Aurélia Thierrée

Watching Aurélia’s Oratorio, performed at Jacob’s Pillow by Aurélia Thierrée and Jaime Martinez in 2007, and conceived of and directed by Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, one certainly could categorize the work as “new circus.” Robert Shore of Time Out London offhandedly defines New Circus as “Old Circus minus the animals and performed in theatres rather than big tops.” It’s imaginative, funny, skillful, and magical. The world we enter is filled with delightful episodes, unexpected interactions, and altered realities. However, this version of a circus takes place on a very human scale and shows us stories and situations that are familiar.

The work belongs equally to traditions aside from circus, such as dance theatre, puppetry, and silent movies.The work belongs equally to traditions aside from circus, such as dance theatre, puppetry, and silent movies. In Aurélia’s Oratorio, props and set pieces suggest a certain place, but without enough pieces to establish it concretely. A bureau, a small table, a coat rack, a vase. Is it someone’s apartment? But where? And who lives here? A telephone rings and rings. A man’s voice leaves a message. From inside the bureau, a hand emerges, now a foot. This sense of disembodiment—a man’s voice, a woman’s body parts—is both funny and poignant.

Not only does Aurélia’s Oratorio take place in a theatre, it takes advantage of the apparatuses of theatre as well. Where most theatrical productions use the curtains or wings to hide offstage mechanicals or performers waiting to make entrances, here the lush red curtains draping the edges of the stage become swings, trapezes, slides. But then, how stable are they? By calling attention to something we have long been trained to ignore, Thierrée Chaplin makes us take note and then suggests that objects we take for granted cannot also be counted on to perform their functions. This theatrical device of making the familiar object strange, or making the inanimate animated, recurs throughout Aurélia’s Oratorio: a coat takes charge of a man, a coatrack moves of its own volition.

Later, a new set of curtains establishes a smaller performance area on the stage. Tightening the frame on the live performer works like a close-up in film. We are invited into the private world where a woman in white rests. Otherworldly creatures—puppets or projections, it’s hard to define—invade her space. She tries to protect herself with a parasol, she resists their advances, only to gradually succumb to the imaginary world. The interaction between two characters—one human and one puppet—blurs the lines between what is real and what’s imaginary. In Aurélia’s Oratorio, when a puppet first romances Thierrée and later joins others to manipulate her passive limbs, one wonders who is the puppeteer and who is the puppet.

Thierrée as performer and Thierrée Chaplin as creator certainly come from a heritage that understands the potential eloquence of performers who need no spoken words to communicate. To look at silent films from the early twentieth century is to marvel at the expressivity of the great performers. How much could be made known to the viewers with a glance from Greta Garbo, a hiccup from Buster Keaton, a duck-toed walk from Chaplin? When her grandfather Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, the four-year-old Aurélia Thierrée had already made her stage debut. She commented in an interview that joining in the performances of her parents’ New Circus endeavors: “was a way of keeping the family together.”

In the quiet performance of Aurélia’s Oratorio, we see the skill, wit, and poise that may be in the blood of this family. And it feels personal. Theatre on this intimate scale does nothing to diminish its effect—it is not about huge spectacle. Rather, these episodes sketch comedic yet heart-felt slices of life.