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(humming)
(drops of water)
(♪♪♪)
(indistinct radio message)
(cries of birds)
- Eau. - Water.
("Water" in many languages)
- Well, the world below the Bellagio pool,
it's completely different.
When I step in the theatre doors,
I know that this world is going to give me
a way of living that people on the outside
will never experience.
(dolphins sounds)
(♪♪♪)
- There is a point after the takeoff
where there is... there is a moment of stillness.
If you watch the rain fall
and you just try to focus on a single drop,
it almost seems still at that time.
The world kind of freezes on that raindrop
for a single second.
And you can create that feeling yourself in the air.
Even in a simple jump when you get to that peak of that jump,
it's almost like you are standing in mid-air.
I don't know, if I could create that feeling everyday,
maybe I wouldn't have to work here anymore.
But you know that this feeling is only a fraction of a second.
And I think that's what we all thrive for,
that there is... there is no gravity.
- That's what got me into diving - weightlessness.
Once you're thrown up in the air,
you hit a point where you're not going up
and you're not coming down.
And that's where you can do the most, and relax the most,
and just kind of let everything go.
- Since there are no boundaries of sport, of judging,
it's definitely a form of art.
Everything could be a form of art, you know,
if you push it to the highest level.
I think that's what art is all about.
It's not about what you do, but how you do it.
You have to look under the surface.
(♪♪♪)
- Eau. - Water.
("Water" in many languages)
- Water is water, but water is same as air for me
because I spend many times in the water.
And when I was in the water is nothing feeling like air.
Air and water, it's the same for me.
After practice, when I got on ground,
I feel something heavy and it's not comfortable.
And I cannot walk.
- When you're in the water, not that nothing hurts,
but your body just expand and it's really a sense of freedom.
When you're on land and you walk or you run,
you have the gravity.
But when you go in the water,
it's completely different
and your body just moves and floats.
- I do consider it the place that I'm most comfortable
because I know how to be there.
There's no ticking clocks.
There's no background noise.
There's just you
and kind of in your pure essence of being who you are.
It's like right before you fall asleep,
you're just kind of yourself.
And that's how I feel when I'm in the water.
I'm just myself.
(♪♪♪)
- Well, in the beginning of the show,
we start off under water.
We're under water, breathing.
It's calm and it's peaceful
and it's a little bit dark.
So you have... it's an unnatural feeling
to be able to sit there and just levitate in the water.
And it's warm so it's almost... it's like going back to a womb.
(♪♪♪)
Like the rest of the swimmers, we feel the gravity of the land
pulling us back and suppressing us back to the water.
And my character kind of feels the air, feels the earth,
and creates this being that goes from the water into the land.
- Earth.
("Earth" in many languages)
(song in foreign language)
- Fire.
- Fire is what gave birth to our islands.
What they're saying in the song they're singing
about the volcano erupting with fire,
we say the mountain has exploded and the fire has come out.
It means a birth to our culture, a birth to our land;
the beginning of Samoas.
Fire to us is, you know, pretty much our beginning too.
(grasshoppers sound)
- The fire jaws of war is out of us.
It really brings us to the forefront and we're ready.
It's incorporated into the dance. It's both.
It's the fire and the knives.
We douse the weapons of war.
We respect it though. We respect the fire.
We respect the knives. We respect what we do.
We don't take it for granted.
Fire for me and for us, it's survival.
It's really about survival.
It changes our eyes.
It changes the look that we have in our eyes.
So you don't really feel
the burns or the cuts or anything like that.
(♪♪♪)
We take it real sacred for us.
It's a very... very important thing.
We carry it every night on stage
when we go up on stage and we do our thing.
We really...we don't only have each other to be accountable to
but we have our whole culture.
And we're bringing their spirits with us on stage also
at the same time with the fire.
(♪♪♪)
You get injured, when you get burnt or you get cut.
You don't really feel it
until after you're off stage when you calm down.
Preparing for it? We don't prepare for it.
We don't prepare for it.
It's just a mental thing that we kind of... we overlook it.
It's not an issue for us.
We just try to become, you know,
just one with the fire.
(♪♪♪)
- Fire for the fire, guys,
has got to be something that is their friend.
And they've got burns or cuts on them some way or other.
And I think: "Why would you want to do that?"
But then they look at us and they go:
"How can you jump off that thing?"
And I'm like: "Well, that's so much easier
than playing with fire or playing with a knife."
I think the best thing of being in O
is nobody thinks what they do themselves is that special.
We're all just normal people.
But we think that everybody else around us
is special and amazing.
I think that that's really interesting.
- I think there is a bit of fire in me too.
I'm like explosive.
And I'm learning at this work to manage all this fire,
this explosion that I have
- Fear is falling off the cerceau
and thinking that you're dead.
And then getting back up the next day and doing it again.
(♪♪♪)
- There's always a little ritual,
the thing you believe you have to do, you know.
You perch the hoop with this hand
or there's all this things you always do.
But before I go out there I concentrate.
It's a very powerful moment.
When you just stop, it's a very silent moment.
When it starts spinning, I love the spin.
For me I always try to get the fastest one.
And it's almost like euphoria.
Then I like... fff!
There is all this wind or you can hear the pressure.
It's a very nice moment.
And when you get it, a good spin it's good in the heart.
You feel like you already start with a big smile.
Air is... my life.
(laugh)
Without it, I don't even know what it could be.
I'm not a very grounded person.
I cannot be without my calluses in my hand from hanging
and creating something that is related to air.
It's even in my name:
"noara" almost sounds like "in the air" in Portuguese.
So it's like, it has to be. It's my life.
("Air" in many languages)
- I think air is the balance
and it connects earth, water and fire together.
And I think in life too.
It's also the balance.
- Balance for me is a way of life.
I feel very grounded in the air, which is interesting.
I feel grounded on my trapeze but I'm in the air.
I would have to I think. If not, I would fall off.
I think I feel weightless a lot because of the balancing.
You feel weightlessness in many things.
Like you have the gravity but at the same time you feel light.
But it's funny; my mom always told me
I walk like an elephant, which is kind of strange.
At the same time I'm doing all these light things
which are weightless.
So I think you have to ground yourself again.
I have these opposites again in me, I guess.
(♪♪♪)
I don't like falling.
I don't mind the height and looking down on Earth,
but I'm definitely not a diver.
I don't like the effect of falling.
I always need something to grab onto.
I still have that connection to a metal, to something.
Yeah, so in the end to Earth again, I guess.
When I first started with the O show,
and it was making me very nervous
in the first couple of weeks, couple of months;
trying to relax, at the same time to not shake,
because once your nerves start shaking, balancing,
it's horrible because you start vibrating and nothing's working.
So I try to concentrate on the music a lot.
I try to concentrate on Roxanne singing and try to feel that.
(♪♪♪)
And then as soon as your brain starts thinking:
"Oh my God, oh my God, I could fall off!",
And you have to train your brain to think about different things.
For me, nerves is always hard to deal with,
especially if my mom is watching.
And then after many years of working,
you try to stimulate yourself from the outside as well;
trying to think that my positions that have an aura
or that they're longer than they actually are.
Just different way of feeling one
and not falling off, I guess.
Just all little things that help you at that time.
(♪♪♪)
- Until the point when I step out on the platform,
my mind is racing.
I don't know how it's going to end up.
- If you think about it, basically that's what it is,
you jump into like infinity.
It's like an unreachable task to survive
or to not get hurt from that height.
- You're kind of throwing yourself into danger.
Even though you know you have control over it,
but one small mistake and I'm falling 60 feet.
I think a lot of divers dive through fear.
- My first one I was so scared. I was so scared.
I knew that I wasn't stupid enough
to actually jump off that.
So I went to my boss and I said:
"I want to do it in the show tomorrow."
(heartbeats)
And I did it and when I hit the water,
I was lying at the bottom of the pool
and I thought: "OK, don't move."
And I wiggled my toes. And then I moved my feet.
I moved my legs. I moved my fingers.
And I was alive. And I just rocketed out of the water.
I was so excited. It was amazing.
It was like: "Ah, I'm not dead!"
(laughs)
(heartbeats)
("Fire" in many languages)
- Fire.
- Fire is a living, breathing thing.
It's alive. It lives in all of us. It's there.
It's dangerous, but yet it's warmth, it's soothing.
So it's all of those elements.
(♪♪♪)
- You learn, you watch, you feel,
you grow with the fire.
We try to calculate like if you were a diver,
you would start very low
and you would build each and every step
until you were able to dive from those heights.
With the fire, it's the same thing.
I start with a little flame
and through the years, you build that flame
until it gets bigger and bigger and brighter around you.
You have to take those steps.
Those steps separate you from just the average person.
Some people think that because you're a high diver,
you're a superhuman being.
And you are because you've grown.
You've excelled in the arts to that point
where you're able to do it.
And it's the same with the fire.
Some people think you're a superhuman being.
There's been some times when I get burned.
Most of the time, I've learned how to adjust myself
and to sit with the fire, just inches away from my face,
and that takes a lot of respect.
You have to know that that fire anytime can burn you
and what can you do to get out of the way of it.
Sometimes it leaps up and you have to move slightly.
The temperature conditions, the wind conditions,
they all go into how the fire grows,
how much fuel you can use.
On a windy day, even though the theatre is very closed,
there's still... the wind still finds ways
to get into the theatre.
You never know when something is going to go wrong.
I'm not really superstitious,
but you go through certain things
that you do each and every time.
Like something as simple as kissing my wife
before I go out on stage.
When I came to Cirque, I was fortunate
that they said I could work with my wife.
And we've been working together for 20 years.
She puts the fuel on me.
She makes sure that everybody is in a position to put me out.
If something is wrong, she knows immediately.
And I think that's probably
one of the greatest safety elements in my whole act,
in everything we do, is having her right by my side.
- Trust is the most important thing.
I know for myself that Junior walk with me
and take that walk to the end.
We will go there with each other.
I don't have a friend in my life
with this kind of trust that I have with Junior.
- We feed off of each other that way, you know.
And we know when the other person
is struggling with our own families.
We feel it too on stage.
- When I go on stage with Junior,
I don't have to think about what he's doing
and he doesn't have to think about what I'm doing.
We just know that we'll be there.
We meet each other halfway.
(♪♪♪)
- To me passion goes hand in hand with sacrifice.
But sacrifice is the giving up of something good
with the expectation of receiving something even better.
If you look at every single person in this show,
most of us have had to give up
the country that we love, where we live.
We've given up all the friends and family that we knew.
And everything that you have goes into it.
(♪♪♪)
(song in foreign language)
(♪♪♪)
- I have the liberty on any night to be whoever I want.
Sometimes I can be aggressive and powerful.
Sometimes I can be coy and shy and a little bit playful.
And I have the option every time I'm on stage
to be who I choose to be.
(♪♪♪)
You can reach to the audience with your gaze,
and with your energy, and with your spirit.
But there's always going to be something
that they're going to see you not as a person,
not as someone they'd sit and have tea or coffee with,
but as something else.
- It always feels great to put yourself
into somebody else's personality.
And the mermaid is just something
you can really play around with.
Mermaids have just this ability of putting people in a spell.
And you want to understand why they can do this,
where do they come from,
where do they go and why do they exist,
if they exist.
We're there but at the same time we're not really there.
- I always feel a separation because I'm in this water world
and they are not very far away from me.
I know the bicycle racers
used to race for flowers, you know, 20 years ago.
And I've always thought that I would perform for flowers
because I love that connexion,
of being able to entertain
and to be able to give to people
something that they can't give themselves.
- Synchronicity is when everything is just in harmony,
when everything is absolutely synchronized, perfect, the same.
When it's... You know, you can have four people
and it looks like it's just one person doing it.
- The people I got most connected with
were the girls that had the same goals as I had
and we were going in one direction
towards one certain goal.
And I could feel that the other person
was putting the same amount of effort
and nothing that put us away together.
Sometimes I felt we were exactly one,
but then I got feedback from the coach
where she said: "You guys were not together."
And so it confuses me still.
It's really difficult sometimes
to understand these individual differences.
- Eau. - Water.
("Water" in many languages)
(lapping of water)
(♪♪♪)
- We have to wait 10 years because we were always separate.
We wait 10 years and start working together.
But this is very, very amazing.
We feel very good, stay together.
- We're very happy. - Yeah.
- Because this is his dream. His dream, yeah...
- We stay together, we work together.
- We laugh together. - Yeah.
- Yes.
(♪♪♪)
- We trust together. We...
I can't open legs, she can't open eyes.
Is impossible because if we fall, we fall together.
- Well, we can talk underwater.
We have . . . we actually can talk underwater.
- I think across language barriers, element barriers
because it just... we've made it natural to us.
We've made the water our home.
You know, it's almost easier for us
to be in the water than to walk down the street.
(indistinct radio message)
- These girls from different countries,
all a different background, speaking different language
can just get in that pool and make it happen
like they swim together for 10 years.
Because it takes a long time
to get that in synch and to get that harmony.
But when you see those moments in the water,
with 10 different countries right in there, it's amazing.
(♪♪♪)
- Here for me in circus, when you have a sports life,
you don't know about theatre.
And I didn't know anything about theatre.
But it's always was some magical things.
It was not real,
and now you are in the not real world.
Actually I had to... I just had a lot of things I had to learn,
a lot of things to work with as a human being.
I work with parallel bars, but 10 times higher than before.
Everything moving.
The light is different,
the noise and everything different.
So it was a set of big changes.
I have to use my heart and my brain.
I have to put myself into other person.
I have to put myself into the relation.
It's really, really a team work.
And it's not just I did a long fly,
if it's a nice fly, we did together.
- It's about control, trust...
trust in your partner, your catcher.
My catcher, his name is Zoltan. He's from Hungary.
And he showed me from the first day I can trust him.
I am lucky to have a really good catcher
who I do really trust.
- To take the responsibility of catching someone in mid-air
and being confident about it
and being very true, honest to yourself that:
"Yes, I'm here because I can do this.
I'm not here because of other reasons.
I'm only here because I can do this."
You know, when you things that you would do them anyway,
it's good for your soul.
I used to tell people:
"You know why I'm doing it? Because I can."
- When you see in his eyes that:
"No problem, we're going there, we're doing it",
it's much easier to do than you see fear.
I don't think I would go.
But he's going for it, I'm going for it.
- I think it's a very honourable thing, you know,
when you have someone fully trusting you.
Yeah, it's great to look at your partner and think that:
"Yeah, she knows what we're going to do.
And she knows exactly
that she's going to go home to her family too tonight."
(♪♪♪)
- Water.
("Water" in many languages)
(breathing)
- Earth.
("earth" in many languages)
(drops of water)
(♪♪♪)