An uncompromising direct-cinema experience, GRAND DISASTER: Inside an Underground Circus takes viewers on a journey of astonishment and discovery as the dozen members of a cutting-edge circus arts troupe struggle over the ... more »course of a year to pay the bills and stay together while on a cross-country tour aboard a second-hand transit bus. Seattle-based Circus Contraption is an acclaimed, one-of-a-kind organization that?s helping to revitalize the world of circus arts in America. Their bizarre stage and music spectacles bring together a unique punk-cabaret musical sensibility and an inspired and passionate performance vision drawn from the best of Old World and early American circus traditions. Behind the spectacle, though, is a kind of surrogate family comprising a dozen individuals often torn between the demands of circus life and the imperatives of real life. Poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, divorce, and artistic and personal differences in one way or another affect everyone in the troupe, and make what they do night after night on the stage that much more intensely moving. GRAND DISASTER presents an emotional and deeply personal account of a group of artists? utopian efforts to live, travel, and work together, culminating in a possibly insane three-month long, 10,000 mile tour of the West and the Midwest aboard a rejuvenated Seattle Metro transit bus.« less