Epidermis Circus: control, comedy and getting all puppet porno

6 Mar 2024 - Photos by Helene Cyr, Jam Hamid and Ingrid Hansen

When Baby Tyler develops octopi appendages and soars gracefully through the dark blue depths, pockets of the audience burst into laughter. Another pocket bursts into spontaneous applause. Yet another burst into tears. But we all react on a gut emotional level to stunning but incongruous imagery that made narrative or logical sense in only the most surreal manner. Because we are talking about puppetry—and Baby Tyler is a doll head—there is the temptation to suggest that Ingrid Hansen has tapped into some long forgotten or suppressed childish innocence. The primitive plaintive part of our brains that is charmed by balloons, patterns of glitter and colour, clown pratfalls. Except Epidermis Circus is not a show for children. During a deconstruction of the classic "Here is the Church" hand game, Hansen ponders, "Why does it always get all porno with me?" Her conclusion, as we squirm in our chairs, tantalizingly titillated by her writhing frotting digits, is that "I tell simple jokes for simple folks who are horny."

That's as good a description as any for Epidermis Circus.

There is no point in trying to recount the acts in the "cabaret" that is Epidermis Circus. They are all dependent on that alchemy between the visual, the sonic, and the hypnotic dream state that Hansen lures us into. She is a presence of quicksilver moods. Entering clad in fabulous and elaborate couture courtesy of Jimbo the Drag Clown, she revels in the glamour with all the au courant haughtiness of a steam punk Norma Desmond. Yet she is visibly giggling at the absurdity it of it all. Playing both at once without denying the power of either. An aw shucks beauty queen on a comedic red carpet. It is a duality that Hansen maintains, the charming girl next door who just happens to be insanely talented and smart. And who, with a look, lets you know that if she is not obeyed, she could easily shiv you in the nearest alley. Exactly the quality one desires in a puppet master.

Epidermis Circus does have a cabaret-like structure, a variety show from the twilight zone. Hosted by bitter faded vaudevillian Florence McFingernails, the format quickly degenerates into whatever manic magical puppetry Hansen and director Britt Small have conjured. Baby Tyler makes appearances as varied as a burlesque bubble bath to a picnic with shark rides. Two audience volunteers become the physical stage for Hansen's undergarments to perform a love at first sight saga of lust, betrayal and death. A simple mirror fragments Hansen's face into a kaleidoscope of creations and emotions, again evoking hilarity and sinister awe. Through it all we see Hansen at work. The characters that appear so lifelike are products of her superhuman dexterity and timing that can't afford to be anything but exact. She breaks the fourth, or maybe the fifth, wall with a series of jokes about pockets and fingering, before looming over a barren but green landscape and literally vomiting an entire world into existence.

Yes, Hansen is a god. A creator and a destroyer. At the beginning of Epidermis Circus she reminds us that we are all "bags of meat," a phrase we all gleefully chant at her urging at a later point. The inanimate becomes animate, lifelike, due to Hansen's manipulations and artistry. And we bags of meat are manipulated as well, seduced into her off kilter world where nothing is what it seems and is all the better for it. I don't think that Hansen is creating a conscious meditation on control, using her body and imagination as a canvas. I think she is striving to entertain by unleashing the weirdness that lurks in all our brains and turning what if and pretend into reality. Exercising a distilled circus worth of control to let the mind explode out of control. So we can react with an uninhibited lack of control. Epidermis Circus is utterly unique, utterly charming, uproariously funny and shockingly moving in a very visceral strange way. And no matter what Florence McFingernails says, Baby Tyler is a major talent.