Circus | Air Temple Arts | Arts & Culture | Woodbridge
Eva Skewes Photos.
Three travelers are running through the airport, their limbs in constant motion. On one end of the terminal, a makeup salesman is perfectly coiffed and still harried, determined to make his flight to Dallas. A musician hustles through the space unaware, completely in the zone. Nearby, a yoga student gingerly glides over the floor, well on her way to enlightenment. The three orbit each other, electric.
Then baggage starts flying, and something magnetic crackles through the air.
It marks the beginning of Layovers, a new project from artists Stacey Strange, Nick Strange and Dani Bobbi Lee of Air Temple Arts. Conceived in 2022 and workshopped over the past two years, the show foregrounds prop manipulation like juggling, diabolo, ensemble acrobatics and hoop dancing, marking a first for the company. It premieres May 4 at the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on Audubon Street.
Performances are scheduled for 3 and 7 p.m.; tickets and more information are available here.
Strange: "We just want to go out there and have a really good time and make sure other people have a really good time." Eva Skewes Photos.
"We've had a really fun time putting together the show," said Stacey Strange, founder and creative director of the organization, at a rehearsal Sunday afternoon in Woodbridge. "This is the first full comedy that we've ever done here—I definitely tend toward more serious themes. Since the pandemic, that has shifted a little bit ... we didn't have entertainment for a long time. We just want to go out there and have a really good time and make sure other people have a really good time."
Set in an airport, Layovers tells the story of three strangers who keep crossing paths after their respective flights have been canceled. Nick, a traveling salesman dressed head to toe in Barbie pink, is headed to Dallas to receive recognition for his record-high profits. At a nearby gate, Stacey is going to Berlin for a guzheng audition she can't afford to blow. Dani is a yoga devotee who uses words like "manifest" and "meditate" so liberally they lose meaning. Together, they are an odd trio, with seemingly nothing in common.
But this isn't any old airport, and the three aren't any old travelers. Colorful juggling pins, jelly-bean like plastic balls, and several gum-colored diabolos appear from inside their luggage, as if everyone has props in their carry-on. Airport chairs give way to intricate balancing acts and gymnastic, dreamy routines. The building's loudspeaker (Liz Richards) makes announcements in personalized and surprisingly poetic phrases. And when music floats into the terminal, it's only a matter of time until dance and juggling take over.
Eva Skewes Photos.
The result is both enchanting and surprisingly relatable (after all, who among us has made it through air travel unscathed?). As a fuzz-drenched, propulsive introduction gives way to the announcement of flight cancellations (a nod to Richards, whose has channeled a kind of delightful Dwight Schrute-Miss Trunchbull mashup), all three performers spring into action, trying to make nice with a customer service representative who is just not having it. It’s enough to hook the audience, and keep them there.
The cast, meanwhile, operates in both quirk and charm, with a hard-won physical precision that feels seamless. There's a burst of pop-inflected vocals, and Nick is suddenly a live wire, three pins going airborne above his outstretched palms. Stacey steps behind her guzheng—Strange has been taking lessons for almost three years—and gives the audience an impromptu sound bath, the looped melody carrying her through a hoop dance. Lee mixes gymnastics and prop manipulation with her beam-of-positivity persona, so much so that it sometimes seems she may emit light.
Like many of the group's previous works, there are moments of real magic, strung together with bits of funny, warm narration, a few zingers (“everything I learned about eyeliner, I learned on TikTok!”) and references to juggling that are slipped slyly into the plot. Lee pulls out a diabolo and strings to Toro y Moi's "Who I Am," and in the audience, it is hard to stay still. Strange becomes so absorbed in a hoop dance that it feels like she has stepped through a portal, and is as controlled by the hoops as they are by her. Nick Strange is funny until he's all business, and juggling pins, balls, and pieces of luggage that seem to multiply in his hands.
Eva Skewes Photos.
But it is when the trio is moving as a unit that Layovers shines its brightest. At one point, all three characters find that they are seated together, and become a human balancing act, legs and arms intertwined. At another, they spin, rotate, and jump into ensemble juggling that has required months of clear communication. A third, and they dance through an entire dream sequence, kinetic as they play off of each other and the space around them.
"For all of us, this is 100 percent a passion project," Nick Strange said. "This is something that really consumes our free time. There's no money to be made in performing a juggling show. So like, we love performing and we love making audiences happy and sharing circus with the world. We'e just thrilled that people want to see it."
It's also very much a labor of love that grows Air Temple's footprint. Two years ago, Stacey and Nick Strange had just returned from a festival of the International Jugglers Association—held in the far-away land of Iowa—when Guilford Greenfest announced a round of grants for new creative work. She started thinking of the company's strengths, and something clicked.
"I was like, what if we submitted a show that was primarily prop-based?" she recalled. "We've done all these really aerial-heavy shows, and it would be cool to explore something different."
Eva Skewes Photos.
Guilford Greenfest didn't take the grant proposal—the first version of the show still had aerials, which made it a no-go—but the festival hired company members for a shorter, 30-minute version of the show and an accompanying workshop. Initially, Strange thought about the group's show Missed Connections, a full-length circus performance that weaves through a number of onstage relationships.
But the longer company members worked, the clearer it became that the show was taking on its own identity. Enter Layovers, which she affectionately referred to as "all juggles all the time" at Sunday’s rehearsal.
In building it for a New Haven audience, all three performers have both honed their physical skills and been able to poke fun at their real-life selves, with a sense of delight that radiates to the audience. Strange, for instance, plays a musician who is anxious and high strung, from a 13-point performance plan to a clear disdain for anyone who tries to make smalltalk. Onstage and off, the role is a quiet reminder to herself not to let neuroses take over.
Nick, meanwhile, "loves a good scam," and has created a persona that is all about that multi-level marketing life. And Lee has based her retreat-loving yogi on a version of her younger self, a twenty-something "doing yoga and drinking ayahuasca and thinking I had it all figured out” that she doesn’t recognize anymore.
Together, the three have learned how to captivate each other, themselves, and an audience—all before running off to catch their flights. Behind the scenes, Richards, Brianna Thompson and Sierra Bachmann all keep the show running smoothly, from the mysterious voice on the loudspeaker to ferrying props on and off between numbers. At a final rehearsal Sunday, Lee said she’s excited to bring it to audiences this week.
“I hope for like, a super awesome turnout—and that people have a really great time and feel that same awe-inspiring feeling that they feel when they watch aerials,” she said. “Juggling—on this side, it feels like it’s harder to impress. But you hear feedback, and people are like, ‘That was so cool!’ And it’s like, ‘Thank you because I’ve been working on that for like, five months.’”
Layovers premieres May 4 at the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on Audubon Street. Performances are scheduled for 3 and 7 p.m.; tickets and more information are available here.