The 7 Fingers company was about to begin performances of its multidisciplinary, train travel-themed show “Passengers,” and it was in a big pickle: A cast member was injured while practicing an especially tricky segment. It was anticlimactic — initially nothing seemed askew at the Tuesday evening rehearsal I had been observing — but the consequences were weighing on everybody. The first preview, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, was a mere two days away.
The troupe, which specializes in a hybrid of circus and theater incorporating dance and music, had been running through part of a hand-to-trapeze segment. That discipline combines ground and aerial acrobatics, and is a signature number of the director and choreographer Shana Carroll. She had developed it for the Cirque du Soleil show “Paramour,” then took it to the 7 Fingers, the Montreal-based collective she helped found in 2002.
Like many circus acts, hand-to-trap (as it’s commonly referred to), is spectacular but also dangerous. A flyer is catapulted up or dropped down by porters on the floor and one on a trapeze. There is no net or mat underneath the trapeze, because that’s where the floor team stands.
“My safety mat becomes my porters, my colleagues,” said Marie-Christine Fournier, who is this production’s flyer.
At one point on Tuesday, Fournier was in the air, dangling from the wrists of Eduardo De Azevedo Grillo, a porter who was hanging upside down, batlike, from a trapeze. He released her and she gracefully dove into the arms of seven company members who were waiting underneath them.
I had my eyes on Fournier, since she appeared to be the most at risk. But it was someone on the ground, Pablo Pramparo, who staggered back, holding his arm. The next moment, he was lying down in pain as his anxious colleagues gathered around him.
Calm Amid the Stress
When I rejoined the group the next day — the one immediately preceding the first public performance — I noticed that everybody looked preternaturally calm despite the stressful predicament. Carroll likened it to the way certain aquatic reptiles can slow their heart rate to preserve their energy underwater. “You have to go in crocodile mode,” she said.
“There’s always so much fear and adrenaline just doing the things they do,” Carroll said of the performers. “So though it’s an emergency, everything often feels like an emergency in our world.” She laughed. “But I don’t think they’re genuinely chill.”
As Pramparo sat on the edge of the stage, his arm in a sling, he was watching Carroll work with his replacement, Sereno Aguilar Izzo, who had flown in a few hours earlier from his vacation in Vermont.
Slotting him in was more complicated than if “Passengers” were a play or a musical, in which an understudy can come in at even shorter notice without affecting the entire show. Even in a Cirque du Soleil production, performers tend to stick to an assigned lane. Carroll, who is from Berkeley, Calif., is familiar with both models: She spent her formative years with Cirque du Soleil, touring as a trapeze artist, and last year contributed circus design and choreography to the Broadway musical “Water for Elephants.” Tellingly, the 7 Fingers often appear at Off Broadway-type venues and performing arts centers — in 2017, their production “Cuisine & Confessions” played N.Y.U. Skirball.
Practically, the troupe’s creative and cooperative ethos means that cast members are almost always onstage. They all get moments in the spotlight but are also part of the ensemble. (The “Passengers” one is nine-strong, plus an offstage swing.) So being a floor porter in the hand-to-trap number was not the only role for Pramparo, whose specialty is juggling.
That Aguilar Izzo happened to be available was serendipitous because he was in the original cast of “Passengers,” in 2018. This, of course, helped considerably. Still, he had not done the show since just before the Covid pandemic, and he and Pramparo have very different approaches to juggling.
“It’s never one for one in circus,” Carroll said. “You’ll never just get a juggler who’s going to come and be identical in every aspect, both in technique and with acting and everything.”
A Domino Effect
The staging had been tweaked to accommodate Pramparo, who uses clubs and makes bigger movements. Now it had to be retooled again for Aguilar Izzo, who juggles Hacky Sack-like balls.
Not only that, but his contained, minimalist form had evolved from the hip-hop-like moves he favored earlier in his career to an athleticism drawing from sports like basketball.
“It’s like remembering different tricks, different sequences, and also remembering something I did such a long time ago,” Aguilar Izzo said. “It’s kind of like that delicate dance of, ‘Do I try to do what I remember, even if I don’t remember it that well, or do what they’ve been doing?’ It’s a compromise.”
The juggling number in “Passengers” takes place in the relatively close quarters of a train compartment. At that crocodile-mode rehearsal, the ensemble members had to review their positions and practice handing over balls, instead of clubs, to Aguilar Izzo — who was memorizing the timing, as indicated by the music and cues (like a sneeze or a yawn).
The domino effect of bringing in a replacement extended throughout the entire 90-minute show, which is scheduled to run through June 29. At one point, Pramparo was to sing a song while playing a ukulele. Now De Azevedo Grillo and the acrobat Kaisha Dessalines-Wright were joining forces for that number because, as Carroll explained: “Eduardo can play but he can’t sing and Kaisha can sing and not play, which means it changes all the choreography we’re doing in the back, because we’re taking two people out of it and moving it around.”
The few times the performers step offstage is when they have to prepare for a big moment, as Fournier does before hand-to-trap. “I need to change my clothing and get ready by adding resin on my body,” she said, referring to a kind of powder that becomes sticky with body heat. “I put it all over my forearms and on my ankles as well, everywhere that people will catch me, to make sure that even if there’s a little bit of sweat or whatever, it will be sticky and there’s less chance of a slip.”
Still, the real bond remains the one among the artists.
“For the choreo, we have some counts on the music but other than that, it’s really just to listen to each other as a team,” Fournier said. “It’s a rhythm all between us. At that moment, I’m not listening to the music, I’m looking at my partners. We’re together.”
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