Clocking in: ‘Cirque Mechanics: Tilt!’ brings flips and thrills to Popejoy Hall

Defying gravity takes on a new meaning as “Cirque Mechanics: Tilt!” comes to Popejoy Hall, bringing an 18-foot-tall man-powered Ferris wheel.

“The show is set in a 1980s amusement park,” Chris Lashua, show founder and producer, said, “and so we have a Ferris wheel that actually comes to life with people that are pushing it and pulling it and climbing on it.”

Lashua started with Cirque du Soleil and then founded his own company with Aloysia Gavre. They decided to combine a mix of circus, acrobatics, theater production and narrative story in a real-world setting, alongside large mechanical contraptions.

“I build these mechanical contraptions that look more at home in a factory or inside (a) clock,” Lashua said.

The show is built around those mechanisms.

“Often we’ll start with a device,” Lashua said, “and then we’ll think about where that device (is), what it does, what it looks like and how we could immerse that in some kind of real-world setting.”

He said he wanted to lean into an ’80s feel for the show and found an amusement park seemed like the perfect fit.

“This one on the whole ’80s thing, it’s very much, I wouldn’t say, poking fun, but we’re absolutely going down that path and we’ve got a composer who wrote music that very much feels of that era, and it’s fun,” Lashua said.

The centerpiece will be the Ferris wheel, inspired by a video Lashua’s wife saw of men working on one.

“These guys would run up this thing, climb all over it, throw themselves off, hang on to it, and propel the wheel around,” Lashua said, “and it just looked like a circus.”

While the Ferris wheel acts as the main mechanical piece in the show, other acts and contraptions also lend to the amusement park theme.

“There’s a five-person act of teeterboard,” Lashua said. “Which is like a teeter-totter, like a seesaw, where people are jumping on each end of the teeter-totter, and they’re throwing the other person on the end higher and higher into the air, and they flip and land back on the board.”

“That act is actually created to mimic the ride of a roller coaster,” Lashua said.

He said the show also features juggling and dance.

A popular act, he said, is a clowning piece with a plate-spinning act. Another favorite is a man on stilts who swings an acrobat between his legs and then up in front of him, catching her.

Lashua said “Tilt!” has layers that move it beyond a typical circus to something surprising and new.

“Because of the nature of the fact that we build things that are mechanical and they support the arts, we have a really unique ability to connect with people who typically wouldn’t go to theater,” Lashua said.

Elizabeth Secor is an arts fellow from the New Mexico Local News Fellowship program. You can reach her at esecor@abqjournal.com.