• Tightwire

    A high-tension wire that the circus artist walks and balances on. Replacing tightrope as a more reliable material that can bear more tension, tightwire is an unevenly practiced discipline – rare in the UK and many other countries, but much more common over in France where, on the one hand, there are true, old-school high wire artists (staging incredible walks between city towers, etcetera), and then, on the other, a contemporary circus movement led by the influential company Les Colporteurs, who have become internationally renowned for productions that go deep into the technique of tightwire in search of a unique theatre of poetry and abstraction.

  • Magazine

    By John Ellingsworth on 20 July 2011 in Reviews

    As the audience enter the small tent, Compagnie Rasposo are at table – eating, reaching across each other, talking, some sitting, some standing, one man building a card tower from biscuits, musicians to the side playing a jaunty air.

    By John Ellingsworth on 19 July 2010 in Reviews

    One memory of InStallation is a chain of enduring images, seen through washes of blue and white light. A Chinese pole swings as a pendulum, casting a crisp shadow.

    By John Ellingsworth on 28 January 2010 in Reviews

    Circus has always understood the appeal of the mechanical process. It's intrinsic to the artform at close examination, but just in the course of LIMF10 ideas in this line have taken more explicit form in The Mill (a giant, human-powered factory) and Öper Öpis (an unstable, tilting stage).

    By John Ellingsworth on 4 September 2009 in Reviews

    A member of the audience is stepping over the guard rope and posing in front of the Colporteurs’ rig, a confused triple wire structure where the underbeams run slanted to the ground, hitting a pose while her friend takes a picture.

    By John Ellingsworth on 7 August 2009 in Reviews

    There’s a scene in Le Cirque Invisible where Victoria Chaplin walks out on stage with a number of furled umbrellas. She dances, and opens them one by one until they obscure her—more umbrellas than two hands could hold or control.