Clocking in

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, acrobatic stance, 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 the clock …,” Lashua said. “They’re visually part of the scene, and so that look gives it a very different feel and flavor from the more fantastical kind of dream world setting of what those shows were at the time.”

“So these devices are the things that we kind of build the shows around. 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 the production to lean into an ’80s feel for this show and that 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 in another country.

“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, there are other acts and contraptions to 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 the 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, acrobatics and dance.

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

Lashua said “Tilt!” has layers that move it beyond a typical circus act audiences expect 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.