Witch doctor or demiurge, armed with a cog rattle, he’s a strange prophet in a strange mask who approaches the raft in his skiff. His mask and his sail are decorated with a fascinating spiral—the symbol of hypnosis. The ragtag wooden raft of survivors appears gullible and hapless. He’s invited aboard. They’ve let their guard down. He describes comets and cities and atom bombs. He has a way with plants.
The children who gather close around the raft to stand knee-deep in the shallows of the Hudson River know something about the man is wrong—like fish gone off—before the crew does, but the children must suffer the fate of all spectators.
Resembling a riverborne stage, when a wooden vessel adorned with a shack and pilot’s quarters—or is it an outhouse?—drifts to within a gangplank’s distance of the beach and is made fast in the sand with rope and stake, a child would have to be a dull light bulb not to stand open-mouthed, transfixed, waiting to see what comes next. Even if it’s all a little frightening. But after all, the crew seems plucky.
Like a motley group of impossibly talented hobos, there have been a few demonstrations of can-do spirit, inventiveness and physical dexterity by this point in the show, which maybe explains why these survivors of a future apocalypse—ramshackle, foolhardy, chock-full of whimsy—are still floating.
They are, in fact, the troupe of the Flotsam River Circus, 28 days into a 38-date tour, who set out together on the Erie Canal in Buffalo to follow the ocean-bearing current down to New York City.
Tonawanda, Lockport and Medina. Rochester, Fairport and Geneva. Seneca Falls. Oswego. Canajoharie. They’ve played them all and more. They never charge admission—just pass around white buckets, boots and hats, like a basket in church to be filled with suggested donations.
Raftmates include, but are not limited to, Ambalancer—choreographer, gymnast and balance artist from Taiwan; “Nikki” Laumb, silks aerialist and co-founder of the Shoestring Circus, based in Bellingham, Washington; and Danila Bim of Brazil, multidisciplinary alumna of Cirque du Soleil, Palazzo and Teatro Zinzanni. Musicians include, but are not limited to, river circus founder and accordionist Jason Webley, and Miriam Hacksaw and Rye Oomen, a fiddler and a drummer, both of New Orleans.
An auspicious day, then. If there had been lightning and a rainstorm … but adults have become used to disappointment. Children are different. It’s important when they’re still impressionable and on the ground floor of existence that they see how to catch a boot with a fishing pole, or balance life jackets on top of a hat stand, or bail out a raft following a storm at sea. And floating circuses might only visit the City of Kingston once in a lifetime. Even if it did return, neither the child nor the circus would be the same.
“Like whale songs,” says Kalan Sherrard, artistic director of the circus. “Little variations, but the whale songs of today are as different from those in the 1970s as the Beatles and Beethoven.”
Now in the troupe’s sixth season of rivering, Kalan counts off the waterways they’ve navigated together.
“We did the Sacramento, the Willamette, the Ohio and the Mississippi. During COVID, we just did waterways around Seattle. I think one was on a river, but mostly, they were technically lakes.”
The show veers into the consequences of human overreach, infatuation and love, regret, struggle, misjudgments, adventure, nautical considerations and flatulence—all with a sort of Lazzi-Zanni theatricality. What is communicated is done through body language and action, very little script, and all in such a way that even an adult can understand what is happening.
“I think it’s playing with a lot of absurdism,” says silks aerialist Nikki Laumb. “When we talk through the themes, they’re pretty heady, and then it’s fun to take heady stuff down into the most cartoony version. So that’s really what it is for us.”
Laumb’s fiancé and business partner in her Shoestring Circus, Justin Therrien, also performs in the Flotsam show. He was part of the original troupe in its first iteration. The two have the opportunity to play through the paces of a romantic duet that begins with a hat and a mop stick and ends with Laumb spinning in the air.
“Love,” she says, “and the apocalypse. Didn’t have to twist my arm too hard.”
At the culmination of an emotional narrative arc, Danila—pronounced like Vanilla—Bim performs one of the most arresting feats of the show … but it would be a crime to ruin it. For the consideration of the reader: it involves either a potted plant, a digestive metamorphosis or a sea monster. Or all three.
A master of the aerial hoop, Bim also performs hoopless in the air, spinning like an ice skater, lowered to dance on the water’s surface, suspended only by her hair.
“It’s fun,” says Bim.
On the day of the show in Kingston, it was a seaside scene. The sky above the beach was as blue as a bottle, the sand was sun-warmed, and any clouds overhead were only wisps.
A crowd of more than 100 had gathered on the beach. There were jugglers tossing nine pins to pass the time, and sea chanties were spontaneously generated by an audience member with an accordion as the sun fell behind the Catskills far inland. Sailboats tacking in the channel were still gold and glowing in the magic-hour light, while on the eastern bank of the river, the trees and hills were already covered in blue shadow.
When the show begins, all the action takes place on a stage hardly longer than seven strides. One by one, members of the band appear, costumed as mutant fish. The mouths of the fish agog, the humans within gaze out. Large, grapefruit-sized nodules indicate that they are, indeed, mutant.
The first mutant fish plays a triangle. The second climbs up a platform where a drum set waits. Before long, an accordion and violin will join. One of these mutant fish breaks the fourth wall to communicate with the audience—to tell them the only two syllables they will need to express their pleasure, astonishment, approval or shock, to sing out call-and-response choruses with the music.
According to the narrator, the scenes that follow take place in an apocalyptic future of sorts: “The temperatures have risen. The waters have risen. Little remains of the lives that we know.”
Self-destructive, compulsively extractive, relentlessly exploitative—mankind must have consummated his worst instincts. A spiral moving inward, ever tighter, like a whirlpool.
“It’s a hard time to be human,” he says, “but a glorious time to be invasive, mutant fish.”
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