FLIP Fabrique: Blizzard Resource Guide
As a replacement to the Study Guides we’ve sent in the past, we are offering these easy to access links that you can share in your classroom along with information to help your students get the most out of the school matinee they are attending.
School Matinee
FLIP Fabrique: Blizzard
Monday, March 2, 2026 • 11:00am-Noon
FLIP Fabrique is a contemporary circus troupe based in Quebec City, Canada. Created in 2011 by seven friends from the Quebec Circus School. After working in the biggest circuses in the world, the group came together around a common dream, that of creating a circus in their image, unifying, authentic, innovative and above all breathtaking!
FLIP Fabrique has made a name for itself around the world with its Catch Me, Transit, and Blizzard touring shows. In addition, FLIP Fabrique is recognized for its large-scale outdoor shows Crépuscule (Twilight) and Féria (Vacation or Holiday) presented in collaboration with the city of Quebec, appreciated by hundreds of thousands of spectators since 2015. Today, the FLIP Fabrique family brings together a hundred artists and artisans around the same desire to promote the circus throughout the world.
With Blizzard, FLIP Fabrique takes you on a crazy, poetic and gentle journey in the dead of winter, and invites you to lose yourself in a moment of complete wonder. What if winter has taken over? Not just outside, in the streets and in the fields, but also in the houses, in bedrooms, underneath our clothes, and even right into our hearts. With performers at the peak of their art and outstanding visual poetry, Blizzard promises to blow away everything in its path.
Blizzard combines a wide range of artistic disciplines to create a richly diverse performance full of poetry and humor:
› Circus arts: Aerial acrobatics, floor acrobatics, balancing, juggling.
› Theater arts: Staging, acting, storytelling, themes, script.
› Sound recording: Radio static, wind sounds, waves, and birds accompanying the music.
› Music: Modified piano (keyboard, drum pad, and synthesizer), vocals, guitalele, cowbell, triangle, whistle, flute, melodica, glockenspiel.
› Dance: Dance and wrestling numbers.
› Visual arts: Sets and props, costumes, lighting.
Blizzard‘s music is performed entirely live by musician composer Ben Nesrallah. He plays a futuristic piano custom-designed for the show. It has all kinds of drawers and hiding spots that houses a synthesizer, console rhythm machine and other sound effects. It can even generate smoke!
Piano
The piano serves multiple purposes—rolling around the stage, hiding other props, and providing a platform for circus artists to climb onto to perform. But its main purpose is to create the show’s musical atmosphere. The musician’s instrument has been modified specifically for Blizzard, adding other instruments to provide rich musical variety in a single instrument:
- Keyboard: The main instrument used for the melody.
- Drum pad and synthesizer: Instruments for sound modulation and percussion.
- Effects loops: Allows the musician to automatically replay and simultaneously record musical sequences and determine the speed and the number of times they replay.
- Stomp box: A small wooden box with a contact microphone allowing the musician to produce percussion sounds with their feet.
- Microphone
- Four speakers
For an added visual effect, the piano also contains its own lighting system and smoke machine, with independent piping. This makes the piano emit steam, which represents the instrument’s warmth in the cold of winter.
Video
Learn More:
Interesting To Know:
Blizzard Was Created During a Freezing Winter. The show was created in Québec City in the middle of winter in 2019. As luck would have it, this winter was particularly harsh, with colds of -4 °F and snowstorms in profusion. The heating system even broke down during rehearsal!
Quebec is one of Canada’s 10 provinces and has a population of 8 million Quebecers, with a French-speaking majority within a mainly English-speaking country. Quebecers have primarily French, English, and Indigenous origins. Quebec’s territory is 579,153 square miles in size, almost a quarter of Canada’s total area, and for comparison, almost three times the size of France. More than 80% of the province’s population lives along the banks of the St. Lawrence River, which traverses Ontario and Quebec in Canada and New York in the United States. In Quebec, the average winter snowfall is between 7 feet and 12 feet.
California Arts Standards
The 2019 California Arts Standards provide guidance toward a common goal: for all California students to fully participate in a rich and well-rounded arts education. The standards are based on the artistic processes of creating; performing/producing/presenting; responding; and connecting. Our school matinees correspond to responding and connecting:
- Responding—Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and Analyze Artistic Work; Standard 8: Interpret Intent and Meaning in Artistic Work; Anchor Standard 9: Apply Criteria to Evaluate Artistic Work
- Connecting—Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and Relate Knowledge and Personal Experiences to Make Art; Anchor Standard 11: Relate Artistic Ideas and Works with Societal, Cultural, and Historical Context to Deepen Understanding
Common Core Standards
Common Core broadens the definition of a “text,” viewing performance as a form of text, so students are experiencing and interacting with a text when they attend a performance. Seeing live performance provides rich opportunities to write reflections, narratives, arguments etc.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.3, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.6, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.3