Interview by Sonia Desai

Director Shana Carroll. Photo by Oliver Tétreault. 

We’re so happy to have The 7 Fingers return to The Old Globe. Our audiences loved Passengers last year. What should they expect with Duel Reality?

Duel Reality is based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, so of course it has those bones in terms of the story that’s well known. With a show like Passengers, it is more variations on a theme, it’s a little bit more abstract. Duel Reality is kind of based on Romeo and Juliet, but it’s also told like a sporting event. It definitely has a more high-octane vibe to it, especially to start out. 

It’s very intentional in that we’re trying to bring out that team spirit competitiveness, so when it turns into something sour, the audience realizes they were kind of complicit. Suddenly you realize, “Oh shoot, I’m maybe part of the problem,” and putting a magnifying glass on how tempting that is, how easy it is to get carried away. And I think this is way more of an emotional roller coaster. The audience is constantly being pulled from one emotion to the next. With Passengers, it was more playing on our imagination and imagery. There was much more of a visual language, I would say, whereas Duel Reality is a more energetic storytelling in a lot of ways.

It’s fascinating to hear you talk about how you’re playing with the themes of Romeo and Juliet. Was it that idea of the two feuding houses that brought you to the story, or was it the love story?

It was really the sense of how things become so polarized that nothing can move forward. So the first idea was just doing a show underlining the polarity and what that means. There is something about the fact that these two children loving each other is enough to destroy the lives of everyone around them just based on which team people are on. 

People think they know the story. People think of it as the ultimate love story, but I think of it as the ultimate war story in so many ways. And using circus allows us to show that in the storytelling. I often talk about how when there’s high emotional stakes, we can mirror that with high physical stakes in circus. The audience is genuinely scared for the characters. So there’s a lot of playing with that to highlight the emotional storytelling. 

The cast of Duel Reality. Photo by Arata Urawa.

Could you talk a little bit about the process of choreographing and putting together a circus show? It seems very different from the process of rehearsing a traditional play.

It’s different for different shows. When I’m working on a Cirque du Soleil show, it’s not as collaborative with the performers, and I need to come in and be more prescriptive. When I’m doing a 7 Fingers show, I really want to work with the performers and find their natural vocabulary and physical expression. I work a lot with improv. With Passengers, I didn’t have a script when I started, I was still writing it, and I got to say, “Let’s improv about saying goodbye,” and that inspired the story. Duel Reality was more intentional because we were working off a specific story, so we took the first scene, which is a huge battle, and played with how to use acrobatics to tell it. Our Romeo and Juliet, they are a duo in real life and have a lot of vocabulary, so it was a question of me sculpting that, and changing the intention or the details. But I’m doing less of the pure physical research because they’ve done so much of it, and more the nuances and structure. 

Also people have specific tricks in their wheelhouse, but sometimes I’m making up the tricks with them. I think that’s also something that’s very different in circus. In dance it’s rare that you try a whole new pirouette that’s never been done. Here, we’re quite often trying to find a new trick. There’s a lot of trying to find how to tell the right aspect of the story through the acrobatics. 

How did you get into circus? 

When I was a teenager, I was into theatre. I did high school productions, and camps, and youth theatre, and all that stuff. I wanted to try to work as an actress. Then there was a weird series of events where I was getting disillusioned by auditioning for commercials and that whole world. At the same time, my father, who was a columnist in San Francisco, fell in love with the Pickle Family Circus. It was very small and intimate with no animals and very theatrical. I had never really been interested in circus and wasn’t athletic, but because I needed a day job, my dad suggested I work at Pickles in the office. And a week into it, I fell in love with trapeze and just said, “Okay, that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to change my whole life and become a trapeze artist and work at Pickles.” And, no one really thought it would last, but I fell more and more deeply in love with it. I realized I wanted to do my art through my trapeze. After two and a half years at Pickles, I decided to go to Montreal for the circus school, and suddenly I was in a whole other domain where this was considered an art form. It was just one thing after another. 

What’s funny for me is I felt like I was leaving theatre, but now it’s like it’s all looping back so I can merge my work with my original love of theatre. Recently doing Water for Elephants on Broadway, it was fun to be able to incorporate these two things. Theatre was my original passion, but of course circus has been my passion for 35 years now, so I feel fortunate.

Header photo: The cast of Duel Reality. Photo by Ekopics.