Arts & Culture
‘Passengers’ at crossroads of circus and theater

“Passengers” brings theater and circus together on the A.R.T. stage.

Courtesy of The 7 Fingers

Madeleine Wright

A.R.T. Communications

September 8, 2025 7 min read

7 Fingers co-founders explain how they unite the two art forms in their latest A.R.T. production

The 7 Fingers, a contemporary physical-theater troupe, brings “Passengers” to the American Repertory Theater this month. In this edited conversation, Diane Paulus, the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the A.R.T., speaks with 7 Fingers co-founders Gypsy Snider (circus choreographer of “Pippin”) and Shana Carroll (writer, director, and choreographer of “Passengers”) about the human scale of contemporary circus, how the art form relates to theater, and the troupe’s special relationship with Boston-area audiences.

Can you tell us a little about how your contemporary circus collective The 7 Fingers came to be?

Carroll: I started in theater and discovered circus, versus Gypsy, who started in circus and then fell in love with theater along the way. Our paths crossed through the years of touring in Europe, Canada, and the United States. And in 2001, we said, “Well, now is a good time to create our own thing together.”

Snider: That was when The 7 Fingers was born. We are seven co-founders, and the company really came into being because we were at the point when we wanted to go from being performers to becoming creators. When we started in 2002, we were looking at emerging forms that were inspiring to us, things like Blue Man Group or De La Guarda—shows that were undefinable, but deeply human and energetic and that really combined mediums.

We were a little bit rebellious and looking away from the big spectacle, the elaborate costumes, and the fantastical. We wanted to come back to something that was essentially human. Now we are a creative collective and production company that tours the world with our own shows as well as collaborative productions and projects.

Photo by Grace Gershenfeld

The 7 Fingers works at the crossroads of circus and theater. Can you tell us more about that combination of mediums?

Carroll: I think we try as much as we can to do this fusion hybrid form of circus and theater and bring all of our original passions back into the same place.

I didn’t really like circus growing up. I always thought that Ringling Brothers and the huge circuses were just so unidentifiable that I didn’t see the human being inside of it. It was so out of this world that I didn’t appreciate that there was a real human doing extraordinary things. I didn’t have any sense of emotional connection to the person doing it. Seeing it close-up was what made me see its beauty and its metaphor and its potential.

Snider: The history of circus and contemporary circus in the United States is a complex one. In so many ways, “circus” has been kind of a cursed word in the sense that it’s a form considered to be outside of society. It was accurate when the film “The Greatest Showman” came out featuring a circus sideshow considered to be lower-class yet wanting to be thought of like the opera or the ballet.

There’s always been this tension in the States around the art form. Is this street performing? Is it just base popular entertainment? Is it just about doing tricks? However, at the same time, across history and time, from early Chinese and Russian culture, Eastern, European and African cultures, circus has been founded in the idea of learning a skill and presenting or offering that skill to the audience without a fourth wall. Circus has also always hinted at narrative or the idea of creating character and storyline. In contemporary circus, which began in the late ’60s and early ’70s, story, interpretation, movement, and image-based art began to influence the form more profoundly.

With a 7 Fingers show, we are trying to create storytelling to connect emotionally with the audience, but without necessarily telling a story that has a beginning, middle, and end in the traditional theater sense. Sometimes we do that as well, but what is important to us is that we use images that are inherent in the physical intensity of the circus, the way that song and dance might move a story forward in a musical, the acrobatics must as well.

When we talk and think about how extraordinary the circus is, one of the key things for us is to tune in to how vulnerable we are within that extraordinary act. That human fragility has become the core of our story telling at The 7 Fingers. Vulnerability and humanity are what drives everything we do. “Passengers” is Shana’s baby, and it is a show that explodes with extraordinary movement in order to express authentic and absolute vulnerability.

Photo by Martine Poulin

Shana, can you tell us how “Passengers” came about?

Carroll: The little seed was planted when I was a kid growing up in Berkeley, California. We had a train that passed 10-15 miles down from us and I always remembered how we’d hear the train whistle. I remember noticing how we stopped hearing other city sounds, like the buses that were constantly passing, but we never stopped hearing the train. On the one hand, there’s something nostalgic about a train, it seems like remnants of a past era, but it’s also a promise of a future, of an unknown land. So, to me, trains have this way of talking about the past and the future all at once.

I wanted to create a piece where we have a cast of characters that all are looking for something, needing something, and are leaving for some reason. And then in a moment of suspended reality on the train, suspended time, suspended lives, they have fateful and unexpected things happen.

Right before starting the creation of “Passengers,” a very close friend passed away unexpectedly young. And it was just so tragic. I was really grieving, to the point that I thought, I have to go into rehearsals for this show, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I was feeling like nothing made sense. I couldn’t get out of bed one day and I said to my husband, I want the world to go back to being a place where magical things happen and not a place where young men I love die. And he said, it’s both. And when he said, it’s both, that became the thesis statement of the show. You see the two rails of the tracks as parallel tracks, and it’s joyful and celebratory, beautiful and fun, and it’s also tragic, and people die early. We travel down these two realities at once.

A.R.T. audiences are familiar with 7 Fingers’ work through Gypsy’s incredible circus chorography for our production of “Pippin.” What does it mean to you to return with “Passengers”?

Snider: I could almost cry thinking about it. “Pippin” was one of the most important creative experiences of my career. I learned so much on that production. To be able to come back with The 7 Fingers’ work to A.R.T., is really one of the biggest honors. I can’t express enough how excited we are.

“Passengers” runs through Sept. 26 at the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center. For ticket information visit the website.