Features

Sideshow spins the summer circus festivals in an editorial centrifuge to separate out the circus, with Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, Watch This Space, Hat Fair, Zircus Plus, Bristol Harbour Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and more under scrutiny.

'After debating the safety of a visit ('it has been cleaned but there's still some...' – reaching a moment for the English word – 'poison'), Tomi took some of the visitors to CIRKO into the old building in small groups. Inside it's cavernous and empty, 41 metres in diameter and 38 metres high. We went up to the lowest walkway, at the level of the great, rusted iron dome that would have risen and fallen with the pressure. Grey walls were cut with stripes of glass bricks that ran from floor to ceiling and let in low, refracted light.'

Sideshow visits the CIRKO Center for New Circus in Helsinki, a custom facility built into the shell of an old industrial building and housed on the site of a defunct gasworks.

Sideshow travels to Stockholm for the CASCAS tour – a headlong, six-day race through Swedish circus and street arts – visiting the incredible Subtopia facility in Botkyrka, hearing from students training for work with Clowns Without Borders and from teachers at the University of Dance and Circus, watching circus artists and punks and fakirs at Subcase, and taking many long walks through the snow and ice of the winter city.

Heavy rain, desperate improvisation, an exploding generator – Jon Deline on performing at Cambodia's Tini Tinou International Circus Festival and why he'd do it all again.

'The technical malfunctions started at annoying but soon reached a level of terrifying. Lights would go in and out, sound levels would go up and down for no apparent reason, sometimes causing the audience to shield their ears because the music was too loud. The coup de grace of the technical staff was the full-scale explosion of the generator that powered the follow spot. A doomsday visage, engulfed in flames, perched ten feet away from the audience.'

Sideshow profiles Finnish aerialist and dancer and not-a-theatre-maker Ilona Jäntti and her un-British body of work.

'I'm not really saying that it's a bad thing to work in narrative, but I was not theatre trained and I just feel that there are so many things in circus that I'd rather explore than how to tell something. I'm just really interested in what you can do with your discipline or with your body, other people, objects you've got within the space you're in. What can you do? I don't think there always has to be a story. I don't think the circus disciplines have to be forced into a theatre format somehow.'

Sideshow pays a visit to Slip 6, a 19th Century warehouse in Chatham's Historic Dockyard, once used to build and launch ships, now the shell-home of a new creation centre with big aspirations.

'Being realistic we're not going to attract half a million, a million Pounds worth of funding – which, you know, two years ago we might have been able to. But while there is the La Brèche model, these other places like Atelier 231, these French centres that people hold up, they actually started out in a fairly rudimentary state and have been developed over the years and through many residencies.'

'It's still a tent festival, with chapiteaus by the river, in car parks, hunched low outside the gates of Auch's towering cathedral, at the head of the Parc du Couloume – among the life of the town.'

Sideshow visits the Southern French town of Auch for Festival Circa, a nine-day programme of student and professional work, and one of the big events on the contemporary circus calendar.

'Equestrian ‘performance’ holds a special interest for me. In my younger days I competed as a sport equestrian vaulter, a little-known discipline that shares more with circus or ice-skating than it does with the usual round of equestrian disciplines in the sporting world. Despite training at the time in theatre and dance, it was in equestrian vaulting that I first experienced the tangible feeling of ensemble and of a certain kinaesthetic sympathy with another performer – in this case the sympathetic bond between equine- and human-kind.'

Former prince of the ring Thomas Wilson reflects on the horse in contemporary circus performance.

Fuse Medway, City of London, Glastonbury, Watch This Space, Greenwich + Docklands, Surge, Theatre Meadows, Stockton International Riverside, Edinburgh Fringe, The Big Splash...

Sideshow boils and reduces the summer festival programmes into one combined guide.

'I go to Stoa; a cold afternoon, a light rain. Walking out the back of the building where they load and unload the stage equipment there's a rank of entranceways with drawn-down metal shutters. No numbers or signs to differentiate the doors, but something catches the eye out on the concrete steps in front of one: two big lumps of ice, not sculpted, side-by-side, creature-like with melted runnels and reaching limbs. They're a little beautiful, and a little ugly, not really scintillating now in the weak sun, and they put me in mind of a throwaway replica of the stone statuettes that certain families place at the end of drives or on porches: for the time being at least, Compagnie Non Nova lives here.'

Sideshow goes to Helsinki to see Philippe Ménard's Position Parallèle au Plancher, a work of fear, elation and longing played out within a stark landscape of ice.