Flotsam River Circus, a touring troupe of circus artists and musicians, floated into town earlier this month on a “handmade, ramshackle raft” assembled largely from scavenged materials — and put on a show.
At a Flotsam performance, the audience imagines that the world has ended, that what remains is just a few hungry humans on a boat surrounded by invasive mutant fish and existential threats — but that such a world can nevertheless contain camaraderie, beautiful movement, singing and laughter. Thanks to effective pantomime, the audience knows that the clown’s suitcase is impossible to lift. Yet, someone special may be up to the task, if given plenty of encouragement.
The characters perform stunts, clown and sing as they navigate harrowing encounters with both a sea monster and a Prophet of Doom. The performance takes place on the 32-foot Flotsam vessel, featuring a crow’s nest, two motors, a small cabin with tattered curtains and a platform complete with ladder, rocking chair and tuba — and has drawn audiences from the hundreds to the thousands.
In short, it is unlike anything else. And that’s the appeal.
“I hope people remember it wrong — and even more wild,” puppeteer Kalan Sherrard says during the final week of Flotsam’s 2023 tour, which ended on September 10 in St. Louis.
But though St. Louis was always scheduled to be the circus’ last stop, the three planned performances here almost didn’t happen. After the September 8 show between the Martin Luther King Bridge and Eads Bridge, a staffer in Mayor Tishaura Jones office told the circus to cease the shows— founder Jason Webley told the RFT that he hadn’t gotten a permit for the performances.
Webley ultimately moved the shows to a spot near Mural Mile, saying that he does not want the situation to be viewed as conflict with the city and hopes to return on a future tour. Shows two and three occurred without issue, against the dramatic backdrop of the MacArthur Bridge at sunset and the ambient rattle of passing freight trains.
“The trick with Flotsam is for it to always feel like it’s about to not happen and completely fall apart,” Webley says.
It’s good luck that things stayed together, both for St. Louis and for the circus itself. Flotsam is many things to many people: a symbol of creative possibilities; a series of epic journeys; a step toward renewing communities’ connections to their natural environments; and a haven for anyone seeking a couple hours of joy — including those in the LGBTQ+ community, who are, as ever, in need of meaningful, subversive, affirming spaces.
Flotsam began as a dream of Webley’s, an Everett, Washington, based troubadour. He’d gotten the idea for a floating troupe maintaining a show schedule of near-daily travel and performances, and the first tour took place in 2019.
“The definition of ‘flotsam’ is garbage or debris floating on a body of water, usually from a wreck. Flotsam, my Flotsam … it’s a piece of art that floats down the river.”
This summer, Flotsam began its tour in the Twin Cities, where the cast rendezvoused with the boat from as far away as Seattle. There, the cast rehearsed for a week and a half before setting off down the Mississippi on August 4. They passed through towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. St. Louis concluded a 33-show tour that spanned five weeks and over 670 river miles. All were free to attend, with donations welcome.
“It’s important that [the show] is accessible,” says Kalan Sherrard, a puppeteer.
Both Webley and Sherrard say Flotsam doesn’t have one unifying message or plot. “I want it to not have a specific story but also not not have a story … [not just] a series of acts but more like a bunch of characters interacting, and maybe magical circus things keep happening,” Webley says. Large portions are wordless, which he says helps to “cast a certain spell.”
Webley does, however, hold up several signs featuring lines such as “the water has risen” and “little remains of the life we know” at the beginning to orient the audience. At times, the cast moves through the crowd playing instruments and wearing mutant fish costumes, mostly gray and pink garments with an excess of eyes and teeth, as well as some fish netting and superfluous fins. Sherrard gives a reflective, partly improvised speech toward the end that posits many possible ways of looking at Flotsam.
Matthew “Poki” McCorkle says of his character, and perhaps the onlookers as well, “There's this doom and destruction on the horizon; who’s going to be there to ignore the message?” To Webley, the characters who pay no attention to their world “dissolving” are not necessarily wrong or right, nor is the Prophet of Doom character necessarily wrong or right.
“[We’re] just doing a story in the future,” fiddler Miriam Oommen says.
Flotsam’s 2023 cast was Webley (project originator, boat-builder, accordionist, vocalist, mutant fish), Sherrard (puppeteer, Prophet of Doom), Sari Breznau (percussionist, trumpeter, vocalist, many-breasted mermaid), Sadye Osterloh (acrobat, trapeze artist, physical comedian), McCorckle (mime, hairhang artist, balancer, Flotsam treasurer), Tanya Gagne (aerialist, trapeze artist, and hula hooper), Oommen (fiddle player and folk jam facilitator), and Ferdusol Intérprete (clown, mime, dancer). Many perform with other circuses, such as UP UP UP Crane Truck Circus. Not all of the original cast returned, but most of the current members have done multiple tours since 2019, which have included the Willamette River, Seattle waterways and the Sacramento River.
A new presence in 2023 was Otis, Osterloh and McCorckle’s 11-month-old baby. Otis delighted in the boat and the water, as well as listening to Sherrard play music using only a balloon. One of Otis’ most memorably unpredictable moments was peeing on the Flotsam library — a stash of zines and books, including, fittingly, A Book of Surrealist Games.
“We’re trying to guess what he’s going to be like … he’s always changing,” McCorkle says. He thrived on the doting attention of the cast, as well as crew member Matty Semkowich, who watched Otis during the shows — in addition to playing key roles with boat operation and gathering supplies, often via dumpster-diving.
Sherrard says that one of the central features of this project is its ‘ecological’ nature. “Of course [Flotsam] has a footprint, but it’s this idea of trying to activate rivers — these huge thoroughfares — while we’re increasingly divorced from nature,” Sherrard says.
At every St. Louis show, small children from the audience played by the water. They tossed stones, shifted driftwood, sculpted sand, poured water from littered cups and splashed. Proximity to nature was made inevitable. During the first performance, one small child could be heard saying, “There’s an ant in my shirt,” to which their friend replied, “So? You don’t have to interrupt the show for that.”
Beyond the moment-to-moment action, Webley says, “I don’t think it has to be conscious, but I think that there’s this slightly ritual aspect of coming in the evening to the river. … When we pulled into St. Louis, part of [the moment] was the emotion of, ‘We made it to the last place,’ but also part of it was tangibly knowing a bit about St. Louis’ history with the riverfront. And it just [felt] really special and specific that we were here doing this and people were coming.”
One of Flotsam’s supporters, Crackers, has been following the tours since the beginning. He is a key part of operations, like flyering, as half of a duo dubbed ‘Jetsam.’ Crackers says that every time he’s seen the show, he’s been in a bad place, but that by the end he is “maybe not fully healed but on the path.” Other St. Louis audience members came from as far away as Rhode Island. Sherrard, who performs internationally as enormousface, also gave an “anti-narrative” solo puppet show at CBGB on South Grand on September 9.
Webley calls Flotsam “a love project” and that there’s little he wouldn’t give up to keep it going. Crowd donations, in the form of cash tossed into the open mouth of the sea monster and also plain old Venmo or PayPal, get them closer to solvency. Many audience members, especially children feeding the sea monster, were happy to donate.
Attendees said they had not known exactly what to expect; many learned about Flotsam via social media, friends or flyers. Others voiced pleasant surprise at the high quality of the music.
“Every show makes me feel different. But, in general, there’s kind of a humor to it [that] has a bit of an edge but also is for the kids,” Oommen reflects. “My previous experience playing in bands is that the majority of the audience is 20- or 30-year-olds, but with this project in some of these small towns, those are the only people that weren’t there.”
For Oommen, creative work and identity closely intermingle. “I see gender as performance, and I’m also a performer, and I came out [as trans] through the punk scene — finding other people who were performing and expressing different gender identities in artistic contexts,” she says. “So I see performance, art, music and gender identity as really pretty intertwined, which is definitely not how everybody sees it.
“Performing is almost like a shield, so I almost have an incentive to be on the stage because people respect you. … I love it, but it also is a tool to be accepted. I haven’t come through a lot of harassment [on tour]. And the crew — I’m not sure how many of them identify strongly with queerness, but they’re all very familiar.”
Post-tour, Oommen’s plans include traveling around a bit then heading back to Eugene, Oregon. She is working as Miriam Hacksaw on a solo folk fiddle project that taps her Malayali-Americanheritage. “In folk music, as in anarchy, sometimes certain voices are heard louder than others, but it’s also a space in which people can assert their voices,” she says.
Performance also relates to gender for McCorkle. In the show, they describe themself as having a generally masculine gender expression with “maybe a little more rouge than a captain would wear normally.” Playing with norms is salient to them as a queer person visible on stage and that it is one facet of the show’s ability to bridge gaps with a variety of people and places. “Keeping the conversation going even in small ways feels pretty important,” they say.
One of their many artistic ventures includes a “father-son magic duo” with Osterloh as the father and McCorkle as the son. McCorkle points out that magic is often gendered, with a woman as a passive assistant to a man executing all the magic. Their act with Osterloh keeps “the beauty of the tricks” yet re-frames and subverts “all these ‘magic dude’ vibes.” The duo performed at the Portland Juggling Festival immediately following Flotsam.
The Flotsam crew packed the boat up the day after the third St. Louis show, loading its components back onto the trailer to be stored until the next tour (likely the Ohio River in 2024). The post-show celebration on the final night included a dinner with many raised glasses and much gratitude expressed among the cast and crew.
But Flotsam may linger in audiences’ consciousnesses long after the boat has traveled on to a new river. “I talked to this four-year-old in Minneapolis who said ‘I had nightmares about the sea monster. I dreamed the sea monster was six times bigger — bigger than a house — and it ate everyone, and then the person with the unicorn horn saved everyone,’” Sherrard says. That’s kinda my dream, too.”
Anyone who catches a future show may feel that the world is both constantly dissolving and constantly being saved, and that, either way, laughing together on a riverbank can be much more than a novelty.
