“Sometimes you run away to join the circus, sometimes the circus runs away with you!”

It started, as the best adventures do, over Russian gypsy music, a ‘certain’ amount of alcohol, and the yearning for something more. We were a motley collection of performers, actors, and musicians, all working for arts organizations that had outgrown their humble, hungry beginnings. The bigger these organizations got, the more burdened they became with overhead and the bottom line. As my sainted great-uncle Rostislav used to say:

“The bigger you get, the less room you have”

We wanted to worry less about filling seats and more about finding meaning. We wanted to draw on our different disciplines, to tear down the walls between them, to tell compelling stories about what it means to be human.

As the night wore on, someone said something about ‘running away to join the circus’, and someone suggested that starting a circus would be better still ~where, after all, would we find a circus in which we could stage cutting-edge object theatre and puppet shows for grown-ups that included fire dancers and aerialist. Somehow, even after that night turned to day, starting something continued to strike us as a good idea ~one that began to gain traction in the weeks that followed.  Some of those original revellers moved on to do other things, but some stayed, and other folks joined, intrigued by the vision, and the Wild Hare Circus was born.