brother Roberto and I were born in Madrid, Spain. We are a sixth-generation circus family. My grandfather did head-balancing, my father did trapeze and Rolla Bolla (balancing boards), my mother was a singer and Spanish flamenco dancer. As kids, we were in school but every summer, Easter or Christmas we would go to see our family at the circus. And we started to love the circus because of family, because of tradition.