Shh! Flotsam, the floating river circus, comes to the Twin Cities

Let's keep this a secret.

There's a wackily inventive floating circus kicking off a 650-mile tour on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and St. Paul this weekend. But the information about the novel performances by the merry band of musicians, puppeteers and acrobats is not quite out in the open.

"In the past we've never gotten permission — we just show up and do things. I get worried about too much publicity," said Jason Webley, an accordionist who prefers the term organizer or captain instead of founder of the Washington State-based Flotsam Circus.

The troupe has nine members who perform circus acts with a twist. The trapeze artists, for example, don flippers and their costumes look like they've stowed away from a pirate ship.

On Friday, Flotsam performs at Bohemian Flats on the East Side of the Mississippi near 10th St. SE in Minneapolis. Saturday's show is at Hidden Falls near Highland Park in St. Paul and Sunday's is at Harriet Island. All shows begin at 6 p.m.

The troupe's Twin Cities engagement is part of a river odyssey that will see them perform 33 shows in five states along the great waterway. The riverine revelry culminates in September in St. Louis.

Admission is free but Flotsam is seeking donations.

"I grew up under the spell of the Mark Twain books," Webley said.

Rivers, to him, are enchanting. And there's no river more storied and magical than the Mississippi, the fourth longest in the world after Africa's Nile, South America's Amazon and Asia's Yangtze.

Webley, who lives on a houseboat outside of Seattle, started Flotsam in 2019. In that first year, the troupe toured communities on Oregon's Willamette River, giving free performances along the way. That whetted the artists' appetites for something bigger. They were planning a tour of the Ohio River when the pandemic hit.

After things reopened, Webley had huge ambitions. He scouted the Upper Mississippi and was bummed that the locks to the dams were closed in downtown Minneapolis. Still, he and his troupe were undeterred, even if their implements seem wobbly.

Their hand-built pontoon boat, which also is their home on the road and their transportation, is 32 feet long and is pretty rickety.

"It all breaks apart into a bunch of inconvenient pieces loaded onto a trailer and bus and hauled across the country," Webley said. "If we have to travel a mile or 500 miles, it has to be broken down."

While Flotsam is the latest act to make a name for itself in the niche water performance space, the troupe is not unique. In 2009, artist and filmmaker Caledonia Curry, also known as Swoon, brought a waterborne art boat installation, the Venice Biennale.

And Poppa Neutrino, the nom de aqua for the late musician and raft builder William David Pearlman, became a symbol of watery free-spiritedness by sailing boats made of trash across the ocean.

For Webley, the tour is about having fun.

"This is a whimsical floating art show," he said.