By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Your chance to run away and join the circus is at hand. Thanks to Firefly Theatre and Circus, we have a whole festival for all things circus.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

The Alberta Circus Arts Festival returns Thursday for a total immersion circus weekend: performances from across the country, industry and public workshops, panels, outdoor activities for families, showcases of Alberta talent, a cabaret of 17 (!) acts. It runs through Sunday at La Cité francophone, the venue for which it was originally intended. And since Le Café Bicyclette is there, the festivities come complete with a happy hour, dubbed a ‘cinq à cirque’ for the occasion.

The circus arts are buoyant and upwardly mobile, from every angle, as Firefly artistic director (and co-founder with John Ullyatt) Annie Dugan, a circus artist herself, will tell you at the drop of a silk. “It’s been expanding, exponentially. And why not? It’s fun to do, it’s fun to watch, it’s healthy, it’s challenging. AND it’s also an art, a vehicle for expression!”

As the festival’s effervescent executive producer explains, the lineup runs a gamut between wonder-inducing feats of human agility in the air and on the ground to productions that incorporate those rarefied skills into bona fide theatre. “I want it all! I love it all! says Dugan.

In a way, that range is an organic outgrowth from Firefly’s own multi-faceted history. The company’s theatre archive includes original circus arts plays with both narrative and text, among them Inferno (based on Dante), Duck Duck Bang, Craniatrium, Primordial Blues, Operation EVAsion (inspired by the strange history of the corpse of Argentina’s First Lady Evita Peron).

“Two of our shows are one-woman plays,” says Dugan of LookUp Theatre’s Twist of Fate and Frostbite Circus’s Deep Dish. In the former, Toronto’s Angola Murdoch tells her own remarkable true story. The Toronto-based dancer/ acrobat/ aerialist was diagnosed with scoliosis, and now performs with a 12-inch metal rod in her back. Says Dugan, “she has her own free-standing rig. Along with a musician live onstage, she does all her own lighting and projection mapping…. She’s her own technician and stage manager!”  

Deep Dish, Frostbite Circus at Alberta Circus Arts Festival. Photo supplied.

Deep Dish, from Winnipeg’s Frostbite Circus, is a partly true story, “creative non-fiction” as Dugan puts it. In her one-woman contortionist show, Samantha Halas tells the story, based on her own personal journey, of a server in a pizza joint — complete with crummy boss and customers to match — who dreams of being a professional circus artist. As Dugan describes, “the character ends up on the table, balancing pizzas on her feet,” the season’s only example of foot-juggling with Italian food.

Barka by Montreal-based GIROVAGO, billed as “a celebration of festive chaos,” is on a scale rarely seen (well, maybe never) on La Cité’s stage. “We’ll see 12 people onstage, nine musicians and three acrobats,” says Dugan of a Latinx-infused show (with a majority of Colombian artists) she saw at the Montreal Circus Festival. “Everyone dances, sings, plays.” There are two performances Saturday. At the 2 p.m. matinee , kids are invited onstage to dance. After the 8 p.m. show, “a live band, Le Fuzz, will pied-piper the crowd out of the theatre onto La Cite’s patio for music and dancing.

As for the workshops, led by visiting artists, the range of subjects speaks volumes: devising small-scale circus, how to put together shows from circus skills, mechanical pulley systems.…  The festival is a way, Dugan says, “for Alberta circus artists to see what’s going on in the east,” where circus has had a major stronghold for decades, thanks to Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil and an assortment of circus schools. She remembers being on cross-country circus panels where she was the only representative west of Quebec. And circus traffic is two-way. “It’s so important for people from the industry to see who we are and what we do!”

For the full schedule of events, and tickets: albertacircusarts.com.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, NUOVa Vocal Arts. Photo supplied.

•The third production of NUOVa Vocal Arts 2023 festival of opera and musical theatre redefines riotous logistics. In the light-hearted 2013 musical comedy A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, one actor plays all eight of the doomed heirs to a family fortune, felled by murderously creative means. The NUOVa production, directed by Max Rubin, with musical direction by Ruth Alexander, happens Friday through Sunday at the vintage Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton. Tickets: showpass.com.

•At the Gateway Theatre, Thursday through Saturday, is a new play by Liam Monaghan, produced by the playwright. Strange/Familiar chronicles the journey of a queer protagonist and their quest for love and family. Brett Dahl directs a cast of three: Monaghan Graham Mothersill, and Kathy Zaborsky. Tickets: showpass.com.