FESTIVAL FEATURES | UniverSoul Circus
I It’s not until the opening routine of UniverSoul Circus: Hip Hop Under the Big Top comes to an end, that you realise what your face is doing. Eyes wide and shining, mouth open and smiling, and a sense you’ve become Tom Hanks in Big (unless you’re a child already, of course).
So full of colour and wonder is the carnival celebration by Trinidad and Tobago group, Caribbean Dynasty, that the stilt-walkers, giant puppet and brightly costumed dancers catch you in their wave of energy. Which is exactly the response UniverSoul founder, Cedric Walker, is going for. ‘That’s our goal,’ he says. ‘It takes you to a place where you turn into a child again and forget about all your problems.’ A lovely sentiment, but Walker’s reasons for starting his company 25 years ago
in Atlanta, Georgia had much deeper roots.
‘It was an idea whose time had come,’ he says. ‘In America back then, there was no family entertainment that rel ected the urban culture – meaning the dance, energy, colourfulness of the kids in the urban communities. So our initial goal was to bring families together and create a show that rel ected their culture.’ Walker stage managed and produced live music and theatre shows before turning his hand to circus, including touring with 1980s soul group the Commodores. When he looked around, however, he saw black lives represented in theatre, i lm and music but not in large-scale family shows. At that point he decided: ‘I want to be the Spike Lee of the live entertainment industry.’
branched out both onstage and in the auditorium. ‘It’s done more than I expected, in that not only did it bring families together, it brought cultures together,’ says Walker. ‘We took in performers from America, Asia and Africa right from the start, but we performed it to mostly black audiences. ‘But then it took on a life of its own and evolved. We’re living in a time now where the internet allows us to learn about each other, which takes down the compartments that used to be there: this kind of music is only listened to by this kind of person, that sort of thing. And one of the most pleasing aspects of what we do is bring cultures together – I love watching all these different people have fun at the same time, with each other.’
A quarter of a century later, UniverSoul has played to more than 25 million people and UniverSoul’s Edinburgh show has performers from Cuba, South Africa, Mongolia,
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10 THE LIST FESTIVAL 15–27 Aug 2018