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

Hello, I’m Kyr (rhymes with ‘ear‘), I am pursuing both a Multimedia Design Degree, as well as one in Business, here at Lane; with an eye towards producing original, thought-provoking performances that cross and combine genres and media.

I am returning to school after a long absence and some strange adventures, including working for a number of non-profit arts organizations, ditching the big city to live in an off-grid cabin in the middle of nowhere; and co-founding a multidisciplinary performing arts group called Wild Hare Circus.

That last one started, as the best adventures often do, with no small amount Roma music, and no small amount of Russian libations, and the yearning for something more. We were a motley collection of performers, actors, and musicians, all working for various arts organizations that had outgrown their humble, hungry beginnings. The bigger these organizations got, the less willing they were to take risks. As my sainted great-uncle Rostislav used to say “The bigger you get, the less room you have’.

Weirdly, even after the libations wore off, I still wanted to do it. More than I have ever wanted anything in my life. I wanted to worry less about filling seats and more about finding meaning. I wanted to draw from 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 how we ought ‘run away to join the circus’, and I said 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. If we wanted it, we would have to create it from scratch.

This, then, is the story of how it begins . . .