Sarah Pearline designs sets and projections, and sometimes builds and paints them. Read Part One and Part Three of this in-depth designer profile.
When the Circus Comes Your Way
Sarah Pearline grew up in St. Louis. In high school, she tried her hand at painting and thought she’d spend her days in a scene shop. “I started out at NYU in the production track,” she recalls. “It was a wonderful experience. I got lots of studio practice, and plenty of opportunities to practice collaborating with my peers,” she recalls.
By the time she finished, she was designing.
When Pearline was a senior at NYU, she designed Blithe Spirit for Cecil Mackinnon, theater director and ringmaster of Circus Flora. MacKinnon felt at once that Pearline could design anything—even for a circus that presents shows with storylines and requires scenery that people can fly over and animals—including horses, dogs, cats, domestic donkeys, pigs, and camels—can perform on. Spaces for entrances had to be large enough to accommodate Flora, the elephant. “I inherited a bandstand that had been built [above the stage area] to accommodate Flora's entrances,” Pearline recalls.
The St. Louis-based circus took her back to her hometown. There “she had to forge relationships with 90+ people. There is no stage manager or production manager, no hierarchy. She had to find her way with all these personalities. No one likes change and everyone worries about safety when you put anything in the tent. I thought she would quit,” MacKinnon recalls.
She didn’t quit. Pearline came in 2006 and stayed for eleven years.
“One of the things I loved about working with Cecil and David Balding, the producer and artistic director, was that they would weave current events into the theme of the show. That year, it was the great immigration debate, so much of the story took place on a tall ship, and of course, I wanted to turn the bandstand into a ship with a mast, some sails, the bow, and a plank.” She learned that nothing hard could stick out too far “in case the trapeze artists landed on the net, which was rigged close to the bandstand at one end, or too high, lest it poke a hole in the tent. And of course, nothing could drape too low, lest it spook the horses,” she explains.
“So, there I was with a huge open space and lots of ideas to fill it with—and a lot of roadblocks. In the end, I was able to make some sails out of muslin and heavy armature wire to keep their shape and got one of the ring crew guys to climb on top of the tent to place a rigging point for the sails, and then one of the aerialists, who I was amazed to find had an entire basement in his trailer, found some hardware,” says Pearline. That helped her create a retractable plank. “After all, what’s a show set on a tall ship without a clown walking the plank?” Everyone was happy with the results.
During the early years, she constructed and painted her sets in a back lot behind the tent where performers stayed, and she had to contend with weather. “I remember needing to take shelter once, but mostly, it was a lot of thunderstorms. I often felt like I would get a huge project setup and ready for paint, or whatever step of the process it was, and then the rain would come,” she recalls. Installation, accomplished in quick bursts between rehearsals, was also a challenge, especially since she had to round people up to help. And once loaded, touchups were difficult. “It’s not like I had a genie or even scaffold.”
Eventual budget increases enabled her to get some building done off-site and to convince her partner, Brian Dambacher, to join the circus, too. (Dambacher and Pearline met at Yale, when he was in the TD program, and she was studying design.) “He's a TD with plenty of rigging experience, so suddenly, I could dream even bigger. Once Brian came on board, the quality of the scenery increased exponentially.” The pair also taught at Michigan State University and were able to prep circus scenery in the MSU prop shop, which provided tools and shelter. Even running water!
Pearline’s circus sets included chandeliers (Moulin Rouge), windmill towers with floating windmill blades (Don Quixote), and an interactive set that accommodated a trampoline act (One Summer on Second Street).
The circus shows took an enormous amount of time and effort. “Sarah liked to work all night when she was at NYU. She’d get locked into the building at times,” MacKinnon recalls. That worked out well for the circus, where they all lived. “I’d get up in the morning and all this stuff had happened.” As Pearline continued to work for the circus, sets became more ambitious. These included a boat for a show about immigration and a castle with floating leaves of a book, which required careful planning to steer clear of aerialists.
For The Legend of King Arthur, she created a huge book inspired by the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, “an upside-down book with pages raining down in suspension.” The book floated 20' above the bandstand, with pages suspended in midair. Dambacher built a curved structure for pages covered with pink foam and muslin. Pearline painted calligraphy and put the Beardsley illustrations onto those pages, which were hung from fishing lines. The book was over 15' wide and six feet deep; pages were five feet tall, to fill the huge circus ring.
Circus plays were loosely scripted with “more of a theme than a script” and sometimes were based on a book or poem. All acts were hired before plans for a play began, and stories were often motivated by how aerialists or clowns might fit into it.
In one instance, a clown juggled umbrellas. And a play about a clown who makes rain emerged. Time shifted from the past to a draught-threatened future. “The main character is a clown ancestor who is a rainmaker and so has time to solve the draught. Great floods are happening because the rainmaker hadn’t perfected his technique.”
That might have been too complex to achieve had Pearline not done projections for a play she designed at Wayne State University; it called for an abstracted façade of a plantation home that doubled as a projection surface. Given building limitations on the backlot of circus grounds, a solution came to Pearline, who took the set apart and moved it to St. Louis. “We were able to install it before rehearsals started,” she recalls. The projectors came, too, and Pearline built animated projections and stills for this show.
“She created this whole thing that never existed, a theater in a circus tent. Her sets are very real and look beautiful. What wonderful work she did, and she managed it on a shoestring budget,” says MacKinnon.