Artists are a special breed of people. They live a life of travel, there are hardly any boundaries for them. But there are biographies that stand out even from this already illustrious circle. One of them is that of Molly Saudek. The tightrope walker seems to have been at the center of almost all the formative moments and developments in the recent history of acrobatics. And yet the likeable American, who has lived in her adopted home of Paris for 18 years, is free of any vanity. I met her for a chat in the Tigerpalast, where she is currently engaged with a tightrope walking duo together with Florent Blondeau.
Molly's life sounds like a modern circus fairytale. Once upon a time there was a child in rural Vermont. As chance would have it, the successful clown Rob Mermin founded his Circus Smirkus there and invited children from the region to a casting. Casting is probably the wrong word. "We couldn't do anything," Molly says, laughing. But when talent meets visionary, great things can happen, as we later saw.
Three weeks of training and a tent tour later, in Smirkus' second year, Mermin decided at the end of the 1980s, in the midst of perestroika, to set off for the Soviet Union with his young artists - because he was convinced that the best circus trainers in the world were there. So, one day Molly and her youth circus mates walked past the Yaroslav circus building and read on a poster: "Russian-American Youth Circus - tomorrow at 3 p.m." Now they realized that they were supposed to put on a show.
Molly remembers an anecdote. Since there was no time to rehearse her trapeze act beforehand, she suddenly found herself in the middle of the large ring during the show and saw a trapeze with a motor winch above her. A trapeze that moved down towards her, she had never seen anything like it before. She grabbed it and moved up - "and higher and higher, and higher and higher." She saw two strong men below, they would catch her, she thought with youthful recklessness and simply showed her act. It was only later that she found out that Rob Mermin was panicking backstage: "Get her down, get her down!"
The 4-5 years with Smirkus were formative for Molly. From Guennadi Totokov, her first trainer on the trapeze, she learned how to work, how to create something. But she switched from the trapeze to the tightrope early on. "I thought you could actually do everything on the rope that you could do on the ground," she explains her passion, "it's possible to create movement there." She was also attracted to the mental aspect - "It's very balancing" - in the truest sense of the word.
When she came to the circus school in Montreal, Molly knew immediately what she wanted and spent 5-6 hours a day on the rope. After only a year at school, her work caught the attention of Cirque du Soleil and she was selected for a solo tightrope act for the show Alegria. It must have been an exciting time - Cirque du Soleil was driven by great "dreamers and thinkers", as she puts it; as a young student she toured Asia for a year. But what she took away with her was realizing that this type of work was not her thing. "I felt like my tightrope style was being used choreographically in a way that was not what I intended," she explains. Choreography means more to her than just space to create a trick. Rather, she chooses the tricks based on what she wants to say and doesn't try to fit all the tricks into one act.
After the tour with Alegria, she put all her energy into creating her own solo act. The reward came in 1998, in the form of the silver medal at the "Cirque de Demain" festival in Paris, which was still taking place at Cirque d'Hiver at the time. Shortly after one of her festival appearances, she remembers, a woman approached her backstage - it was Margareta Dillinger with Johnny Klinke in tow. They offered her a contract in their Tigerpalast Varieté, which was written entirely in German. Her father advised her not to sign it under any circumstances, as she didn't understand anything. But Molly simply replied: "I think they're both pretty cool, and I've heard of the Tigerpalast" - the contract was signed before the show finale, despite her father's reservations.
She was replacing Duo Mouvance in the show with their legendary trapeze tango - too big shoes for the young Molly, she thought with awe. In addition, the conditions for tightrope walkers in the small theatre were difficult - with steps on the floor and the audience only a meter away from the rope. She had to take her back flip out of the act, which was her most spectacular trick. But that was no problem for Margareta Dillinger, for her the dance was more important anyway. The two got along well. 26 years to come in which Molly has been associated with the Tigerpalast, performing in Frankfurt again and again - "It's my second home".
Shortly afterwards, Molly's path took another unexpected turn. After "Cirque de Demain" she toured with New York's Big Apple Circus. Then a call came from Stockholm. There was a small group that did rock-style circus - "great people", she was assured. It was the early days of Cirkus Cirkör, now the most renowned contemporary circus company in Sweden. From a large, established circus in her American homeland to a small group of alternative artists in Europe who wanted to revolutionize the circus, including a rock band on stage? Molly decided to move to Sweden. "There was this feeling that anything was possible on stage," she still is still enthusiastic today. So she went to Stockholm and took part in the show Trix, which was to be the company's breakthrough.
From then on, Molly kept switching back and forth between her "parallel lives", as she calls them. On the one hand, she worked with her classic number in the Tigerpalast, the Wintergarten or the Nikulin Circus in Moscow. On the other hand, she appeared in contemporary productions and began choreographic work. In 2005, Agathe Olivier and Antoine Rigot asked her if she would like to work with their company Les Colporteurs to realize a dream of many tightrope walkers: a show with only tightrope walking. She said yes. The result was the production "Le Fil sur la Neige", which the Tigerpalast brought to Frankfurt's Bockenheimer Depot in 2009. This is where the two parallel lives met.
Today she advises young artists to try everything. "You won't invent anything new if you don't know all the parameters," she says, "whether you come from traditional or contemporary circus, say yes to the other. If someone makes an interesting offer, try it out." Once you've found your way, you can start saying no to offers that don't help you artistically.
Molly's seems like a dream life - until a stroke of fate struck in 2012. She was engaged for a season in the Budapest capital circus and had just been on home leave in the USA for two weeks. She was hit by a car and her life was in danger. She was very lucky to survive, but the injuries caused her to lose almost all of her vision in one eye. How can you ever walk the tightrope again without spatial vision? "I was lucky, but part of me screamed at the universe: 'You don't get to decide when I stop. I'll decide for myself!'" she recalls the tragic moments after the accident.
She told Cirque Plume, where she was due to have her next engagement, that she wasn't sure whether she would ever be able to perform again. But the circus encouraged her and wanted her to come no matter what. And so Molly learned to adapt, to give up some tricks that were no longer possible. But she fought back and is still walking the tightrope today.
She has now reached an age that makes her look for alternatives to performing as an artist. "I want to stop when I feel like doing other things, not when my body forces me to," is her motto. Once again, there seem to be no limits to her creativity. She has been building wooden boats in Maine every year for the past five years, but laughingly admits that this will probably not be her main job. She devotes herself to directing and choreography, teaches at circus schools such as the Academie Fratellini in Paris, completed a master's degree in new performative practices in Stockholm and has been part of the artistic jury of CircusNext since 2018. In addition to all this, she can still be seen on the tightwire, not only in the Tigerpalast, but also on tour with the Les Coporteurs shows Méandres and Coeur Sauvages.
"I've gotten back to the point where I say yes to everything," she says with a wink. If that's the case, then we can expect a lot more interesting things from Molly Saudek.
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