Ringmistress of Cirque du Soleil - choreographer Debra Brown - includes related article on dancer Karl Baumann

Dance Magazine, July, 1998 by Daniel Gesmer

The protagonist of Quidam is a young girl--double cast with Emily Duncan-Brown and Audrey Brisson-Jutras, daughter of composer Benoit Jutras--who flees her parents' bland, mundane, closed-in existence. Her journey is a distinctly psychedelic stream-of-consciousness affair, replete with lightning strikes, physical danger, mysticism, joy, death, and awesome superhuman feats that test the skills of Cirque's astonishing performers. The young girl returns to her parents at the show's end with enough vision and faith to heal their pained, alienated reality.

"Just be in the moment," Brown says, when asked about the message of Quidam. "Take it in as a gift to the soul, a gift for the eyes. I love it when audiences walk out of the show feeling transformed by what they've just seen. I say, yes, we have done our job when we have lifted their spirits during the performance."

Seemingly driven to reinvent art forms, Brown has choreographed for pop artists such as Celine Dion, rhythmic gymnasts such as Lori Fung (who won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games), and Apogee, a touring fifty-minute exploration of the bed of the trampoline as a dance floor, using three to four musicians and three to five performers. She was the choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera's 1991 world premiere of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles. At the Chicago Lyric Opera, she choreographed a twenty-three-minute "bungee ballet" for the Rhine maidens in its 1992 Das Rheingold and had acrobatic spear-wielding valkyries bouncing across the stage on a row of trampolines in its 1993 Die Walkure. She is already at work on 1998 Cirque productions for Las Vegas and Disney World in Florida.

Although Canadian arts granting foundations have usually turned down her applications because they didn't consider her work "dance," Brown was honored last November with the Fosse Award for most innovative choreography. Performing at the awards ceremony in Las Vegas was a group of four contortionists with whom Brown has worked for the past eight years. Her widely known "quidripedal choreography" with these contortionists--in which all four limbs are exploited as means of locomotion--won her the first-ever Soviet Press Award for most outstanding choreographer at the 1990 World Circus Festival in Paris.

As childlike in her enthusiasm for her life and work as Quidam would have us all become, Brown hopes to continue working with Cirque "for as long as we're growing together, and for as long as they're still interested in working with me." (She also humorously notes her ambition to continue drinking fresh juices, a passion.) She is grateful to Cirque for "a lot of wonderful experiences that I've had and will, hopefully, continue to have." She would love to choreograph for dance companies, and resolves to schedule her career counter to the usual order, "starting as a choreographer and finishing as a performer. The standing joke is that one day I'm going to perform again." Constantly buoyed by Cirque's insistence on the power of dream, we should not be at all surprised if that comes to pass.