What Do Heart-Pounding Australian Contemporary Circus CIRCA: HUMANS Performers Eat?

(Gerry Furth-Sides,  photos courtesy of CIRCA) Internationally acclaimed Australian company CIRCA makes its debut as The Wallis’ first foray into contemporary circus with Humans on Friday, November 1 and Saturday, November 2, 2019, 7:30 pm, in The Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater. In a thrilling and heart- stopping performance, ten acrobats from this award-winning contemporary circus ensemble push the boundaries of circus on a stirring journey of “what it means to be fiercely human.”The idea is to explore the physical limits of their bodies, they lead viewers to reflect on life’s burdens and find redemptive power in the physical and emotional strength it takes to overcome them.

Created by Artistic Director Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble, Humans premiered in 2017 at Australia’s Sydney Festival.  Circa Contemporary Circus, now considered one of the world’s leading performance companies, blurs the lines between movement, dance, theatre and circus. From its base Brisbane base, the wildly popular  CIRCA has toured the world since 2004, acclaimed for pioneering how extreme physicality can create powerful and moving performances.

Committed to fostering the next generation of circus artists, CIRCA runs a Training Centre from its Brisbane studio, along with regular circus programs with communities throughout Queensland and around Australia. As a champion of live performance,  CIRCA manages arTour and was the Creative Lead for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games arts and cultural program. (www.circa.org.au)

And what does this troupe eating to keep up their energy?  Cirque du Soleil performers “could live on Nutella,” according to the traveling kitchen chefs we talked to, with nutrition being more and more of a factor recently.  So would nutrition be more on the performers’ mind? Or would their habits be more along the lines of the earlier Cirque “sweet tooth” which this case could start with Australia’s absolutely favorite dessert according to polls, the Pavlova, created for the ballerina Anna Pavlova in honor of her visit in the 1920’s.

//www.cnn.com/travel/article/australian-food/index.html

According to two performers, the Cirque du Soleil former free-wheeling diet only applies to the calories. Acrobat, Seppe Van Looveren, trains eight hours a day and he reports,” The extra physical work I do …all depends on how much energy I have but I’ll always do some kind of power training to maintain my overall fitness.

He describes his day this way:  “I like to eat. Depending on the layout of the day I will have 3 or 4 good meals and some snacks whenever I can. People often ask me, because I’m an acrobat, if I have eating habits like a gymnast. I don’t know much about their eating habits other than the clichés but I always say no, because I don’t really follow a diet. I eat what I want and as much as I want. We burn so many calories training every day that sometimes even I am surprised of how much I eat. I don’t really eat candy or other sweet stuff. A quick snack would rather be a bowl of granola with fruit.  Because of long work days and me eating a lot of food I usually will cook big dinners so I can put some away to have as lunch the next day. An example of what I would eat in a week looks something like the below:

Breakfast: A 3 or 4 egg omelet with veggies, bacon and potatoes and a bowl of granola with fruit and yoghurt.
Lunch: This is usually leftovers from last night’s dinner.
Snacks: 2 – 3 crêpes, granola & yoghurt, apple or banana, a muffin, burrito, eggs on toast
Dinner: Typically something with meat, vegetables and a side of rice, pasta, potato or vegetables.

Tim Fyfee refer to himself as an acrobat “with a heavy focus on hand-to- hand acrobatics. A typical training session involves running through our fundamental hand-to-hand exercises in a pretty specific order (starting with the simple things and progressively moving towards the more difficult ones). After a hand-to-hand training session, I’ll do a little bit of strength training followed by some flexibility work.

Does he eat in a specific way to be an acrobat? He does not and elaborates.”I don’t have a “special” diet. I believe that the food I consume is reasonably healthy and well balanced. I’m considered to be quite “big” for a flyer. It’s not very common for a flyer to be 73kgs, they are usually a lot lighter so I don’t fit the “typical flyer profile”. Below is an example of what I would eat in a standard week.

Breakfast: Oatmeal or Weetbix with fruit and scrambled eggs with grilled vegetables on toast
Lunch: Usually left over from dinner the night before. Sometimes I’ll have a few sandwiches: cheese, lettuce, tomato and ham or something like that
Snacks: Fruit and yogurt with granola, mixed nuts, dried fruit.
Dinner: Typically steamed or grilled vegetables with some sort of meat and sauce on either rice or potatoes.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase tickets ($29 – $79.) and for more information, please call 310- 746-4000 or visit thewallis.org/Circa.