Preview: Acrojou Circus Theatre, Wake

Duvets and white linen lie in trails and heaps about the studio. Jeni Barnard and Barney White, Acrojou, have fed an elongated hatstand through the centre of their German Wheel and are lashing it to the bars. Fixing the stand, the bottom half of which looks like it might be the inner tube of a carpet roll, the two push the Wheel up onto a low pedestal. You can see how heavy it is—more or less a thick steel ladder worked into a circle, the German Wheel rolls easy on the flat but has to be heaved up an incline. They clamp it in place, upright, and begin to push the outer edge of the Wheel, the base pedestal rotating freely, building the momentum to breakneck pace before flicking inside. The Wheel’s rotation is enough to begin, like a fast spinning penny, to faintly generate the illusion of a sphere, Jeni and Barney working inside to unfurl a thin long sail and hoist it up the hatstand mast, which whips around at fifteen degrees off vertical. I have a strong feeling that what it all looks like is an astrolabe without really having a clear idea of what an astrolabe looks like, and write it in my notebook, ASTROLABE. The intuition is later destroyed with a few minutes research, but there is something recognisable about the form, and it stirs fantastical associations of gateways and travelling machines. For all its dangerous weight and speed it has a very benign character—if it’s a vessel it’s the kind that would carry you to safety.

In another scene, Jeni and Barney work with the bare Wheel, and I’m struck how easily they can give and take its energy. A simple step inside the frame can start a fast roll, but jumping out through the bars kills the movement instantly—the momentum transferring into a high, straight leap. With the two of them working together, usually one in the Wheel and one alongside, the possible configurations increase—it can be braced and set in motion from outside—but most of what they do entails following the equipment. They read it and exploit its behaviour, knowing when to stay and when to leave—the benefit of the frame being that it’s as solid or as permeable as you want it to be.

***

Later on, sitting downstairs in the Jacksons Lane café amid a sea of roiling children who may or may not be waiting for a workshop, I ask the obvious question: why German Wheel? ‘It’s got its own rhythm,’ says Jeni. ‘I like its softness—you kind of get this nice suspension off it. I think similarly to probably all circus disciplines, there's a way of working with Wheel that makes it very easy when you kind of get the feel for the timing and start working very much with the equipment rather than using your strength to manipulate it. And I think once you’ve trained on it long enough to have a feel for the timing, a knowledge of where bars are and what’s happening around you as the Wheel moves—then it can be really nice choreographically, the way you move with it rather than it being something you're kind of using.’

Jeni and Barney met on the Circus Space degree course, and during the second year made the decision to work together with Wheel as a specialisation. In this country it’s a fairly rare piece of apparatus, but Barney explains that the technical vocabulary has actually been mostly developed outside of circus: it’s a gymnastic discipline with its own Code of Points and national competitions. ‘As soon as you get into German Wheel World it’s very strange. Just doing it in this country you’ll see maybe two or three people who train it; people who taught us or came over from Germany to teach us. But we went to do an intensive in Denmark and there were like 200 people with Wheels.’ The two felt a little out of place. ‘They've all grown up together doing German Wheel together,’ says Jeni, ‘and they put four year olds into Wheels with blocks on their feet so that they can reach the bars. And it's this real like—people bring their kids, everybody knows each other; they all go away and do intensives together. We were the new kids.’

Though they’re interested in using the Wheel purely as gymnastic apparatus, Acrojou work also with its sculptural and visual aspects. ‘There's so much you can do with it,’ says Jeni. ‘Approaching it purely as a frame or a circle, it's really interesting. We've only just got into being able to explore that since we graduated. But it's completely endless; there's such a nice simplicity to the Wheel. It's quite a kind of basic thing, but it’s also really versatile creatively and visually.’ The company’s outdoor production, The Wheel House, builds an entire circular home into the structure, complete with bedside table, chest of drawers and window. Jeni: ‘The basic concept of it was to build a house inside a wheel—as the name implies. We worked with my dad on that; he's a designer and carpenter… It's really fun to use. We're going to take it back into development with Flick [Ferdinando] when we've got the financing to do so. There are so many bits to it and little tricks built into the set—because it was just us and my dad in a workshop going, Oh! we could do this and add this in, and as happens with these things we've never really had enough time on it to really kind of draw everything out of the set and the equipment. I still find it quite exciting even though it's a year-and-a-half old now.’

The new show, Wake, their first full-length indoor production, began as an ambitious idea Jeni had for an end of year piece at Circus Space: ‘I could only go into it in a really small way at the time, and then it became this pet project, passion. Initially I was playing with it, working on the designs, developing little bits of material for it in my spare time, then when Acrojou formed Barney got involved and we started developing it more. And it's just been on the backburner for a long time. We'd get it out sometimes and develop ideas and play with things, but it was always with our own time and resources. And then at the end of last summer we had a kind of big re-evaluation of where we were going as a company and realised that if we were going to make a show we'd have to make some sacrifices—because we'd been half writing a funding application between gigging and getting the company set up, and never gotten very far with it. So we decided to stop earning, essentially, at the beginning of last winter, and started turning down gigs—which was really scary—and just locked ourselves away to work on the funding application… We were really lucky to get awarded it first time round.’

The funding has allowed Acrojou to bring on John Paul Zaccarini as director (Company FZ also mentor them) and Kathy Hinde as video artist and impromptu sound designer (‘she was kind of sat spare for an hour and ended up doing a lot of it’). Wake pulls together a number of thematic threads, but its grand design is to layer an actual physical journey with the psychological journey of a relationship between two people. Barney: ‘The main kind of theme of the piece is confronting the negative aspects of life so you can find a kind of stillness. Not confronting them to solve them, but just confronting them to acknowledge them and accept them and get some balance.’

Company FZ are of course a very direct influence, but the company also mention James Thiérrée as a big inspiration, and it seems as though there is perhaps some traceable lineage in the use of constructive design—latent objects combined on stage to create moving contraptions. The main interest is in seeing them fit together (watching Le Cirque Invisible I remember thinking how like an Animata game it was), and for now Acrojou are just seeing what they can make: their ACE grant is for research and development, and they’re trying to stay mindful of the need to retain the spirit of experimentation. ‘Right back at the beginning,’ remembers Barney, ‘when we were devising, the tendency was to just set things and keep working on them, and John Paul was really amazing at going, You don't need to do that; you've done that idea, that's made, that's a good idea. Now let's move on and do something else.’