Linge Sale is no larger than its two performers, Alice Roma and Damiano Fumagalli. It's avowedly and deliberately small – stripped of artifice by its own relaxed easiness. The idea of character or performance will sometimes emerge, yet soon collapses back into the strong onstage relationship of two people who seem, simply, happy to be there.
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In her last show P.P.P. the juggler Phia Ménard worked with ice — a substance that couldn't be held and that couldn't be dropped, and that would, slowly, change its state if left untouched; a substance that was 'unjuggleable'.
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Performed by four men who will travel the sweat spectrum from dry to damp to sodden in the course of the gruelling 60 minutes they spend under the public eye, Un Loup Pour L'Homme's Face Nord is presented as a series of games or exercises meant to test the physical limits of the group onstage — asking more and more of them until, inevitably, they fail.
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An off-kilter, sloping trapezoid, broad and low ceilinged, the white chamber of Les Fuyantes is a place where physical space loops, where gravity upends or bifurcates, and where time halts, stretches and snaps.
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It's always worth seeing a full solo show from a longtime ensemble performer – you can get major shifts in aesthetic, scale, tone, thematic preoccupation; things just spill out.
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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.
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The Circa essence is sort of this: there are ideas and concepts and emotions that inhere in circus and they fly out in the moment of performance. Trust, risk, failure, pain, vindication, joy, hardship, strength.
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Appearing like a faerie ring there's an exploded circle of hay on a small green in Tackley village, a Giffords Circus A-board materialised at the centre to advertise their latest production: War and Peace at the Circus.
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I was told beforehand that Kimmo Pohjonen once mooned the Queen, or some Royal, at a Proms performance in London. I don't know for sure, but I can credit it. With a low mowhawk, bare arms and a sweeping dress he's salty, earthy, tanned, strong; onstage he has a clear, unwavering confidence in whatever he happens to be doing, which could feasibly include mooning the Queen.
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At the start of Motet there are juggling balls of all sizes and colours lying on the stage, and it's very dark. Sakari Männistö, wearing voluminous, brocaded trousers, treads daintily among them, moving from one edge to another, staring out and not in, waiting for something perhaps.
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As we enter the auditorium, we see the members of Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger loitering onstage, a motley assortment of men and women of various ages – some tall, some small; some stocky, some svelte.
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Two characters, a man and a woman, are undergoing a rehabilitative process, alone except for the ambient voice of a calm, insistent psychiatrist. The man remembers a terrible accident, and struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide; the woman's memory slides away whenever she comes close to its pivotal moment.
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As we enter the auditorium, the lights are dim and rosy, and there’s recorded piano and accordion music playing (sounding like something that might be on the Amelie soundtrack). It all feels very warm and welcoming.
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For all that Jay Gilligan stands by the door and greets each audience member as they enter, Objectify isn't inviting work – it's uncaringly individualistic, highly and minutely developed, and intellectual in that way that is perhaps a little impatient with your ability to keep up.
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There's a certain kind of imagery that's the imagery of the photoshoot. Objects are cut in for colour or to create visual friction – you know the sort of thing: putting a pale, fey model in boxing gloves, or situating a burly thug on the tiny horse of a bleached-out, ruined carousel.
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