Lovers and losers, seekers and cynics, doers of great deeds and couch potatoes alike, as you bicker and bargain on the slippery surface of capitalism, as you bemoan the sorry state of welfare gone workfare gone warfare, as you battle the bladderbrain rogues of the social imagination, fling yourselves into the outstanding, uplifting, underpaid arms of our one-ringing ever-swinging circus RUN amok!!
WHO WE ARE
Circus Amok is a New York City based circus-theater company whose mission is to provide free public art addressing contemporary issues of social justice to the people of New York City. The group has been together since 1989 bringing its funny, queer, caustic and sexy, political one-ring spectacles to diverse neighborhoods from East New York to the East Village. The company is comprised of seven ring-performers, a 7 member live band, 3-roustabouts, and a trucker/technician extraordinaire. The performers in the ring are trained in traditional circus skills - tight rope walking, juggling, acrobatics, stilt walking, clowning - as well as experimental dance, theater, and gender-bending performance art and improvisational techniques. Over the years the traditional circus techniques have been combined with dance, lifesize puppetry, music old and new, and dramatic monologues creating new meanings for circus while continuing to entertain the crowds of all ages throughout the city streets, gardens, parks, and playgrounds.
Circus Amok performances prove that diverse audiences can join us in envisioning a more empowered life of community interaction while enjoying a queer celebratory spectacle. But most of all, Circus Amok brings a seventeen-act-in-59-minutes joyful extravaganza of acrobatic artistry, satiric skill, and good old-fashioned circus fun free to neighborhoods throughout New York City.
Pleasure pranksters and apocalypse seekers alike, close your eyes, hold on tight, 'cause the Quality of your Life is about to take a remarkable turn, hovering on the edge reason, dissolving at the tips of your fingersƒ. It's Amazing! It's Out-a-Sight! It's AMOK!!!! CIRCUS CIRCUS HELP HELP!!!!
A DAY AT THE CIRCUS
A day in the park looks something like this: a big Circus truck pulls into a site. Ten strong-muscled women and men unload the Circus regalia. People gather, watching and questioning, as they lay out a brightly colored circus ring, unfurl painted backdrops, lay out yards of blue acrobatic mats, hang up flashy costumes, assemble several sets of scaffolding, and orient the hand-built sets and glittering bandstand to catch the sunlight. As audience members interact with the company they are unlearning homophobia while learning how to juggle. After finishing preparations, donning costume and make-up, and warming up a few tricks, the band strikes up and all head out on parade gathering a crowd as it winds through the neighborhood, jugglers and stilters careening with banners streaming behind them. The parade returns to the ring and the show begins, running amok!
Friends and neighbors of all persuasions, crackpot or persnickety, motormouth or teletubbie. To your left, spectacular antics, uncommon athleticism, perilously perched fantastic feats. To your right, the bearded lady escapes straight jacket and chains, the man in the furry bra dances the can-can, mayhem on the move!!!!
Clowns break into a hula-hoop routine to decry tax loopholes. We watch a soaring acrobatic treatise against entitlement cuts called the Disappearing Safety Net Act. Guerilla gardeners vault over and over run the developers. It's unpredictable! It's impolite! It's intelligent, raucus, campy and all happening to the rollicking sounds of the Circus Amok Band playing klezmer ,hardcore, jazz ,polkas, cumbias, and mountain melodies. There's an erotic adagio, a tragi-comic lecture, terrifying and hysterical animal acts - huge condors soaring, elephants in delicate balance, lions chasing and swallowing the mayor. The rope walker is carefully balanced between dream and reality, stripping down to his tutu and finishing the number prancing the rope on flashy 2-inch heels. The knife-throwers are reciting statistics of the AIDS crisis, the stilters are dancing through the minefields of gentrification, the women are lifting the men into the final amok pyramid, and audiences are laughing and thinking.
After the show, as we pack up we talk some more with the crowds. The kids who earlier had questioned the who, where, and why of us are now helping us pack and spinning cartwheels as the Amok performers lead acrobatics workshops in the ring.
Boys and girls, adults of all ages, set your sockets wide and wondrous, set your ears wary and wily, as we vault, as we somersault, as we bungle and bugle our way into the next Splendid! Prophetic! Pathetic! Utopic! Diabolocal! millenNium. Will we make it? Can we fake it? Is it dire? FIRE FIRE HELP HELP!!!!
A BRIEF HISTORY
(some excerpted from Mark Sussman's A Queer Circus:Amok in New York) Circus Amok performed annually in various experimental theaters in Manhattan from 1989 to 1993. In 1994 the Circus decided to take to the parks and community gardens to start an open conversation across community lines with people in other neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Since that time the Circus has dedicated itself entirely to producing free performances in outdoor, public spaces. From an initial outdoor touring season of six shows, Circus Amok has doubled the number of performances. Each year Circus Amok chooses a loosely defined theme around which it creates its wild and provocative acts. The very first was 'The Ozone Show: A Circus of Environmental Destruction,' performed at Performance Space 122 in October 1989. Since that first project, Jennifer Miller, Circus Amok director, has collaborated with a crew of performers, most of whom she has trained in the traditional arts, lingo and folklore of the circus. The crew of performance freelancers who regularly choreograph, dance, write, design and teach includes Cathy Weis, Scot Heron, Rick Murray, Alessandra Nichols, Jennifer Monson, Sarah Johnson, Tanya Gagne, and band leaderJenny Romaine. All accumulate circus, dance and musical skills during the downtime between performances (rehearsal time is February through May, all performances happen in June), training regularly at Miller's williamsburg loft which functions as Circus studio, storage, office, and construction space.
Past Shows
- 1989 The Ozone Show
- 1990 Spies are Us
- 1991 The Survival Show
- 1992 I am you, the hypothalamus story
- 1994 NY: Ground Under
- 1995 NY:Ground Under II
- 1996 $$$ Money Amok $$$
- 1998 Quality of Life
- 1999 Quality of Life II
- 2000 COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELVES
- 2001 The Medicine Show
- 2002 The Experimental Walking Tour
- 2003 Home * Land * Security
- 2004 Back to School Show
- 2005 Princess!
- 2006 Citizen * Ship
Fellow travelers, zealots and pantywaists of all ages, races, mental conditions, and unmentionable proclivities, untether your grasp on the known, swing cockeyed into the two faced and the double handed. feel the rumble tumble erupting from the depths of your unconscious, make a ruckus, run amokus, Help help it's CIRCUS AMOK!!!!
