• Festival Hautes Tensions

    Compagnie Anomalie & Les Witotos, Mister Monster | Photo: Sabine Delcour

    Taking place at various locations in Parc de la Villette, the enormous and extremely French conceptual culture park in Paris' 19th arrondissement, Hautes Tensions (High Voltage) is a new festival concentrating on circus and urban culture – with at least some of the programmed pieces exploring the space between the two forms.

    For 2011 the festival is divided into two five-day blocks, with a programme that mixes circus, dance and puppetry (particularly interesting in the latter category is a marionette piece from the Democratic Republic of Congo), and among the highlights of the 2011 line-up are Finnish bad boys Race Horse Company, who bring their exciting and chaotic JTCE show Petit Mal; a new piece from Compagnie Bal / Jeanne Mordoj (of the brilliant, delicate and intelligent Eloge du Poil); and Compagnie Anomalie & Les Witotos' Mister Monster, a bizarre, palpitating nightmare based on the Carolingian romance of Valentine and Orson.

    Artists: Anomalie & Les Witotos, Association W, Compagnie Bal, Jean-Baptiste André, Jeanne Mordoj, Race Horse Company

  • Magazine

    Compagnie Non Nova: Vortex
    By John Ellingsworth on 2 May 2012 in Reviews

    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'.

    Un Loup Pour L'Homme: Face Nord
    By John Ellingsworth on 23 April 2012 in Reviews

    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.

    Les Choses de Rien: Les Fuyantes
    By John Ellingsworth on 18 April 2012 in Reviews

    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.