ArtsEmerson is opening its 10th anniversary season with the U.S. premiere Of "Passengers." It is the latest production by The 7 Fingers, Montreal's world renown circus troupe, and will run Sept. 25 through Oct. 13. Two of the shows performers, Sabine van Rensburg and Brin Schoellkopf, joined Boston Public Radio Friday to talk about the production.
The show is described as a mix of circus theater, illusion and dance, all rolled up in a nostalgia for trains. Rensburg told BPR that the premise was inspired by the experience of director Shana Carroll traveling on trains when she was young. "I would say that it is basically this universal global feeling of leaving a place or why go towards another place," Rensburg said about the shows meaning.
Despite being about trains, the show does not have any actual train sets. "We are manipulating — we have chairs — and we kind of create the scene and create these forms that look like trains," Schoellkopf said. "Then it immediately disappears and kind of weaves in and out of that, and goes into this dreamscape as well of when you are in a train, and what that feels like when you fall asleep and you wake up and you are still on the train."
