No clowning around: Sacramento native earns a triumphant return with Cirque’s ‘Amaluna’

Kelsey Custard kicks up her foot for a photo in a pair of burgundy patent leather heels, balancing atop a steep, sandy slide down to the craggy, oak-strewn beach of the American River behind her. Just another day’s work in the life of a professional clown, where the job description often, if not always, requires some combination of tripping, falling, running quickly up and down stairs, or into people, usually in outlandish footwear of one sort or another.

“The wardrobe people are going to be really mad if I fall in this dress!” Custard laughed. She’s wearing full clown makeup, her head topped with colorful, wind-blown messy buns, and the ornate, cleavage-bearing canvas dress and flowing headdress that is her stage costume.

Yes, Custard has followed her passion for being funny all the way to the circus, and not just any circus. Custard scored a coveted clown position in the famed Cirque du Soleil, which will be raising its glorious blue-and-white big top in January for the first time in Sacramento since 2002, bringing their newest production, “Amaluna,” to town.

Gender equity and Cirque du Soliel

Custard caught up with The Sacramento Bee to talk clowning, gender equity, and why she loves being a part of Amaluna, a unique show among Cirque du Soleil productions in that its focus is a celebration of feminine expression in multiple forms and features a cast of acrobats and performers that is roughly 70 percent women.

“Those numbers don’t happen in circus,” Custard explained. “Usually the women in circus are doing some sort of, like, bending, or are partners to men, but in Amaluna, we have former Olympians, there’s a whole group of Amazon warriors, there’s an all-woman band.”

Custard knows what it feels like to be under-represented and, frankly, under-appreciated in circus, which is why she finds the concept of Amaluna’s female-centric plotline and powerful women-driven performances so exciting.

Custard recounted an experience she had during her time at the San Francisco Clown Conservatory — from where she received a rubber chicken upon graduating — of a male teacher who rehashed the old adage to his students (male and female) that “women weren’t funny,” so they shouldn’t bother learning cane tricks.

“Why not?” asked Custard. “We’re all funny. Every person on this earth has the ability to be funny. I don’t know why there’s this horrible line.”

Custard said she would never forget that teacher’s prejudice, and has gone on to prove him wrong. In 2010, out of 80 clowns who auditioned for Cirque du Soleil in San Francisco, only six were chosen, and Custard was the only female. So her cane trick capabilities are just fine, apparently.

Clowning remains a male-dominated industry, according the Custard, but she hopes shows like Amaluna will give women more and better opportunities to showcase their multifaceted forms of expressions in the coming years.

“I want every kid of every gender to watch it and watch strong women, because they don’t get to see that represented in much media, especially circus.”

‘Amaluna’ features unusual Cirque traits

Amaluna is unique among Cirque du Soleil productions because of its emphasis on storyline. Cirque shows are typically beautiful and interwoven with music, but there’s very little plot to follow. One of the show’s influences is Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” hence, the island and water themes, and hence Custard found herself balancing in heels next to her hometown river.

“It makes me feel amazing,” Custard said of returning to Sacramento to perform. “I was born here, I worked here in the summers at music circus. To be here in Sacramento performing is really incredible.”

Custard’s clown character in Amaluna, Maïnha, is a nanny to the young woman protagonist Miranda and the caretaker of the island.

“She directs a lot of the magic and ceremony,” said Custard.

The clowning comes in when Maïnha gets involved with Tito, the captain of a ship full of sailors that crashes on an island of women after a storm.

While Miranda has a deep, young love affair with sailor Romeo, Maïnha and Tito’s relationship reflects the more humorous, and much more real, aspects of falling in love, explained Custard.

“They’re the sweet, romantic, serious love and we’re like the ‘oops! I fell down a hole’ love.” Custard laughed.

Custard also has a background in acting, with a BA in theater from UC Santa Cruz, which she said makes her style of clowning adapt well to Amaluna’s plot-driven structure.

New artistry and acrobatics

Mark Shaub, the artistic director for Amaluna, said the female-centric perspective of the production ensures audiences can look forward to acts and acrobatics that have not been utilized in other Cirque productions.

“Diane Paulus, the director of the show, wanted to build a show that really brought women to the forefront,” Shaub said. “It wasn’t really an idea about talking about women, but showing women in all the many ways they can express themselves — acrobatically, artistically and aesthetically.”

Shaub said that among these “extremely powerful acts” are the aerial straps act, unique in that this type of performance routinely features male acrobats in other Cirque du Soleil productions, but Amaluna features three women.

Also “an amazing, very exciting act,” according to Shaub, is the uneven bars, which have never been done at Cirque du Soleil before. The bars are a female-specific apparatus designed and built around the traditional Olympic gymnast sport. Normally they consist of bars at two different levels, but in Amaluna, there are four bars.

Among technological feats audiences can look forward to, AMALUNA has a cane-balancing act that includes an acrobat gliding in and out of a giant Plexiglas bowl big enough to hold 1,800 liters of water.

“It’s worth every bit of trouble it has caused because it’s absolutely beautiful,” Shaub said.

While the acrobatics are astounding, making audiences laugh is the best part of the show for Custard. She likes to see people able to let go, forget their problems and enjoy themselves, like that little girl in the audience during one of her recent performances that fell out of her chair laughing.

“I was performing for her,” said Custard. “Yes, all the other people were watching, around 2,000 people, but she was having the best time of her life. It’s those moments that feed you and make you thrive.”

Cirque du Soleil will raise the big top for Amaluna on January 16. Amaluna is playing January 22 to February 23 at Sutter Health Park, the home of the Sacramento River Cats.

If you go

Amaluna

When: Jan. 16 to Feb. 23

Where: Sutter Health Park

Cost: $49 to $250

Tickets: www.cirquedusoleil.com/amaluna

This story was originally published January 16, 2020 at 4:00 AM.