More of this article: • All Together Now! Part II

Geneva, Christmas Eve. The venue, L'Usine, a former gold-processing factory on the banks of the Rhone River, is a cavernous black room filled in with waffle-surfaced metal catwalks up over the bar, a balcony with chairs & tables overlooking the huge concrete main floor & an enormous high stage filled with speakers & amps. The catwalk backstage leads to a mezzanine retreat for the performers, tiny plywood rooms high up under the roof with beams so low that Whitman McGowan, American poet, has to stoop. He sinks into a beanbag chair, quiet amid the hubbub of equipment-carrying & plugging-in -- as a poet his instruments are his voice and body, totally portable, & as a “spokaoke” performer, he adds only a mike & tape player.

Angelique, the wiry, efficient, tiny-dread-locked sound engineer for the club, has done her sound checks & marked her cues. It's 9, but the show won't begin for several hours. Six-year-old Jules, son of a Cirque performer, chases the colored light of the programmed track spot across the empty floor. The members of the Cirque have gathered in the backstage mezzanine, introducing themselves in English, French, German, Swiss-German, convivial but holding back just a little. Soon all the circus artists are seated at a long narrow table decorated with streamers, balloons & chocolate ladybugs for the pre-show communal meal -- and the free food turns out to be great home cooking by Stephane, owner of the club. He has even prepared a cream-filled chocolate-frosted pineapple sponge cake for dessert.

Around midnight the place begins to fill. DJ Seb (Sebastian), slight French-speaking Asian guy with white rubber-soled elevator shoes & a silver ring in his nose, hasn't spoken much backstage, but he programs tidal waves of American music to begin the show, cut after cut of guitar gods old & new as he tries to draw the black leather bodies out into the center of the floor.

Alain Meyer of Vendetta Agency, Geneva is the organizer, instigator, promoter & biggest fan of the Cirque Electrique. He created the first circus last year to mark his 30th birthday. This year he is everywhere behind the scenes, smoothing the way & writing schedules, but when the show goes on stage, you can always find him out front in his ringmaster costume, gold braid & buttons & all, sparking the audience's energy with the simple intensity of his enjoyment. He has been trying to talk about his hope that the Cirque will be a synergistic artistic confluence of odd souls interacting, creating something new out of the connection of their various arts & acts. But no one seems to be listening to him. Tonight we are strangers, newcomers. Everyone is focused on their own performance & watches the others from a distance.

Whitman's is the first live performance on the bill tonight. When the music stops, Hotcha is on stage in satin bell-bottom suit & ruffled shirt, carrying his emphatic cane. Former rocker from the Swiss band Pull My Daisy, he is the circus MC but wants to be known simply as “the man who tells things” -- & over the course of a week he tells many things, shifting from French to Swiss German as we criss-cross the linguistic boundaries of Helvetica. His French introduction of Whitman is extravagant, bombastic & mostly incomprehensible. Whitman walks on stage carrying a big book, perches his reading glasses on his nose & says, “I'd like to begin by reading my newest work. It's a found poem, 'James Brown's Greatest Sounds.'” And he reads, & at the same time shouts out, Brown's “ughs,” “uh-hunhs,” “oooeeeees” & “git-git-git-git-git-git-git-git-downs,” channeling the Godfather of Soul in his extra-large frame. Even the non-English speakers in the audience get the humor.

Next up is Bob Log III (yes, that is his real name) & his “pool party blues.” He's the only other American in the Cirque, a one-man music machine -- plays a positively manic slide guitar, one foot on a big bass kick drum, the other on a drum effects box. He looks like an alien astronaut in his “blues helmet” -- black proboscis-like phone receiver mike attached to the front of a motorcycle helmet. His songs have titles like “All the Rockets Go Bang” & “Pig Tail Swing” & his performance is a joyful, twangy, total hoot. At first we cannot believe so much noise comes from just one man, then we begin to admire his guitar playing & the down home roots of his blues songs, then he cranks the energy up and I wonder why I'm not seeing smoke from the musical fire he has lit on stage. At a later performance of the Cirque, a column of stage smoke does rise behind him at the end of his act, when he is going like a windup toy gone mad. Backstage with his helmet off, Bob is a goofily good- natured Arizonan with a Texas-sounding drawl & an innocent eager charm, always ready to jump in to a party & cheerfully mangle somebody else's language. His soundman sidekick Danny is an opinionated cynic, but he, too, has a quintessentially American cheer & enthusiasm & charms us all.

After a side-stage interlude filled with the antics of “The Real Space-Out Sound System” (a Goth-kitsch club owner from Thun who dj's & does sound effects with an assortment of toys), the Dead Brothers go on in the back room, making their way through the milling audience with a megaphone & two tubas, dispensing swigs from a bottle of “the cure for what ails you all” (Bloody Marys, I think). Alain Croubalian, lead singer of Les Maniacs, a Swiss world-music punk-rock band, fronts the Dead Brothers as a New Orleans-style crooner. His tuba-playing companions, brought back from the other side specially for the circus & dressed in antique tuxes, are Jean-Philippe (who also plays banjo) & Fred (who also plays trombone). Their music is lovely, melancholy & very American -- they cover Hank Williams' “Ramblin' Man,” a Cajun pop tune once done by Elvis called “Jolie Blonde” & an old Tom Waits song, “Doctor Says I'll Be All Right.” Alain wails “We're all gonna be just dead in the ground” with soul & gusto.

Christmas, Biel/Bienne. We've all piled into the van/bus & driven along the Swiss lakes as the sunset lit peach-colored fires in the Alps across the plateau, to arrive at La Coupole, tonight's venue. The multilingual conversation surges through the backstage rooms ringing the circular club less gently than last night, when we were all a little tentative. Currents of English, French, Swiss-German, byways & eddies between people who haven't yet found their common conversational language, bursting into froths of laughter as the linguistic river opens into a new channel between two of the mingling artists. Alain has juggled the performance order tonight, a good thing because these shows go on until dawn & not all of us can stay to the end every night. Last night we missed Tulip & the Last Torridas; tonight they are on stage early.

Tulip, die singende Tulpe, are a surrealistic art-rock threesome, a mushroom, singing tulip & firefly with a sense of humor, from Hamburg. This circus has no animals, but it does have vegetables. Gregor Hartz, the mushroom, plays keyboards with his back to the audience, his spectrally thin frame-stem encased in white knit, head & shoulders invisible beneath a 4-foot-wide white-spotted red mushroom hood that sways very gently as he plays. Drummer Axel Jansen is a goggled & pearl-necked firefly. And Holger Steen is the 7-foot singing tulip, dressed all in stem-green with a giant yellow tulip-bloom cutout surrounding his face, singing by turns in an operatic falsetto & a deep guttural voice of soul pain. He lifts his arms as though helplessly carried by the music, jumps down from the stage to sing to individual members of the audience, then sits down to play a sweetly folky tune on the guitar while Gregor the mushroom & Axel the firefly dance & clap center stage front. They are brilliant & funny & bizarre all at once, & like the Dead Brothers they offer a uniquely European take on American pop culture in songs like “Odo” (yes, they are Trekkies, too). At one point in the middle of their set, they go silent & simply freeze on stage. Suddenly we can hear the hushed rustling of the audience -- the performance has morphed into a mirror, reflecting everything back into the huge domed center of the club.

The Last Torridas are indeed hot, five Swiss women & a boy drummer. Barbara & Mo are sweet-faced but heavy-duty guitar goddesses; Helene, barefoot bass player, seems the female incarnation of Keith Richards when she moves on stage; Karin is their intense red-haired boot-buckled lead singer; & Gabrielle plays percussion & sampler, sings backup & waves her nest of red hair joyfully as she jumps with the music.

Part II next week: The troupe performs in what were once farm houses, castles & factory complexes, ending their trek across Switzerland with a New Year's Eve party in Zurich. . .

Margery Snyder

Next page > Le Cirque Electrique, Part II > page 1, 2

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