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The Corteo school

By on July 26, 2009

The Big Top

Many kids have fantasized about running away from home and joining the circus. Instead of having Spot the dog, you’d have Ellie the elephant as a pet; and rather than walking to school in the rain on a dull September morning wearing a brown gabardine uniform, you’d don a sequined leotard while galloping on horseback around a Big Top. Sound enticing? Your mates would no longer rank in the ‘dullsville’ category of Mary and Tommy from around the corner, for you’d be consorting with Yeosef and Anastasia, the coolest acrobatic teen act in the solar system, while Cleo the clown could help with your homework.

But what if this circus fantasy was what you were born into? What if your dad wasn’t an insurance salesman, or your mum a shop-keeper? Who among us has ever stopped to think that that chap flinging himself about on a high wire might be someone’s father, or wondered if that sparkly contortionist jumping and leaping about from trampoline to high wire is someone’s mother? Such is the case at the world’s most famous circus. 

But before I shatter the preconceptions and emergency getaway plans of children all over the world, let me just clarify that the performers to which I allude belong to no ordinary circus. This is the Cirque du Soleil – not the Duffy’s Circus that I remember from my childhood, which used to turn up once a year in a mucky field on the outskirts of some suburban town in Ireland, hauling with it scrawny looking bears that did demeaning tricks and clowns that frankly, looked liked they’d spent the afternoon in the local boozer. 

No. This is the Canadian reinvention of the circus. With this incarnation, you’ll find no tigers jumping through blazing hoops nor elephants in tutus standing on one leg. (Did this really use to entertain people?) The Cirque du Soleil is artistry in motion. It is first and foremost a spectacle, a theatrical live show, two of which are in Japan this year.

The first show is called Zed, which recently became a permanent fixture at Tokyo Disneyland. The second is Corteo, which started showing in Yoyogi Forum, will be visiting Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and Sendai before returning to Tokyo in November.

The idea behind Zed is that it is a living poem, depicting an imaginary world using imagery from the Arcana, described as ‘a central character bringing together the lyrical odyssey at the heart of human experience’. Corteo, on the other hand, dramatizes the life and imagined death of a clown, and his own imagined festive funeral attended by his friends and former lovers – all presided over by a host of angels.

If you can digest all that, then it should come as no surprise that the artists who make up the Cirque’s troop are also an extraordinary group of people. While they can leap and dance and twist and bend and tumble and turn like nothing I’ve ever seen before, many of them are also parents. And though they don’t exactly have what you’d call a nine-to-five office job, their lives manifest the ultimate balancing act between extraordinary careers and parenting: Walking a tightrope by day and simultaneously (the scariest of all jobs) raising and educating their children.

The artists of the Corteo show travel with their families. While the majority of the Corteo entourage are lodged in hotels, those with families stay in self-catering apartments. The mind boggles at the logistics!

Corteo’s School Star Pupil

In the park one day, while mulling over educational issues and worrying if I had made the right choices for my own kids regarding their schooling, I met by chance a nine year old girl whose father is one of the artists with the Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo show. She’s from Kazakhstan and speaks English with a strong North-American accent. She might just be the coolest nine-year-old I’ve ever met. 

Sasha is articulate, funny, energetic, smart and hates maths. Though we spoke in English, she’d have been equally at ease had she been interviewed in French or Russian. She is currently the one and only student in the Corteo School, which is housed in the unlikely setting of a prefab building behind the Cirque du Soleil’s Big Top. She goes to school there four days a week, while the fifth day is home-schooling with Mum, in Russian. She joins the Zed kids’ school in the Disneyland site once a week for gym, art and drama. She is currently at Canadian Grade 4 level, following Quebec’s English curriculum. 

She likes badminton and watching TV. She hates sushi. She hasn’t decided what she wants to be when she grows up, although it most probably won’t be swinging from the chandeliers in a Big Top as she doesn’t really like gymnastics, in spite of her mum being former gymnastics trainer. At breaktime, she throws ball with the aerial ballerinas, and at lunchtime, she chows down in the canteen with some of the clowns. And she does her homework like every other nine-year-old, that is to say, sometimes reluctantly.

For Sasha, kindergarten in Kazakhstan must seem like a long time ago, as she has been entirely schooled since then ‘on the road’. From the age of five, when the Corteo show first started touring in the US, she has gone to the Corteo school. Although other teachers and students have come and gone, it is Sasha who remains the ‘permanent fixture’ in this otherwise fluid world. Perhaps it is her unique character that allows these two seemingly polar opposites to blend so well – the artistic realm of the circus and the educational domain of the classroom.  

There are not many nine-year-olds who can list all the states and their capitals in the US – something Sasha remembers because she has visited most of them in person. She recounted wonderful tales of car trips across the Arizona desert with her family in between shows. For anyone who might doubt that a travelling circus could be a conducive environment for primary education, a short time in Sasha’s company would assuage their doubts. 

Corteo’s Travelling Teacher

Suzanne Malo, Corteo’s travelling teacher, originally comes from Manitoba and happened upon this unusual job by chance. After quitting her former teaching post and taking off to New Zealand for a year, getting back into a regular classroom didn’t seem so appealing. So while checking out the Cirque du Soleil website for a show in Montreal that she’d been invited to, she clicked the ‘job opportunities’ icon and, as they say, the rest is history. 

She has been teaching Sasha the English version of Quebec’s standard Grade 4 syllabus. This is not a ‘distance learning’ programme, as Sasha is a registered student with the Quebec’s Board of Education, with Suzanne merely delivering the programme.

The advantage of this for Sasha is that she has a one-on-one tutor. No competition for the teacher’s time or attention! Other potential difficulties of ‘distance learning’ are avoided too. There is no online tutor or e-mailing of assignments to an off-site monitor, which can be very impersonal and abstract, especially for young kids. 

Suzanne faces other challenges, however, with this unique set-up. The most obvious difference and difficulty is the lack of a group dynamic. Other students’ questions, answers, mistakes and everything else that happens in a larger class, which makes up the learning process, is lost. Here, it is entirely up to one very curious student and one extremely inventive and energetic teacher to compensate for the absence of this group dynamic. When I visited, however, it seemed to me they were doing just fine.

When I asked Sasha what exact role her dad plays in the Corteo, she told me, “He throws the girls.” My shock must have been apparent as she quickly added, “But it’s OK. He catches them again too!” (And indeed, on seeing the show after our interview, I can confirm that he does just that.) So while her dad is flinging the aerial ballerinas from frightening heights and dangling upon scarily thin ropes in the Paradis section of Corteo, entertaining millions of people year in and year out, he can rest assured that his eldest daughter is in the best of hands at school.

Sayonara…

Sasha set me to thinking about education and all the amazing choices that are at our disposition in the twenty first century. ‘School’ doesn’t have to mean going somewhere from nine to four, into a class of 30-plus kids, wearing the uniform and going to school sports each Saturday morning. It doesn’t even have to mean a set location. These days it can be – and in this case so clearly is – so much more. Corteo shattered my preconceptions on so many levels, by presenting the artists and their mind-boggling contortionism and the grounding needed for a proper schooling.

This unassuming nine-year-old is a credit to her parents and their brave choice to continue working at what they love while raising their family on the road. She is a credit to her teacher, whose job it is to keep her interested and stimulated in this unique but sometimes difficult job. 

And one day, if my life gets too hectic and stressful and if one more of my own children whines at me, then it might just be me rather than the kids who leaves a sayonara note saying, “See ya ‘round kiddos. Mummy has run away to the Cirque!” 

Cirque du Soleil Corteo Japan Tour 2009 – 2010

Osaka: 29 July 2009 – 18 October 2009

Tokyo: 4 November 2009 &  24 January 2010

Fukuoka: 11 February 2010 – 4 April 2010

Sendai: 21 April 2010 – 6 June 2010

Check out the Cirque du Soleil website for more details of the shows near you!

www.cirquedusoleil.com

About Dana Killalea