Students from the Royal University of Fine Arts’ Circus School will perform a more than one hourlong show on Saturday and Sunday under the direction of Marie Mercadal, a French trapeze performer.
For two weeks, Ms. Mercadal practiced several hours each day with a group of about 12 young people aged 10 to 24 to teach them basic trapeze skills.
“I liked working with them a lot, they are a very interesting group of kids. They were very good at acrobatics and other things before, but they never had a trapeze teacher,” Ms. Mercadal said on Friday, as she was finalizing the show with her students.
The first part, she said, will be a presentation of the past two weeks achievements.
“I don’t like robotic circus, I want to see the humans inside of the artists, I want to see their characters and their hearts. So we worked a lot on this, to find out how they want to present themselves on stage,” she said.
Ms. Mercadal will showcase her 10 years of experience on the trapeze, and the students will also perform acrobatics and juggling.
Francois Alaitru, who works with circus groups in France, said that the show would resemble modern French circus performances, where emotions play a big role.
“It’s not just about the performance, not just what the artists do, but we want to provoke an emotion in the public,” he said.
