Taylor Casas and Cynthia Price are just a couple of bossy flyers looking to share their creative acrobatic style with the world.
Traveling throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, Casas and Price have toured their performances of Flight and Elements, two plays directed by Ezra LeBank– co-founder and artistic director of theatre company Bossy Flyer– that rely on telling a narrative based on acrobatic movements and no dialogue. In the last three years, the team of Casas and Price have taken the acrobatic shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, New York, Canada and San Diego.
The acrobatic duo is now prepping a tour of Terms & Conditions, a comedy that will serve as an exaggerated version of their friendship and relationship as roommates.
Casas and Price are both Cal State Long Beach theatre majors. Their time in Curbside, a site-specific theatre company in Long Beach, inspired them to join LeBank to form Bossy Flyer. The three use the term “bossy” in reference to LeBank, a leader at heart, frequently being called bossy by his co-workers and friends, which would hurt his feelings to a degree.
“He started to think, well, I’m sure that women who get called bossy all the time must feel that same way– it ruffles your feathers,” Price said. “It’s not kind. Then he started to think, ‘What if I just embraced the word bossy?’ […] Bossy Flyer is really a platform that allows us to celebrate using our voices to make sure that we’re having the best time. Whether you’re doing acrobatics, whether you’re writing your own work, whether you’re solving some math problems, the universe is just going to move on no matter what you do, so why not enjoy what you’re doing? In days and months and years to come, we’re really interested in taking this notion and trying to spread out with some extracurricular volunteer work to help empower young women.”
When it comes to acrobatics, Price acknowledges that her pairing with Casas is quite untraditional.
“We are both females, and we are both similarly sized,” said Price, who serves as the base to Casas’s flyer role. “Normally you will go to the circus and see one 6’4 man and the tiniest little girl ever. Then you can do the crazy tricks with a lot less effort. So, the margin of error you can have in your technique is much larger. For Taylor and I, we’ve got to make sure that our technique is locked in. The fact that we are so similarly sized […] physics would go against us.”
And with that concept in mind, mastering fluidity and safety while trying to entertain an audience– with the absence of dialogue, no less– could be a daunting challenge. But, years of bonding together have made the process easy for Casas and Price.
“There are solo things, but as a duo, there’s just a whole different type of trust,” Casas said. “So, our specialty, we like to say that we do creative acrobatics […] We do a mixture of dance, high-level intense acrobatics that some people can see as, ‘Oh, Cirque du Soleil?’ Yes, but also no. So, our own style, I would say is creative-style acrobatics.”
For more information about Terms & Conditions, including tour dates and production details, visit bossyflyer.com.
Podcast edited and produced by Denny Cristales
