Bienvenue Chez Nous

If we could have done literal backflips when we heard about Bienvenue Chez Nous! we would have.

Instead, we’re leaving the flips to four awesome acrobats who met when they were students at the National Circus School of Montreal.

Eventually they formed the circus collective “4 En Ligne” (“4 In A Row”), with a flexible (ha) repertoire of magical storytelling.

“Bienvenue Chez Nous” means “Welcome to Our Place,” and they mean it literally as well as figuratively because it’s at their place, out back.

This outdoor, family-oriented circus show invites the audience into a whimsical environment built around a scaffold in a residential neighborhood. Having fun, playing, and using acrobatics on the scaffolding they’ve constructed, they lift the audience into a world of imagination.
That scaffolding? It’s vital. Obviously it helps everybody on the ground get a good look at the performance. It creates appropriate distancing. It’s a great blank structure that adapts to different kinds of set decoration.

But most importantly for the flexible four: AERIALS!

These performers know how to do them, and they know safety is important and expensive. That’s why there are so few free performances of aerial acts. The right rigging costs money, so tickets must be sold.

The artists of 4 En Ligne will use this Awesome Without Borders grant to create a safe structure for supporting their aerial work. They need a beam, straps, trapdoors (!), and high quality circus rigging, along with set decorations and costumes.
They want to offer performances in neighborhoods and festivals and other outdoor venues because they want to show that circus is for everyone to enjoy and participate in somehow. “You can be any gender and any combination of short, tall, strong, flexible, and so on, and there is room for you,” they say.

Run away to the circus here.