• Phare Ponleu Selpak: Rouge

    Phare Ponleu Selpak: Rouge

    For the second edition of Milton Keynes' biennial IF Festival, the organisers are following up on the storming success of 2010's InStallation by once again pitching a big top at the edge of MK's creepily artificial park and inviting an international circus company not seen before in the UK (Sideshow is pretty sure; not in recent memory anyway): this time Phare Poneleu Selpak, a performance group connected to the Cambodian multidisciplinary arts school of the same name. The piece they're showing, Rouge, is about memory, physical and otherwise, in light of the Khmer Rouge regime, and combines vernacular acrobatics with the dramaturgical input of Compagnie UBI, who are now in the last year of a three-year French-Cambodian collaboration and exchange project with PPS.

    For more on Phare Poneleu Selpak see Jon Deline's account of a visit to Cambodia, with Clowns Without Borders, for Tini Tinou International Circus Festival.