IN LIEU OF DOG

“In Lieu of Dog” was a stripped down ground acrobatics production that took place in Niagara Falls in the autumn of 2021. It featured acrobat S. Lou Routley in handmade fox costume, with spooky lullabies performed by members of the doom ensemble Harmonic Shadow Circus. Mx Routley’s short performances incorporated strength tricks, flexibility tricks, balance tricks, along with jarring movements and playful trickery. Shows could start and stop seamlessly, a strength in these times of plague. Shows occured in conjunction with other local events, and as pop-ups, to mostly pedestrian audiences.

“In Lieu of Dog” loosely tells the story of pivoting to “handbalancer” during these long months of distance and isolation, seen through the eyes of an animal. It arose in response to the closures starting in March 2020. Normally a flying acrobat, Mx Routley lost access to her aerial spaces, and then two months in, her dog died. The experience was, quite literally, grounding. After a period of mourning, she began training circus in her room with only the ground as her apparatus. Circus became a way to move through the grief, and to keep the torch burning through the coming seasons. The production arose as a creation from quarantine, and shows, trick by trick, how to rebuild from the ground up.

Our primary goal through showcasing these mischievous and gentle movements was to engage a sense of play and joy from our audience, reminiscent of the feeling of being bonded with a good dog. Truly, it was the vicarious joy of birds and other dogs out the windows that got us through so many of those days. Our secondary goal was to showcase what contemporary circus looks like in 2021 in Niagara Falls, home of ‘the eternal circus’. Our tertiary goal was to celebrate our street level wildlife neighbours, namely the rarely seen red fox, as well as Foxdog Sadie. In the interest of accessibility, we have compiled footage from pop-ups as well as interior (den) shots so that our production may reach a wider audience. We enjoyed blurring the boundary between life and art, much in the same way a fox blurs the boundary between urban and wild.