These republishing rules DO NOT apply to all of our content. The CityBeat is a nonprofit-funded position that specifically reports on city council business in Winston-Salem and Greensboro.
You are free to republish all content from the CityBeat under the following conditions:
Aerialists with Cirque de la Symphonie fly high. (Photograph by James Farley)
The symphony is performing this weekend, but rather than staying quiet, the performers are encouraging the audience to “get loud.”
“When you have certain performers on stage, you just can’t help it,” says Alexander Streltsov, the creator and producer of the upcoming show of Cirque de la Symphonie. The company, which has put on performances in North Carolina in the past, will host a one-night show at the Reynolds Auditorium in Winston-Salem at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday. Unlike traditional symphony performances, this event will fuse together music and performance with acrobatics, adding whimsy to each act.
An aerial artist himself, Streltsov explains that performers will hit the stage to a medley of classical masterpieces. There’s no storyline — rather, different acts take the stage for each song. With a strong man, acrobatic and tumbling acts, juggling, aerial feats, the show is full of delight — even a bit of magic. The symphony, conducted by Michelle Merrill, will play music by well-known composers from Shostakovich to Tchaichovsky, Strauss to Sibelius.
“It’s quite a variety, that’s for sure,” Streltsov says.
And what’s more, each act choreographs their own pieces.
“I don’t do the choreography for them because they’re professional artists,” he says.
“It’s almost impossible to get them all together just to work on the choreography, so therefore they do their own homework and then present it onstage.”
The show aims to seamlessly blend the sights and sounds so it “doesn’t look like the performer just does his thing and the music plays in the background.”
“It has to be a true fusion of the music and the performance,” Streltsov says.
In traditional symphony spaces, there is often “etiquette” that audience members feel they must observe. But in this show, Streltsov wants people to know that they can clap and “express their feelings.”
“Get loud,” he says.
As for what tour life is like, Streltsov says that he doesn’t really call it a tour because performers don’t stay on the road.
“We kind of joke around, saying that this is sort of like a weekend job,” he says. “We do performances on the weekends and then we fly back home and take our kids to school, pay the bills and do the home chores, you know, like normal people would do.”
But one of the creators of the show has also had a brush with the law.
In 2017, William H. Allen, the show’s co-creator, was sentenced to two years in prison after he was discovered to be secretly videotaping underage performers by hiding cameras in the smoke detectors of their rooms.
“That was a shock for everybody,” Streltsov says. “None of us were aware of that.”
Streltsov says that from day one, he has “never been a big fan of involving the younger generation into the production because of so many different aspects.”
Now, the company avoids hiring minor performers in order to prevent something like that from happening again.
“If we do involve somebody in the program that is underage, we try to protect them and create a safe environment for them to perform in,” Streltsov says.
He also sees the melding of artistic backgrounds as a way of helping recruit younger generations to the symphony, an “ancient art form.”
“Let’s face it, nowadays symphonies have so much competition — the games, sports events, rock concerts,” he says.
He adds that some audience members might come just to see the performers and not care that much about classical music or the live orchestra.
But by exposing them to the live orchestra, he’s “hoping that they get exposed to this world and it catches their attention.”
“They might be curious about coming back to the symphony and visiting other projects that the symphony does, and therefore also bring the younger generation,” he says.
See Cirque de la Symphonie in action on Saturday, Feb. 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Reynolds Auditorium, 301 N. Hawthorne Rd., Winston-Salem. Buy tickets here.
