Cirque du Soleil has arrived in New York City for the first stop of its North American tour with the visually stunning “Luzia,” a “Waking Dream of Mexico.” This visit marks the return of the big top to Randall’s Island, the circus’s first production on the island since 2016.
Inspired by the locations, people, and sounds of both classical and contemporary Mexico, “Luzia” moves from urban scenes, such as an old movie set and a smoke-filled dance hall, to the beach and barren desert in an adrenaline-packed series of edge-of-your-seat acts.
True to Cirque du Soleil form, the enchanting show, accompanied by live music, includes a surprise, incorporating rain into the classic acrobatic and artistic scenes, a first for the circus’s touring production. Cyr wheel (the single ring used by acrobats) artists perform the feats of rolling and spinning under the rain, while an aerialist suspended on a trapeze flies and twirls through cascading showers. Hoop diving is taken onto gigantic treadmills, expanding exponentially the speed and number of daring leaps executed.
Jaw-dropping highlights include a male contortionist skillfully twisting his body into unimaginable positions, a powerful aerial-straps specialist defying the law of gravity at the center of a cenote (a natural sinkhole), a juggler tossing seven pins at breakneck speed, and two soccer freestylers deftly mixing street dance with mind-blowing ball manipulation.
“It’s always such an honor to be able to sing ‘If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere,’” one of the show’s featured hoop divers, Nelson Smyles, tells the Voice. “I’m just so stoked to be back in New York since the last time we were here [at Citi Field, in 2019] and excited to bring it back to a new audience. In Luzia I do hoop diving, which is acrobatics through a stack of rings. We do a lot of solo tricks and group tricks. We’re a team of eight to nine hummingbirds. What makes it super special is that we do them on two super giant treadmills that are moving and rotating around the stage.”
The classic Cirque du Soleil style is to take the audience out of everyday life and put them into something completely out of this world.
Smyles started training in gymnastics at the age of 4, before getting into springboard/platform diving at 10. As a teenager, the native Australian fell in love with parkour, the discipline of moving through a complex environment in the fastest and most efficient way possible. He remembers running around Melbourne with his friends, tumbling and finding new acrobatic combinations to perform and realizing that becoming a circus artist would allow him to make a job out of his passion for sports, movement, and acrobatics.
“Parkour is essentially street gymnastics,” says Smyles. “It’s a French movement that is basically the quickest way from point A to point B. When it was getting popular, they’d set up different locations and you would have to figure out the quickest way to get over buildings and across gaps, and then it evolved into ‘free running,’ which is more of the tricks and the acrobatics. That style of movement was very appealing to me.”
At the end of his high school studies, Smyles joined the college program at the National Institute of Circus Arts, in Melbourne, to specialize in hoop diving, clowning, and group acrobatics. For three years, he worked at perfecting his acrobatic and artistic skills in order to become a full-rounded circus professional. Toward the end of his studies, he sent a video demo to various companies, including Cirque du Soleil. His first contract was with the renowned Canadian circus company.
Eleven weeks before finishing his circus degree, Smyles signed his contract for “Luzia.” He joined the tour in December 2017, in Los Angeles, after a few weeks of acrobatic training, costume fittings, and make-up sessions at the troupe’s Montreal headquarters.
“Circus college was the best,” says Smyles, who earned a bachelor’s degree at NICA. “I’m from a small beach town in Australia, where there isn’t really a big art or gymnastics scene, so to go there to attend the circus university and finally feel a sense of community was beautiful at the time. It’s 40 hours a week of training. You learn about anatomy, business, and circus history. You grow with your peer group and then spread out. It’s taxing for sure, but great to have proper direction and a safe space where you can learn how to work for a company like this. Clown is such a versatile thing for actors to learn.” He mentions that Joseph Gordon-Levitt studied clown techniques, adding, “It’s a great tool for anyone to have.”
And while Smyles’s dramatic hoop diving, and the other death-defying acts performed by artists and acrobats at Cirque, get the most visual recognition, Smyles would rather just clown around. “Those acts are super-human to the audience,” he says. (Smyles understudies for Luzia’s main clown, Eric Koller.) “Some of the stuff my teammates do every day just blows me away. The clown is the connection for the audience member to feel attachment to those super-human spectacles of the show. The clown brings the audience into the show, and the Luzia clown is very special because he’s essentially traveling through this dream, and really engaging the audience. Eric has taken me under his wing and has taught me everything I need to know to be a comfortable clown on the Cirque du Soleil stage, which is something I never thought I would be doing. Further down the road, I think that would be the direction I’d like to go. I love Cirque du Soleil, and if I could stay with Luzia I’d love to, but if they need a clown elsewhere, that would also be a dream. My body is still strong and I love acrobatics, so I’ll do that as long as I can.”
So how does your mother react when you tell her you’re off to clown college to join the circus?
“My mum’s a painter and my dad was a ballroom dancer, so they were all over the art scene,” responds Smyles, whose sense of adventure and constant movement are just in his DNA. “So my mum sold the house and the furniture and bought a boat in the Mediterranean and lived there for a couple of years.”
This fits into the classic Cirque du Soleil style — take the audience out of everyday life and put them into something completely out of this world. The combination of the music, the colors, the lights, and the costumes is perfect for getting people to forget everything outside the tent and become fully immersed in the show.
“I’m excited to perform as the clown for the New York kids,” says the accomplished acrobat. “I imagine a lot of kids in the city have seen plenty of big shows, so they might not be as scared to engage with a circus clown. That’s my favorite part of performing. Everyone from 2 to 92 can come and have that experience for two and a half hours, and maybe see different things, but enjoy it equally with each other.” ❖
Luzia
Under the Big Top, Randall’s Island Park
Through April 27