Review: Children’s Theatre launches new season with spirited South African circus show ‘Moya’

There’s a precise moment in “Moya” when the show captures us with its electric virtuosity.

It happens in the opening minutes as Jacobus Claassen, known as Trompie, portrays a homeless street kid begging for loose change while a live narrator and band set the scene with sincere rhymes.

As Trompie reaches out to strangers for help, two passersby grab his hands in tandem, lift him and flip him in place. Dynamic, quick and thoroughly exhilarating, that flip announces the blithe artistry of a show shot through with tumbling, trapezing and juggling adrenaline.

“Moya” launched the Children’s Theatre Company’s 59th season Saturday. Brisk at just an hour, the power-packed production comes to Minneapolis via South Africa’s Zip Zap Circus, a company that uses circus routines to home and help children in tough circumstances escape and heal.

The show’s name is derived from the Bantu word for “spirit,” and it is certainly infused with vim.

Zip Zap co-founder Brent van Rensburg has directed “Moya” tightly, using the performers’ own tough life experiences as the basis for the stories that are enacted through feats of skill and strength. The performers themselves do not speak but their voices are represented live in songs, raps and spoken word compositions created by bandleader and bassist Josh Hawks.

The score, which covers a range of South African musical styles, conjures both Trompie’s alienation and hardship on the one hand as well as the ensemble’s exhilaration as it discovers its gifts in a supportive environment.

Hawks was part of the band that performed the Afro-fusion soca of “Waka Waka,” made famous by Shakira. That influence can be heard in these compositions. Hawks also nods to South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, whose “Stimela” captured the haunting calls of the trains delivering miners.

“Moya” is officially billed as a circus, and we can certainly see why. Its acts and implements are drawn from and named for the circus world, including juggling, the Cyr wheel and trapeze.

Kudos to strongwoman Bridgette Berning for her displays on the trapeze and breathtaking drops on the long aerial fabrics known as silks, to Phelelani Ndakrokra for his dangerous manipulation of the Cyr wheel and to Masizakhe Kovi for his calm power and skill as he turns and balances on one hand. Impressively, Kovi uses his hand as a turning base, which frees his legs to move like expressive hands.

Claassen also takes part in a mesmerizing juggling duet with Jason Barnard.

However, because of the strong dramaturgy and narrative, the show sometimes feels less like a circus and more like a dance-heavy theatrical work. And what circus addresses a political injustice so artfully head on?

“Moya” wrestles with and repudiates apartheid, South Africa’s state-sanctioned system of discrimination that governed the lives of those who lived there from the late 1940s into the early 1990s. The racial mosaic of the performers on “Africa (Rise Up),” for example, offers a pointed fist-raising refutation of apartheid beliefs.

The performing ensemble, petite but powerful, also models a new reality. For all are talented individually, but as a group, they rely on one another for safety and inspiration, modeling Nelson Mandela’s dream of the rainbow nation that first inspired van Rensburg.

In other words, “Moya” turns political harshness into communal healing and celebrates with a thrilling gumboot dance, the stamping, body-slapping communication form used by the men who moved earth in South Africa’s gold mines that shares similarities to the stepping of African American fraternities and sororities.

As Trompie moves from earnest alienation to smiling inclusion, and as we get wrapped up in its dances, “Moya” offers visceral lessons in grit and resilience.

Where: Children’s Theatre Company, 2400 3rd Av. S., Mpls.

When: 7 p.m. Thu.-Fri., 11 a.m. & 2 p.m. Sat., 2 & 5 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 20.

Tickets: $15-$73. 612-874-0400 or childrenstheatre.org.