Transcription of Under the Big Top #194
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle. Recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Chris: Our end, kind of creative culture making a part of how we think about the fabric of the project right from the beginning has been really key.
Peter: It’s the whole point of circuses, what can a human being achieve and what is that experience like, and how do you make that into art and entertainment and performance.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Berlin City Honda of Portland, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms and Bangor Savings Bank.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 194, Under the Big Top, airing for the first time on Sunday, May 31st, 2015. Maine is known for constantly reinventing itself often in fun and interesting ways. Recently, a group of developers has been making significant changes to Thompson’s Point in Portland.
They will be offering space to businesses, artists and a variety of creative folk including a new circus group. Today, we speak with Chris Thompson at Thompson’s Point and with Peter Nielsen of the Circus Conservatory of America about their exciting new ventures. Thank you for joining us.
As a long time resident of Maine, I made many journeys across the bridge looking towards the Portland Jetport. Overtime, I’ve noticed things like a train and the bus station and all kinds of new and exciting things happening over to … If you’re going south, happening over to the right. Now, something really exciting is happening and that is Thompson’s Point.
Today, we have with us Chris Thompson who has developed several hotel and mixed-use projects in New England. Current projects in Maine include Thompson’s Point in Portland and a 93-room Hampton Inn Hotel in Lewiston. Chris is an associate professor at the Maine College of Art and author of Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to me today.
Chris: My pleasure.
Lisa: Thanks for doing something with that piece of land. I think those of us who have lived in Maine a long time we wondered what’s going to be done there because it’s waterfront, it’s riverfront.
Chris: Yeah, it is. It’s an extraordinary site. It’s a 30-acre peninsula with really … It’s water on all sides. It’s got 295 right next to it, the transportation center right across the tracks. I mean, it’s an extraordinary piece of land. I mean, you’d search the world for something with that much in a potential but that’s always been the key, its potential and how do you activate that.
That’s why it sots along. It was a really a challenging site to pull all the pieces together, the access, the environmental, all of that. We’ve been at it for about 6 years and it’s taken that much time to do all the ground work really when it come to life.
Lisa: If I remember correctly, there was more of an industrial use to it previously?
Chris: There was, yeah. It’s an amazing site with a great history. It’s an old rail yard and all of the existing buildings, there are a couple down there today still standing or at least parts of old buildings still standing that were all part of the old rail complex.
All the buildings were positioned so that trains could move in them, through them and get shuttled across the site and there was this spider web network of tracks leading in and out of buildings. Just an extraordinary site that there’s still a couple of pieces left that we’re trying to bring back to life and then of course add new construction to that.
Lisa: What drew you to that site? What was it about that landmass?
Chris: I think a lot of folks like you made that trip passed Thompson’s Point said, “How can that not be something else? What will it take for that to be something else?” The answer was a lot of mixed-uses that worked together in synergy because otherwise it’s virtually impossible to carry the cost, the infrastructure cost alone of a large project like that.
You really need a few uses to gather that make sense and can happen more or less together. Our group has done hotel development. A lot of mixed-use projects like a lot of small development companies in Northern, New England. Our group became a fairly multidisciplinary one and that worked in a lot of different commercial real estate product types.
Over the last maybe 10, 15 years hospitality and hotel development and management has been our key focus. A lot of our projects are either hotel projects or mixed-used projects that have a hotel and hospitality component. We love that business of welcome and greeting, making sure people have a great experience whether it’s in a hotel or in a larger project as a whole.
We had been interested in … and this was back, this was probably 7 years ago before a lot of the new hotel rooms had come in to the market. We were looking at a couple of different sites in town for a potential hotel site. Our family were owners in the Red Claws team. We were talking about the Red Claws that had a first season and we’re looking at possibly doing a practice facility.
We have been interested in doing a hotel. We were looking at Bayside as were they, down near where Whole Foods is today. We said if the Red Claws want to do a practice facility and we could do the hotel project and there was another group who is interested in doing an office building and pretty soon the project outgrew Bayside and we said, “Well, let’s look at Thompson’s Point. If we have this kind of a mix, we probably could put something together.”
That’s what led to it, feeling like there was enough critical mass to really make it make sense and leap of the curve and take a risk. Of course, it’s like anything in life, any creative project, what you start with and what you end with are often radically different in form but not often in terms of the impetus and the goal behind it.
I think right from the beginning for the last 6 years plus, our goal has been to transform that site into a really great mixed-use project that feels like it’s part of Portland. I think when we started we had a slightly different approach to the site. We had other pieces of the site that were not available that since then we’ve been able to pull in the Suburban Propane site for example when we started.
We were just working around them. Since then, we’ve been able to put a deal together to get them to relocate. We’ve been able to really pull that whole peninsula together and really look, I think afresh at what’s there. It’s obvious in hindsight and surprising that this wasn’t the way we began the project. I think we assumed it would have to really essentially scrape the site and build new and make the whole site come out of the ground at the same time.
In hindsight, I think we didn’t spend enough time really paying attention to what was there that could be kept. Those 2 old existing brick buildings are just extraordinary resources. Then there’s a piece of the old Union Station actually at the site which is remarkable. It was the building that for a long time was covered with corrugated metal and plywood and surrounded with debris.
It was the thing that everybody saw when they looked over at Thompson’s Point and said, “That’s terrible. We got to be able to do better.” Lo and behold, when you strip all the junk of the outside of that building it’s an extraordinary old steel structure that was part of the old Union Station.
It’s about a third of the old rail depot that people used to come in and out, coming into St. John Street. We restored that and we rebuilt the structure of it and put in a new slab and a roof. That’s where we had the Beer Camp event last summer.
Lisa: Well, tell me about that. This was the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp which was the summer of 2014.
Chris: It was. It was our first event. It was about a 3500-person event. At the time we were still finishing up all the offsite infrastructure. There’s a lot of work that development projects require that you don’t see which things like road widening and underground infrastructure and rail crossings and all that sort of stuff. That work was nearly complete and really, it was a real hustle to get everything ready to accommodate that event.
Sometimes having an event like that is what you need to really push everybody to move at warp speed to get everything done, ourselves included. That event was just remarkable. It was Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp which was a cross country tour that Sierra Nevada was part of and there were a couple of key craft brewers, Allagash, others, that were part of the train.
Then at each location they would assemble this great collection of local. Wherever they were, it was the local brewing community who would get together around this core event. Maine just had this unbelievable turnout and of course Maine has an amazing craft brewing both history and present. There’s just some amazing folks doing amazing things with beer and all of its forms.
The all converge for this event and it was just spectacular. It was really interesting too because that depot structure, that old pavilion building, Sierra Nevada and all of its other locations had just used temporary tents. That was the way they had assembled it and that had been their plan before they came to Portland.
Even though they knew that structure was there, their model was a different one and then saw that and said, “Let’s really think about how to use that thing.” Set everybody up, all the local brewers and the beer hall environment underneath that roof. It was just an amazing experience. Everyone who we talked to just had a blast. That was our first event. It was just I think a really remarkable one that let us I think see what the site could be when it really became a hospitality center.
We’ve been talking with Laura Wayne and the state theater folks for a while about how to put an outdoor concert series together. That goes live this summer. We’ve got 3 concerts already confirmed and there’s one or 2 others that may get done this summer too.
Lisa: Who will be there?
Chris: We have Ingrid Michaelson on June 28th, we have Primus and Dinosaur Jr. on July 27th which I’m particularly excited about. I live on primus during college. Then we have Grace Potter on August 1st, so those are the confirmed shows. It should be fun.
Lisa: It’s a diversity of music represented there, I think.
Chris: I think it’s a natural extension of what the state theater is doing which is growing this just world class modest in size. I mean, the state theater is a couple of thousand capacity and then they got Port City. It’s this great and then of course when they know, when they have something like Mumford & Sons, I mean they know to do a big show and really do it right.
I think Mumford & Sons really showed everybody what Portland could do and that’s really Laura and her team really making sure the experience is good because that’s what it’s all about. I mean, people will come back if you treat them right and make them feel like they’ve had a good experience and good value.
Maine, Portland has such an amazing music community and she’s really I think led the charge and giving that a form to really be as great as it can be and bring in some great acts. We’re really excited about the partnership with her this summer.
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Lisa: We at Love Maine Radio are fortunate to have a collaborative relationship with Apothecary by Design and to offer an ongoing speaker series. The next speaker in this series is me. We invite you to join me and hear more about finding wellness in water and nature. We’re going to be discussing the brain, the body and the deep blue sea.
During this event, we’ll explore the power that water has to relax, restore, and revive our spirits from a neurobiological perspective. We’ll give you some tips for putting these things into action in your own life. This event will take place on Monday, June 1, 2015 from 5 to 7pm at the offices of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland.
For more information, visit the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or lovemaineradio.com. This event is free, but we would love to know if you’re coming. We hope to see you on Monday June 1, 2015 from 5 to 7pm. It’s going to be a great time and you’ll learn a lot, plus I just like having my friends around me. Thanks. You also had Sam van Aken and the Tree of 40 Fruit.
Chris: We do.
Lisa: You’ve had music scheduled and art in the past, on the future, I’m assuming.
Chris: Sam van Aken and Tree of 40 Fruit project is this wonderful experiment that has rarely born fruit where he began with a question like all great all starts with asking the right question. He wondered what had happened to all these great varieties of heirloom stone fruit that he knew were out there in the world, the such and such plum from the 14th century.
I mean, in theory someone is still growing this but I can’t find them anywhere and it’s because the world of monolculture takes hold. Our kid doesn’t want to eat the yellow plum so we don’t want to buy it. The store doesn’t want to carry it and pretty soon the farmer doesn’t have any reason to grow it. Of course that’s the trend overtime.
Maine used to be I learned from this great artist Sam van Aken who I’ve been working with. Maine used to be one of the nation’s top producers of stone fruit which is a fruit with a pit, plum, et cetera. Now, where did that go? He started trying to figure out where are these varieties and how can I find them.
He was a Syracuse … Actually still a professor at Syracuse and found this orchard in upstate New York that have been part of the state university system or something that was about to get bulldozed because they couldn’t continue to support the growing of these varieties because they couldn’t find a market for them.
He convinced them to let him take over the lease for a while and call what he could and bring it home with him and figure how to get it at least stabilized. Then he figured well, I don’t have X thousand acres of a farm of my own. How do I get creative and efficient and figure out how to graft multiple different varieties under the same tree.
He calls it an orchard on a tree. You got one trunk up to these 40 different varieties that he works with. It’s this really interesting pretty radical preservation of these great historic varieties that our grandparents and great grandparents use to be able to find and eat and taste.
That’s one of the fascinating things that we learn from him is that in the old days the first thing that use to matter was how does it taste, second was how does it look and third was how well does it ship because it would come off the tree or come out of the ground to be in the store within moments or days. Now, it’s the complete inverse of that.
How does it ship, as question 1? How does it look in the display shelf, question 2? Then how does it taste is the distant 3rd. One of the things that’s really remarkable about this project is when you could pull one of these things off the tree and eat it. It’s a taste that no one gets anymore. In fact some of them no one’s had around here anyway, ever.
You get a 14th century French plum. I mean that’s pretty cool to be tasting something that’s 500 years old. Anyway, so this all goes back actually to the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp event. When we were planning that event, we remembered that Sam, this artist had done this really cool project back in 2005 called the Time Machine.
When he was at University of Maine, he used to show work at the Whitney Art Works Gallery on York Street which was great, contemporary art gallery that was around for a few years and he did a show and one of the great pieces. I’ll never forget was this Time Machine which was a workman’s trailer, just a regular old work trailer from the outside but on the inside it was a replica, Irish pub that he had recreated with the green walls and the wood paneling and the oak table.
He had the great innovation that in my mind made a better than any pub you ever go to of actually having the pump register on the table. You could sit and fill your glass without even getting up and have the shelf for the Irish whiskey and all the stuff that’s cool. I mean, it’s a tiny space. Maybe 5 by 9 square … I mean it’s a tiny space and you can fit 4 in there comfortably, maybe 6 if you really get cuddly.
This is just a great project. We said, “With the beer camp coming, I wonder of the Time Machine is still out there. Maybe we could get it and hitch it up to the trailer and bring it to Portland.” All these artists do all these great projects and end up paying someone to store them. They never see the light of day again and indeed that was the case with the Time Machine.
It was just sitting in his barn and he said, “I’m happy to hitch it up and bring it to Portland. In fact, I’m coming to Maine for this tree project that I’m working on.” Of course we said, “What tree project?” and that was the Tree of 40 Fruit. He sent me about 10 different links. There was a TED talk that he had done and interview in Epicurious, just all these great stuff. I just consumed it.
I read 1 interview in Epicurious where he had talked about wanting to do a grove of these trees. I thought that’s it. That’s what we got to do. We got to be the first grove of the Tree of 40 Fruit anywhere in the world. What a great link to the goal behind our project which is to take this really interesting hybrid form and figure how to let it … Not to get too poetic, but how to let it bear fruit.
The idea is that we planted the first 4 trees which is the core part of the grove last October. They’re in the ground now. You can drive down and check them out. There’s all these little white tags on the branches. In each one of those is a different variety. You can go down and see the tags fluttering in the wind and you can imagine that those all will be multiple varieties of these really cool peaches, plums, et cetera.
The plan is that as the site gets built out the grove will grow so that when a building comes online, we plant another couple of these trees of 40 fruits so that overtime the site and the grove grow together, sort of Johnny Appleseed style to be able to really create, I think this pretty fantastic orchard for the residents of Portland.
One of the great things, I think about how the project is unfolding is the infrastructure, the sidewalks, getting into the site. Those are the first things to come so before the buildings are even all built out there, there’s an invitation and a way to get to the site. That’s the first thing that occurred.
As the people who live in Libbytown and Rosemont and elsewhere in Portland, see these things coming online. They just walk in to the site that can function as their backyard and have an orchard there which I think for us is what it’s all about.
Lisa: You were an active professor at the Maine College of Art in art history and cultural history. You have a PhD from the University of London. You have a …
Chris: Seamless move into real estate.
Lisa: Well, I think it’s interesting that you have incorporated your art background into the work that you’re doing with real estate. I actually think that it’s important because not everybody is able to see the business and the art side of things. I think they often are held separate and then that causes frustration if you’re an artist. The business side comes hard or if you’re a business person and you can’t access that art side of yourself. It’s interesting that you’ve been able to bring these together and it’s largely as a result of your own background.
Chris: I think that’s a big part of it and I think I grew up with a real estate developer. My stepfather was a developer. He’s great, just fantastic. He passed away a couple of years ago. We were fortunately able to work together for a number of years before he died. One of the things that I learned early on was how much real estate development and really all entrepreneurship in general is a creative practice, one where it’s like being a painter or being a culture and musician.
It rests with you. If you don’t get out of bed and do it, it’s not going to get done and real estate development is the same thing. You have your attorneys and your architects and your contractors, but if you don’t get out of bed and move the ball forward, the project doesn’t occur at the end of the day.
There’s nothing necessarily special about me or him other than you get out of bed and be the cat herder and figure out how to make this project that you know can occur actually happen. It’s like having a studio practice in that sense. I guess for me, right from the beginning, it made sense that taking something and turning it into something else which is what real estate development ultimate is.
I mean, there are people who made great careers doing nothing but class B office buildings. They may not look at it like I looked at it but I think what they’re doing is creative practice like anything else. It takes building things and steps and responding to things that change because the world changes. We’ve been working on this project for over 6 years.
Portland has changed a lot. When we started, it was the hay day of the recession. I mean we could literally walk into the planning board. Now you got to wait months because Portland is thriving. You got to be able to change and rethink and respond to changing conditions in the world like art makers do. I think the other thing as a professor at MCA I learned was how truly creative art students and artists are.
It’s not just in the ways that they think they’re creative. They look at history differently than a trained historian. They look at entrepreneurship differently than a business person. They’re no less creative, inventive and motivated. In fact to me, the history of real estate and the history of artist are really one in the same and that you take all these great places in the world that became cool, think of SOHO or Williamsburg or East Bayside.
I mean, these are places where creative work found a home and figured out how to flower and then the city suddenly realized that that was great and cool and other things starting to occur around it. That’s really I think the story of great culture happening in cities that either are great or become great.
For me that’s just a fascinating model and one that I think artist and people who trade in making culture, I think need to be mindful of and need to understand what role they play in making that happen and require some of that equity that they’re creating, they have some ownership in.
For me, how to build that into a model, how to actually make sure that that occurs, that it doesn’t just become a cool place no one can afford to live anymore. I mean, you have to balance that. I guess conversely, that’s the other side that I think coming from the real estate side you bring to the table is you need to have a balance of kinds of risk and a project.
You can’t just do 100% highly risky, let’s hope that this occurs. You have to balance that with some more stable component of your project so that the ones that are really fairly radical and progressive and need help and support in order to thrive. Take for example at Thompson’s Point, we have this great project called open bench which a guy named Jake Ryan put together.
It’s this really interesting model. It’s a membership structure for makers of all kinds to be able to have a facility that they can use and share. They’ve got private workspace. They’ve got access to shared equipment. They’ve got great programming. That’s a project to me represents how Portland is changing and becoming.
I think this really fascinating small city. It’s growing in ways that I think make facilities like that possible in a way that, would they have been a few years ago, I don’t know. I think for us, we can’t have a whole project of entirely open bench. That wouldn’t work but neither can we have a whole project of office buildings. I mean, who needs more of that? You need a couple.
Having those and open bench be on the same piece of the earth, with a circus conservatory and a hotel and really putting all these uses together and balancing them out I think is to me what makes a great place possible, not just a great commercial estate project. You can do an office park anywhere in the world, why do it in Portland?
Well, someone else might really want to do that. That’s not what we do. I think you’re absolutely right that that comes from … at least for me and everybody will have their own trajectory that gets them to where they are but for me seeing how integral artist and people who make culture really are to cities becoming great.
Figuring out how they get woven in to the project from the very beginning and not being the whole concern about public art or coming in later. We’re done with the project. I guess be grudgingly, we have to let someone put up a mural now. I wish that didn’t have to happen that way and it really doesn’t. I mean, things like that don’t add complexity to the process, they don’t add a lot of cost.
If you think about them early, they often add tremendously to your project and save you money. For us, I think making sure that our end kind of creative culture making a part of how we think about the fabric of the project right from the beginning has been really key.
Lisa: I’m excited to go up here maybe Ingrid Michaelson and Jim or to see the tree. I haven’t seen the tree yet, the Sam van Aken, Tree of 40 Fruit. Chris, is there a website, how do people find out more about Thompson’s Point?
Chris: There is. If you go thompsonspointmaine.com, you’ll find a wonderful website that launched several months back. Then there’s also links to the state theater site in there. They’re essentially the keeper of the concert logistics and information if you want to know how to book it, take it or where to park or what have you.
You can go to either. You mentioned Ingrid Michaelson on the 28th of June which is our first show, then there’s Primus on July 27th with Dinosaur Jr. That’s a duo that I’m particularly excited about. Grace Potter, August 1st. Then there’s a couple of other events. The circus conservatory is hosting the American Youth Circus Organizations festival which is actually a pretty remarkable thing for a startup institution.
There’s institutions all over the place that buy to get this event. They secured it so there’s 400 gifted young circus folks from all over the country converging on Thompson’s Point in mid August. They’ll be at least one public performance down there so that should be pretty cool. There’s a couple other things in the works, couple other smaller events. There’s a Makers Market that’ll start and become a regular thing on every Saturday morning down there. There’s lots of activities starting in June and going forever.
Lisa: Excellent. Well, I’m very glad to know that now as we’re flying in to Portland or we’re driving to the airport or we’re going to the bus station and we’re going to be looking at this great project that’s bringing art and business and culture to the City of Portland. We appreciate you’re doing that.
Chris: It’s our pleasure.
Lisa: We’ve been talking with Chris Thompson who has developed several hotel and mixed-use projects in New England. We look forward to hearing more about Thompson’s Point here in Portland. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Chris: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up. I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream.
Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow, sometimes those are the aha moments.
If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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Lisa: Growing up in Maine, I had the opportunity to go to what is considered to be a more traditional circus at the Cumberland County Civic Center which is now not called the Cumberland County Civic Center. What was going on that was beyond a more traditional circus, I didn’t really know much about. Now, there’s a lock going on which the circus here in Maine.
Today we have Peter Nielsen who is the president of the Circus Conservatory of America, who’s going to talk to us about the circus and his approach to the circus which is really very exciting so thanks for coming in.
Peter: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Now Peter, your background, you have 25 years of organizational leadership background. You produced theater, music, performance poetry, dance and visual arts events and festivals throughout New England for more than 2 decades. I mean, you’ve done a lot of things and been in a lot of places doing them. Tell me why the circus?
Peter: The circus I discovered mostly through my son. My son is now 20 years old and he’s studying in Montreal to become a professional circus performer but when he was born, we were living in Vermont and we were on the trail for the summer tour of Circus Smirkus which is headquartered in Vermont and towards around New England, it does 70 shows and 7 weeks every July and August.
They would finish up their summer tour in August on Montpelier where we’re living. We had these little kids, Isabel and Noah and we would take them to the circus and when they would come home, they would just start doing even when they were just 2, they would do summersaults and just try to mimic what they had seen.
They would do it all the way until the next year when the circus would come back. They were really big Smirkus fans. As my son, my daughter got really into dance and went off in that direction but my son was just really into all kinds of movement that was extreme movement. He would take his tricycle down the hill at 100 miles an hour and just find all kinds of ways to be dangerous.
He had incredible sense of balance which a friend of mine who was a stilt walker recognized. This friend of mine builds Noah a pair of stilts when he was 8 and they were big, tall stilts. Noah got right on them and talked to my friend who basically said you don’t really have to learn how to walk on them, that comes easy. You have to learn how to fall.
Noah at 8 years old, just takes me outside and says all right, I got to start falling. He just had this fearlessness and sense of balance and determination. All of that became characteristics that led him into the circus. We let him to go to Circus Smirkus camp and he auditioned for the Big Top Tour. He got to it eventually and he toured for 4 years doing those 70 shows in 7 weeks with Circus Smirkus.
That exposed me to this whole culture, this youth culture of what contemporary circus that blew my mind open and maybe realized that there was an opportunity here for more of that.
Lisa: When I mentioned my experience with the circus, my experience really was big elephants and animals. There was acrobatics but it didn’t seem like it’s what you’re talking about. You’re talking about more than a Cirque du Soleil kind of circus.
Peter: I think the distinction and where the shift happened was the kind of circus that most of us grew up with here in the United States was essentially a form of American expansionism, capitalism circus. What that means is that the circus is ancient and has been around and has been a part of almost every society in the history of humanity.
In the United States, it took the form of … It had a lot to do with the expansion of the railroads and the circuses travelling by train from community to community and bringing things that people hadn’t seen before to the frontier like tigers, and lions, and bears and elephants. Also just acting out the Americanism of what was happening.
You ended up with a circus that was driven by this railroad lifestyle and the kinds of people who would live on the railroad and never settled down and things like that. That merged with vaudevillian comedy and what we ended up within the late 20th century was the Ringling Brothers show which was the corporatization of all that earlier frontier rodeos and things like that.
It has a very strong place in American history but a lot of things that happened at the end of the 20th century was exposed to globalization. There were other influences happening in other parts of the world that began to work their way into North America specifically after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russian Soviet Union, let it nationalized the ballet and it nationalized the circus among many other things that we nationalized at that time.
The ballet and the circus both were driven by the same approach of bringing the state‘s influence and military style coaching and discipline to these 2 art forms because the intention was to show how the perfection of the individual would be demonstrated as the triumph of the state really what happened.
They bring all these Russian circus coaches emerge as a disciplined, very highly trained, very capable circus coaches and over the course of the rest of the 20th century, they start moving their way into Western Europe, between the wars getting in evolved in cabaret shows in Paris, meeting up with these French artists and putting together these very artistic circus shows that were also very, very, very high level of athleticism.
That became the basis of contemporary circus. In the 1960s in North America, there was a renaissance of the performing arts and there was also a movement in Quebec for Quebec separatism from Canada. There was a nationalist fervor of having a French cultural identity. Things from France were imported, cultural things were imported to Quebec to create this Quebec identity and circus was one of them.
Over the course of the ‘70s, circus was flourishing. In 1981, the National Circus School of Montreal was formed in Montreal. It is the National Circus School of Montreal, not the National Circus School of Canada. It is also ENC, Ecole Nationale de Cirque. It exists today as the most highly respected circus training school in the world.
Across the street, is an institution formed 3 years later, Cirque du Soleil and its international headquarters are across the street from ENC. They also share a campus with the Toho Theater which is the world’s most purpose-built theater for circus. All this emerged because when this European style circus became part of a French identity of Quebec, the government invested in it because the Canadian government and the Montreal City government and the Quebec Government all wanted to make sure that they maintained this identity that the Quebecers wanted.
They couldn’t create it and they invested in it and institutionalized it, built the school, gave Cirque du Soleil a million dollar grant for its first tour and therein lies the birth of a multibillion dollar industry that is still headquartered in Montreal. Over the next 25 years it moved in across the United States, toured around the United States, eventually settled and built many theaters and shows in Las Vegas.
I think Cirque du Soleil does what I’ve been told about 85% of its revenue in the United States. What happened then in the last 20 years since that all happened is that all kinds of kids across America got exposed to this new style circus. It’s a circus that doesn’t have elephants and tigers and bears anymore. It doesn’t really travel with tents that move from town to town by the railroad.
It’s this European style circus that emphasizes the highest levels of human achievement whether it’s in movement or endearing or in risk taking or in magic or in theater. The whole point of circuses, what can a human being achieve and what is that experience like.
How do you make that into art and entertainment and performance? That’s just a big shift from the white phase, goofy clowns with big shoes running around sweeping up elephant mess. That’s how contemporary circus shifted with American circuses.
Lisa: My understanding is that your son is actually one of the best in the world at a specific way of throwing things in the air. I don’t want to call it juggling. I’m not sure that’s what it’s actually called but, tell me about this.
Peter: He would call himself a juggler when he’s using just street language. He studies object manipulation at Ecole Nationale de Cirque. The specific prop that he focuses on primarily is the Diablo. The Diablo looks like an hourglass of sorts. It’s essentially a sphere, cut in half with the poles connected with the small axle. It’s made out of some kind of rubber, vinyl or something.
It’s the contemporary version of the Chinese yoyo. What he does is he has these and he can use one or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5, however he chooses to have in his act. Most people just use one, unless they’re into this advanced performance. He has 2 sticks in his hand that are connected by a string that’s about 5 or 6 feet long. That axle of the Diablo travels on his string.
He performs that how he’s become so talented out of it is by bringing his own style to it. He studied a little bit of modern dance and ballet. He’s just got the moves really. He adapted his own personal aesthetic to the use of this prop and created a very unique performance style with it. He’s also mastered all the tricks and all these ways you can operate the prop.
It’s like in a lot of contemporary circus, it’s those 2 things combined. You have aesthetic that you develop that unique and personal. Then you have this training of how to actually technically master it. When you can bring those things together into an original performance using an ancient prop, then you’re creating something new.
Lisa: I’m really enjoying hearing about this because my son who’s 21, he was very active. He was very daring, he would have been the kid on the tricycle but unlike you I did not have a friend who was a stilt walker. My son did more traditional route which was baseball, soccer, basketball.
There was something really great about that and something he learned a lot from being on all those teams, he got very good. He no longer does it and there wasn’t … He was a pitcher. That was about as personal as it got. There really wasn’t much of an aesthetic, at least not at that level. To hear that your son is actually pursuing something, that felt so resonant with him. That makes me happy that we offer that to kids these days.
Peter: I can tell you a little bit of a story about a specific moment in Noah’s evolution as a human being. Noah did a lot of that other stuff too. he was a good lacrosse player, a good park skier and did a lot of skateboarding, mounting biking, pretty much anything.
He was in to the traditional things when he went to Circus Smirkus camp, there was … and he was about 12 at the time, 11 or 12. There was this coach there who was about 7 or 8 years older than Noah. He was probably 19. He had been through Circus Smirkus. He basically was looking for something for Noah to do. He gave Noah this Diablo and said try this.
He came back a couple of hours later and Noah had been working on it for 2 hours. Noah, tells me this story, I hear this story once in a while. His coach, his name is Erica Bates. Eric said to Noah, “Wow, you’re really good at that. You should stick with it.”
As Noah said he could have been doing anything at that moment but being a 12-year-old boy and a 19-year-old young man, comes up to you and says, “You’re pretty good at that, you should stick with it.” Noah is like, “That’s why I’m still doing it today because somebody recognized that and told me to not stop.”
That’s a big piece of what when we talk about our kids and how they discover what it is they’re going to do, that mentor that you discover whether it’s a very opportunistic time or perhaps a very vulnerable time is discovering that mentor and having them … You see something in them that makes you respect them. Then they see something in you that encourages you, that’s where it all fires up.
Lisa: That piece is really important to you and important to the work that you’ve been doing with bringing the circus here to Portland. There’s going to be a youth circus element going on at Thompson’s Point this summer what you’re really interested in is more of the coaching element and really creating high level instruction. Is that right?
Peter: Yeah, and I think to connect those 2 points, I think that what we see is seeing these mentorship happening all the way up the ladder of development. We have very young kids who are coming in for … We actually have 5 to 7-year-old programs but also have a 7 to 12-year-old and then we get in to our high school kids. We have these paths that kids can give progressing up through different levels of beginner, intermediate to advanced.
Then we began this year our college club. That was kids who were involved in going to college in this area or at least be in college age. They were invited to come Friday nights and all work together with kids their own age. On Sundays, we have open gym for them.
This group of 19 to 25-year-olds starts working on circus with our coaches. A lot of our coaches are 35 and 40. They’ve toured with Cirque du Soleil and they’ve already had these careers. We have a continuum from 5 to 45 of people helping people just younger than them move up.
What we have going on this summer with these coaches that we have in place now is that we developed a lot of kids in our college club to not only learn a lot of the techniques and acrobatics and different styles of performing circus tricks, et cetera, circus activities. We’ve now asked them to come in and they’re shadowing our coaches in teaching the younger kids.
This summer we have about 8 college age students who are going to be coaching our summer camps. They are going to be mentored by our 35 to 40-year-old performing artists that are visiting us. Together we’re going to create a whole community here on Thompson Point that involved a lot of circus camps and a lot of circus.
Then in the evening a lot of adult circus classes. Our goal over the course of the summer is to pull out those people from those different groups who really want to perform and will be creating and staging performances. We have everything lined up from kids shows by the kids and for other kids to circus nightclub that we intend to build and really power forward within the fall on Thompson Point.
Lisa: When I was growing up, there were the music and drama and art people. Then there were the athletes. Then there were some of us that did music and drama and art and we’re also athletes. There wasn’t that middle ground. What you’re describing right now is that middle ground. You’re describing that true integration of art, aesthetic, physical, kinesthetic. I mean, it’s really pretty amazing to hear what you’re describing.
Peter: Yeah, you hit the nail in the head. That’s the value that I saw in circus. That was the culture that it really attracted me to this because as my son got more involved and as he hit that age of 17, 18 and having all his friends come to the house and stay for a while, they were from all over because they were travelling with Circus Smirkus, et cetera.
I got to see this community, this culture of teenage kids who were super athletes, just they could have made any varsity team they wanted to but what they were in to was this art form. I began to watch this and say this is just unusual to find really artistic, aesthetic kids who are really can talk to you for a long time about a painting or about a book that they read or something but are also just incredibly gifted at using their bodies.
That was interesting but then I started observing what the rest of that culture, what the other attributes included and I found really intelligent kids like off the charts intelligence. Also a real do it yourself culture that was willing to take in anything. All these kids would build their own equipment, build their own props and got into designing their own costumes. It was just do-it-yourselfers.
Then they also had this determination. They were in control of their own destinies. They were just like not just extreme sports kids but extreme humans. That I found really captivating as a culture that I realize was coming from this combination of having this very physical world and being in control of their physical world, having good relationships with their bodies and good control over what they did with it.
That motivated them also to be very nutrition conscious, wellness conscious but then they were also very visionary. I saw that the combination of these 2 parts was just really the integration of the whole mind, body, spirit connection and that what I was witnessing was that when you have that whole triumvirate of your being in balance, then you get this surplus positive creativity.
That’s where I see circus are and what the opportunity that circus brings to anybody. It’s when you can be socially engaged with other people collaborating on something and really feeling that sense of spirit that that will bring. You’re physically working your body and training it to do well with what you’re doing with your movement and your strength.
Then you’re also using your brain and your mind to really look at how to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. It’s been measured that there’s actually cognitive development that happens with focus on juggling and things like that. It’s a really cool culture when you can bring those worlds together.
The other beautiful thing is that it really brings community together as a result because in some of the shows we do, we get people showing up just because they’re in to see the hand to hand act, the partner acrobatics act and to see what people can do. It’s a physical culture. They go from that to a hockey game or to even a boxing match or something.
Then you have other people who see it as a form of dance and a form of art. They take it back and they look at the European paintings that have circus sites. To bring all that together is really part of how we hope to develop the community around the school that we’re building around the conservatory. I think that we have a little strong affinity with that and the vision for Thompson Point in Portland in general.
The way that development is shaping up is to bring the best the both those worlds as well. A very artistic community and a very athletic community and to take that step back, yet, another step, that’s what Maine is. That’s why Maine is the perfect place for this because a lot of people are attracted to Maine for the outdoor recreation opportunities.
Climbing Mt. Katahdin or canoeing the Allagash or something. Yet they also participate in the creative economy and enjoy this quality of life that, that creative economy offers. That’s one of the reasons we came here to do this is that because circus does bring in both of those worlds into 1.
Lisa: For people who are interested, you are doing a first Friday that’s coming up in June?
Peter: Yeah, first Friday, we’ll be in the Congress Square Park, next to the Eastland Westin or Westin Eastland, whatever it is and across the museum. We’ll be in there and we’ll have all kinds of people that are part of our circus community both our professional performing artist and some of the younger students will all be performing together and demonstrating what it is that we do.
They get to show off a little bit and show you what their skills are and show you what the acts that they’ve developed over. It depends on how long they’ve been involved with it but it’ll be a good show.
Lisa: How can people find out about the Circus Conservatory of America? Do you have a website?
Peter: We do, it’s circusconservatory.org. There’s all kinds of information in there about our summer camps and our adult programs and the performances we have coming up. If you’re local too Portland, you can just swing in to Thompson’s Point and you’ll find our building right there. We’re in there a lot and we don’t mind people coming in, checking out what we have going on.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Peter Nielsen who is the president of the Circus Conservatory of America and I’m really excited about what you’re doing. I really appreciate that you’ve had this type of vision and you brought it to Maine. I’m glad that you have a friend who is a stilt walker.
Peter: Excellent. Thank you very much.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 194, Under the Big Top, Our guests have included Chris Thompson and Peter Nielsen. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Main Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes.
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