Harness & Wired Aerial
Aerial where the artist is wired into a harness, allowing them to run along walls and perform, slow, exaggerated acrobatics using the side of a building as their ground. Cumbersome to get in and out of and requiring a fairly substantial investment in equipment, harness aerial tends to be the preserve of companies who specialise in its use – companies like Upswing or Wired Aerial Theatre in the UK. It's very common to see wired performance in big ceremonies and opening events – because it's high enough and the actions are big enough for it to be seen from a distance – but artistic work in the medium is a little harder to find. Usually it's outdoors.
For some, harness work is more a subset of dance. The lines are always blurred, but the sense of risk that is somewhere at the fast-beating heart of the circus artform is missing in a discipline that can seem anaesthetised and just... pointless. At its worst, harness is people in drifty costumes jumping around on the side of monuments; at its best it has a quality of slow grace and unworldly gravity that creates an upside-down, snowglobe world for its audience to peer into.
Magazine
There’s a rather untypical theatre audience waiting to go into the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, a venue that’s a fair way out of Edinburgh’s centre—a long line of chattering twenty-somethings who look like they are up for a night of clubbing rather than a Fringe show.
Stilt-walking has always been the most lavishly costumed circus discipline—a lot of times the pleasure is in seeing the bespoke detailing and the ways in which the weaknesses of stilts (the need to cover up the legs, the jerky movement) have become strengths of the design (cloven hooves for pegs, insectile limbs, giant stilt robots, etcetera).