In France in the 1970s, Victoria Chaplin (daughter of Charlie) and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée (a French movie star) started performing a kind of circus act nobody had seen before. It was a marriage of the new and the nostalgic, vaudeville for drug people, that ditched the traditional flashy costumes, animal acts, and other three-ring hooha for dreamy clowning.

People called it cirque nouveau and it became the fountainhead for the cabaret and circus revival that’s everywhere today, from Circus Contraption to Cirque de Soleil. None of that would be possible without Chaplin and Thiérrée, the American actress and the French movie star who fell in love and ran away to their own kind of circus.

Aurélia Thiérrée is their daughter and is coming to the Seattle Rep, to perform her show Aurélia’s Oratorio. We talked on the telephone—me sitting in the park in Seattle, her sitting in her apartment in New York. She did not want to talk about her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, or her great-grandfather, Eugene O’Neill.

You grew up performing with in your parents’ circus?
It was a way to keep the family together. Sometimes we were on the road for eight or nine months. We had tutors who came to give us lessons two hours a day in each city.

That’s nice. So if you had a teacher you hated, you knew you’d never see him or her again.
Well, sometimes yes. But sometimes we would be in one city for a few months.

What was your parents’ circus like?
They were the first to believe circus could be changed, but circus performers weren’t ready to change. They were using traditions that had been passed down through the generations. Changing their acts, their costumes, or no more animals—it wasn’t possible. So my parents created their own circus to do whatever they wanted.

Your mother created this show?
My mother and I together, little by little, while I was working with the Tiger Lilies. As a family, we always work together.

What were you doing with the Tiger Lilies?
I prefer really to focus on this show, because that’s my reality today.

What’s it like?
It’s difficult to describe. It’s not circus, not dance, not a children’s show, and not theater. The original idea began with a book of medieval drawings of the world turned upside-down. They reverted situations to create humor and were also used as politically—maybe a man riding a horse upside-down or women going to war, things like that. That was the idea: to take a tableau you’re familiar with, but everything is upside-down. Also, I had the idea of a woman going completely mad.

What will people see at the show?
I’m reluctant to describe the acts precisely.

Could you describe them generally?
I tried to use whatever I could to please my mother.

What pleases your mother?
She has a very precise theatrical language. She uses old tricks but attaches them to images that are very modern.

What kind of tricks?
Optical illusions—there is a costume where I am an hourglass and then I turn into sand, using a really, really old trick but one that’s never been used in this way.

Is there a name for this trick?
If there were, I would never, never tell you.