Text and Photos By Daniel Krieger

Sam Landa and Emma Owens are circus arts evangelists. They met when they were students at Columbia University, bonding over their love of all things circus. This past summer, they launched New York Circus Project, the culmination of years of dedication and practice. Their nonprofit’s three-show inaugural series, the Fall Cabaret, had its final performance last Sunday at 71st Street and Columbus Avenue. It was the biggest and most eye-catching spectacle of this year’s edition of Columbus Avenue Open Streets, which runs until the end of October.

Landa and Owens, who are both 23 and graduated from Columbia last year, each got into circus arts when they were kids. Landa came to it from ballet and Owens via gymnastics. Landa went to high school at the National Circus School in Montreal, the global hub of circus arts. He is an aerialist, with a specialty in trapeze, while Owens specializes in tightrope walking. But in recent years, they both got sidelined by injuries and found the constant training required to be a professional circus performer wasn’t the right path for them. So they pivoted to production.

The pair produced three distinct one-hour shows to spotlight the talents of two dozen circus artists, both local and from elsewhere. “We curated this group of artists, and they brought their own acts with them that they created,” said Landa in a recent interview with WSR. The performance on Sunday, showcasing eight performers doing ten acts, mesmerized the huge crowd. The combination of the wide open street, the dazzling circus performers, and the boisterous audience — full of kids, parents, locals, and supporters of the artists — made for a festive and uplifting communal moment.

An MC introduced each act with a few words about the performers, and the crowd loudly cheered for them all. It was a full house, with several hundred people wrapped around the stage and a dense cluster of children sitting on Astroturf in front.

The show featured a range of circus arts, spanning traditional to contemporary. There were two different types of jugglers, several aerialists each with their own spin, a contortionist and a clown with supposed acrobatic skills that he kept shying away from demonstrating, drawing laughter, until he finally did a backflip. Every time a performer executed a death-defying or simply stupendous trick, the crowd showered them with cheers. At these heightened moments, you could hear exclamations of awe: “Wow!” and “Oh my goodness!” and “Look at that!”

Watching these feats without knowing what was coming next made it so riveting because of the mounting tension. The acts flowed from one to the next, and each was short and sweet, just giving you a little taste of that particular circus discipline and leaving you wanting more. It ended with Mr. and Mrs. G., a couple from Las Vegas who Landa described as “circus royalty.” Their act consisted of shooting arrows with crossbows at targets placed within increasingly precarious proximity to their partner. It was impossible to look away.

Afterward, a spectator who himself has a background in circus arts said the performers were topnotch professionals and he appreciated that it took place out in public in the middle of the street. “The crowd got bigger as the show went on,” he observed. “People walking by just happened upon it.”

Inspired by free events in the city, like Shakespeare in the Park, that’s exactly what the producers had in mind, explained Owens in an interview with WSR. And as for what’s coming next, their plan is to start producing complete theatrical works.

“I’m passionate about using circus to tell narrative stories in the same way that you would go to the ballet and watch a narrative through ballet,” said Landa. “We really want to do that with circus as well.”

And they already have, with a production of Hamlet at Columbia in which they wove circus elements into the story with text and choreography. The success of that show made them realize they were onto something that they can develop further. They plan to bring New York Circus Project Presents Hamlet to an Off-Broadway venue next year. Following that, they intend to produce more narrative shows told through circus, working in a multidisciplinary way with local artists from genres such as theater, fashion, and dance.

“Circus is a very powerful art form for telling big important stories,” said Owens. “We are pretty passionate about showing people what circus can be and what contemporary circus arts looks like.” Contemporary circus arts, they explained, is so much more than the limited American conception of circus that has long been informed by traditional shows such as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, which resumed touring in the US last month. And they will do this work not as performers but behind the scenes — as producers, directors and creators, handling development and operations.

And now, with the first production of their brand new circus company behind them, they are ready for act two.

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