The New York Times

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2001

PEKING ACROBATS: IT’S IN THE SPIRIT

By CINDY MARVELL

IN China, children as young as 5 with acrobatic promise are recruited to train at special schools, where they follow a rigorous program of contortion, hand balancing, object manipulation, martial arts and character dance. Some of those children grow up to perform with the Peking Acrobats, China‘s elite troupe of gymnasts, jugglers, cyclists and tumblers.

The skills have been so admired in the western world that modern-day troupes like Montreal‘s Cirque du Soleil, San Francisco‘s New Pickle Circus, New York‘s Big Apple Circus and Australia‘s Circus Oz have borrowed from the techniques. Many have had Chinese acrobats on staff.

Since 1952, the Peking Acrobats have produced a fast-paced showcase of skill and unmistakable style. The 30-member troupe is made up equally of men and women, including 21 acrobats (age 12 and up) as well as musicians, led by Liu Yen. Ken Hai (or Hai Ken Tsai, as he is known in China) serves as artistic director.

”In China, the name Hai is synonymous with great acrobatics,‘‘ said Don Hughes, who has been co-producing acrobatic shows with Mr. Hai for 27 years. Mr. Hai, a fourth-generation performer of the Hai family, also designs the special silky costumes for the troupe; some of his protégés are working on the remake of the feature film ”Oceans 11.‘‘

In the Peking Acrobats’ visit to New Jersey before a three-week run at the New Victory Theater in New York, look to see elegant choreography, lively energy and a concentration that borders on the sacred. While each performance is an individually crafted effort of will, with the program tailored to fit the performer‘s carefully honed specialty, it is the historic and mythological connections that give this progression of acts their depth and dramatic effect.

The Peking Acrobats are not to be confused with the Peking Opera, although some of the same physical skills are used in both forms. In Chinese Opera, a highly conventionalized form of theater, the emphasis is on Confucian ethics and morality. Although they frequently performed for Chinese royalty, the acrobatic troupes are more grassroots in nature. While the musical drama of the Chinese Opera began in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), the Peking Acrobats can trace

their origins to the Ch’in (Qin) Dynasty (225-207 B.C.).

During the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi there was a long and hard struggle to build walls, waterways and canals. Acrobatics evolved as a folk art, and Asian artwork includes images of contortionists and street performers.

The present troupe of Peking Acrobats began as an outgrowth of the Great China Circus, which achieved great popularity in the 1920‘s. The company then became an integrated professional acrobatic touring organization in 1958. The group leader is Cheng De Ping and lighting is designed by Rusty Strauss.

There is no singing or dialogue. Folk arts rooted in daily life form the basis of the entertainment. In the Lion Dance several performers inhabit a fleecy lion costume that quivers with life. The Lion Dance has Buddhist origins: the lion was believed to be a reincarnation of a woman who could be teased into revealing its true identity and granting protection from bad luck.

Look for jugglers and gymnasts, with a bit of a twist. Traditional Chinese jugglers manipulate jugs. A large ceramic vase is balanced on the head and shoulders and rolled around the body. The work of the antipodist, or ”foot juggler,‘‘ traditionally a woman, employs the complexity of a physics problem with the patience of an angelic artist. One of the most difficult forms of juggling, antipodism is performed lying on the back on a specially constructed stand. Up to four squares of fabric spin like magic carpets on the performer‘s hands and feet, wooden umbrellas are twirled and flipped, and mystery objects come into play.

The troupe does not like to ”glorify the individual‘‘ or invite comparisons by revealing identities of the performers, Mr. Hughes said. They prefer that audiences view the troupe as a whole in all its cooperative glory. Whether climbing a pagoda of chairs, balancing candles, spinning meteor bowls filled with water, or flying high in dive rolls over swirling flags, the Peking Acrobats are representing the People‘s Republic of China and they stand — on feet, hands or head — as a living tribute to a system driven to excellence.

JUGGLE Magazine

Fall 1999

Moschen Explores Shape of Juggling

By CINDY MARVELL

It is Sunday, August 1. The Niagara Festival has just ended, and all the juggling has been packed up and spirited away. In order to avoid the usual post-festival letdown, we have just driven from Buffalo to Lenox, Mass., to see a juggling show. This will have to fill a tremendous void, coming as it does fewer than 24 hours after the I.J.A. Public Show. Only an unparalleled artist from a parallel universe could follow this weeklong act: Michael Moschen in concert at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

That Moschen, and in the past the Alchemedians and Airjazz, have found acceptance here is in itself a significant development for the art of juggling. Founded by Ted Shawn and company, the Pillow presents dance companies and choreographers like David Parsons and Janis Brenner, Moschen’s longtime choreographer. Yet the Pillow’s doors have remained open to new vaudevillians, viewed by the management as “pioneers” of movement art. As Suzanne Carbonneau writes in a program essay on Moschen’s work as a juggler, “What better metaphor for the ultimate nobility of human beings—our ability to fly in the face of experience in order to wrest transcendence from long odds.”

In this case, the odds are that we will be impressed, perhaps depressed, but ultimately transfixed by the presence of a gently overwhelming genius who never lets his ideals out of his grasp. On the way to the mainstage space, we encounter an exhibit of photographs by Peter Angelo Simon, a follower of Moschen’s work and career, taken in the late

1970’s. “These pictures show Michael’s extraordinary centeredness while performing,” he writes, “He seems to organize the space around him. He is like the eye of the storm.”

Inside the theatre, “Light” is about to take shape. A summer breeze sends the curtain rippling outwards, and behind it Moschen has already begun. An unearthly blue reflection casts ripples of light on the stage. The curtain rises to reveal Moschen facing the audience and kneeling, focusing intently on four crystal balls rotating in each hand, the only other motion a gentle swaying of the body. Snatches of birdsong flit around this image of a man at peace yet constantly searching, gently exploring. Working his way down to a single contemplative sphere, Moschen seems poised to host a Japanese tea ceremony, introducing his audience to the illusory world of shapes and rhythms which he so consciously and cleverly inhabits.

Methodically rising, he recedes out of the spotlight and moves on to the shape he calls the teardrop. The physical properties of nature gradually unfold as Moschen uses the shape to conjure strangely familiar longings. As Moschen has often stated, he seeks to liberate the patterns of movement inherent in the objects themselves without losing the humanity of the juggler as a marked individual contending with the forces of the universe. Watching him twirl, manipulate, and caress an object, you might just as easily form tears yourself.

After replacing the prop in its stand, Moschen looks across the stage towards what appears to be the juggler’s moon, a large crescent hanging on a string. Alighting on the floor, the crescent rolls around him like a giant melon rind or the rib of a ship. Moschen lets a ball roll on the crescent, and finally sits down to observe the interaction of shapes he has set in motion.

They will continue for a time without him, like a child’s top after it has been dropped, yet without the child it is just a lonely prop awaiting the juggler’s return.

As the music takes an upbeat turn, balls roll across the stage in a staggered line. Soon a ball is rolling on Moschen’s stomach as he breathes, a reminder that all movement and gesture begin with breath, with the muscles around the solar plexus. The ball rolls into a chin catch, a perfect intro to the most classically vaudeville segment of the show. Wearing striped pants and white jazz shoes, Moschen manages to use his famous intensity to play his own straight man, eliciting laughs as he reacts to his stunt people: the balls themselves. A series of head rolls leads him to the triangle, which looms like an omnipresent yet accessible peak to be explored. With the energetic grace of a taiko drummer, Moschen begins his symphony on the bounce. White silicone balls crisscross the space in increasingly complex paths, creating a web in which Moschen plays both insect and spider.

“I feel like an Olympic athlete every time I get through that triangle piece,” he said after the show, and the shape does seem to alter between a trap and a zone of delightful discovery. Now and then he ducks under a ball as it appears to float overhead. When he jumps out, it is only to embrace a new form of play, a juggler’s tap dance in which a ball shuffles off the soles of his shoes. The punchy ending garners a burst of applause from the captivated audience, now in essence a vaudeville crowd wondering how on earth this is done, and whether it would work in their own kitchen.

One lucky gentleman gets an approximate idea as Moschen collaborates with a volunteer to digest an apple while juggling. It must be pointed out that this is not accomplished in the usual manner seen at your local renaissance festival; it is a way of expanding the meditation to include the entire audience, and why shouldn’t they get their chance to dance, too?

The next piece on the menu, “Sticks and Vectors,” though abstractly titled, plunges me into a sea of navigational and maritime imagery. The vectors, staff-sized sticks with arrows on one end, balls on the other, suggested harpoons being tossed in various configurations without actually leaving the hands of the imaginary harpooner. A supporting sculpture anchors the piece like a ship’s steering wheel as Moschen launches into another exploration of the physics of space. Balancing the vectors on his face, shoulder, and foot, Moschen seems to become a giant, 3-dimensional clock. The ball becomes and extra socket from which to swing the staff, adding to the complexity of the manipulation.

“They’re like stilts,” says the child next to me as a shape resembling a tetrahedron of vectors joined by a single socket emerges. As Moschen rubs the shape between his hands like a puddle jumper, it seems lifted by an inner electricity as it is raised overhead. When a miniature version of the vector emerges, Moschen lunges around and above it, using it to explore variations on the larger sculptural theme, a spatially effective device that surfaces throughout the program. Often the larger shapes make an initial impact while the downsized versions give Moschen the mobility to expand upon the images.

As Act II progresses, shapes make appearances like animals, sharing the spotlight for as long or as short a time as suits their particular natures in the moment. At the outset, Moschen appears in a gray unitard in “Circles.” A compass-like, isosceles shape seems to draw a circle around his feet as a striking shower of light flickers around him. The next circle, more familiar to jugglers, is the hoop he demonstrated at the Montreal Festival. This piece is accompanied by the most soulfully effective music in the show, and the hard-earned magic which floats the hoop between Moschen’s fingers and around his hands while he broods and hovers artfully around it, an active observer resembling a marionette player more than a juggler, culminates in one momentous throw, an act of release all the more climactic for it’s singularity.

As two big hoops take the stage, the music takes a Brazilian

percussive turn. By the time the truly giant hoop appears, the soundtrack has developed a circus atmosphere, which perfectly suits Moschen’s subtle, endearing buffoonery. It has been noted that Moschen has a childlike, off- balance quality whenever he goes up on his toes, a wonderful complement to the centered sureness of his spidery second-position plie. This playfulness seems to be just what this big hoop was looking for, and Moschen lets himself become comically dwarfed as the hoop eventually gathers it’s own momentum for an escape from control. Next follows a “mystery piece,” which Moschen would like more time to develop before it plays across the nation. Suffice it to say that it involves cylindrical shapes which rotate and swing around his hands.

The New York Times

Sunday, December 10, 2000

Lust for Life Thrives On a Shadowy

Stage

By CINDY MARVELL

IMAGINE some favorite puppet characters, like Kermit the Frog, Big Bird and Ms. Piggy, are captured by an invading nation and used to voice competing theologies and political policies. Sound a tad farfetched? Something similar actually happened on the island of Java 55 years ago when the ”Wayang Revolusie‘‘ came to be.

Just ask Tamara Fielding, a puppeteer who immigrated to Long Island from her native Java in 1956. Ms. Fielding has since performed her one-woman show, ”Tamara and the Shadow Theater of Java,‘‘ in Long Island theaters, colleges and schools and at festivals from Great Neck to Greece. Her own life story is as dramatic and complex as the art form she practices, and the story of her journey from Java, Indonesia, to Northport is woven with the threads of politics, war, love, remembrance and home.

Ms. Fielding is a dalang, or shadow master; her specialty is wayang kulit, the traditional Indonesian art of shadow puppetry in which mythological tales are told through intricately carved rod puppets. Made from buffalo hides and horns, the characters tell stories symbolic of the human condition by casting their shadows on a cotton screen illuminated by lamplight. In Indonesia, dalangs craft and manipulate their puppets to portray traditional Hindu-Javanese legends. During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in World War II, Indonesians fought the Dutch for independence. The dalangs’ centuries-old puppets were rebuilt in the images of President Sukarno, his cabinet members and Japanese soldiers who aided the Indonesians in their battles against the Dutch. Wayang became the medium through which the new government promoted family values. Today the art is taught throughout Indonesia in special schools where aspiring storytellers can earn certificates to become dalangs. An Indonesian women’s movement has named itself after the rebellious mythological character, Srikandi, the woman who traditionally questions male authority in shadow theater.

Tamara Fielding first saw a wayang kulit play at age 8 on her family‘s rubber plantation on Java. Behind a screen illuminated by the light of an oil lamp, the filigree- perforated puppets danced out their tales under a starry sky. The skillful hands of the dalang made the puppets quest, fight, grieve, triumph and love until sunrise brought the event to a close. Ms. Fielding remembers it as ”an almost mystical experience that proved to be a great force in my artistic development.‘‘

But the road to the realization of her artistic and cultural heritage as a Javanese- Long Island puppeteer was fraught with hardship and trauma: during the war, her family was imprisoned by the Japanese. Her mother was Javanese, her father Dutch, and Ms. Fielding grew up speaking both languages. After surviving three years in a concentration camp for Javanese women, she faced prosecution for her Dutch heritage when the Dutch colonial empire collapsed. Her family fled to Holland with other refugees when Tamara was 12. As a young adult, she became a drama student in Paris and appeared in the films ”Lust for Life‘‘ and ”Trapeze.‘‘

Flash forward to Aug. 26, 2000: Ms. Fielding is waiting to begin her performance at the Northeastern Performing Arts Conference in Boston. As she puts the finishing touches on her puppets, who are assembled in a crowd beside the 12-foot-long screen while a rock‘n‘roll band finishes its set in the foreground, Ms. Fielding explains that even though she was unceremoniously uprooted from her native land, ”I never lost my love and passion for the art of puppetry — the magic and stories of the wayang were locked inside me. I had a few old wayang puppets given to me by relatives many years before, so I built a screen and started to play with them. I spoke for the puppets just the way I remembered them speaking. Now I have 400 puppets.‘‘

Only a small collection made the trip from Northport to Boston, where the showcase was held in the John F. Kennedy Library on the Charles River. A display outside the room indicated several firsts, and, in her own way, Ms. Fielding is one of these: she has won renown as the first Javanese-born female dalang to perform wayang kulit professionally outside Indonesia, where her posters are typically blacked out when she returns for a performance.

The art of the dalang is a practice forbidden for women on Java. There, boys are taught to operate the puppets, girls to decorate them. ”It‘s a common after-school activity, and a way for boys and girls to meet each other,‘‘ Ms. Fielding said. ”But during the performance, the men and boys are led around the back of the screen so they can see the dalang at work. The women and girls have to remain in the audience, so they never learn how it works.‘‘

Ms. Fielding‘s puppet people range from Sinta, a questing princess, to Gareng, a master magician. Striking reds, purples and lots of gold make them a feast for the eyes even when motionless. As Ms. Fielding, with a flowing silk scarf and a lily in her hair, disappears behind the screen, the puppets begin a traditional morality tale she likens to a soap opera. For the next 30 minutes, puppets flip, twist, cavort, console, mesmerize and mourn as her various voices cast their hypnotic spell.

The action is framed by two giant leaf shapes, each representing the Tree of Life. While it appears two-dimensional, the tree actually has three sides: the good side, which shows the tree rooted on the roof of a temple, the evil side, which resembles an eye- bulging clown mask, and the ”shadow side‘‘ as it appears when the colors shine through the screen. After the show, Ms. Fielding recalled meeting Julie Taymor, the Tony Award- winning puppeteer behind the Broadway musical ”The Lion King,‘‘ in Manhattan. In a talk for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Ms. Taymor spoke of the profound influence Javanese puppet theater had on her career during the four years she lived in Indonesia after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. Ms. Fielding reciprocated by presenting Ms. Taymor with two female puppet characters from her collection, the assertive Srikandi and the submissive Sumbadra. Ms. Taymor, of course, recognized both.

Last August, Ms. Fielding spoke and performed at the International Wayang Festival in Jakarta, where the president welcomed her. In March, she will return to Indonesia aboard the cruise ship S.S. Rotterdam, on which she will perform.

JUGGLE Magazine

May 2002

lukaluka

Modern Juggling

Since that memorable performance in Pittsburgh, the two have had quite a ride in their quest to take experimental juggling into mainstream show business. In addition to playing at some of the most renowned variety theatres in Europe, they recently took their act and life to another level by celebrating their marriage in a circus tent in Cologne, Ilka’s hometown where the duo resides together when not touring.

Both performers credit the Gandini Juggling Project (now called Gandini Juggling) for the early beginnings of their collaborative efforts. As students during the first season of The Circus Space, they quickly became protégés of teachers Sean Gandini and Kati Yla-Hokkola. It was here under the Gandini’s daily tutelage that Luke and Ilka developed their famous “body placements,” take-aways, and modern movements techniques. They adopted the name lukaluka when English coaches had trouble saying their names, usually when the duo was caught whispering in the early days of their friendship/juggling romance. Today there is a web site bearing the name “lukaluka”, which they spell in lower case. The site has text in both English and German.

When one considers their individual backgrounds and skills, it seems unlikely that they would ever team up in the first place. Charlie Holland’s brainchild The Circus Space is to be commended for facilitating many such meetings, as artists can receive academic credits at neighboring colleges. At the start of their careers, however, Luke and Ilka seem to have been hatched on different planets before crossing orbits at The Space.

Ilka Licht was born in Cologne, or Koeln, in German, in 1973. She got hooked on circus arts at age 8 through a local program similar to Circus Smirkus, in which students tour in a tent show after studying the craft with professionals. Her first love was trapeze, and she spent many hours practicing to be an aerialist. It would have seemed very farfetched, then, to conclude that she would choose to become a professional juggler.

“What changed my view of juggling was a trip our youth circus troupe took to the European Juggling Festival in Maastricht, Holland. It was 1989, and Cindy Marvell performed her award-winning act to Rhapsody in Blue in the Public Show. I was also very impressed by Michiel Hesseling of the Flying Dutchman. I had never seen such juggling, and I think they had about 3000 jugglers there. After that I started practicing a lot more.” The next year, the festival was in Germany and she saw Airjazz perform. “Airjazz completely changed the way I imagined juggling, it was such a different style, not just juggling but movement and theatre. I especially enjoyed talking with Jon Held, and Kezia was one of the few female jugglers I had seen.”

She quickly noticed that there are not too many female jugglers worldwide: “Many of the famous ones, like Lottie Brunn, Jenny Jeager, or Trixie La Rue from Austria, left for America during the war. If I’d been alive then, I would have left, too. So I was not influenced by them and it was not until much later that I saw them on video.”

While there seem to be a larger number of female participants at the EJC then the IJA festivals, Ilka believes that European women are more likely to be hobbyists, while America has more professionals. So, Ilka was encouraged by a certain lack of encouragment to develop her own style and technical approach early on. In one of her trademark moves, she grips a club with her toes, the lifts it shoulder height with her leg fully extended while juggling three clubs, and grabs the fourth into the pattern. She wears special footwear and a wacky hairstyle helps her balance clubs on her head and slide them off to her partner.

Luke Wilson was born in London in 1976 but grew up in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. He started practicing and performing close-up magic at age 11, later winning the title, “Close-Up Magic Champion of Southern England”. But it was not until he discovered a secondhand copy of “Juggling for the Complete Klutz” at age 14 that he began his transformation into a fanatical juggler. His first step consisted of finding the missing beanbags. From there it was a few short years before he started performing with partner Jamie Fletcher. The two performed a comedy street show at the Winchester Hat Fair and at many other events. It consisted of 6-7-8 club passing, unicycle, and free-standing ladder.

Luke’s juggling was going so well that he decided to leave his A-Levels (the British High School equivalent) one year before graduation. In addition to shows, he practiced solo for 7-8 hours a day during this time. He claims that IJA videos were a great inspiration. At age 18, he became one of the first students to enroll in the new Circus Space, which was still being constructed at an old power station in East London. The students were eligible for the “Btec National Diploma in Performing Arts (circus),” awarded in conjunction with studies at East Berkshire College. The academic program consisted of technical craft, lighting design, and theatre history, while the simultaneous circus courses covered aerial skills, clown, acrobatics, dance, and theatre skills.

Ilka was also enrolled in the program, and the two moved in together after the first month. “It was clear that we had a similar level in terms of skill and knowledge,” Luke recalls. They spent two years working together at The Circus Space, culminating in a group show which contained a trio version of their original club duet. After the Pittsburgh performance, their first “real” show as a duet, Ilka returned to Aachen to complete her architectural degree. Luke worked on his German language skills and continued his solo practice in Brighton, visiting whenever he could. The first word he learned was ‘die Keule,’ which means ‘the club.’

After Ilka finished her degree, the two began work in earnest. Their first big gig as professional variete artistes came in 1999, when they won second place in a young variete competition called “ShowstArt”. The prize included a one-month run at Friedrichsbau, a variete theatre in Stuttgart. They had worked on their act whilst attending Chalons-en-Champagne’s Professional Training Course the previous year. They had some great teachers in the 4-month course, including Mads Rosenbeck, who performed in the IJA Public Show in Primm, and Didier Andre, a French juggler from the Pittsburgh showcase. Luke and Ilka recognized both as great jugglers who could help them towards their goal of “working in a variete setting but creating acts that go further than a self–contained spot on the program”.

Recently, the duo had such an opportunity as guest artists on Lazer Vaudeville’s North American tour. They rehearsed five-person numbers with drums, balls, bolas, and a 17-club finale, rehearsing for 3 weeks in preparation for the final show at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach, CA. The cast, which consisted of Carter Brown, Cindy Marvell, Bee Jay Joyer, and lukaluka, hope to perform excerpts of this work at the Reading IJA Fest this summer.

On the horizon for lukaluka is a November stint at the GOP (that’s the Georgspalast in Hannover, Germany, not the Republican convention). Last spring they landed a two-month contract at the Krystallpalast in Leipzig. Why so much in Germany? Aside from Ilka’s origins, Germany happens to have more variete theatres in full-time operation than any other European county, ironic when you consider that many were bombed during the war. When they met Lottie Brunn in Las Vegas, she recalled seeing Jenny Jeager perform in Berlin on just such an occasion.