by kSea Flux

KSea: Hey ho! kSea here, with Chris and kFire of Dreamtime Circus, who just returned from India and China. Was Dreamtime part of China as well?

kFire: A little bit, kind of extension of the project. We were filming the 6 months of tour and then we met up with a friend who's a filmmaker in Beijing to start editing for a full-length documentary.

Chris: Do you want to tell it or do you want me to tell it?

kFire: You can tell it. 

kSea: You can both tell it. [kFire laughs]

been doing it for a while. I brought a staff there. The two of us really brought our fire tools to play around on the beach, for the most part, but we would always attract a crowd – particularly, these kids that were in this one place.

Chris & Matt, Bombay - Photo by Kristy Evans.

They'd kind of hover around us. They were just so fascinated with whatever kind of circusy things we were doing. We decided that we should really actually take a bit of time and choreograph a show, and put on the show for the kids – actually, for whoever wanted to come, whoever was in the community. So we did that. We spent a day, I think, just near the beach, putting together this show. We had made friends with some people at a cafe that were running the cafe. We asked them, 'Hey, can we use your parking lot to do a show tonight or tomorrow night?' They were super stoked on that, because that would bring some of the tourists over to buy drinks and whatever. So we did that. We put on the show, and the kids loved it. The parents of the kids loved it and everyone, the tourists love it. We just got such a great response. They asked us to do it again the following night, like, 'Oh, my sister didn't get to see it!' and stuff like that. Really, we just did that show everywhere we went in all the villages we went to in Indonesia from then on. It really transformed our experience as travelers. There's a real dynamic, particularly in places like Bali, that are very dependent on its tourist infrastructure. You just cannot break down this dynamic that you are, to some degree, a Western tourist or Western traveler, and everyone that you are meeting that's from that country is some way a part of the service industry, serving the tourists that are there, for American dollars. To create any real cross-cultural interactions or relationships in that dynamic is very difficult, but once we started performing and giving something other than just our dollars back to the communities that were hosting us, it really changed things. People were inviting us into their homes and people wanted to know more about us. It changed that whole dynamic. So, we were sitting on the beach one night, thinking about all of this. 'You know, it would be really great to put a really full-on circus troupe together, and do this on a bigger scale in a more coordinated effort.' We've always wanted to go to India. We knew that we weren't going to just go India as tourists, that when we went to India we wanted to do something, like volunteer.

Chris: Exactly. We thought, 'This is the way to do it. Let's just take a fuckin' circus troupe to India and make it happen.'

kFire: That was, what? 2005. We had the idea, but then it took us another year to actually start moving on it. [laughs] I think, in January '06 we had a potluck.

Chris: January '07.

kFire: '07?

Chris: It was October 2006 that we did our first 3-person show. It was January '07 when we did the potluck.

kFire: Oh, right. Okay, so we did a show before. We had the idea and we were putting it out there to friends. Matt Walker, who was Chris' roommate at the time and a clown performer/circus guy, just responded from the beginning. We booked a show just to get started working together with the MAPP project – Mission Arts Performance Project in the Mission – so the three of us put on a 3-person show, which was in Balmy Alley. It was cool, because it was kind of still along the lines of the vision of the project, to be doing performance out in the community, for the community. That show became the basis of which we built off the Between Worlds show, which was their big fundraising shows for India. We developed the characters and the storyline a little bit there. Matt was with us, but we thought, 'We need more people.' In January we had this potluck and put out the idea that we wanted to take a circus to India, and 50 people came.

kSea:That's a good number of people!

kFire: Yeah. Most of those people, the vast majority, stayed and continued through the project. They helped us with putting on the show Between Worlds, and 36 of them ended up coming to India.

kSea: That's quite a crew!

kFire: Yeah. [both laugh] Not all at once, but they came in and out. There was another crew of people that didn't make it out to India but that were part of the circus. It just exploded. It was just an idea, I think, that really responds to people here because there are so many performers here but there's also this political activist social consciousness, and people want to be engaging and not just doing stuff for profit. 

kSea: So, when did you go to India?

Chris: We left October 1, 2007. The tour lasted for 6 months, and then we just hung out in India for a little bit after that, before going to China to work on a documentary.

kSea: As far as the culture between Bay Area and the States and India, what were some of the things you experienced as far as reception and how people enjoyed you?

kFire: India is – it's kind of cliché at this point, but – I think that when anyone talks about India, it is like going to a different planet or a different world. There are so many cultural differences. I don't think any of us were really prepared for it. The only person who had actually been to India was Matt, in the entire troupe.

Chris: Yeah. We had all these people coming to India, and nobody had ever been, except for Matt. There were a couple of people we picked up along the way that had spent some time in India before. Everyone's first experience in India was traveling with this circus troupe.

kSea: Did you plan it before, or was it just like ending up in one spot and then trying to figure out where to go after that?

Chris: Well, we thought we were going to do it that way. That was the original plan, because that is essentially what we
did in Indonesia. 'Wherever we are, we'll do a show.' That seemed to gel well with the general way we do things, but we also had this vision that 'we're going to have all these people there, why don't we see if we can connect with any of the non-governmental organizations, like NGOs, nonprofits that are doing cool work on the ground. We've got a lot of people, we could do some volutneer work.' So we started sending emails out to NGOs all over India. One organization called Swechha, Swechha We for Change Foundation. There were quite a few responses, but everybody said, 'Yeah, give us a call when you're in your area,' but Swechha said, 'No, no no no. This is amazing. We want to work with you guys. Let's put a plan together.' They were very strategic. They're very planning oriented. We found that in Indian culture, too, there's a lot – even though you're often in the midst of chaos, there is a desire to have – people always wanted to know who the leaders was, and to plan things to some degree and to set up shows. They weren't really into the idea of us just going wherever. They really wanted to coordinated us. What they did was put us in contact with NGOs all over the country, so essentially everywhere we went, we would show up and there would be a local organization there to host us. They would often either help us find accommodation or even give us accommodation – floors to sleep on, or whatever. We slept in some crazy places. We slept in a hospital in the middle of a jungle one time, because it was this rural health care organization. Really interesting stuff. We slept in the classrooms of an elementary school of this alternative elementary and nursery school in the hills of Tamalnadu. Just really crazy places. Sometimes they'd hook us up with food. They would often help set up our shows.  This was really good for us because we didn't have to do a lot of that work of finding the venue and setting up the show and figuring out where to do it. It was good for them because they could say, 'Alright, we really want to do some work in this community or build or reputation or our repore with this community. What we're going to do is have a big a free circus show for the people in this community, sponsored by such and such NGO.' We drew press attention everywhere we went. We would work with environmental organizations. It gave them a platform to talk to the media about the toxic waste dumped in the town, or whatever. We had an environmental message in our show as well, so there was a nice fusion with that. The whole thing became very structured. It was originally that we were going to just show up wherever, but by the time we were doing working with Swechha, we had the whole itinerary set up. There was some flexibility – it wasn't like every single show was booked from the time we started, but it was more or less. We knew we would be in this area at this time.

kFire: We've gone back and forth about the pro's and con's of that. Toward the end of the tour, because we didn't have a lot of contacts in some of the last states that we were going to, we switched back to our original model of just showing up and finding the schools and the orphanages or an NGO that's working in the area, and just sitting down and talking to them and trying to set something up when we arrived, which worked pretty well too. To talk about some of the cultural differences, one of the big ones is just the amount of people. Maybe it's just a demographic difference, but so many people in India. There's no taboo on staring, and just getting up close and personal. If you were just traveling alone in India, you would draw a crowd, but we had a bus full of circus freaks. Wherever we went, we had hundreds of people at times. Setting up these shows became pretty serious in terms of having security and having things together.

kSea: Fire safety and things like that.

kFire: Yeah, yeah. The reaction of people was, overall, very positive. They would get very excited. They had never seen something like this before, but when you have hundreds of very excited people, it can get kind of out control. India is kind of famous for mob activity, in Bombay and things like that. We experienced some of that, where if we were just performing in a big open lot and there was no barrier between the audience in ourselves, we would be mobbed. Then we got into issues of being groped. Both the men and the women. 

kSea: Wow.

kFire: Yeah. We knew security was going to be an issue, but it took us some learning experiences to really take it very seriously and think, 'We have to set up the conditions a little more wisely.' Having a raised stage. One of the things found helped a lot was that the other part of our mission was to do workshops with the kids as much as possible in the places we went to.

kSea: Tell me about that. That is something I would really want to get into at some point in time.

kFire: It was really great. They were craving that personal interaction. That's why they wanted to get up and touch us. The more that we could engage directly with them and build a relationship with them, there was more mutual respect that happened. The workshops were really cool. It took us a while to get them going. The more people that came for the troupe, the more people we had to organize the materials and everything. We did juggling and poi. Then we had some acro, like acroyoga and acrobalance.

Chris: Aerial, too.

kFire: Aerial.

kSea: Really, for the kids? How did they take to that?

kFire: They loved it.

kSea: As far as the learning curve, I would imagine that teaching children, a lot of them would just pick it up like second nature.

Chris: It's just pushing them to do something they've never done. Hannah has been doing aerial for so long, she was one of our main aerialists in our show here. She would just sling this silk over a branch on a tree, and the next thing you know she's got a kid hanging upside down, swinging around on it. They're only a few feet off the ground, but everybody's laughing. Here's this kid. He's suddenly swinging from a branch upside down. It wasn't super difficult stuff, but just those little things are huge in their eyes. That's great stuff to do here in the Bay Area, even. We're actually moving toward doing that. Tomorrow I'm doing a juggling workshop at the Mission Arts Performance Project, which is where we did our very first show back in October 2006. That's a bimonthly event, so we're doing circus workshops in the park tomorrow for kids in the Mission. But, to then go to places where there's no TVs. We went to some places where there's no power, no running water, so to then show up there with a circus and teach kids to do these things, we would make very simple juggling balls and just let the kids keep the juggling balls, so if they took to it, if they're into it, then they could just keep doing it.

kFire: That's one thing we were talking about expanding. Another guy, Hitch, who was in our circus, worked in a similar project in Thailand. They had actually raised money to get toys donated. They did workshops and then left toys with the kids at the schools so they could continue to develop their skills. That's a vision for this next tour, to be able to do that.

kSea: Would that be Laughing for Life?

Chris: That's the one.

kFire: Is that the Thai circus?

Chris: Yeah, there's a photo of Hitch on the website with their picture. Basically Hitch and Matthew Freidman, when the Thai circus ended, jumped over to India and joined our circus, which was great because they just infused that experience. They were seeing how we were doing things really differently, and they took the best of both and tried to help.

kSea: Okay, cool. So you're already in touch with them. I know that Andrea and that group got a bunch of donations for toys and devil sticks and things like that. That's already taken care of.

Chris: Well, we haven't gotten the donations, but the connection's made. [everyone laughs]

kSea: What are some of the most memorable experiences that really stick with you? 

Chris: I know the one I like to talk about, which is Chennai. One of the shows that we did that was not planned was when we were staying at -- I don't know, it was actually a Christian social service center. We weren't really working with that NGO, that was an environmental NGO, and they knew of this place that would house people working on activism and humanitarian causes or whatever, so it was a cheap dorm room situation. There was a woman there working with these girls and women that were at this shelter across the street from there. The women in that shelter – a lot of them had been victims of sexual trafficking. These girls had experienced some really serious, hard times. There's really even some horror stories that I've heard about even shelters then, in India, but this place seemed like a pretty positive environment for them. They didn't leave the shelter very much. Most of them stayed there for several years, but going out on the town was just wasn't really something that they do. We got to talking, thinking that it would be great to do something with them. We were pretty booked. We had so many shows in Chennai, workshops and all kinds of stuff. I thought, 'You know, they could all just come across the street.' We had this huge roof top on a place where we were staying, and we could just do a fire show. That'd be a relatively simple thing. We don't have to get in the bus, we don't have to go anywhere. We just put on some makeup, go upstairs. We've got our fire stuff, and we just do a fire jam for them. They all came over, sat down and everything. It was also just fun to get out of the structure of what we had been doing, too, because we were always doing the same show over and over. This time we just cranked on music. We're doing these fire vignettes -. we all that these totally absurd, crazy costumes. They didn't match at all. It was a total free-for-all. My God, the women and girls just loved it! They were just beaming. We always had this finale track, where we'd all come and spin at the same time. It was the same one we had used in our show in San Francisco, and it fed right into this bhangra dance track. Whenever possible, we'd like to get people up and dancing after our shows. We always do that here, and that would work really well. We'd just transform the stage into a dance floor [snaps] instantly, just merge the audience and the performers. If we could do it India, we would. Sometimes, culturally, it was difficult to do that. Sometimes it worked. That night, that bhangra came on and all the girls got up and just started dancing. They were just dancing with us. They were just beaming and happy. It just turned into this dance party for 10, 15, minutes, 20 minutes or whatever. The woman that had worked with them said, 'This is amazing, they don't do this,' to just create a safe, positive space for that to happen. She said, 'These are probably the most memorable moments of these girls' lives for them.' It was a really amazing experience. Ruth, Chris, Megan, and Kfire dance with the incredible young women and girls from a shelter in Chennai that houses survivors of abuse and human trafficking.

kSea: For those of you who can't see it, Chris is tearing up a bit right now. He's kind of making me, as well... [everyone laughs]

Chris: I thought I could tell that story without tearing up, but I guess I can't. [kFire laughs]

KFire: I'm sitting there thinking that there are so many different shows or moments, but for me, one child particularly sticks out. Dreamtime has its internal magic working on different levels. From the beginning, everything fell into place. It was really challenging along the way, but I think that in India we had our magic bubble around us. India itself is filled with magical energy in so many places. This one place we were in, Khajuraho, which is almost directly in the center of the country. It has some of the most ancient temples. It has temples in every direction – north, south, east, west. Five thousand year old, really powerful places. In this town we met this girl, Sapna – She more like adopted us. Her name means 'dream' in Hindi. She was from a gypsy family. They had settled on the outskirts of the town, but were going to be moving on at some point. She adopted us. There was the language barrier, of course, but you would have conversations with her on this psychic level. We were all interacting like we were talking to each other. She hung out with us. We were doing yoga together. She was hula hooping.

We were having rehearsal, and she's in a chair with sunglasses on watching the rehearsal. [laughs] She was this beautiful angel. I would say she was somewhere between 8 and 10. She loved us. She had been with us for a couple of days. We were wondering where her parents were. Eventually her brother came looking for her, with her family and her mother. They were really worried. They didn't know where she was. We tried to communicate that we were taking care of her. They were upset because they had been worried, but then the next day apparently they let her come back, because she came back and was with us again. [laughs]

Chris: I think they heard that we were just taking care of her and feeding her, too, so her parents thought, 'You've got a place to eat. Go for it.' I think they could just tell that we a good influence for her. Then we did this show in Khajuraho. There was a ton of press. All of the local television stations were there. They were interviewing us. They wanted to get an interview of one of the kids. They wanted to interview one of the kids from the audience. Suddenly, Sapna appears again. Next thing you know, they're handing Sapna to Matt, who – somehow his makeup had just run and his face was just black. He looked like this total psycho clown. He's holding this angel, this beautiful Sapna. They're telling her what to say and she's just saying it. We actually have a photo of that. I really think it was just one of the most surreal images of the entire, crazy, surreal tour. It's on the press page of our website. If you go to 'press,' you just see that. The camera man is this dude that looks like he's straight out of the '70s holding the microphone, and Sapna in Matt's arms. It's definitely crazy.

KSea: What are some of the most challenging things that you saw?

kFire: I think, all around the attitudes towards women were the most challenging for both the women on our tour, as well as, I think, the women in India. [laughs] Especially not speaking the language, it's hard to get a really full picture of how everything goes on. India has really strong families and definitely a lot of love, but the women also pretty much have second class status. At moments, there's no women on the street at all. You're just wondering, 'Where are these people?'

They're not really integrated into the economy so much, so you don't see them as much. Being a Western woman, you're stared at constantly. If you understood what the men are saying, because we had people with that understood Hindi that were with us. They said, 'You don't even want to know what these people are saying when they're shaking your hand.' Then, obviously boundaries were even further pushed with us being touched inappropriately. I didn't know if that was just an issue that Western women were facing, but then I was talking to my women Indian friends and they said they experience the same thing riding mass transit, just traveling alone as a woman in India, experiencing the same level of harassment. Unfortunately, that's often the case in a lot of places that I've traveled, but I would have to say that India is one of the worst if not the worst that I've experienced with harassment, being a woman.

kSea: I guess that's entirely accepted there, to a certain degree?

kFire: To a certain degree, yeah. Then it's also just the ideas about the interaction between the sexes, or the genders, is really different from here. It's pretty separated. There's the men's world and the women's world. Also, you look at Bollywood. The same love scenes repeat over and over again, where the man is chasing the woman and the women is kind of teasing. It's a 'no means yes' kind of thing. 'No no no' but then 'yes' and 'no.' I've had Indian men explaining to me that you don't talk to women, so when see them, if they look at you and don't look away, that means they are interested in you. The dynamics are really different around love and romance and interactions. They're not accustomed to just having regular, casual interaction, especially with foreign women, for sure.

Chris: The attitudes are slowly changing, particularly in the urban areas and particularly in the wealthier classes that are more progressive, moving away toward what they would see as traditions that are hurtful to women, to seeing things in a different way. After the tour, I went on what's called a yatra with Swechha, so the main NGO that we partnered with for this whole tour. Basically, one of the things that Sweccha is they take youth on these journeys, called yatras. What they do is have an environmental focus, so they take these students from Delhi up to the source of the Yamuna river, which is considered the second holiest river in India next to the Ganges. At the source, it's amazing and beautiful and it's flowing, but then you go down through town and village through village, to where they start damming it up and where the industry begins. You follow it all the way down to Agra where the Taj Mahal is, and through Delhi. There it goes from this beautiful, magical majestic river that people are living off of to what's basically a toxic cesspool, literally black and bubbling with methane gases. In fact, I'd say that, aside from seeing the way that women are treated in India, I think the only thing that was really hard to even comprehend or take in was that mesh of poverty and environmental degradation, because what that meant was that people living in very dire straits were still – For example, I saw this obviously very poor man that was actually diving into that cesspool of a river to try to find coins and valuable things at the bottom of the river. We took this rowboat out onto this cesspool, which was kind of crazy. The high school students were freaked out if they got a drop of water anywhere near them. Meanwhile, we're looking at this guy with goggles on, diving into it. There are other examples of that, too – what poverty means in a place that has been so destroyed by industry and chemicals. In any case, the good part of this story is that some of the high school students were coming from some of the wealthier families in Delhi, and I had extensive conversations with them about women in India and the treatment of women in India and women's rights. They were very much like, 'Our generation is going to change that.' They're not taking any of that crap. They want to have a career. They're going to date who they want. They were straight up, full on, feminist young women, so I thought that was very encouraging, but we also all knew, and we were going to more rural areas as well, that that attitude does not exist in most of rural India. The countryside as opposed to the cities are completely night and day. In the countryside, it's almost inconceivable to see that shift happen because it's so rooted in very old traditions that are really to the disadvantage of a lot of women's livelihoods, in a lot of ways.

kSea: As Dreamtime, do you think that – not only Dreamtime, but all of this new circus movement and so many people going over to different countries – there's a likelihood or a possibility that we might be able to change their views, their visions, their outlook, their feeling about themselves, and their environment and who they are and be able to make a difference there? kFire, you as a Western woman, you went there went there and were taken aback at how you were treated. Do you think anyone got the hint that that's not really what should be happening? Do you think it's possible to put a positive light to it?

kFire: I think that the vision for the circus and for these types of efforts is to really build real relationship. Especially when we have this kind of globalizing world – and you see that just as much in India as any place else – where you have this post-modern mix of lots of different cultural influences. I think we're in that mix but we're trying to be developing positive things with in that mix. Maybe not every one who saw or show or came into contact with us, but the people that we spent time with and built those relationships with, like our driver and the 'helper' or the 'assistant' of the driver, who lived with us for 5 months. They were both Rama's, it was Ram and Ram.

The younger guy was 25. We actually went to his village and performed in his village. It was one of the more poor, disadvantaged communities that we had been to. If I he hadn't been with us on the tour, he would have been another one of these guys probably staring at me on the street [laughs] but we developed a close friendship. He developed a close friendship with everyone in the circus. We learned a lot from him and I think that he learned a lot from us. I'm sure he'll never look at a Western woman the same again. We developed a real friendship there, based on respect.

I think that so many issues came up around us being violated, and he was our friend and wanted to prevent that from happening, that I think that, yes, that his attitudes around appropriate interaction with women, I think, will have changed from that.

Chris: I also do think that you have to be really careful. We don't our mission to be that we're going to go and impose our culture on another culture, but it is nice to be sending diplomats from the U.S. other than soldiers. I think that's a good thing, too. [laughs] I think what's nice is that in this history of clowns being able to get away with things that are not culturally appropriate, back to the days of [kSea interrupts]. The fact that they have court jesters where jesters were the only ones that could be critical of the king. You'd get away with us. I think there's a degree of our circus doing that. We have women putting men in their place in the shows. It's subtle but I wonder if some of that message carries sometimes. I also think that it can't hurt to just be doing circus workshops with the girls and the boys together, doing things are building self confidence for those girls, empowering them to learn things and do things and show that they can do them just as well as the boys. I think that creates a very positive environment. Where they take that, where that goes – I'm not sure.

kFire: It came up a lot. We would really see the women, especially the older women, really respond to the shows and the women in the shows. We would create that space for them to express themselves and get up and dance with us. They pretty much told us. We were in a really poor Muslim community where the women had said that they had, within their generation – that they used to be beaten if they danced. That they had stood up for themselves and worked within this NGO that we were working with to defend their right to express themselves. They were telling me this story because they were looking forward [to our show] because they had been told that they were going to be able to dance with us. They were like, 'Yes! This is how it used to be, but now we're going to get up and dance!' Things are changing. India's on its own trajectory of change. We stepped into that stream and gave support. That's the idea – it's to give support to peoples' struggle, not to bring our own anything. Just to give support, not our own agenda. There was also the sense of – people felt really honored that we came to their community. They would ask us, 'How, why did you? How did you decide to come here?' That was one of the best gifts, I felt, that we gave, was that we gave them a sense of being special and worth visiting and getting to know. I think that probably a lot of times they're feeling isolated and ignored by the government, or by other sectors of society that are getting a lot more resources or attention.

kSea: What is Dreamtime's plan for the future?

Chris: We've begun planning a second tour. We have our sites set on somewhere in South America. We don't know where yet. We're thinking that we've learned some lessons from the first tour, so we might structure it a bit differently. One of the main differences, I think, is we're looking to spend more quality time in fewer places and work with a community and kids for an extended period of time, like doing workshops with kids and then having them perform in a show at the end of it. So, really making it a lot more interactive and seeing if we can have more impact, though what we sacrifice is reaching fewer people. I think everyone seems really excited about that. We also want to do what we were doing in India here as well. We are starting to put together a program and think about possibly performing in schools. We had this performance with an environmental theme in it so that's something that could fit really well in schools. It's a fun way to teach kids about the environment. By doing workshops, if we do it in schools that's a way to supplement some of the arts funding that's been cut out of schools. We've also been thinking about how we can use the circus as way to bridge cultural divides right here in the Bay Area. One of the really cool things in India was that, by showing up with a circus, it had that ability to make really genuine relationships with people that we met in India. I think the circus brought us together and fused things. We think that there's potential to do that here in the Bay Area, where there are a lot of communities, like in Oakland, where you've got white and Asian and artists living in warehouses in predominantly Latino or African-American communities, and there's very little interaction between those communities. We were thinking, 'What if we connect with some of the youth organizations, some of the organizations that are putting on positive hip-hop shows, conscious hip-hop shows for youth, and we say, “Hey, you mind if we come and teach some juggling and do some circus choreographed to hip hop at your show?”' as a way to just start merging worlds. It's what we did in India and I think there's potential to do it in the Bay Area as well. We're still in the process of crafting all this and seeing if we can raise some money to make it happen.

http://www.dreamtimecircus.org/