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Le Vorris & Vox Circus: Circa 2002 Photos of 2002 Participants of 2002 Back to Past Performances The Call Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 17:35:03 -0500 (CDT) hello boys and girls of all ages: yes, yes, oh yes!!! indeed, the rumors going around are true!!! we are leaping forth into a NEW CIRCUS ERA during ninth week. control your bladders boys and girls because the BIGGEST, the COOLEST, most DISTURBING, refreshingly POST-APOCALYPTIC show on earth is coming to our campus. "Le Vorris & Vox, circa 3001" will be an opportunity to fuck with people's ideas on the circus by combining its most beloved aspects (i.e. animals, clowns, music, jugglers, cotton candy, and whatever else you want) with the most unsettling acts, since Richard Simmons' "Dance your pants off video" (i.e. u of c kids, fire breathers, semi-nude people swinging from trees, backyard wrestlers, mr. and/or mrs. lift-o's, and whatever else you want). obviously, we need your help. actually, let me rephrase that, I'm simply letting you know that you people are the performers. girls, boys, grown men and women from all over the Chicago area have said that they "aren't taking another shower until daddy promises to take [them] to see 'Le Vorris & Vox'". now, who do you think you are to disappoint all these people? just raw material for the dopest freak show on campus, that's who. we need jugglers, acrobats, dancers, stilters, fire-breathers, builders (carpenters), musicians, and FREAKS... many, many FREAKS. everyone is welcomed, the less talent the better, and the more talent the better too. if you have no skills, our staff with decades of experience with traveling circuses from all over the world will give you a hand with five fingers (nudge, nudge, *wink*, *wink*). SO, come and meets us (Forest Gregg, Shawn M. Lavoie, Roberto) Sunday, April 14 at 5pm in the REYNOLDS CLUB CONFERENCY ROOM (room #019, down the stairs by the C-Shop and through the door on the left) Oh, and let this message spread to your friends and lovers like a virulent strain of scabies. We also promise first hand exposure to scabies. Proposal "Le Vorris & Vox: Circa 2002" Shawn M. Lavoie, Forest T. Gregg, Roberto Kutcher The circus is a contradiction. Nothing is more wholesomely American than the circus: small town values; cherished childhood memory; disparate actors made into a happy family. Simultaneously, the circus is the strange, the menacingly exotic, the sexualized: chaos — “media circus.” How many movies are there about evil clowns? We want, in our circus, to amplify both constructions (the freak show and the family values) of the circus concurrently. Our circus is a collaborative venture culminating in a show, which highlights the virtuosity of the performers, provokes wonder and uneasiness through spectacle, artistry, and grotesque overstimulation. Our performance will be held together by a unity of style, the style of the post-apocalypse and the decaying technology driven world: Mad Max and Bladerunner respectively. Against these elements of chaos, we place highly traditional circus arts and the ancient, ritual Morris dance. Indeed, the traditional will disrupt the subversive. We invoke the peculiar wonder of the circus. The very existence of it enacts the myth of the circus as an entity bringing together many different groups and individuals into a whole without any loss of uniqueness. We respect the paradox of the circus, as we do all the peculiar potentials of the form, and commit ourselves to maintaining this tension. The circus begins with a parade. Led by a train of elephants (pairs of stilters with elaborate costuming), we see jugglers, stilters, clowns, trick bikes, a robotic ringmaster (more costuming), and a circus band. Upon arriving at the circus ring, delineated by technological debris and a semicircular frame, our ringmaster instructs the audience to sit and relax, turns and goes to the back of the frame and drapes her enormous cape over the structure to create the backdrop and backstage (there are two panels on the wings to complete the stage). Our ringmaster raises her cloak and the show begins with jugglers, followed by a traditional elephant act, then fire spinners and breathers, staged battles, and an enlarged flipbook show where the audience lends their faces, finishing with our Morris dance. Clowns, with the stock routines of the European circus, shuttle us between our acts. Competing, ineffectively, with the main show will be swingers perched from the trees of the quad, and a German reading Hegel in German. The individual act is the center of our circus. The acts of our circus will be executed by largely different groups: JELLY, various dancers, UMPH, Occam’s Razor, University Theatre. Our relation to these groups will be one of deferential collaboration. Making our vision clear, we allow these groups to work out for themselves the specifics of their own acts; after all, that is their art. Participants of 2002 Juggling: JELLY, University of Chicago's juggling club |