Cirque Alfonse, having just returned from the South American Premiere of ANIMAL at the Teatro Mayor in Bogota, heads next to Europe and then to Australia and New Zealand in early 2025.
Premiered at Montréal Complètement Cirque in July 2021, the production has already toured right across Canada and throughout Europe as well as to festivals in Mexico. Following its European tour in the autumn of 2024, the company will return to Australia for an engagement at the Sydney Festival and Pavillion Theatre in January 2025 followed by first tour of New Zealand in March 2025 with engagements at the Auckland Festival, Dunedin Arts Festival and the Wanaka Festival of Colour..
ANIMAL offers up a series of slightly surreal farm fables as well as some of their familiar irreverence, impressive virtuosity and the irresistible comic touch favoured by this troupe of country hipsters.
On this occasion, the creators of TIMBER, BARBU and TABARNAK take the audience on a journey to discover a somewhat re-invented agricultural world. In ANIMAL, the farm is turned upside down and the barn turned inside out! A gentleman-farmer has surrounded himself with some familiar but slightly bizarre creatures: the chickens have teeth, the ducks are slightly menacing and the cows are kicking up a fuss. In this “farm fantasy”, the imagination conjures up stories from childhood. Rural life turns out to be energetic as well as poetic. Cliches are joyfully turned on their head as the production appeals to young and old with both its atmospheric lyricism and its acrobatic prowess.
Yet again, Cirque Alfonse has favoured its multidisciplinary approach where circus, song, dance and theatre all come together, the driving the production being the original live music … an irresistible mix of trad and soul that the troupe calls ‘agricultural funk!