![]() So I stayed with the theme but lightened it up. As we got into the creation process, I realized that it was becoming too serious, good for the theater but not the big top. "It has themes of power and what having power can do to us. Then the Innocent gets hold of the wand of power and unleashes the underworld. ![]() I also wanted the show to revolve around a central figure, a clown called the Innocent, who meets this character called the Trickster, who calls up the world of the circus. These kids come out and do these phenomenal acts - and the acts we have are brilliant, just jaw-dropping - and the clowns would be really funny. "The most important thing was that the artists were the stars. "I wanted to go back to the Cirque's origins of a simple story line," he says. The clowns hold the show together in a loose narrative framework, Shiner says. Luckily, these guys are talented, so it works really well. "I went out and found funny people and created these acts for them. "Yes, this is the first time we've actually built the clown acts for them at the studio," Shiner says over lunch after his ACT class. Where most clowns - including Shiner's successors as featured Cirque entertainers - spend years developing their personas and specific acts, Shiner has taken non-clowns and trained them to perform the acts he's written. But it also represents a radical departure from those traditions. premiere Friday in San Francisco, is billed as a return to the Cirque's roots, with its focus on first-class acrobatics and clowning. ![]() "Kooza," which opened in Montreal in May and makes its U.S. He's had to call on those skills for "Kooza," the latest Cirque du Soleil show, which marks his debut as conceiver, writer and director of an entire show for other performers. In his classic "Cinema" routine - a showstopper in both "Nouvelle" and "Fool Moon" - Shiner picks four people from different parts of the audience and coaches them, using gestures, facial expressions and sound effects, to perform a hilariously convoluted silent-movie melodrama. It's a talent that Shiner has honed in years of practice as a clown on the streets of Paris, a featured artist with Cirque du Soleil's early "Nouvelle Experience" and as co-creator and performer, with Bill Irwin, of the hilarious, two-time Broadway hit "Fool Moon." Universally recognized as a master clown, Shiner is unusually adept at the sensitive craft of picking volunteers from the audience and putting them through complex routines. The hint Shiner caught in a tiny, involuntary reaction has added layers of comic depth to the scene. The first warrior now has the personality of an uncertain high school freshman the other is a cocky, bullying senior. ![]() In short order, Shiner creates not just one character but two. "There," he exclaims, stopping them again. "I saw something there," he says, asking the pair to repeat their initial encounter, when one samurai accidentally jostles the other. This time, however, Shiner stops the students as soon as they've begun the routine. "If you're utterly relaxed and breathing, the audience is breathing too."Īnother student is told that this is a good moment to simply pause - "There's tremendous power in stillness and silence" - or do a double take ("Let the audience know that you know what they're seeing"). "You're not breathing," he says to two students who, almost imperceptibly, have been holding their breath in a comic angry-warrior face-off.
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