Interview by Olympia Davis
I recently had the opportunity to interview Felicity Hesed, artistic director at Circus Center. Most recently, she adapted and directed The Secret Garden into a circus and theater fusion production. She spoke about The Secret Garden, her team in directing, her next project, and advice to young performers and directors.
*Note: Some dialogue has been changed slightly for clarity and length.
Olympia: Can you tell me about the acts of The Secret Garden performance? How did you incorporate circus into the acts? How did they flow together and tell the story?
Felicity: The Secret Garden is a novel originally, and I adapted it into a play that would incorporate circus. There’s a pretty famous adaptation of The Secret Garden that is a musical version, but ours is very different. I used the book as the source material, I didn’t use the musical or any of the movies. I worked from the book but modernized it a bit. I really wanted our show to feel present and real.
The book starts with the main character, Mary Lennox, living in India and everyone dies from a cholera epidemic. Since cholera is not a problem today for people and I didn’t want to have it set in India or in England, our show begins with people at a party post COVID talking about how they all survived COVID. They discuss how they’ve been hearing about this new virus, but it’s probably not a big deal. And then, we find out someone at the party has died and then things go crazy. Because it’s targeted at children, we’re not super overt about what happens to everyone, older children in the audience understand from the rest of the story and younger children think, “I don’t know, things got crazy at the party”. That’s where our first acrobatic act happens. It is a chaotic scene in the party where people are running around and freaking out and we do a lot of lifts and tossing people and tricks like that.
So Mary is left alone on stage and she’s been handed an iPad to occupy herself because her parents don’t want to deal with her, everybody says, “Mary, just go away”. She’s all alone and does an acro-contortion solo where she’s staring at her screen the whole time and moving the way a little kid wiggles and squirms when they’re staring at the TV.
She then moves to live with her uncle in this mysterious Manor. When she goes exploring in the hallways, we have the hallways come to life with spirit characters that build staircases and toss her around and create tunnels. It gives you a sense of this weird mysterious house, and how her imagination comes to life inside it.
The garden comes to life, so that’s fairly abstract. Plants don’t do back handsprings and don’t toss each other and don’t dance. But to me, it’s indescribable when you see a beautiful plant in bloom or you see a whole garden just burst into color. There’s no way really to describe that. The garden scene is our take on what that is like; what is a garden like when it’s grasping and trying to find the sun and trying to find water? How do we show that movement quality in our bodies? And then when it’s fully in bloom, what does that exuberance look like? We show that through very exciting acrobatics.
There are some parts of the show that are a little more literal – like the neighbor family does a jump rope act because they give Mary a jump rope and she’s like, what is this? They realize she’s never seen a jump rope, and she’s never been taught to jump rope. So they show her. That’s an exciting acrobatic jump rope act, which is a bit more literal.
The robin is a pretty important character in this story. They show Mary the key to the garden and show her where the garden door is. Most of the show, the robin is portrayed as a puppet that’s manipulated by a person on stage, but there’s one moment where the puppet leads Mary off stage and when they come back on stage, the puppet is a person who performs a trapeze act. Everybody loves that act, it’s very exciting.
Olympia: How long did it take you to adapt it from the book into your version?
Felicity: I read the book for the first time during the pandemic, sometime in 2020. I immediately envisioned it as a circus show. For about a year it noodled around my brain – which is important work. Right around the beginning of 2022, I started working on a written adaptation. I started working on a written adaptation. I worked on that for a few months, then we started development rehearsals around March of 2022.
We developed it in a pretty fast rehearsal process. We did our initial production of it in June 2022 It went well, but I knew there were things about the script I knew I wanted to fix. There comes a point when you’re already in rehearsal that the actors will lose their minds if you keep changing the script on them. As a director, you have to cut off how many more changes you will make, and the acrobatics, we did as much as we could in a fast rehearsal process with the people we had. But we knew we also wanted to kind of upgrade some of the circus moments. We were really fortunate to get a residency at the Children’s Creativity Museum in downtown San Francisco. It’s a beautiful museum with a beautiful theater. We were excited and we got to dive back into work. After that first production closed, I did a lot of mental work and then around the same time the following year, I jumped back into rewriting the script, around January of 2023, and spent about three months rewriting. Then we got back into rehearsal right around the same time of March in 2023, and the show ran for four weeks at the Museum in June and July of 2023. So about a year and a half.
Olympia: What is the casting process for the show? Did you have auditions?
Felicity: For the recent production we did, which was a four week run at the museum, we held open auditions and we posted it pretty widely. We were definitely looking for local people because it was a longer run, and because it was a pretty intensive rehearsal process since we’re combining theater and circus.
Because it’s produced by Circus Center, we were primarily looking for people who have some connection to Circus Center, but we were open to looking at other folks as well. We ended up casting seven youth performers that are all part of the San Francisco Youth Circus. It’s written to have youth artists in it for some of the lead roles and some of the extras.
We also cast 10 adults. About half of them are actually teachers and performers at Circus Center. A couple of them are primarily actors in San Francisco – one of them actually was an actor before he started this and has since learned some circus. Another person was mostly an actor but she’s done a little bit of circus. These actors were great for some of the roles where we didn’t really need them to be able to do as much circus, we really just needed people who could act the parts. They’ve been great. They jumped in and learned a lot.
Olympia: Interesting! That’s a lot of people, but also less than I was expecting. Does each person have multiple roles throughout the show?
Felicity: Most of the characters just play their character throughout. Some of the bigger youth characters we actually double cast. So for example, Mary Lennox and Colin Craven – they’re the two biggest youth roles – we double cast; we have two Marys, we have two Collins. When they’re not playing their primary role, they play kids in the neighbor family. It’s a much smaller part and they do some group scenes and some group circus acts. That way, because we do two shows a day, it gives them both a break. It also allowed us to give more people opportunities, and if someone were to get sick or injured, we’re not lost.
Most of the other people primarily have their part to play, but they join in group scenes and acts. For example, the person who plays Dicken. She is mostly Dicken throughout the whole thing. She’s in the party scene at the beginning, everybody’s in that as a different person. And then she’s in the corridor as a part of the ensemble.
Most of the acrobatic sections are done by our ensemble. The ensemble is a group of seven people. One of them is a teenager and the rest of them are adults. They transform into different roles throughout the show, from hallway to garden to people at the party. They do it all. In the end they’re part of the big finale, so they’re very busy.
Olympia: What is the process of creating the circus routines and choosing the music? Are they choreographing their own routines or are you choreographing?
Felicity: I worked with Evan Tomlinson Weintraub on this – he was our acrobatic designer. He is amazing! He grew up training at Circus Center in the San Francisco Youth Circus. I was super lucky to have him come back and work on this show both times with me – the initial production and then this remount. He’s really the mastermind behind most of the circus acts. We also had a choreographer this time who was also one of the artists in the show. Her name is Lex Baesen and she teaches at Circus Center as well. She brings a lot of circus experience as well as dance training. She also worked with us on the choreography to make everything seamless.
All of the acts were created for this show. People bring tricks and sequences they know, but it really was created collaboratively during rehearsal together. Even the solo acts would work with us to shape their piece so that it fit the emotional tone of the show. Each artist did a lot of research, exploration, and discovery. Anyone who’s been fortunate enough to see the show will be like, “Wow! I’ve never seen stuff done that way”. It’s very creative, it’s very unique. It’s so collaborative, but Evan and Lex definitely take charge in that moment.
For me, one of the joys of working on a show like this is how collaborative it is – and Evan and Lex are right there with me on it. Everybody we cast is very creative. Part of what we were looking for in the audition process was improvising and seeing just how creative they could be; what they could come up with, and how open they were to trying new things. We were really looking for people who could dive in and create with us.
Olympia: What was your background before you became the artistic director at Circus Center?
Felicity: I started as a theater person, I did theater as a kid and I studied it in college. After college, I moved to Chicago to pursue a career as an actor, which I did for a while. And then I stumbled on circus. I was walking in Evanston one day, and I looked in these windows and there was this room where all these people were hanging from trapezes and tumbling. I was like, “What is this? I want to try this!” It was the Actor’s Gymnasium, a circus school in Chicago. I started taking classes and just totally fell in love.
Once I started getting into circus, I immediately was curious about how circus and theater could combine because I had this strong theater background. I quickly started working on shows that would incorporate both. Sometimes there is more theater, sometimes more circus, sometimes they’re a pretty even split like the Secret Garden. There’s always some element of each in all of my work.
Since moving to San Francisco to train at Circus Center, I’ve done a little bit of everything; I’ve taught, I’ve been a student, I’ve directed shows. During the pandemic, I got to keep creating. Circus Center was really supportive and I kept artistic projects going for Circus Center during that time. As we were coming out of the pandemic, they were looking to restructure, and the executive director asked if I would be the artistic director because I was kind of doing that job anyway. He was like, “Why don’t we make this official as we start to reopen?”
Olympia: What’s your favorite part of directing, either for this production or overall?
Felicity: Whenever I create a show, there’s always an essential idea there that I feel compelled to communicate. For The Secret Garden, one of the things that struck me about this story was how it was really about these people who were experiencing isolation, trauma, and loss – things that we were all very familiar with during the pandemic – and they were finding a way through it. They were finding a way to come back to life from that by being outside in nature, by being part of a community, by playing. I felt very strongly about wanting to communicate that theme. For me, when I direct a show, it’s very important that I have a strong theme in mind that I really want to put out into the world.
Probably the most fun part of directing is working with the performers, going through that process of having this idea that can only go so far in my own mind, to seeing what amazing things the performers or other collaborators bring to the process. Seeing how their ideas come together and then seeing this whole new thing come about. Some of it might be what I imagined in my mind, but much of it is stuff that I never could have thought of by myself. It requires that group, that collaboration, that community to really make something new, that no one person could have ever done by themselves. For me, the most fun part is that process of discovery and creation and seeing an idea go from a seed to this big blossoming flower.
Olympia: What is your next project? Do you have something in the works?
Felicity: Yeah, I do! I’m working on a new show. It’s called {IN}TANGIBLE. Brianna Kalisch, a circus and theater artist based in New York wrote this very beautiful play. It’s about a woman with dementia who’s living in a home and her children come to see her, and it’s about her experience with dementia. Her memories come to life on stage as these circus fantasies. It’s so beautiful, beautiful script, beautiful concept.
She found me as a person who directs circus theater and we hit it off! In August, we’re going to New Jersey to do a development residency at a place called ArtYard. We get to do this two week development residency where we’re living and working there and just developing the show and exploring and all those things we just talked about that are so awesome. We found an amazing cast of performers. Most of them are New York based, but I’m bringing one of the people who did The Secret Garden with me. We’re hoping that down the road, once we develop the show more, we’ll get to fully produce it and see where it goes. I’m happy to be continuing to do this fusion circus theater work, which is really my passion, and excited to get to know the east coast circus and theater community a little bit better.
Olympia: Do you have any advice that you would give to performers or directors?
Felicity: I would say the biggest advice that I could give anybody is just go for it. You can make a lot with very little, and the only way to learn and to grow is to go for it. Ideas can sit locked away in a journal or a box for many years, but it’s really much better if they have a chance to get out in the world and become something. It’s scary because you don’t know what will happen, and not every show or not every act is going to be your best one, and that’s ok. They don’t all have to be, but the only way to get better is just to do it.
The only way to get good enough, the only way to be ready, is to go for it and to do it. That can be in the backyard with your friends, or your local circus school, or making videos. If you really love it and you really care about it, eventually you’ll get to a point where you can do it more professionally. I think it’s so fulfilling to the soul to create, to make art, and nothing should ever hold someone back from doing that.
circus is my life 