No Mean Feats at the Perelman Performing Arts Center
On a Lower Manhattan stage, a woman is launched into the air, caught by friends, swung to and fro for maximum momentum, then tossed again like a rag doll, arcing high through space. Time stops as she flies… and restarts when she lands in the arms of others. Okay, you can breathe now.
Time stops for the audience, time and time again as they watch stunts like this during “Passengers,” the new theater/circus/dance show at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. Time pauses, space expands: one may ponder elementary physics watching these astonishing performers. The training required to pull off such extraordinary height and distance and speed is hard to imagine, not to mention the faith that someone will be there to catch you.
Shana Carroll, the director, choreographer, and co-founder of the Montreal-based 7 Fingers physical theater troupe that performs “Passengers” — and a former trapeze artist herself, with Cirque Du Soleil — admits to uttering a prayer every now and then as she observes each performance. Although most of these cast members are veterans from previous iterations of the show, they still had only 10 days to rehearse before the first performance at the Perelman on June 12.
The physics of acrobatics is often on Ms. Carroll’s mind. “You have to find the swing at a particular moment,” she says, offering examples of the science behind the choreography. “The leverage of the toes. It’s the biomechanics of the stunt.” In “Passengers,” the milieu is a train, an environment she calls “one small, time-space contradiction” because the contained setting within the train car is moving through a landscape. Over 90 minutes, the dozen performers combine and recombine in acrobatic tableaux that reveal relationships of the characters. At one point, characters even discuss Einstein’s thought experiment about lightning striking each end of a train car simultaneously.
“Passengers” is at the Perelman Performing Arts Center through June 29. Tickets start at $30.