Interview: James Genaro (Surreal Sirkus)

A time traveler from 1996 Asheville might be immensely confused by the state of their beloved city in 2025. The Vance Monument no longer rises over downtown, tourists fill the sidewalks, and road work on I-26 somehow remains unfinished. But paradoxically, they might be grounded by the ongoing presence of the bizarre: the Surreal Sirkus is still around to put on a show.

The performance art troupe, known for its annual Halloween festivals in Pack Square Park, took a lengthy hiatus starting in 2005 — after a “Viking funeral” complete with a flaming boat in the Pack Square fountain. But James Genaro, its creative director, says the Sirkus was reborn in 2021 as a vibrant, independent response to the increased gentrification and corporate presence the group had observed in Western North Carolina.

Now, the Sirkus is adding a new summer festival to Asheville’s creative calendar. The Red Egg, taking place at the Fallout Art Space in Alexander, Friday-Sunday, June 20-22, brings together over 20 local bands, sideshow acts, fire dancers, and other artists to complement the latest entry in the troupe’s Tale of the Cosmic Eggs, a science-fiction epic it’s been performing in installments since October. Headlining performers include alt-soul trio Chilltonic, cello-rock act Polly Panic, hip-hop producer Bryant Perez, and puppeteer Toybox Theatre.

Genaro spoke with Asheville Stages about the upcoming festival and where it fits in the broader arc of the group’s ongoing saga. The conversation has been edited for concision.

Daniel Walton: Let’s start with Surreal Sirkus itself. Why resurrect the group after its dramatic, ceremonial end in 2005?

James Genaro: Asheville in the late ‘90s and early 2000s was a very vibrant, sort of weird place to be, and it felt like a lot of that spirit sort of weakened over the years. In 2021, we looked at the fact that it was our 25th anniversary, and we were inspired by this idea of “making Asheville magic again.” To me, the spirit of Surreal Sirkus is creativity, drawing on art that’s coming from within and not necessarily supported by big structures or big corporate money. We’re really just trying to create something magical with what we’ve got.

DW: The Red Egg itself is part of a broader piece, Tale of the Cosmic Eggs, that the Surreal Sirkus has been presenting over multiple performances. What does an audience just now joining you need to know to grasp what’s happening?

JG: We are exploring a series of different alien civilizations that have contributed to a grand project: creating a garden of eggs on a new planet that’s going to seed the life of a future civilization. The show that kicked this off at Halloween was about a world that was dying and sent its aspirations and hopes out into the universe in the form of a black egg. The Red Egg has to do with the element of fire, so there’s a lot of fire performance and fire walking and all kinds of integration of the fire element into the story.

This is the sixth of eight planned performances, and the big culmination will be [Saturday,] Oct. 25 at Pack Square. There are some videos on our YouTube channel that show the performances and tell the backstory of some of the shows. But you don’t need to have necessarily seen any of the others to appreciate the story of The Red Egg, because it’s a standalone tale.

DW: You’ve said the whole arc of this story has its roots in a performance you were developing before Tropical Storm Helene. What of that initial vision has remained, and what’s been tweaked in response to the storm?

JG: The story we were going to do was about a person’s journey after death and their encounter with the spiritual forces or aspects of personality that shaped them in their life, as expressed through different kinds of worlds — there’s some borrowing from the idea of the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism. Each of the scenes was also correlated with the seasons of the year, using the neopagan calendar of equinoxes, solstices, and cross-quarter days. What we’re doing is taking those eight scenes and unpacking more of that story, developing the context of how it’s being encountered.

DW: It’s almost like you’re taking this from one soul’s exclusive journey and fleshing it out into a civilizational rite of passage. That seems appropriate for a post-Helene Asheville, where everyone really has gone through a harrowing experience together.

JG: Helene has had a huge impact in that way, particularly the piece we did at Halloween. The Black Egg was about a civilization that is dying — it’s a metaphor for our own world in a lot of ways, but it was very immediately connected to what we were experiencing in the aftermath of the storm. Before the performance, we did a big community grieving ritual. We constructed a black egg on Pack Square, and we used the mythos that we were going to tell in the story later that night. We invited people to contemplate, “If you knew your world was dying and you were going to cease to exist, what one part would you hope would continue in the universe?”

DW: Moving from The Red Egg as a performance to The Red Egg as a festival, you’re bringing in a bunch of other performers to surround the headlining Surreal Sirkus show. How did you approach curation for those acts?

JG: Having lived in Asheville for 30 years, I know a lot of artists, and I’m taking kind of an unusual approach. I wanted to bring in very diverse music and performers, with the intention of showcasing a wide variety of styles. We have everything from cello rock to hip-hop to modular synthesizer music to blues — it’s really all over the map, and it’s kind of a sampling of all the different styles and creative projects that Asheville has to offer.

There’s also a sideshow stage that’s going to be featuring a lot of fun, more circusy kinds of acts: magicians and fire breathers and sword swallowers — that sort of thing. Because we’re not just surreal, we’re also a bit of a circus.

DW: The festival is also a fundraiser for the nonprofits Arts 2 People, for which you’re the executive director, and Fallout ArtSpace. What should people know about those causes?

JG: Similar to Surreal Sirkus, Arts 2 People was inactive for a number of years, but in the 2000s it put on LAAFF (the Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival) and has a long history of supporting small artists in Asheville. We hope to do a lot more of that in the aftermath of Helene. We raised funds for micro-grants for artists that were impacted by the storm, and got money to 15 of them using proceeds from the Halloween events that we did.

Fallout ArtSpace is an artist nonprofit run out of Alexander, where the event is located. They have this former high school building that houses artist studios, and they raise funds to support the artists they work with in North Buncombe. One of the reasons we were inspired to do The Red Egg here is because the stage area is in the burnt-out hall of the old high school auditorium, which they’ve converted into this outdoor venue. It’s very cool, sort of post-apocalyptic looking, with a lot of history.

IF YOU GO

What: The Red Egg, hosted by Surreal Sirkus
When: Friday-Sunday, June 20-22
Where: Fallout ArtSpace, 475 Fletcher Martin Rd., Alexander, FalloutArtSpace.org
Tickets: $24.80-$87.61 via EventBrite

(Sneaky McFly of Unifire photo by Jennifer Bennett)