It’s Wednesday, Aug. 21, and “Kooza,” one of the traveling shows of the legendary Cirque du Soleil, is about 32 hours shy of opening night.
The cast and crew, all 120 of them, are making their last-minute adjustments at Portland’s Expo Center. Actors limbering up. Coaches walking a relative newcomer through a harrowing aerial hoop routine. The wardrobe crew spiffing or modifying the estimated 1,200 costume pieces for tomorrow’s show. And all with one goal in mind: To make the physically improbably appear to be effortlessly possible.
Welcome to “Kooza,” the story of an Innocent, swept into a phantasmagorical world by the Trickster, in pursuit of the King and his crown. Or maybe just to prove that it's OK to dream.
With just a day to go before beginning the touring company’s two-month stay in Portland, actor Mark Gindick of New York is backstage amid the trampoline, free weights, stationary cycles and basketballs that the cast use to both kill time and to stay limber. Gindick is a relative newcomer to this show, now in his third month playing the role of the King.
“Look at this,” he says, glancing around the frenetic, back-stage portion of one of the lesser tents, as if seeing it for the first time. “I’m the luckiest person on the planet.”
Gindick began his creative career pursuing filmmaking and studying the earliest masters of cinematic horseplay; actors like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. He was so enthralled with their physically demanding performances, he switched gears and, in 1997, went to “clown college.”
“My mom would want to tell you that I’m the only clown to score the trifecta: Ringling Bros., the Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil,” he says, grinning. “I grew up in Scarsdale, New York. My mates became doctors and lawyers. Don’t get me wrong; those are great careers. Me, every morning I wake up, shower, shave, get some food, then go have fun.”
He admits that, at 48, he can’t do the same physical kinds of comedy he did in the 1990s. “Yeah, but the secret of clowning is: everything comes from the heart. From truth,” Gindick says. “I can’t do what 21-year-old Mark did, but what I do today would be difficult for 21-year-old Mark to do. That’s my truth.”
He also sings the praises of the man who created, wrote and directs “Kooza,” David Shiner of Boston. “The best 21st century clown in the world,” Gindick says.
Bit by bit, putting it together
While Gindick works out, the Innocent is two gym mats to his left, going through the role’s choreography. Well, make that the Innocents, plural.
Alexandr Yudintsev of Kazakhstan is working with his understudies, Dmitriy Zakharov and Denis Pirogov, both of Russia. They may know the role by heart, but they don’t necessarily know the Expo Center venue. The stage will feel microscopically different, the city's elevation, heat and humidity will all be factors. They’re hyper-defining their performance for this specific space, under the watchful eyes of Rob Tannion of Australia, the show’s artistic director, and his assistant, Guilhem Cauchois of France.
And next door, under the midnight-blue big top, aerialist Mariia Konfektova of Russia is working on the aerial hoop, a stiff sort of hula hoop held aloft by a cable. This hoop is no toy, though, as Konfektova does a lightning-fast, tornadic routine of pure strength and agility, then stops to consult the show’s head coach and stage manager, then does it all again.
And again.
Konfektova is a tall, sculpted, blonde cyclone in the air, spinning too fast for the eye to follow, dangling, dancing and darting across, over and within the hoop. Then offering a gamin grin after every practice run.
Head coach Cherie Walker of Australia says Konfektova is relatively new to this show. She and the stage manager, Rodrigo Llanes Sologuren of Mexico, are fine-tuning her performance because, every time the set is struck and the crew up-stakes and moves to another city, like Portland, there are almost invisible variables to account for.
“We realized that when the tech team set it up, there’s a difference in the hoop,” Walker says. “By, maybe, a centimeter. We couldn’t see it, but it affected Mariia’s spin. Just a little. It’s often as simple as one centimeter’s difference but….” she shrugs. “It matters.”
A Russian, and Australian and a Mexican walk into a tent and communicate with each other; but not without some difficulty. While English is the de facto language of Cirque (oddly enough, since its homebase is francophonic Montreal, Quebec), the cast and crew speak 31 languages. “We pick up a little bit of each other’s languages,” Walker says. “We have to.”
Walker took a roundabout path to the circus: She gained a PhD in biometrics from the University of Sydney, with the intention of working with Australia’s Olympic swimming team, focusing on their divers. Then she saw an opening at Cirque du Soleil and shifted gears.
As Konfektova walks off stage and two workers take down the aerial hoop, the crew sets up one of Act II's splashiest special effects, the wheel of death.
Yes, it’s actually called that.
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art
Under one of the lesser tents, Alexandra Mancini of Toronto, head of the wardrobe department, finalizes the hats, gloves, masks, shoes and unitards that make the choreography and acrobatics come together.
Mancini’s creations are kinetic; they don’t stand still, and neither to the people within them. Some costumes require material with more friction; some with less. Some have spangles; sometime the spangles are just patterns in the material. Konfektova, at one point, will hang by her feet from the hoop; her shoes have to be custom-made for that to work. But the shoes needed for the high-wire act have to have an entirely different sole.
Mancini clothes vocalists and unicyclists, contortionists and stilt-walkers, aerialists and acrobats. Different jobs, different garments. Just like the real world.
Mancini works on the costumes worn by the Trickster (dancer Mitchell Wynter of Australia), with his signature yellows and oranges, then shifts gears to make sure the crown worn by Mark Gindick’s the King won’t fall off while he’s clowning it up on stage. The crown is one of Mancini’s proudest creations; it takes 72 hours to make, appears to be heavy and metal, but is made of a flexible neoprene, custom-fitted for Gindick’s head.
“We take 175 measurements of each performer, including a 3D head scan. We work with the coaches. They tell us what the artists need, but we also have to take into account the physics,” Mancini says.
“It needs to be perfect. It all needs to be perfect,” she adds with a shrug. “And it is.”
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