It’s been one year since The Criss Cross Circus set out from Hampshire College to travel the nation, leaving smiles and greasestains in our wake. The summer 2008 tour sure was a crazy, grueling, exciting, and ultimately rewarding adventure!
The troupe is now scattered far and wide, pursuing college degrees and other ambitions. Yes, we do have more footage of the tour, and yes, we do plan to edit it eventually into a short documentary to inspire and forewarn others…
It’s also likely that one day (next summer, perhaps?) some of the original troupe will regroup under a new appelation but with the same spirit of intrepidness, creativity, and conviction, and embark on another experiment in living the dream. Until then, prepare for the Circapocalypse!
p.s. the audio got taken off the teaser trailer we had on youtube, but now you can watch the full version again, audio and all, over at vimeo!
A post-apocalyptic landscape is the backdrop for the Criss Cross Circus summer 2008 tour. These 11 Hampshire College students have driven from east to west in a colorful, rusted old school bus that runs on used vegetable oil. While the setting is tragic, it is with the humor and magic of circus that we hope to entertain and educate audiences across America.
The moment you’ve all been waiting for, VIDEO of the tour! How did I edit 15 hours of footage down to five minutes? Beautifully detailed tape logs. At some point in the next year, Tara and I will be editing a feature length documentary about the trip. Not sure how that’s going to work yet, as we’ll be living 6,000 miles apart (she in London, I in an undetermined place in the Pacific Northwest) and neither of us will have access to video editing software. But we’re problem solvers, we’ll figure it out.
So I exaggerated slightly – the bus (along with Jacob, James and myself) rolled into Melrose, Ma for its final stop on Wednesday. It had a lot of difficulty with reversing while running on diesel, so parking took us several minutes of starting, stalling out, rolling back a few inches, repeat.
Nevertheless, us six Criss Cross Circus members (Sairuh, Tara, Lucy, Jacob, James, and myself) who journeyed back to the east coast plus Becca, a friend we picked up in Washington, all made it safely to our various destinations (Colorado, New York, Boston). We escaped the flooding in the midwest, skirted around hail storms, and arrived in Massachusetts just in time to miss the thunder here.
It is a strange feeling to have all of the Criss Cross Circus spread out across the country (and soon the world as several of our members will be heading over seas within the next few months) and I already miss living in a small space with a lot of people. Having an entire bed, let alone a room, to myself is very bizarre! Definitely keep yourself posted if you want to hear more from us – Milo and Molly have been dreaming up big things for the Criss Cross Circus book and we’re all excited about getting that out within the next year! It should be quite spectacular.
Well, since the tour ended about a week I ago, I’ve been lazy about updating the blog, so I guess it’s time to backtrack a bit…
Sadly we said goodbye to Sarah in San Francisco so she could start her summer job at Acrosports. We had a lovely drive up the west coast, stopping to camp near Mt. Shasta, and stopping to visit some old friends in Portland. We performed at the Evergreen State College in Olympia for their huge Super Saturday festival. It was a great show. We heard Pure Cirkus was in Olympia and we headed to town to see their show, but sadly being poor traveling performers, none of us could afford it. Luckily we happened upon several jugglers in the street, and had fun playing with them for a while.
We had a nice relaxing day at my house north of Seattle, and did one final show in a neighborhood park. For our final Roadtrip Nation interview, Tara, Lucy, Juliana and I visited the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts (SANCA) and chatted with Chuck Johnson. After repacking the bus, some unsuccessful greasearch, and much hugging, Manfred departed with Jacob, Lindsay, Tara, Lucy, James and Lucy’s friend Rebecca in tow – bound for the east coast. Milo and I chased them down the highway for a while to get some final video shots of Manfred on the road. Josh and Juliana headed back down the coast towards San Francisco.
Lots more pictures up on flickr, including pictures of our show that my dad took!
so awesome our bus, manfred, didn’t want to leave. but we had a wonderful time with our new friends at CAMP (even the kids who liked our bus so much they locked us out of it, with themselves inside) and also with our lovely hosts at the bolozone who let us crash at their traveler’s sanctuary while we waited for jacob & lindsay to work their magic with some charitable bus mechanics.
sairuh, lucy, james and tara making music on the bus
one very very flat state, a few lightning storms and golf-ball sized hail later, we are quite enjoying boulder, co. manfred doesn’t particularly like the mountains, but we do! (oh, so excited for the rockies tomorrow…) our filter system is totally under control, with an ingenious bag-and-bucket method that is reliable, only moderately messy, and doesn’t take forever. the indoor venue show yesterday fell through, but we had a good time putting on a enthusiastic though shaky street show at the pearl street pedestrian mall. as I write, we are all having a relaxing bonding dinner party at the house of ukulele loki (our boulder benefactor), our first chance in days to spend some non-traveling, non-performing time all together.
every once in a while it hits us that we are a traveling… veggie-fueled… circus. despite hiccups & our many ‘learning experiences,’ we are living our dream. we are doing what circus is known for: the unlikely, the impossible, the incredible, the magical. we are making real connections with each other and with people all across the nation, doing what we think is necessary and important for ourselves and the world.
tara, milo, sarah, and james collecting grease
- tara (& molly)
(p.s. lots of new pictures on flickr, because I finally got a new card reader. also, *ahem*, new troupe bios…)
The Circus bus made a screeching, groaning halt in Iowa City, Iowa for two reasons. The first was the need for more used vegetable oil and the second was the fact that it was no longer going to drive properly, if at all.
As some of our troupe filtered vegetable oil, and some of our troupe made a trip to the auto mechanic the musicians decided to practice on the street next to the bus. This was a very fortunate decision. We attracted some local circus folk who pointed us in the direction of an awesome little park where – a few hours later we performed twice. We met some amazing people including book store owners, a man with a tiny kitten, jugglers, break dancers, hoopers, unicyclers and even some higher-up circus folk who were happy to give us some performing tips. We made a decent amount of money and some other unexpected loot including coupons for free ice cream, a crystal, and blessings from born-again Christians.
For not being on our tour at all – Iowa City was still one of the best places we have stopped thus far, and it was a necessary Awesome Day after a string of difficult ones.
Just to give you a gist of what our tour on the whole has been like thus far: Filled with amazingly awesome people. Just about everyone we have interacted with has been beyond friendly and helpful. We have put ourselves in some tight spots, but so far someone has been there to help us out every time. Occasionally it has felt as though this tour is more about 11 college-aged kids learning how to run a grease-bus across country tour instead of a Circus tour, but the past few days has really broken that down. We have performed four times in the past three days, and we are actually beginning to see a very teeny tiny small amount of money… which will probably need to go straight back into the bus.
One other amazing thing I like to call the Big Blue Bus Effect is this: It feels as though enormous quantities of people are encouraged to come and speak with us randomly on the street due to our giant blue bus. It makes us very accesible to the public at large, having a big blue bus certainly seems to be one wonderful conversation starter.
Minnesota was almost a bust – it was rainy all day and we didn’t get to do our noon show in the park. We were shown some incredible hospitality by the parents of one of our Hampshire friends, and finally figured out a fast and simple method for filtering grease. Despite the rain, people showed up at 5:30 to see circus, so we gave them a show! It was an abbreviated version, under a gazebo in the rain, but it was fun and the crowd loved it. Though morale was a little low last night when we didn’t find any grease…
Today we stopped in Iowa City for what we thought would be a brief grease excursion – but we started street performing, met several other circus folk, and people started asking if we were going to do a show. We collected a TON of grease, did a lot of filtering, and decided to do an impromptu show in a nearby square.
It was probably one of our best shows yet! In fact, it’s so great here that we’re about to go and do two more shows tonight. We met a lot of amazing people, and the most adorable tiny kitten ever. All quite serendipitous. Alright, time for me to stop blogging and go do another show!
Tomorrow: St. Louis. More pictures will be up soon…
We are still in Chicago. Grease has been more of a debacle than we expected… We’ve actually had little trouble collecting grease though, there are plenty of restaurants willing to give it away.
A sample phone conversation might be like this: “Hello, I was wondering if you use vegetable oil in your cooking? No no, I don’t want to order anything. Could I speak to a manager? No, I don’t want to make reservations. No, I don’t want to sell you oil, I just want to use it after you’re done with it. Could we just pick it up from your grease dumpster out back? You see, I use it to run my blue hippie school bus full of circus performers going across the country… No, I DON’T want to order anything…”
Filtering the grease has been our major setback. Jacob, Lindsay, Milo, Sairuh and others were working all day yesterday experimenting with new systems to filter it. It’s been very time consuming, but it can be pretty fun – creative problem solving is what we Hampshire students excel at!
I was going to upload some great pictures I took the other night of collecting grease, but my camera card reader broke so it will be a few days until those are up. For now, enjoy this picture of one of our first tries at filtering grease, at Oberlin College. We have enough grease to Minnesota, so we are headed out within the next hour!
The past few days have been a real whirlwind! After leaving Boston friday night, we made a stopover at Hampshire for a few hours to filter and dispose of bad grease. It felt like such a stealthy heist, running around campus at 2 AM when no one else was there with toxic Zen Garden Grease.
We spent all friday night and saturday driving, and when we realized we wouldn’t make it to Chicago by saturday night, we stopped over at Oberlin College to visit our circus friends there. Unfortunately we just missed a show of theirs (we walked in as they were taking their bows), but it was fun to see them and they helped us find a bunch of grease.
Sadly we had to miss our show saturday night in Chicago because of miscalculating how long it would take to drive and how much grease we needed. But we got to Chicago sunday morning, and got straight to rehearsing with Le Vorris and Vox, the UChicago circus. Our joint show was a ton of fun, and our troupes had a really great energy together. We made some new friends, and they generously offered to take us to their dining commons and host us in their apartments for the night.
Today brought an overhaul in our overall organizational structure, tasks were re-delegated, schedules were made, information was gathered, streets were performed on, and grease was collected. Our plan at this point is to leave for Minnesota tomorrow morning, so we can have a full day of street performing and show development before our show on thursday.
I just updated our flickr account with a ton more pictures, check it out!
Find out when we will be in your town and how to book us here!
If you are able to contribute to the Criss Cross Circus either through sponsorship, publicity or donation we would greatly appreciate your support!
We accept and love contributions we are also interested in partnering with eco-conscious companies to promote them as sponsors in our brochure and at our information tables.
