Il Carillon e La Gru

 (il carri-yon ee la grew)

To start this week’s post, I will tell you a little known fact about me: I love music boxes. I have always loved music boxes. As a young girl, I had a small collection of them that I procured from my sisters. I didn’t personally have one until I was older, but I especially loved music boxes with spinning ballerinas. There was something really magical about opening the box and having a beautiful dancer emerge and dance to what I imagined was her favorite song.

Last week I was offered a performance role in my school’s Christmas show, to be performed in the center of Turin, as well as other cities throughout Italy. I was given the role of the ballerina in Cirko Vertigo’s Carillon (music box). For this show, we build a music box and when the lid opens, performers are pulled up with it for aerial routines. There are clowns, lovers, fairies, and me – the spinning ballerina. For the first portion of my performance, I do aerial dance, meaning in this case that I get suspended in the air by a hip harness and do some simple ballet positions, contortion, and flips. The second routine I do is on a contraption that we call simply i cerchi (the circles). The apparatus is a giant hoop with two others suspended from the sides, then one more suspended within the large hoop. I perform on the center hoop.

The first time I practiced on this contraption was pretty nerve wracking. While I have done aerial hoop performances in the past, i cerchi feels much different to work on than anything I’ve tried before. We were practicing in the Creation Studio at school, and the hoop I have been assigned to was rigged approximately 3.5 meters high and unstable due to the movement of the other performers. All of the hoops spin independently of one another; so watching the other performers from my hoop is quite an experiment in coping with vertigo. All of these trials are simple to manage. The greatest challenge with performing in this show is coping with le gru.

La gru is Italian for “the crane”. Our carillon is made out of a strong aluminum frame, the top portion of which is then hoisted up by a crane to an altitude of 20 meters for the first portion of the show. The finale is performed at 30 meters. The first time we tested the show with le gru, every single performer that went up was momentarily stunned by the height. Although we wear safety harnesses, the view of the ground from that elevation and knowing that only a few steel cables and some air separate you from your demise was enough to make any of us think twice about being in the music box. Being hoisted up 90 feet above the ground, on a wobbly apparatus, in the wind, on a cold winter night was almost enough to paralyze me… but only almost. Thinking about the magic we can inspire for the audience, and especially the little girls in the crowd who are watching a music box come to life, is enough to make all of us find the courage to conquer our fear of la gru.


To catch a little glimpse of our carillon, click here.