STEREOPTIK will present the live-animation piece Dark Circus at HERE May 30 through June 4 (photo © JM Besenval)
HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
May 30 – June 4, $25
212-647-0202
www.here.org
HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry Program has something special planned this week: Dark Circus, a multimedia production from innovative French company STEREOPTIK, running May 30 through June 4. Founded in 2011 by Romain Bermond and Jean-Baptiste Maillet, STEREOPTIK (The Suit Is Too Big, Paid Leave) creates live animated shows projected on screens but without actual film, whether digital or analog. Inspired by silent cinema, Bermond and Maillet serve as illustrators, musicians, projectionists, sound designers, lighting designers, and cameramen. For the fifty-five-minute Dark Circus, based on an original story by Pef and in collaboration with Frédéric Maurin, they are using animations made offstage for the first time. This is no mere Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus but an experimental wonderland with surprises galore, brought to life through shadow puppetry, ink drawings, sand animation, and unusual objects by Bermond and Maillet, who sit on either side of the screen, in full view of the audience as they work their theatrical magic.