Cirque de la Pops

Alexander Fedortchev is among the Cirque de la Symphonie performers joining the MSO Pops this weekend.

Over 20 years ago, Bill Allen encountered top-level circuses in the old Soviet Union and had this thought: This is high art.

He’s spent the ensuing decades making something of that idea. Allen is now CEO and executive director of Cirque de la Symphonie. An ensemble of eight aerialists, jugglers, contortionists and strongmen/gymnasts will perform in Milwaukee.

In an interview Thursday, Allen said that he first made the connection in 1989, when his job involved assisting a touring Russian circus in New York. The company was there as part of an exchange program that rose from a Reagan-Gorbachev summit amid thawing relations between the U.S. and the old Soviet Union. That assignment got him an invitation to Russia, where he became good friends with the technical director of the Moscow Circus. On that trip, he began to form the idea of “fusing the two great art forms, cirque and music.”

“I was entranced by this moment, by this opening of Russia,” he said. “And I was mesmerized by the high level of the Russian circus. I developed a mission: To bring the circus to the level of fine art.”

He worked on various projects in Russia and started arranging appearances elsewhere for the circus people he knew. The breakthrough came in 1998, when Allen connected with the Cincinnati Pops.

Aloysia Gavre, of Cirque de la Symphonie.

“The conductor, the late Erich Kunzel, was one of the first to collaborate with us,” Allen said. By 2005, the work had become steady enough to form a standing business, Cirque de la Symphonie. Allen said that the company is busy nearly every weekend during the orchestra season. Its sole mission is to perform with orchestras. It doesn’t do arena shows, and Allen has no intention of landing in a Las Vegas hotel for months on end.

This is not a bus-and-truck company. The performers fly in for a weekend of shows, then fly home. Almost all in Allen’s rotating cast are Europeans living in America. He said that the present group is converging on Milwaukee from Orlando, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami and New York. All of them have been on grueling tours with tent shows; they appreciate the relatively normal life that Cirque de la Symphonie allows.

“They get home in time to take their kids to school on Monday,” he said.

“We do everything in the downstage 15 feet of space, right up close to the audience,” he said. “That’s no place for beginners. And with $500,000 violins nearby, you don’t want a juggler who throws one away now and then.”

Allen said that not all circus people are musical, and he goes out of his way to book those who are.

“I choose some music and send it to a cirque artist and have that person work with it,” Allen said. “We might tweak it after that and have a choreographer work with the artist a little, but I want the performers to feel that it’s their music. I don’t want to over-direct. I want every movement to express the music, as the artist has internalized it.”

He’s careful to balance cirque and symphony.

“This is a special marriage of cirque and masterpieces of classical music,” he said. “The orchestra is on stage, not in the pit. We never put more than two people on the stage at a time, and we don’t need gaudy costumes. We’re not there to distract. The orchestra is not just playing along, it’s central to what we do. This is a true collaboration.”

Note: NO Sunday performance for this program. (The MSO will be on the road for a concert in Green Bay Sunday.) Cirque de la Symphonie concerts are set for 8 p.m. Friday, April 29, and 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, April 30. Tickets are $23-$93 at the MSO website and ticket line, 414 291-7605, and at the Marcus Center box office, 414 273-7206. Resident conductor Stuart Chafetz will be on the podium.