The Kif Kif Sisters | Returns Department

Identical twins from Montréal who have been making wordless visual theater since 2007, performing more than a thousand times in 20 countries, bring Returns Department to The Ringling's circus programming. The premise: the two sisters staff the counter where disgruntled customers' merchandise comes back, inspecting a conveyor belt of defective goods and slowly giving in to the urge to play with them, until the objects start playing back. The piece folds circus skills, robotics and puppetry into physical comedy that owes a visible debt to Chaplin and to comic strips, and it tips by degrees from workplace slapstick into the absurd. It runs about 55 minutes and is pitched at ages 4 and up without talking down to anyone.