madness and joy

Brooklyn, July 29-30-31: Cirque Boom Circus Theater’s Madness & Joy! sounds Walt Whitman’s ‘barbaric yawp’ on the backbends of acrobats, the tosses of jugglers, and the soft spots of clowns. Set in P.T. Barnum’s New York, 1855-2005, Madness & Joy! reveals the Whitman under our skins. Cirque Boom, creator of 2004’s The Hoffmann Circus, presents a work-in-progress of Madness & Joy! as part of The Second Annual Outside Art Festival of Free Performances in the BAM Cultural District, a co-production of the BAM Local Development Corporation and chashama. Performances are open to the public free of charge and take place at BAM Park, at the intersection of Fulton and Lafayette Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn on July 29 at 7pm, July 30 at 3pm and 7pm, and July 31 at 3pm. VIP tickets are available in exchange for a donation to the company (see www.cirqueboom.org for more information).

Madness & Joy! explores the legacies of Whitman and Barnum, two 19 th century New York City icons. PT Barnum is widely known for his Barnum & Bailey Circus, a venture he undertook late in life—but the “prince of humbugs” was also the father of modern advertising, an architect of the society of spectacle, and a chief proponent of moral suasion. Whitman, now considered among the greatest of American poets, was a transient printer and journalist in his day whose intense inner life, revealed in his poems, echoes our modern yearning for unfettered democracy, unconditional love, and reconnection with life, place and the natural world.

Our lives, our New York and our America still resound with the visions, words and ideas of both these men. Madness and Joy! approaches them with the language of circus and physical theater: juggling, acrobatics, clowning and more. It brings us back to Barnum’s world—of the Fee Jee Mermaid, Tom Thumb, Jumbo the Elephant and temperance melodrama—and imagines Whitman as a riveted audience member in his American Museum. It then returns to the present day, and discovers how Barnum’s ideas shape the world we live in, and how Whitman’s poetry reveals the extraordinary beauty of our ordinary experience.

Cirque Boom makes original circus theater that integrates historic works of art from diverse disciplines with vibrant theatricality, humor and high-level circus skills. The company uses circus to express concept, character, mood and plot—resulting, as critic Paulanne Simmons wrote in GO Brooklyn, in “a circus unlike any [audiences have] seen before.” Cirque Boom’s two productions of The Circus of Vices and Virtues (2002 & 2003) were recently featured the BBC, and The Hoffmann Circus (2004) was featured three times on WNYC radio and called “Among the funkiest” of New York’s alternative operas by the New Yorker and “Brilliantly done” by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Madness and Joy! features live music by chamber/folk ensemble Silkweed ( www.silkweed.net) the musical brainchild of composers/multi-instrumentalists Colin McGrath and Rob Moose. The music of Silkweed weaves together bluegrass-inspired motives, traditional Irish music, rural American flatpicking, African Cora music, and the rhythmic and harmonic language of classical composers like Stravinsky and Poulenc . The production integrates live readings of Whitman poems by readers from The Walt Whitman Project, a Brooklyn-based community arts organization devoted to exploring the life and influence of this great American writer through readings of his poetry and prose and performances of musical compositions based on his works.

Outside Art 2005 is a festival of free summer performances in the BAM Cultural District. The four-week outdoor festival will feature public art installations, spoken word, site specific performance, circus and dance performances by emerging New York City-based artists. The festival is produced by chashama, a non-profit arts organization that provides opportunities for performing and visual artists ( www.chashama.org) and the BAM Local Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create a vibrant, mixed-use multicultural arts district in Downtown Brooklyn.

Madness & Joy! is sponsored by the South Street Seaport Museum and made possible by The Alan B. Slifka Foundation and the Philip S. Harper Foundation, with special support from The Walt Whitman Project. It is part of the Cirque Boom Launch Pad Series, a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).