As is the case with all Cirque du Soleil productions, it’s the elaborate costumes and incredible athletic performances that are the main attraction of the aerial-centric “Varekai,” which will be at Atlanta’s Gwinnett Center July 29 to Aug 2. The audience’s connection to all this theatrical action, however, is the most grounded characters in the show: the clowns. Multi-talented Australian performer Steven Bishop, who has been part of “Varekai” since 2004, was cast in this nontraditional role following an equally unique acting education.
After traveling to London to study mime, then to Paris’ École Jacques Lecoq to learn physical theater, Bishop continued to pick up unique theatrical skills such as comedy, improv, ventriloquism, escapology, puppetry, stilt performing, and stunt work (the latter of which got him the roles of Rowan Atkinson’s stunt double, as well as the Lunar Ghost, in 2002’s “Scooby-Doo”). It was this broad base of performance skills that impressed Cirque enough to let him clown around for the next decade.
“I was performing at a ventriloquist festival in Las Vegas in 2000 and an Australian acrobat friend of mine who had just been involved with the creation of ‘O’ came and saw me perform,” says Bishop. “He said, ‘I’m going to get you to audition and we’re going to send that to Cirque.’ I got a letter back a year later that said, ‘We’re interested in you. When we’re casting in Australia we’ll contact you.’ In 2003 they were doing a casting call in Sydney, so I flew down there. When I was doing the process I thought, ‘Wow! This is exactly the physical language I’m interested in.’ After those two days, there were three of us out of 30 left.”
The following year, Bishop left his job as a dentist (yet another skill he somehow found time to acquire) to join the Cirque. But it’s his acting skills that often come in handy when Cirque’s athletes need help turning their acrobatics into storytelling tools.
“I’m often called on by the artistic director to work with the acrobats and help them develop characters,” he says. “What’s good about the training I did is that I understand physicality from a very basic level; how you build a character and work that character with an audience. Sometimes you need to make them aware of the power of the movement. Sometimes they have the skills to perform that and sometimes they need a little bit more awareness. You need to find things they do in their normal life that they’ve forgotten about and put that into the show.”
As one of two clowns who begin performing within the audience before gradually becoming more integrated onto the stage, Bishop especially enjoys making the crowd feel like part of the show.
“We’re a bit more theatrical than your typical circus clowns, yet we have the least amount of makeup in the whole show,” he says. “We’re more of-the-people comedic characters. We start out as ushers, then take the audience into the magical world of “Varekai.” It’s great to have a lot of really wild stuff happening on stage. But if you can bring the audience into that world, it’s much more powerful than just observing these moments. Being part of something is what keeps live entertainment vital.”
Although running away to join the exotic Cirque cast likely isn’t the goal of many actors, Bishop’s advice for following in his clown footsteps applies to almost any creative endeavor.
“You nurture your interest until it becomes a curiosity,” he says. “When it becomes a passion, you just follow as far as you can go with that. I’ve never really focused on, ‘This is where I want to be.’ I’ve just done what I do and been very passionate about it and really enjoyed it. Even if you’re doing a really small show, if you do it as well as you can people will see that spark. Everything I was performing in Australia, people recognized something, but it didn’t quite fit in to any of the existing genres. But when Cirque came along it was, ‘Yep. That’s what’s right.’ You’ll find your place if you just keep going with what you’re doing and what you believe in.”
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