This weekend marks the annual fundraising show for the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) in Brattleboro VT, where I (Lauren) did my professional circus training and have coached for many years. The Circus Spectacular has become something of a local institution, bringing world-class circus artists from around the globe to a small Vermont town to raise money for the scholarship fund at NECCA, and this year is its tenth anniversary!
I was invited to perform in the 2018 Circus Spectacular, and I knew I wanted to use the show as an opportunity to devise a new piece on my original aerial apparatus, the Sliding Trapeze (which I created during my second year of circus school). For me, making a new piece is very dependent on the music I choose. While I can create short sequences or movements that I want to include before I have chosen a song to work with, music has always dictated the ultimate flow of the choreography and the mood of the piece.
I spent the fall and winter of 2017 exploring new choreography for the piece, but the right piece of music proved elusive. Nothing I listened to was inspiring, but I kept telling myself that I had plenty of time… though as the months ticked by, I started feeling the pressure of not having a song. Then, about a month before the show, Jeremy and I were driving to Lynn and Will’s for a Windborne rehearsal and we started talking about Pont de Lyon, a French mazurka that we had worked up the previous year but had drifted out of our repertoire. Jeremy had brought it up as a piece we needed to rehearse for upcoming Windborne shows, but something clicked for me and I knew that I wanted to use it for my aerial performance, and I wanted the rest of Windborne to be onstage with me to sing it live.
Once I had the music, the piece came together quickly, though working with live music presented some unique challenges. Although it was a piece I knew very well, the nature of live performance is that there is always some sort of variation in tempo, which is obviously not a variable when working with a recorded track. I trained all month with a scratch track we’d recorded in rehearsal, which turned out to be a fair bit slower than we often sang the piece… oops! We only got one full rehearsal together with me in the air and Windborne singing before we went into tech at the theater, so there wasn’t a lot of time for adjustments, but in the end, adrenaline does wondrous things for live performance. 🙂
Whenever people find out that I am both a musician and a circus artist, they ask if I’ve ever combined the two, and now I can point to this delightful collaboration. It was a very special moment to be on my hometown stage, sharing this unique melding of my two biggest passions.
I hope you enjoy this video! Please feel free share it with your family and friends, but I would like to request that you do not post it online–I am very choosy about when and how I publicly share full videos of my aerial choreography, so thank you for helping me in that.
If you’re interested in finding out more about my circus life, you can check out my (somewhat outdated…) website, follow my circus page on Facebook, or find me on Instagram @laurenbreunig
As always, thanks for your support!
Big hugs,
Lauren
