The Traveler’s Body

Passengers, at American Repertory Theater (Photo: Sébastien Lozé)

 

Many have written lately about the decline of cultural criticism—how it has grown timid, reluctant to judge, more boosterish than incisive.

That charge is not without merit. But the reasons are more complicated than an unwillingness to be harsh or to put in the work to do a careful assessment. Part of that softening comes from a deeper shift: the old hierarchies of “high” and “low” art—and of a designated cognoscenti—no longer hold the sway they once did. I am personally less interested in enforcing categories or boundaries and increasingly respectful of a deeply personal and subjective response. I am also interested in exploring the porous places where forms blur and new ways to speak to one another emerge.

Acrobatics, for example, once dismissed as mere populist spectacle, have over the past several decades become a language of theater in their own right. Since Cirque du Soleil transformed that theatrical offering in 1984, acrobatics are no longer just isolated feats meant to dazzle. They can carry a metaphorical weight where these gestures of risk, trust, and interdependence can illuminate the stories being told on stage.

In Passengers (now playing at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge) that language has been braided into the theme of travel and how it feels to be perpetually in motion. The acrobatic body becomes a traveler’s body, suspended between departure and arrival, balancing in moments of uncertainty, risking the leap that will land in an unknown place.

The resonance with being a traveler—a passenger—is familiar to all of us. Who has not felt the heady mix of vulnerability and possibility when boarding a train with nothing but a suitcase, watching the world slide past the window while in the company of strangers? This narrative resists the tidy structures of conventional theater. It reminds us that each of us are, at essence, just nomads on this earth, moving through shifting terrains and searching for belonging—or, at times, for the courage to leave what is familiar. As one character in the production poignantly points out, it isn’t always a search for somewhere new. Sometimes it is the need to leave a place that is old.

Like Water for Elephants (which ran on Broadway last year), where circus life was woven into the itinerant world of Depression-era railroads, Passengers taps into a deeper cultural vein—the romance of personal restlessness, and the strangers who share it with us. From novels like On the Road and Housekeeping to the countless road movies that have been made, taking a journey is a fundamental life metaphor. Identity becomes undetermined, the possibilities are plentiful, and chance encounters can change the course of our lives. Travel tends to dissolve the ordinary strictures of daily life. In doing so, it tests our assumptions about stability, home, and even time itself.

Passengers leans into this mutability. References to Einstein and the relativity of time echo through the performance. Time is not fixed after all and is actually quite elastic, especially when we are in motion. Anyone who has stared out a train window knows how quickly minutes can stretch into hours, how hours can then collapse into a blur. Acrobatics become an apropos medium for this: suspended in midair, weightless in moments of flight, bodies held just long enough to stretch perception before their inevitable return to earth. These sequences sharpen our awareness of time’s instability—fluid, full of potential, alive.

The staging of Passengers amplifies this theme. Lighting evokes the flicker of passing landscapes, and the constant suggestion of a train ride—its windows, its forward pull—keeps the audience in a liminal space between departure and arrival. Suitcases become props of both burden and freedom, shifting from anchors to springboards. The set itself seems to breathe with the rhythm of travel, as though the entire theater has become a carriage carrying us all to a destination yet undisclosed.

So yes, this production resonates well beyond its spectacular feats of physical theater. When one performer balances precariously on another’s shoulders, the moment embodies both the vulnerability and strength inherent in human connection. To be caught, in midair, is to find belonging. To lift and hold is to provide a home for another body. Acrobatics here render visible not just the fragile negotiations of intimacy, but also the restless search for where and with whom we belong as we travel through life.

Ultimately, Passengers joins a rich lineage of books, movies, and plays that speak to how travel is never only about getting somewhere. It is about entering the in-between, a threshold space where identities shift, time bends, and we glimpse what it means to be human together—moving, risking, and, if we are fortunate, finding a fleeting sense of home in each other.

Passengers, a production by The 7 Fingers based in Montreal, is written, directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll. A former trapeze artist, Carroll has played an integral part in Cirque du Soleil, Water for Elephants, as well as many other productions. The entire cast of Passengers is superb, each one bringing a particular métier to the performance mix. And a special shout-out is in order to scenic designs by Ana Cappelluto and music by Colin Gagné and Jean Sébastien Leblanc.

The production runs through September 26.