How ‘Passengers’ Retooled After a Performer’s Injury

The 7 Fingers company was about to begin performances of its multidisciplinary, train travel-themed show “Passengers,” and it was in a big pickle: A cast member was injured while practicing an especially tricky segment. It was anticlimactic — initially nothing seemed askew at the Tuesday evening rehearsal I had been observing — but the consequences were weighing on everybody. The first preview, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, was a mere two days away.

The troupe, which specializes in a hybrid of circus and theater incorporating movement and music, had been running through part of a hand-to-trapeze segment. That discipline combines ground and aerial acrobatics, and is a signature number of the director and choreographer Shana Carroll. She had developed it for the Cirque du Soleil show “Paramour,” then took it to the 7 Fingers, the Montreal-based collective she helped found in 2002.

Like many circus acts, hand-to-trap (as it’s commonly referred to), is spectacular but also dangerous. A flyer is catapulted up or dropped down by porters on the floor and one on a trapeze. There is no net or mat underneath the trapeze, because that’s where the floor team stands.

“My safety mat becomes my porters, my colleagues,” said Marie-Christine Fournier, who is this production’s flyer.

At one point on Tuesday, Fournier was in the air, dangling from the wrists of Eduardo DeAzevedo Grillo, a porter who was hanging upside down, batlike, from a trapeze. He released her and she gracefully dove into the arms of seven company members who were waiting underneath them.