People Watching Premiering at Chamäleon Berlin with “Play Dead”

A new language for the circus: The young Canadian ensemble People Watching celebrate their grand debut at Chamäleon Berlin with the surreal and enigmatic piece Play Dead.

Reality is best understood by taking a few steps away from it. That is the approach taken by the young Canadian circus company People Watching from Montréal with their exciting debut Play Dead, opening the new season at Chamäleon Berlin in January 2025: With a surreal mix of acrobatics, movement theatre, and dance, the performers conjure a world of dreamlike scenes without words, somewhere between this realm and another, twisted, absurd, and beautiful. People and their relationships with each other take centre stage, as does the approaching farewell to light-heartedness and carefreeness – an intrinsic part of the human condition. But there is no time for excessive melancholy. Best to celebrate life one last time before the fun is over.

Since being founded in the now seemingly unreal spring of 2020, the multidisciplinary artists’ collective has shared a special form of intimacy with its audience and reimagined contemporary circus for itself with its own circus language that is not interested in bold spectacle: In Play Dead, acrobatics of the highest calibre intersect with poetry and humour to create a dreamlike chronicle of the everyday, flowing, poetic and dazzling. Artists jump, fall, fly, dance on champagne bottles, rotate plates on quivering poles, glide through the air – and little by little, the dynamics on stage change. “Transformation is one of the major themes of the piece,” says founding member Brin Schoellkopf. “We watch the characters slowly detach themselves from social and behavioural norms and dive into a labyrinth of changing relationships and forms of expression.”

The title Play Dead emphasizes the juxtaposition of playful ease (Play) and the uncanny, the unknown (Dead). Here, beauty takes its place alongside sadness – and the familiar alongside the ghostly. The aesthetics of Play Dead appear as if teleported from a film world to the theater, Old Hollywood meets European art cinema, accompanied by a soundtrack oscillating between Tchaikovsky and Brenda Lee. “In Play Dead, we witness a very unusual kind of storytelling,” says Chamäleon Artistic Director Anke Politz. “Theatrical on the one hand, gentle and flowing on the other.” The gestures are grand, the backdrops sparse, a dark apartment, baroque furniture, both reduced and exuberant at the same time. “It’s like a gathering of people in an unreal world.”

Play Dead is the first piece by People Watching and has caused quite a stir in the contemporary circus scene since its premiere last summer. It won the Coup de Coeur Award at the Festival Quartiers Danses in Montréal and has since been performed at the Montréal Complètement Cirque Festival, the Fresca 24 Festival in Alicante, the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in Groningen, and the Hupstate Circus Festival in Ithaca, New York. In September 2024, People Watching presented the piece to great acclaim at the Düsseldorf Festival. And yet, this was just the beginning. From January 2025, the ensemble will present an advanced version of Play Dead in Berlin, which will be restaged for the long season on the renowned Chamäleon stage, 30 minutes longer and featuring eight rather than six outstanding acrobats on stage. The core of the adaptation lies in the thematic expansion of the ensemble to include two new artists and characters, who add more facets and new circus imagery to this piece on and about life. What remains unchanged about People Watching: Play Dead is an entirely collaborative work. There is no one artistic director, no one chief choreographer, no one director. The concept and direction come from the entire six-member core team consisting of Ruben Ingwersen, Jérémi Levesque, Natasha Patterson, Brin Schoellkopf, Jarrod Takle, and Sabine Van Rensburg, who also perform the piece together – in Berlin with the addition of Sereno Aguilar Izzo and Imogen Huzel.

The uncompromising collective concept applies equally backstage and on stage: The piece includes no solos; the special disciplines of the individual artists are combined, intertwined, and fused, whether it be juggling, tumbling, parkour, or trapeze. The ensemble met at circus school in Montréal and joined together with the common goal of rethinking contemporary circus, exploring and deconstructing queer themes and stereotypes, and continually stepping outside of the expected. “Our work is also about how the element of risk, which is inherent to the circus world, redevelops and redefines social dynamics,” says Brin Schoellkopf. This could be a purely physical risk or an emotional one. “The risk of losing something or someone – or losing yourself.”

The ensemble members worked with some of the world’s most renowned companies, including Les 7 Doigts de la Main, Circa, Gravity & Other Myths, Cirque Éloize, Machine de Cirque, and Cirque du Soleil. The collective also works with other artists to explore new perspectives on film and photography.