It's about 5pm and the stage of the Savoy Theatre in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland, is abuzz with action. In just under an hour, the cast of Birdhouse Factory will be wowing the audience not only with their acrobatic stunts but also mechanical know-how.
Transforming props into machines and performers into powerhouses, Cirque Mechanics is a circus act with a mechanical twist. In its trapeze act, for instance, a rotating German wheel doubles as a winder that reels harnessed acrobat Kerren McKeeman up and down in mid-air, while Mongolian contortionist Ganchimeg Oyunchimeg gets all twisty on a turntable-like platform that has four unicycles for wheels.
'It's human power. We don't have an electric machine where you press a button and then I go up and come down,' the 26-year-old McKeeman explains. 'It's my partner who is physically wheeling it up, wheeling it down and using his body weight to displace it. The human body is the power behind the machine.'
The troupe's clown, Jesse Dryden, says the moving platform on which Oyunchimeg performs adds more dynamism to the act. 'We have these machines that say, 'Hey, do you know there's actually a relationship here?' or 'Hey, do you know how this is moving?' That's very distinguishing for this company. What makes it very unique is that we're Cirque Mechanics, so there's a mechanism involved in almost all the acts,' says Dryden.
Hong Kong audiences will be able to catch the Cirque Mechanics later this year.
The American troupe was founded by a group of former Cirque du Soleil artists in 2004. Dryden, a 38-year-old comedian who has been with the company for four years, says he has ambivalent feelings towards his former employer: 'On one hand Cirque du Soleil has opened up the world to circus, and made it possible for a company like ours to exist.