Chris Lashua
Chris Lashua started out as a BMX rider before joining Cirque du Soleil’s “Quidam” as a German wheel performer. He then went on to found his own circus—Cirque Mechanics. He takes some time out of his brief stay to tell Leanne Mirandilla all about the show—and all about wheels. Lots and lots of wheels.
HK Magazine: How did Cirque Mechanics all come about?
Chris Lashua: I was doing an act with a German wheel, which is an acrobatic prop. It’s like having a person running inside a hamster wheel. I did that for several years, and then I started building my own apparatus to work with the wheel. Essentially, I wanted my wheel on some rollers so I could spin in place. I quickly realized that it was going to be a cool thing to look at, so I expanded it to include more wheels so I could spin and roll back and forth.
It became a kind of mechanical contraption. I started playing with the idea of how I could mechanize other traditional circus acts. Once we decided to set these machines in a factory, then it really took off. We started thinking, what are other things in a factory that we can play with? There are always chains, ropes, lamps. We thought we would attach these lamps to the bottom of ropes so we could do circus acts on them. It’s a very old circus act to climb ropes and do slides—wrap around and do aerial work with them. It’s a way to interact with the environment, which has become the thing that we do. We build these contraptions and we interact with the set. Once we decided to do this in a factory, we started to look for inspiration. [Charlie] Chaplin, Diego Rivera’s murals.
We used these to inform the decisions we made about everything, from colors to lighting and design. We had this 1930s look. So it developed backwards. We started with a machine, then setting, context, time period, aesthetic, and then the story.
HK: What would you say sets this show apart from other circus shows?
CL: The big companies like Cirque du Soleil are very popular. We all know they do great work. But there are a lot of companies that are just doing versions of those shows. We don’t want to do that. The fantasy style is very popular, but we wanted to find a way to do something that was in a real time and a real place—the 30s, in a factory, as opposed to a lyrical dream-space. [The show] comes out of scenarios that people understand. As the show opens, people are standing in front of a factory waiting to start work. And we’ve all either waited outside for a business to open so we can start our workday, or our parents did but we feel and connect with it. It’s one of the things that I think makes the show popular with people.
HK: What sorts of backgrounds do the rest of the cast have?
CL: We have people who are classic circus people. We have a girl in the show from a Russian family who’s a fifth-generation circus performer. We have a family—a mother, a father and a daughter who’s 16—and they’ve been doing circus all their lives. And then we have some other people who were gymnasts, in sports. We have a clown who just does clowning and acting. We really try to pull people in from different backgrounds.
HK: Before you started Cirque Mechanics, you were a part of Cirque du Soleil. What was that like?
CL: I worked for Cirque du Soleil for over 15 years. I was in Quidam for four years. I did 1,500 shows. When they re-cast my role [as the German wheel performer], I trained two replacements. The guy that’s doing it now was actually 12 when he first saw me in the show in 1996 and told his parents, “I wanna do that!”