BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Circus Festival (VCF) launches Sunday, Nov. 1 and will run through Sunday, Nov. 8, offering a full week of opportunities for all kinds of circus immersion in multiple locations in Brattleboro and Putney.
Produced by Brattleboro’s New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA), the festival, for which the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance is a promotional partner, has been chosen as a “Signature Event” by the Vermont Department of Tourism, which offers marketing support to this festival’s second iteration.
“This is our second year, and it grew out of what we used to call circus workshop weekends we did for many years,” Serenity Smith Forchion, NECCA’s producing director and co-founder, tells The Commons.
“A couple of years ago, we started adding more performances and community social events and soon we looked at each other and went, ‘You know, this is a festival.’ So last year we rebranded as the Vermont Circus Festival, and it’s now more inclusive of other ways that people might engage in the circus,” she says.
The dates for the festival were chosen, according to a media release, “in collaboration with area hotels and restaurants as a way to draw visitors to the town during what is historically a slow time for business.”
Brattleboro’s long embrace of circus dates to the mid-1800s, when circuses would arrive by train to disembark where the Amtrak station now stands.
As described by a news release for the festival, elephants and horses would walk off the train, then pull wagons with tents and exotic animals across the bridge to a field on Island Park in the middle of the Connecticut River (since “washed away by hurricanes and flooded by dams”). Thousands would come to the circus.
Through the founding of NECCA 19 years ago, the circus has been back in town robustly. The nonprofit attracts students from around the world to its Trapezium on Town Crier Drive, where many of the VCF events will be held.
Events for all
The festival offers nine unique shows, clown activities happening throughout town (“so people can clown around with us,” Smith Forchion says), activities for kids and adults alike, and workshops.
“If you’re someone who would rather go to a book reading by someone who wrote a book about their experience in the circus, or you want to come to the storytelling hour, or if you want to just see some high level circus — we’ve got performers coming in from Chicago and from Canada,” she says.
Opening day around town features a free community day of circus classes for youth, adults, and seniors, as well as a free family circus show at the NECCA Trapezium.
In all, over the course of the Festival week, some 60 workshops are offered in “everything from mime to flying trapeze, low wire to aerial silks” as “hundreds of students [come] to the area for an opportunity to learn from top coaches who are also performing in the shows.”
In addition, pop-up shows will be created to perform at Brattleboro Area Middle School and a couple of assisted-living sites. Nine circus shows will offer a variety of entertainment, the release explains, “from the one man show, Happy to Be Here! by former Ringling Bros. star Jan Damm to The Pieces by the acclaimed ALOFT Circus ensemble.”
Guest company Circus Smirkus will present a show created expressly for the festival, and two versions of NECCA’s popular open stage Beta Night are offered. A circus-themed storytelling event — a collaboration with The Moth and the Retreat Farm — will bring forth true stories about circus adventures developed during a month-long Moth Community Program workshop.
In addition to the Trapezium, events and workshops also take place at Brooks Memorial Library, Withington Memorial Ice Rink, Retreat Farm, and the Cotton Mill in Brattleboro and at Landmark College in Putney.
Funding the festival
The American Circus Alliance, a national organization, “is a partner of ours and they’re helping to support our free social events,” Smith Forchion says.
A Saturday night event is open to “anyone who’s a fan of circus or who supports circus to gather, talk about circus, [and] eat free pizza,” she says, and Maple Coffee Company in Putney will “host a queer meetup to help support our queer demographic coming in” and let them connect before a show.
A $36,300 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts “helped seed our ability to bring in some of the bigger name shows [such as] The Pieces by ALOFT,” Smith Forchion says, noting the Chicago-based group “just rocked the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.”
“We wouldn’t be able to have them here if it weren’t for the support of the NEA grant,” she says.
NECCA also received a grant from the Town Arts Fund of Brattleboro, a program of the town and the Arts Council of Windham County, which is helping to pay for the Community Circus Day on Sunday, Nov. 1.
As described in a May news release from the arts council announcing the grants, which range from $1,000 to $3,000, the event, one of 16 “community-centered creative projects,” features “performances, workshops, and participatory activities, culminating in a family-friendly acrobatic clown show.”
“That means a lot to me to be able to offer one of the day’s programming entirely free,” Smith Forchion says.
The Community Circus Day — and the event as a whole — are designed to reflect NECCA’s values.
“What we really hope is that we offer a safe, inclusive, shared space,” Smith Forchion says. “We can bring a sort of joy, whether that’s physical joy or just the interconnectedness of humans.”
For VCF show tickets and workshops, visit necenterforcircusarts.org or call 802-254-9780.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.