Acrobaticalists thrill with unique blend of style and wit

LONG BEFORE MOVIES, TiVo and YouTube, Americans got their performance kicks (and culture) from traveling troupes of artists: circus, chautauqua, and vaudeville. The arrival of out-of-town artists—toting fanciful costumes, tricks, and flavors—sparked community-wide curiosity and glee. Yet now, in an age of media inundation, in which everything and nothing is new, do we still perk up when a show comes to town?

Consider the case of Nanda, now on their third tour of the region—they will be performing at the Kickapoo Country Fair and in Viroqua at the end of the month. There is something titillating about the arrival of these four mild-mannered, millennial, self-described “acrobaticalists.”

The members of Nanda—who incorporate acrobatics, juggling, slapstick, and Kung-faux martial arts into their shows, as well as original music—have been performing together for six years, at festivals, fairs, rock shows, and with touring neo-vaudeville troupes like New Old Time Chautauqua. The four members—Misha Fradin, Chen Pollina, Kiyota Sage, and Tomoki Sage—knew each other as little babies and grew up together as “feral hippie kids” in the idyllic Port Townsend, Washington.

In the past year or so Nanda has been busy touring throughout the U.S., Mexico, and Canada and performing at festivals and theater shows. This spring the group presented their first feature-length theater show, Jacket. It was a big hit in their hometown, where the Port Townsend Leader said: “Nanda makes men want to be boys again. Women want to have teen idols again.”

In the past 30 years, there has been a resurgence of small-scale traveling troupes in the U.S. From the Pickle Family Circus and the Flying Karamazov Brothers to Cirque du Soleil (yes, even they started as a street show), these pioneers brought back the intimacy and creativity of the small stage and single ring. Now, as a new generation of alternative performers arises, a new style is emerging, and Nanda is at the forefront. Just what is the avant garde of performance, you might ask?

In my experience, as a performer and spectator, the most salient feature of humor today—and a central theme of Nanda and other neo-vaudevillians—is ironic self-reference. Think of the New Zealand comic duo, the Flight of the Conchords, hipsters wearing shirts that say “Hipsters Suck,” or even Seinfeld. This type of humor, which assumes that the audience is always in on the joke, is seeing a revival in our postmodern era of information overload, reruns, and identity crisis. Nanda plays to this humor brilliantly, using the trope of old kung-fu movies. A familiar style to the audience, kung-fu provides a corny yet versatile creative source for the group. And what I personally love about their style is that they don’t stop at the ironic “guffaw,” the chuckle that we are all in on the joke, but push through, with their juggling and acrobatics skills, to create visceral awe. You leave their show affected by the craft and giggling about the goofiness.

It struck me that when I asked the group over the phone which performance traditions they adhered to, they responded: “Future traditions...druidism...BuVu...vaudevillian tradition...dinner eating...not really adhering to any particular traditions.” Funny.

When asked how they navigate the line between something being funny/interesting to them and it being funny/interesting to an audience, again they were slippery: “We don’t....We navigate it like a blind man in a windstorm. It’s very intuitive. Our heart chakras play an instrumental role.” Ironic?

So perhaps the avant garde doesn’t want to name itself. But we can: Nanda is worth seeing. They will perform both July 24–25 at the Kickapoo Country Fair and at 8 p.m. July 27 at the Landmark Center, a fundraising show for the Youth Initiative High School. (See Calendar of Events for more information.)