Bring mom and make it a family circus

Lexi Pearl ran off and joined the circus. But she never really left home.

Growing up in Topanga Canyon, young Lexi did her share of the usual kid stuff—soccer, gymnastics, tree-climbing.

A lot of tree-climbing.

“It’s as if she was born to fly,” her mom recalls.

Make that born to fly, dance, choreograph, act and stilt-walk. Not to mention a few other gifts listed in the “special skills” section of her professional resume: Animal Handler, Archer, Circus Performer, Fencer, Gymnast, High Falls 10′ to 50′, Horseback Rider, Physical Fitness Expert, Sword Fighter, Yoga.

Now some of those skills, along with some others she’s honed over the years as a professional dancer and performer, are about to come into play as part of her own uniquely Topangan tradition—the Mother’s Day show at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.

Pearl’s production, called “Momentum Place: An Uncommon Afternoon of Dance and Delights,” has evolved since its first staging 12 years ago, when Pearl was a senior at UC Santa Barbara and looking for a place for her student dance company to perform in L.A.

Last year, the annual performance landed on Mother’s Day and voila—a new local ritual was born. (And really, on a day largely devoted to flowers, candy and brunch, what mom could resist a chance to check out the Eye of Newt Circus instead?)

Like Pearl herself, the show is kind of unclassifiable.

“There’s nobody like her,” says Ellen Geer, the Theatricum’s artistic director and daughter of its founder, the actor Will Geer (perhaps best known to most of America as “Grandpa Walton.”) “When people come forth with such talent as she has, it must be seen.”

“You get acrobats spinning from the trees on pieces of silk, doing things you only thought you’d see in comic books,” says Matt Van Winkle, the Theatricum’s office manager and educational programs assistant, who ran sound for last year’s show and expects to be playing the guitar this time around.

“It’s cool. I guess a good word for it is panoply—a panoply of artists working in all of their different fields: dancing, acrobatics…”

Pearl says she expects to assemble about 25 “dancers, aerialists, singers, spoken word artists, actors, musicians, stilt-walkers [and] jugglers” to take part.

“It always kind of comes together the day of the show,” says Pearl, who’s currently in the midst of a 10-day stint as a stilt walker at the Huisten Bosch theme park in Japan.

Pearl, 35, now lives in Carthay Square with her boyfriend and fellow performer J. Kilgore (“He’s an actor; I dragged him into the circus world.”) But she says that coming of age in Topanga provided a strong creative grounding for her frequently airborne career.

“Growing up in Topanga was a huge aspect of developing my creative character,” she says, lamenting the fact that she’s had to miss even an occasional Topanga Days over the years. “It’s heartbreaking,” she says.

She also cherishes a long-running connection with the open-air Theatricum, where over the years she has taught in the summer camp, choreographed a production of “Dracula,” acted in “The Three Sisters” and played Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“I’ve been part of the company there since I was a youngster,” Pearl says.

Performing runs in the family. Her late father, Robert Pearl, and her grandfather, Frank Everhart, were magicians, and her mother, Karin Woodward, is a former actress.

Woodward, a longtime Topanga resident, says her daughter was an active child who took full advantage of growing up in a place she describes as “a little hometown on the edge of this megalopolis.”

As she watched Lexi clamber up all those trees, “I knew she’d find her own path,” Woodward says.

But perhaps not one she expected.

“Never in a million years would I have thought ‘I want my daughter to be dangling 100 feet in the air on red silk,’ “ Woodward says. “But I love it. It’s thrilling.”

For Pearl, the hometown show offers an annual touchstone—a creative reflection of “where I’ve been and who I’ve met” over the course of the preceding year.

It’s also a chance to live out her professional credo. “My favorite saying is: As an artist, I get to create a tangible experience out of the invisible,” she adds.

And as for the show’s Mother’s Day tie-in, that, too, seems an appropriate reflection of Pearl’s life and times. “All of my girlfriends from 1st grade are having babies!” she says.

Then there’s the influence of her own mom.

“She has completely encouraged and facilitated my creative spirit,” Pearl says. “She’s been in the audience of every show I’ve ever done.”

Guess where she’ll be on May 9th?

The show takes place at 2 p.m. General admission tickets are $20; more information is here.

Posted 5-03-10