This weekend, the touring company of the Cirque Dreams Holidaze will touch down at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre for a six-show weekend run. The Broadway-style show combines circus acts with the Christmas holiday theme and runs from December 6th through the 8th. Theater Mirror caught up with Camilla Bäckman, the Finnish violinist and vocalist for the show, earlier this week. She describes how her experience of “running away to join the circus” landed her a broader career in the arts, including a new phase where she will take on musical theater.
Theater Mirror: It’s been quite a year for you creatively. Can you tell us what you’ve been up to for the last few months?
Camilla: For the past year, I’ve been studying musical theater at the New York Film Academy (NYFA) to find some new artistic inspiration. In September, I performed at the Lincoln Center as Maria from the Sound of Music at the Golden Night Concert, together with the Von Trapp children, my very talented NYFA friends, and the Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra. Also, in September, I performed at the MIT Media Lab with Jordan Rudess from the progressive metal band Dream Theater. He’s a good friend and an incredible musician, and we were kind of improvising with AI – well, Jordan was connected to it, and I was kind of the analog part of the show, singing and improvising with the violin together with them. In the summer, I got to do my first musicals in the US, West Side Story, Fiddler On The Roof, and Mamma Mia at the NCC Summer Theater in Northampton, Pennsylvania. This fall, I also got to be a part of the musical workshop Watcher in the Woods in New York and act in a short film at NYFA based on the movie Black Swan.
Theater Mirror: That’s a really broad range of artistic projects. I know you were trained as a classical violinist, but how did you make the leap from playing the violin professionally to deciding that you also wanted to sing professionally?
Camilla: The singing came very early on. My mom always says that I was singing before words came out. She was a singer, so music was in our family. My dad was a director of opera, and she was a singer, so we were very much a music and arts family, exposed to music all our lives, including my brother, so I was always singing. When I was four years old, I started playing the violin, but the singing was always there. I was playing the piano and doing original songs, but the violin was the one that I needed to study, and it wasn’t always fun. Singing was always just an outlet to release my emotions, express my feelings, and just get away from everything. I performed at the local church from a young age where my mom worked, and we performed as a family. Then I went to music school. I had some bands later on, but I would say that the voice was just a personal thing that I did for myself. It has always been so natural to perform as both a singer and a violinist, but I wanted to be brave enough to come out as a singer more than before, and participating in The Voice of Finland 10 years ago was a leap to pursue this artist’s career as a singer more strongly. In the Fall of 2022, I published an album of my originals called “Give Me A Moment,” recorded in Nashville RCA Studios, where I both sing and play violin and other instruments together with great instrumentalists.
Theater Mirror: How did you end up performing in North America?
Camilla: It was very random. Cirque du Soleil doesn’t come to Finland very often, but they were touring with the show Quidam, and I found their ad in a Facebook group, looking for singers and instrumentalists. I’ve always been a musician at heart and didn’t know anything about the circus or much of acting at that point, but I’ve always been very open to new adventures and new experiences. So when I saw this, I was like, ‘OK, let’s try this’. I didn’t know much about it but just went for it. They accepted me and put me in their database as a singer and violinist and said, ‘We might call you someday.’ I thought, ‘This is really cool, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.” A year and a half later, they called me from Montreal and said, ‘We have this new show coming up, and would you be interested?’. I did and it just changed my life completely. There’s this side of me that keeps on grasping these things that come along with life, and I’m just super happy that I did it. I did this show called Volta from 2017 until the pandemic hit, and I returned to Finland. Last spring, Cirque called me back to perform in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a special event show called VIZION.
Theater Mirror: Did your experience with Cirque help you get cast in Cirque Dreams Holidaze?
Camilla: Not directly. While at NYFA, I learned about the A1 Conference (All-in-One Conference), where you can audition for many projects at the same time, and this is how Cirque Dreams found me. It wasn’t because of my former circus background, it was through the musical theater experience that I ended up with this show. I just did an original song with the violin, and they were looking for a violinist and a singer for their tour, and I fit that profile.
Theater Mirror: That’s really weird. So you won’t be doing aerial silks or acrobatics?
Camilla: (Laughs). No, just singing and playing the violin. There’s one other singer, Xan Oliva, and we interact with the characters on stage.
Theater Mirror: What can the audiences expect to see at Holidaze this weekend?
Camilla: It’s a really beautiful show for the whole family. It’s a Broadway-style production with contemporary circus artists, comedy acts, and amazing dancing, and the aerial acts are just beautiful. The costumes are really cool as well, especially for the kids. There are also elements of the Nutcracker in the storyline, and our main character is called Clara. There’s also traditional holiday music and original music that’s been composed for the show. It’s just a beautiful show.
For information and tickets, go to: https://www.bochcenter.org/events/detail/holidaze
