In South Africa, a circus school in the Salt River neighborhood of Cape Town was built on a dream. This year a product of that dream is coming to Minneapolis.
“We (himself and his wife, Laurence Estève, the co-founder of the school) started this journey 32 years ago with the vision of being a part of Nelson Mandela’s dream of a rainbow nation,” said Brent van Rensburg, founder of Zip Zap Circus School. “We very much stuck to that mission in our own small way, using circus as the tool.”
Zip Zap Circus will be performing its first professional touring show, “Moya” – the Xhosa word for spirit – at the Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company from Sept. 12 to Oct 20.
According to van Rensburg, Children’s Theatre was one of the first places to reach out to Zip Zap after he sent out a video based on an art film, also titled “Moya”, directed by van Rensburg’s daughter, Sabine van Rensburg, who suggested to her father it would make a great live show. From there, the concept of “Moya” as a live show began.
“We were so surprised (when Children’s Theatre reached out). We’ve got five contracts now, (including) two months in France. We’re going to Reunion Island, Mauritius, and then New York for three weeks at the New Victory Theater (New York) in April. But Minneapolis was first.”
The story of the show is based on one of the show’s cast members, Jacobus Claasen, nicknamed Trompie.
“He’s a kid who ran away from home at a very young age and lived on the streets of Cape Town, and somehow found his way to this crazy little place called Zip Zap, where he slowly became part of this little circus school and part of the family,” said van Rensburg, adding Claasen has been with Zip Zap for almost 14 and a half years at this point.
“Now he’s on the world stage playing his life story,” said the show’s creator.
Lukhanyo Samson, one of the performers who seeks to dazzle the audience with his skills, describes the show’s story as “a little bit sad, but, at the same time, fun.” Samson, unlike Claasen, did not find his way to Zip Zap as a child but as a young adult in 2019. He first heard about Zip Zap from a friend a year earlier, when he graduated high school. Now he lives at a residence run by Zip Zap near the circus so he can focus on training. Being at Zip Zap, he said, has improved his health a great deal, physically and emotionally.
“Growing up I always wanted to be strong and all that,” said Samson, who grew up in a township called Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa. “Coming here was a change. I had attitude. I had all this negative stuff – I was influenced (by) Khayelitsha because there’s a lot of gangsters and drugs and all that. So I had to change. Ever since I started living here and started training and (doing) shows after shows, I started training (and) becoming healthy. I’ve even gained weight.”
“Remember Mr. B?” said Samson, turning to van Rensburg. “(When) I came here, I had these bones. I was skinny. But ever since I joined here, I met new friends, good people, and Zip Zap has helped me a lot, especially at home and taking me from Khayelitsha to come and live here. I would say I am mentally (well) and my soul is at peace.”
The power of trust
Zip Zap Circus School brings together children and young performers who, said van Rensburg, may not have met otherwise, and teaches them the fundamentals of movement performance in various programs. These programs are free and are funded through performance revenue, fundraising, grants and donations. The school also runs outreach programs for physical activity and play, such as 2nd Chance, which reaches out to children from underserved communities in Cape Town, along with Ubuntu and Vuka, which engage children living with HIV and chronic illness respectively.
The end goal, however, isn’t to create trapeze artists, acrobats and jugglers.
“The idea is not to turn every kid that comes through Zip Zap’s doors into a professional trapeze artist or circus performer,” said van Rensburg, himself a former trapeze artist. “The idea is really about a safe space to play and to learn and to communicate, to learn to work as a team, (and) to have trust. We think that these basic life skills that the kids in the various programs learn from each other and with each other will benefit them for whatever they do in life.”
In the process of playing and performing alongside each other, trust naturally develops, as occurred in the cast of “Moya” itself.
“Everything was so unique – meeting new people, working with them, and then you have to trust them to not drop you, ’cause I’m a flier,” said Samson. “The trust between us is just good.”
Trust in fellow performers contributes to a good show and, on an emotional level, can be incredibly rewarding.
For Alissa Kaasa, a therapist at Poplar Grove Counseling and an aerial instructor, trust developed in the course of physical performance can work to heal people and communities by fostering connections.
“A lot of times (with) trauma, for instance, or grief, there’s separation from our bodies and our minds and part of the healing process is trying to connect the two,” said Kaasa. “(It’s the) same with other mental health struggles like schizophrenia – there’s a big disconnect – body, mind, there’s fracturing that happens. Dance movement connects us with ourselves, but also each other if it’s in a setting where we’re learning and growing together through collaborative movement. There’s this healing of community that can happen – trusting one another and healing through relationships that way. If you’re doing duo work or you’re dancing with a partner, there’s this trust that has to build. You have to trust your instructor and it’s healing those fracturing pieces that happen in between people.”
Mindfulness and processing
On an individual level, said Kaasa, movement and performance can also be a means of rediscovering the relationship with one’s body and mindfulness.
“It’s that mindful place you have to be in when the stakes are, ‘I have to be in the moment, or I could fall and die,’” said Kaasa of performing in aerial arts, such as lyra and ropes, where she uses the strength of her own body to pivot and move in the air. “There’s this forced mindfulness of ‘OK, I’m feeling my body, I’m listening to what it needs.’ Learning how to listen and follow what your body is (telling you) – ‘OK, this doesn’t feel good in my body. I need to change this a little bit,’ or ‘I can trust my body to go a little further,’ or, ‘Nope, this is what I got for today.’ That necessity of mindfulness helps us connect with our body and process whatever vulnerability or whatever emotion comes up in that moment.”
Moriah Reedy, a therapist currently with Levan Counseling and Consulting, offers dance movement therapy to improve peoples’ mental wellbeing. Reedy stresses that the process is about learning to recognize signs of emotions in one’s body.
“You do not have to dance. You can, I will not stop you,” said Reedy. “If you’re alive, you’re moving. If you’re sitting there breathing, there’s movement and there’s information you can work with there. Your body’s sending you some sort of message about how you are emotionally, and if you can tune into that, you can understand deeper how you are feeling, and then you can work with that too and learn how to express (your emotions) in different ways. Communication happens verbally. A lot of communication is nonverbal also and in dance movement therapy, the approach is on the body emotion as well as the mental, cognitive emotion. So (it’s) an integration of the mind and the body.”
In Kaasa’s own journey, movement in aerial arts – independently of therapy and her own therapeutic practice as a provider – became a way to deal with trauma.
“Aerial is a place of stability for me because I learned to trust my body differently. I learned to connect my mind and body and feel in the moment and work through whatever it is right there, whether it’s figuring out a new move or going through a drop that I know really well, I can be just there. And that is such a precious, stable place,” said Kaasa. “Even if I’m having a bad day and nothing’s really working out for me, there’s that familiarity of ‘This is my rope, this is my body doing these things,’ and I know I can come back here when I need it.’ That stability and safe place has been huge for my processing.”
Moving forward
For van Rensburg, the mission of Zip Zap to connect people across different backgrounds is valuable, especially right now.
“I think the world is quite crazy at the moment. Ukraine, Gaza, we’ve got people crossing borders into America. We’ve got so many issues,” said van Rensburg. “South Africa’s by no means where it needs to be (post apartheid), but I really do think that there are lots of organizations like Zip Zap and people in South Africa that are trying really hard to make it possible. We are very small microcosms of what this country’s trying to achieve. (We’re) taking our message to the world stage and saying, ‘Look, you know, it’s possible. We don’t have to be divided and not accept other cultures. We are different, we can be different, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be together.”
When asked what it means for audiences in Minnesota and around the world to see “Moya” – a show with a majority Black South African cast – van Rensburg went back to the original mission of Zip Zap – bringing people together.
“I hope that they really feel that the world should be more inclusive and more open to accepting people’s cultures, beliefs and orientations,” said van Rensberg. “I think it’s very important in this crazy divided world we live in at the moment (to) show that if you work as a team and you truly trust each other, love each other, then it doesn’t have to be all this stuff that’s happening in the world.”
“(We) can still work together. We can still move forward,” said Samson. “We don’t have to look at the past. We can always look forward.”
Deanna Pistono
Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.
