Sideshow Magazine

Reviews 2009

Table of Contents

Introduction

Cirque du Soleil: Quidam

Ilona Jäntti: Muualla, Cel & Footnotes

NoFit State Circus: Tabú

Ockham's Razor / Theatre-Rites: Hang On

The Insect Circus

FoolishPeople: Cirxus

Scarabeus: Danza Antigua / Upswing: Loved Up

Circomedia: You Take My Breath Away

Tom Tom Crew / Avant Garde Dance with Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto: The Silver Tree

Fittings Multimedia Arts & Sharmanka: Sputnik

Strange Fruit & Graeae: Against the Tide

ENO: L'Amour de Loin

Circus Space: Double Exposure

Mimbre: Until Now

Gandini Juggling: Watch This Space Residency

Circa: C!rca

Anonymous Ensemble: Wanderlust

Bristol Harbourside Festival

TBA Collaborative: The Grind Show

Le Navet Bệte: Zemblanity

Airealism: Noir / Tales of the Apocalypse

Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée: Le Cirque Invisible

Malaje - The Flamenco Circus

Gaitzerdi Teatro: Otsoko

ThisSideUp Acrobatics: Controlled Falling Project

Fidget Feet: Raw

Cia La Industrial Teatrera: Rojo

Les Colporteurs: Les Etoiles

Sugar Beast Circus: The Sugar Beast Circus Show / Milkwood Rodeo

Citrus Arts: Wardrobe Diaries

Cirkus Cirkör: Inside Out

Proteus Theatre: Dracula

So & So Circus Theatre: The Hot Dots

ROH2 Firsts

Green Eyed Zero: In the shadow of picture frames

End

Introduction

Hi. Hi there. Nice e-reader device you've got, I like it.

So what you are about to read – or perhaps skim through before archiving forever in your immense Kindle hoard – is Sideshow's total reviewing output from 2009, the year I started the site. I bought the domain I think in May, and for early content populated it with some reviews of circus shows that I'd written for other publications (and which therefore have a slightly different voice – a bit more patient explaining terminology, a bit less patient perhaps with the work itself).

I hope you can get something useful from this mini-library. The tedious process of copy-pasting a year of reviews into a Word document has actually made me feel a little like a reeling drunk lining up empty bottles or filling the drawer of his bedsit's pinewood side cabinet with Tiger Beer bottlecaps. Empty, so empty...

Enjoy!

John Ellingsworth

Cirque du Soleil: Quidam

Quidam was probably amazing once. A bored young girl is transported from her parents’ world into another place: a dreamland where she encounters strange and sometimes frightening characters, led all the while by a puckish guide who ultimately reunites her with her mother and father. It’s a basic and effective story, which by all accounts worked a decade ago, when the show was first premiered, because the cast were the people who had created the show – it showcased their technical abilities, but also suited their characters and traits as performers.

Over the years, though, performers have been swapped out and in, and replacements have been judged on their ability to pull off the tricks of their predecessor rather than chosen for their like spirit. You end up with performance that is impressive but empty: a silks aerialist with a huge back-bend; eerily fast Chinese diabolists; standard high level acrobalance where there is no sense (as there is a sense in good duos) that the movement and balances of base and flyer are the gestures of a dense, unique communication – privately arrived at, publically shared. There was a man-size female handbalancer who wore face make-up but showed nearly all of her bare tattooed skin and looked like a drag queen, so wildly out of place tonally that it was as though she had accidentally performed her late-night cabaret act.

From what I’ve heard it’s probably not so much that the performers don’t have character or individual style; more that CDS as it has become doesn’t consider the artists themselves the most important agents in the creation of work – giving them no input into the structure or final nature of the show. But there is not much evidence of a live directorial presence either, autocratic or otherwise. It’s perhaps the case that CDS has grown to the point where moneymaking is (in a sense automatically) the driving necessity, a situation in which the artist cannot take risks (because there is so much now to collapse if it ever went wrong). And if something is working financially, if it’s touring the world and getting good audiences, there’s no impetus to change it, even if theatrically it’s broken.

What makes it worse is that there’s one act, the last, that truly reaches and quickens the heart. It has a technical name that I don’t know how to spell, but it’s also called Baskets: three or four acrobats link hands and use their combined strength to toss a flyer fifteen-twenty feet in the air. In Quidam there are more than a dozen on stage, allowing the flyers to be tossed from one basket to another, crossing midair; the finale constructs a human tower, each flyer somersaulting onto the shoulders of the last. It’s terrifying and at times unbelievable, but there’s a basic drama in it that is deeper and subtler than the possibility of injury or death, or the thrill of watching people exercise the skills they have given their lives to attain. If you accept that part of what makes a group of people a community is mutual dependence and the attentiveness of its members to one another, then you find that operating here in its most extreme form. The acrobats literally owe each other their lives, countless times; perhaps this exists only in the moment and space of the performance, perhaps backstage they’re actions toward each other are motivated by the same small attractions, irritations and jealousies as floor-staff at a supermarket – but this doesn’t make it any less powerful or real. There are tiny pieces of choreography, performers clasping hands, moving in sequence, that amplify what is inherent in the act, and it could have been a perfect end to a great show. Maybe originally it was. The intention is still visible: to create a cast of dreamworld characters, then at the end to unite them in grace. It’s sad that the supporting material is no longer enough.

John Ellingsworth, 6 January 2009 @ Royal Albert Hall, London

Ilona Jäntti: Muualla, Cel & Footnotes

Ilona Jäntti is a tremendous aerialist. She’s been in circus a long time and has the consequent deep well of physical resources, but it’s style, really, that sets her apart: graceful but not too-clean, having an all-body approach where elbows, teeth, anything can be used to keep her in the air. Crucial to the theatrical make-up of this triple bill is her considerable and chraracterful attractiveness, kind of serious and shy, which sits very differently from the sexiness of—say—a burlesque artist: she has something beyond herself to exhibit, and her own attention is focused inward to the work she makes. It’s odd. I’ve seen her before doing pure skills pieces—acts where it is just her and a rope, her and a hoop—and her charisma is luminous; here it is too, but the effect is much more complicated and fragile. Basically when this triple bill works theatrically it’s great; the times it wasn’t working, I didn’t feel bored or inattentive, but queerly guilty. Guilty that watching a triptych of circus performances embracing other modes/techniques—animation, live music, and light/sound design, respectively—I wanted to watch something that had none of these.

The first piece, Muualla, featuring animation by Tuula Jeker was my favourite. Jäntti walks on all-fours across the stage, casting a shadow on the back wall, and where she pauses the shadow freezes momentarily to her shape, morphing then into a cartoon-y monster that comes alive and rushes away. It’s whimsical, light, and in its overall tone closest to the intrinsic qualities of Jäntti as a performer, curious, unconcerned, taking pleasure wherever it finds it. Next up, Cel trod familiar ground, matching aerialist with live musician (in this case cellist Jo Keithley) and putting them in an ambiguous, sometimes aggressive, relationship where music forces movement and vice versa. It wasn’t badly performed or conceived, but I’ve seen this set-up too many times, and the interaction between the two performers didn’t run deep enough to fully engage or convince.

The last of the triple bill, Footnotes, had a custom piece of equipment: what was essentially a low trapeze, but with an uncovered metal rod for a bar that was perhaps ten feet long. There was a second identical bar that was unattached to anything but was propped against the corner of the long trapeze—precariously so that it could slide to the floor if disturbed, which it did, on several occasions, crashing down very loudly as Jäntti made difficult journeys back and forth along the hanging bar. It was austerely beautiful, yet difficult to grasp much of whatever psychology it was meant to dramatise. I looked to the programme notes for help determining the origin of the piece, but they were giving nothing away. The sound—not exactly music—that accompanied Footnotes seemed to establish the second free rod as having the properties of an antenna, but rather than arising from any particular metaphor it felt more as though the piece had been discovered within the strict arbitrary limits of its apparatus: so then what on earth are we going to do with this? It summarised in a way how I felt about the whole triple bill: it felt like a try-out, which isn’t a criticism. It’s evidence of an artist trying to push her practice further, and that in itself is something to attend to.

John Ellingsworth, 7 March 2009 @ Jacksons Lane, London

NoFit State Circus: Tabú

If you’re going I recommend tanking up beforehand. Not entirely facetiously; when you first walk in and the performers greet you and talk to you like they’ve known you forever a little alcohol will probably smooth over the dialogue, plus—like the only other show I’ve seen at the Roundhouse, De La Guardia’s Fuerzabruta—Tabú needs big reactions from the audience, and works best if you pay something slightly less than close attention.

The story, laid out in detail in the lush foldout programme then sketched at the show’s start by a voiceover, is that it has been raining a long time (4 years, 11 months and 2 days) and the world’s inhabitants have been ground down to a basic, functional level of existence, without emotion or colour, locked down by their fear (the ‘most widespread, undetected, un-acknowledged of taboos’). Then, in classic out-of-towner mode, a girl Amaranta (the girl that knows no fear) arrives on the scene to shake things up and remind everyone of the value of what they’ve lost. It might be quite hard to grasp this without the text exposition, which is fine by me, but what in the end hurts the show is that the potential for universal sympathy—more or less everyone feels sometimes that they’re not doing enough, giving enough, risking enough, etc—is never fully realised.

The main substance of the show is a dozen or so solo and ensemble circus acts: aerial rope, aerial hoop, German wheel, trapeze, and so on. The performers are beautifully costumed and given characters in the context of the world, but too often their skills-pieces don’t dramatise the original concept. There was for instance a cradle act that I didn’t get anything from. A cradle is essentially a metal frame used for doubles work. The knees of the base go over one bar of the cradle, their feet brace against another, and then they hang below the frame. Hand-to-hand the flyer swings (beats) off the base and at the top of swings—at the weightless moment that is called the Dead Point—executes somersaults and tricks. The duo in the show, Petri Ekqvist and Kadja Karjalainen, pulled very difficult tricks, but their routine was—perhaps because of its difficulty—performed mechanically. Every now and then they would climb to the top of the cradle and make out, rather unromantically.

Artistic Director Firenza Guidi has a little explanatory text in the programme that names Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a major influence on Tabú; it goes also some way toward suggesting that the show, although starting from a rough story, is less a linear series of events and more a set of orchestrated tonal shifts, using every physical, musical, sexual channel of communication to transmit the emotive resonances that would otherwise come out of narrative, to create a ‘total sensual experience’. I am so ready for this: circus that is strange and moving and inexplicable, that interweaves character and physicality so closely into its displays of skill that the result is indivisible. Tabú does it once. Natalia Fandiño on static trapeze is incandescent. Her solo routine, which closes the show, has to be one of the best I’ve seen. It’s rare to see aerialists who use their heaviness—who don’t just chase zero-gravity type effects—and the prescriptive undercurrent of the show, to live to the fullest, finds its truth in a performance which gathers together so much of the reality of being human: it’s distressed and exhilarated, introverted and showing off, and it seems, critically, not to cast off fear but to find some balance with it.

John Ellingsworth, 31 March 2009 @ The Roundhouse, London

Ockham's Razor / Theatre-Rites: Hang On

I’ve been a dedicated stalker—wait, wait, supporter—of Ockham’s Razor since I first saw them perform Every Action at Circus Futures in 2006. About 20 minutes long, played out on a length of rope run over two raised pulleys, it’s a sweetly inventive aerial farce which, like a lot of their work, gets right to the soul of circus. Hang On is their first show for children, a collaboration with established specialists Theatre-Rites, and the first thing to say is that the kids in the audience seemed to really like it. There was a lot of talking and shifting around but that works the opposite way with children: it’s an expression of the keenest delight.

Hang On has six performers: four from a circus background, who are the mischievous characters in the piece, gradually constructing a giant suspended mobile which they clamber over; an actor/improviser, who plays the schoolteacherly role and is overly concerned with health and safety, always trying to forbid the others from climbing the mobile; and a slinky live percussionist, Nao Masuda, who wheels on ever more complex custom instruments. What the show does very well is use escalation and a careful management of surprise/recognition to create its narrative rhythm. So before the aerial mobile is even constructed its constituent shapes, triangles and connecting balls, are established on a small scale: the show opens with the cast picking their coats off triangle hangers that are wired to the ceiling; one of the cast, Sefano Di Renzo, is a ball juggler. These shapes are worked into every aspect of the design, sometimes with hidden surprises: at one point Nao works hard at pushing a huge globe slowly across the stage (kids: what’s she doing?), then spins it to reveal that it is cross-sectioned and contains a harp (kids: wowwwwwww).

I did feel, though, that Hang On didn’t have quite the same buzz as the last Theatre-Rites show I saw, Lighten Up, and that this was perhaps because the circus performers weren’t so adept at whatever you care to call it—traditional/vocal acting. Eric MacLennan as the H&S worrier (who is revealed at the end to have a phobia for heights) was working very hard to rev things up, but there wasn’t enough for him to play off to really get that sense of running energy. But the circus cast did the circus well, and I think the youth contingent were mostly captivated. I was unfairly distracted by my terrible hunger for new technical material—I like to see aerialists who have developed their own tricks or who have a distinctive movement style, and in Hang On they had made the decision (I think the right one) to underplay their abilities: to do things loosely and naturalistically, as a child might. Watching the cast climb up the spinning mobile one young boy insisted several times to his mother and most of the balcony seating that he could do that.

John Ellingsworth, 15 April 2009 @ Lyric Hammersmith, London

The Insect Circus

The great pleasure of this circus is the microscopic detail that has gone into the production of everything from its old letterpress-style posters to the £1 souvenir programmes that are hawked pre-show by Nurse Nursey. These things actually came first, before the show: founder and ringmaster Mark Copeland exhibited a set of paintings at the Portal Gallery in London that depicted giant performing snails rolling into town in the trailer of a circus caravan, aerialists suspended from butterflies, a wasp navigating a slack rope, and even some rare historical documentation of the gladiatorial contests fought against giant scorpions in Ancient Rome, of Chafer beetle baiting in Tudor England, and, particularly striking, of Mr Josia Banks standing perilously atop the saddle of a speeding rove beetle.

At some point the exhibition evolved into an installation (which I never saw although I own the Circus Box that accompanied it: a sweet little collection of curios including postcard replicas of Mark’s paintings and a booklet printing of A True History of the Circus Menagerie by Shandy Banks) and finally into a fully fledged show with Mark as the ringmaster. So here live on stage we see Maroc the Beast Tamer locked in mortal combat with a huge stag beetle (which, in a moment of genuine drama, comes rushing up the church’s central aisle propelled by three pairs of legs); Ephemera the Evanescent Mayfly (replaced and trained afresh for every show as each Ephemera perishes at the end of her act); and Nurse Nursey and the Mighty Mites (a very simple and funny sketch where the good Nurse does her best to housetrain and civilise a trio of glove puppet dust mites).

I think it’s fair to say that the circus skills on display—mostly in aerial disciplines—weren’t the highest in the land, but it’s not the sort of show that relies for its appeal on the entrancing quality of its performers’ incredible strength or dexterity—and, too, in the same way that it is a funny take on the traditional animal circus, the Insect Circus is also wryly self-aware of the theatre and hyperbole that goes into the presentation of physical feats. This doesn’t mean they purposefully do it badly; in fact the opposite: the performers exhibit total conviction, such that the audience is captivated watching nothing more than a woman pretending to play a wood pipe while a charmed earthworm rotates slowly up from its basket (I am of course talking of Tallulah the Worm Charmer).

What really comes through—via the homemade aesthetic and the souvenir programme and the narrative and thematic continuity of the original insect concept—is a feeling of warm communality that fits very well with the model of a circus as a group of individuals who live together and work together and in the end look out for each other. I thought Mark Copeland was a great ringmaster; I liked his twisty introductions and relaxed showmanship, but what really clinched it is that whenever I looked over at him mid-act he would always be utterly absorbed in whatever was happening onstage.

It’s fun and lively. It’s serious about being silly. It gets it right.

John Elingsworth, 8 May 2009 @ Fletch St Andrew's, Brighton

FoolishPeople: Cirxus

Wayward children, lost lovers, murder, cannibalism(?), suicide to protect another, madness—Cirxus is a multi-strand distributed story where the audience are free to walk about the performance space—a warehouse round back of the Arcola’s main theatre--encountering characters who themselves move constantly, following separate tracks that complexly intersect. There’s no way to see everything in one performance (although the action is looped and most things happen twice), and narrative resolution is, as with a lot of free ranging shows, replaced by moments of focused dramatic energy or coherence—a method that tends to work best with stories that are about memory, or have, at least, an absent, sad or memorial quality.

Cirxus takes as its starting point the Windscale fire and interprets it through the lives of a traditional 50s circus—there’s a ringmaster and a strongman, a ballerina and a clown. A woman in a blue dress moves silently through the room, clicking with radiation. Things don’t happen so much as people are affected by the currents of things that have happened and will happen. So there’s a knife that is passed from character to character, which as a visual sign and implicit threat automatically shifts the tone of the holder’s presence, but seems also to drop them out of the show’s wider actions and put them in a state of slowed-down introversion. To my knowledge it's never used. (I think that an interesting route through the show, and one I’d perhaps take if I saw it again, would be to follow the knife and watch it change the people who come into contact with it.)

In tackling the Windscale fire Cirxus is perhaps less interested in the facts of the case than in the allegorical potential of nuclear disaster as an event that, by dangerous radiation, prohibits access to the evidence of its own happening. The ruins of a nuclear site have a special sort of status: the only life that remains is that which is left in objects, or that which objects remind us of. Some of Cirxus’s nicest touches are the creation of objects that have a similar resonance within the show itself: I watched one character stacking a small tower out of playbricks—a simple thing, just bricks atop one another—and after a while left; when I came back later the corner was empty but the tower had gone and in its place was a complex suspension bridge built of bricks and playing cards. Another time I came into a schoolroom—it was my second visit, and the contents of the room were the same as the first except now there was a stack of childlike drawings. The third time I visited, after the show had looped, I entered halfway through the process: a teacher was sitting at her desk and perhaps half a dozen audience members were arranged around her using crayons to draw pictures. Whenever someone finished one they would hand it over to the teacher and she would appraise it and write a small encouraging comment. Every picture was of a man, except for one girl who drew an umbrella; when she handed it over everybody laughed, and the teacher wrote in the margin ‘I like people who can think outside the box’. I continue to torture myself trying to reverse engineer the box.

To say these things are ‘mysterious’, or that the show is ‘like a puzzle’ isn’t wrong or unfair but descriptive only of its surface interactions, and of the typical response of nerdy completists like myself. I think that underlying the desire to know what something means here is the sombre recognition that you can’t—in the frame of nuclear disaster, the contextlessness is a reminder of stopped life. I’d be interested to know more about the reasoning behind choosing the circus/carnival setting for the show—I think probably it has something to do with the fact that small travelling circuses have disappeared from most people’s lives but remain incredibly potent and entrenched in the general imagination.

How well all this comes together I’m not sure. Mileage obviously varies for each audience member, but I found Cirxus uneven in generating a strong tonal character, and felt that the two subject matters didn’t quite join in the moment of performance. I felt also it was cramped slightly by the space (when one of the characters runs off there’s not so much of a need to chase after them—they’ve nowhere to run to) and that the space itself wasn’t such an interesting one to inhabit, in terms of its layout and architecture, being essentially laid bare and divided boxily. I can certainly see an intellectual argument that the spatial limitations are appropriate to the situation and the stuck psychological loops of characters who are all waiting or lost—but this is an afterthought rather than an unravelling of the event as I experienced it. I think it could have done more with a larger space.

I’m sure that a lot of theatre companies are sick of being compared to Punchdrunk, and while Cirxus has some similarities and what are probably marks of influence, the style of the performance is different: no site-specific dance, more speech. I missed the dance, for its own pleasing qualities and for the work it does in activating the building as a metaphorical landscape the characters inhabit; and I occasionally had difficulties with the prose, which was fulsome and weightily symbolic and often carried (intentionally) symptoms of madness. I couldn’t always follow. Again, this is perhaps appropriate, but I felt a touch frustrated, and fantasised briefly about experiencing the show by sitting down with the full script and a diagram, calling in the actors to perform sections whenever I felt it needed the augmentation. My favourite moment in the show, and the only one I couldn’t really have experienced any other way, was when the Cirxus strongman, Koca, was staring into a fractured mirror and whispering to himself. No one else was around so I sidled in close and listened to something garbled and repetitive. He ignored me. After a while I turned to look away at two women, across the space, and as I did so Koca turned also and, suddenly cogent, talked to me, to himself, about what we were both seeing. It was genuinely dramatically thrilling; not so much because it was a one-to-one encounter, more because there was a queer distorted sense of being removed from the action while simultaneously engaging with it deeply, and, in the eyes of Koca, of being there and not there. It was such a powerful strange sensation that I had to remind myself to listen to what he was saying: he missed someone, even though she hadn’t already gone.

John Ellingsworth, 2 June 2009 @ Arcola Theatre, Studio K, London

Scarabeus: Danza Antigua / Upswing: Loved Up

Stilt-walking has always been the most lavishly costumed circus discipline—a lot of times the pleasure is in seeing the bespoke detailing and the ways in which the weaknesses of stilts (the need to cover up the legs, the jerky movement) have become strengths of the design (cloven hooves for pegs, insectile limbs, giant stilt robots, etcetera). In Danza Antigua we have corpse and corpse bride—Søren Nielsen and Daniela Essart, skeletal king and queen—in black, white, deep red and royal yellow. It sends a little stir through the crowd when they first see them: they look great, like they belong in a grim night carnival, Søren lumbering on at the start and pausing to crack his neck back round, relocate his shoulder. The act itself is very simple. There are two aerialists—looking something like dead, pallid elves—whose silk and doubles hoop routines are interleaved with stilt dancing (tango and cha cha cha) from Søren and Daniela. There’s a great mood—the dead come out to dance—that’s helped along by the environment: the company perform under, and rig from, a huge overreaching tree, and at the edges of the ring there’s real fire, real smoke—the smell of it drifts back and forth.

Following Scarabeus’ performance, the audience moved across Rochester Castle Gardens (quite a few of them ran) to the big aerial rig where Upswing were performing Loved Up. It’s billed I think as a battle of the sexes which here means combative flirtation and eventual resolution. Four characters—two guys, two girls—sit (but not still) on a bench. As they jostle for position, dancing on the seat and around it, attractions are formed and dissolved. It’s what you’d broadly call street dance—breaking and popping with some other stuff mixed in—and the performers are very good, having enough variance in their styles that they retain some of the eccentricity that lies at the heart of breakdance and gives it its life. The show works very well as outdoor performance for a large audience (probably 500+ the night I saw it)—it’s quick and light and playful, draws its characters and narrative with clean lines. In a way the wired sections are sort of superfluous, or carry principally the interest of novelty and distraction: it would have worked fine played out entirely on the ground, but the aerial work (brief counterweighted aerial tricks when the characters pair off to duet) adds something in making Loved Up feel like a special and sizeable event—closing the first day of Fuse Medway’s second weekend and leaving the audience abuzz.

John Ellingsworth, 13 June 2009 @ Castle Gardens, Rochester

Circomedia: You Take My Breath Away

The concept for this year’s Circomedia showcase is a reality show where audience votes are disregarded, circus performers competing for stage time while behind the scenes an embittered cleaner looks to ruin the show. There must have been some substantial changes after the publicity for You Take My Breath Away was finalised, as in performance it doesn’t much resemble the marketing blurb or mood of the (lovely) signature image, and the show as a whole feels as though it needs more time to come together. Currently it has some of the problems common to student and end year productions: an unevenness of tone caused by the collaboration of performers with very different styles and ambitions who wouldn’t ordinarily choose to work together; a narrative frame that hangs loose to accommodate the variety of acts/skills and long running time; the inclusion of scenes that confront the audience with material that is intended to be dark or difficult without solid, dramaturgically consistent reasons for doing so; shakily integrated multimedia; and a slightly too great predilection for disco and ensemble disco.

You Take My Breath Away is the first full-length show by Circomedia’s degree students (they’re halfway through the course with one year left), and there are some pieces where the teaching is obvious, not fully absorbed into the work and visible on its surface—two acrobalance/dance doubles ran concurrently on stage and switched between violence and tenderness without enough of a sense of where that dramatic content originated from, or where the boundaries of the relationships might lie outside of it. The most effective pieces tended to be those that worked using the theatrical content of the skills themselves: jugglers won the day. There’s a tramp club juggling act (Eric Nieber) that incorporates a few tricks with cane and hat—very short but no drops and simply pleasurable. I also liked Tom Hunt’s discordant, angular routine where the balls were caught in crooks of elbows and knees—again, short, but certainly with material and life enough to become something longer; it felt like it was his own. There’s a nice vignette where James Allen does a walking globe obstacle course to spy music, jumping from one globe to the next, pausing for the occasional spot of hat manipulation or five ball juggling. Then an ensemble routine where six men in business suits play with the sonic effects of simultaneous club juggling and synchronised movement works very well, even if the particular menace it creates is largely ungrounded and contextless.

The second half of the show (it’s at least two hours, not counting the interval) is where much of the more aggressively difficult material is situated. Kicking off is a management seminar from Randy Lovewell (Darryl Carrington), who explains his system: three attempts, failure met with discipline. So he takes his three attempts at a five ball juggling trick and each time he drops punishes himself (by pushing a needle through the skin of his one forearm, stapling the other with a staple gun, and having his assistant stand on his head while he lays his cheek on broken glass). It’s enthusiastically performed and funny in its way, but perhaps not quite in control of itself—not because of the introduced element of chance (he may catch the balls, he may not), but because the liveliness and reckless confidence of the character generates a slight queasiness and embarrassment when you’re watching him (apparently) hurt himself.

If celebrity or media superficiality is a target in You Take My Breath Away, then the show falls short—sometimes especially when it reaches for cultural touchstones. Flashing Susan Boyle on the back screen when a covert Circomedia student gets pulled to the stage to sing a shy lonesome song gets a laugh, but putting up Josef Frtizl’s face while the cleaner character lowers a bound performer headfirst into a water basin is an ugly appropriation of an image and story that shouldn’t be compressed to a symbol. It’s not so hard to construct an intellectual argument that justifies the decision and reframes it as commentary on other media, but the nuance of that thinking isn’t present in the theatrical material.

On balance, though it was a lot earlier in the course and for some of the students their first experience of public performance, I preferred seeing the individual presentations that were given about halfway through the first year of the degree—there was more space for the students to follow their own interests and creative aspirations (resulting in one great piece: Silke Schirok’s juggling lecture on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). This ensemble show, for all that it has some good in it, might not be the best place to first encounter these performers and their work.

John Ellingsworth, 19 June 2009 @ St Paul's Church, Bristol

Tom Tom Crew / Avant Garde Dance with Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto: The Silver Tree

Tom Tom Crew

A dreadful canker on the South Bank, the giant purple Udderbelly cow is currently visiting London before it floats back north to Edinburgh and its first home, the Festival Fringe. Alongside big music and comedy acts are the Tom Tom Crew, who had an extremely successful Edinburgh a few years ago and are touring this summer preliminary to a Fringe rerun.

The Crew comprises four acrobats, a drummer, a beatboxer and a turntabulist, delivering an hour or so of spectacle that shoots for a club atmosphere and relies on a lively and vocally engaged audience. The circus performers are rotated in and out, backed by the three musicians, who each get their turns in the spotlight: turntabulist Sampology opens the show; Ben Walsh drums up, down and around on eight metal sheets arranged in an octagonal scaffolding frame; and Tom Thumb performs extensive throat-ripping vocals (in one section sampled and remixed live). It’s easy to see why it got its big break in Edinburgh, where audiences are more likely to be people willing and able to spend an hour or two getting wasted outside in the Udderbelly’s Astroturf pasture (worst ever beer garden)—and not people who’ve come straight from work.

For the sober there are still some things to enjoy. I liked the scratching, Sampology's equipment filmed from above and projected large behind him—the physical dexterity needed to work the tables and controls at least as captivating as the skills of the circus performers. There’s also a fun little rap section with an 80s-era Japanese electronic harp (the Omnichord) where the manic energy of the drummer and host drops a few notches and comes closer to the mood of the audience—his friendliness seeming earnest at last.

The acrobats are good at what they do—tumbling, teeterboard and straps—and it works as spectacle and excites the kids in the audience, but there’s no originality in the tricks and not a great deal of personality in the acrobat performers (even though they are introduced by name). The show as a whole has a glossy homogenised feel, which is probably not quite the fault of the Crew themselves, and is partly caused by the show's mainstream marketing of a fringe culture (and the horrible venue)—but it’s also the separation and isolation of aspects of hip-hop: the scratching is good, but no one’s dancing.

Avant Garde Dance with Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto: The Silver Tree

A day later—in Victoria Park as part of Paradise Gardens—I went to The Silver Tree, a new commissioned collaboration between Avant Garde Dance and two Chinese Pole artists, Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto. It was the most successful fusion of urban dance with circus performance I’ve seen—a brilliant example of two companies from different but complimentary backgrounds combining their skills without either discipline eclipsing or reducing the other.

Black fabric had been roughly woven between the pillar supports of the Victoria Park bandstand, not in any pattern but creating an organic and uneven web. The dancers were costumed as birds, or as suggested birds, all in black and with odd runs of feathers—somehow also reptilian and prehistoric. The Silver Tree doesn’t carry a narrative, or not one I caught, but has satisfying rhythms of aggression and quietude, ensemble and solo work.

The piece is choreographed by Avant Garde Dance’s Artistic Director Toni Adigun, although there are some of the signature tricks of the two Pole performers and spaces for them to include what is clearly their own material. I think one of the reasons that The Silver Tree succeeds, beyond the quality of the collaborators, is that Chinese Pole so well suits an urban dance crossover: the twisting in-bent movements of Pole—distinct from the more expansive circular styles you tend to find on rope and silks—seem closer to breakdancing, the artist moving often through the tight gaps between body and Pole the way breakers use their bodies to create and then thread through the smallest spaces. Chinese Pole is getting an upsurge of new material at the moment, and if The Silver Tree is anything to go by then Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto are going to be important and original artists in the discipline.

John Ellingsworth, 20 & 21 June 2009 @ E4 Udderbelly / Victoria Park, London

Fittings Multimedia Arts & Sharmanka: Sputnik

In synopsis Sputnik has a tremendous draw: it’s a collaboration between Sharmanka (he of the theatre of kinetic automata) and Fittings Multimedia Arts (who make ‘new performance and theatre art works addressing serious issues in the language of variety theatre’). It’s performed by Clare Cunningham, whose background is in dance but who started training aerial a few years ago with Blue Eyed Soul, and the choreographer is Mish Weaver. The photos on the publicity are all wonderful, and the quoted text is a siren call to the SF nerd:

‘It is becoming impossible to live on this Earth, I have no wish to die, especially not now, but I do have a wish to live elsewhere. Therefore I will develop a machine for living away from the earth. If my machine has endless possibilities and is powered by not just my body but my spirit, given the right place and the right time, my life could begin again…. Elsewhere. It’s all just a question of how you look at things.’

In performance it’s a queer thing, partly installation, disconnected from its audience. Tucked into a corner of the square outside Greenwich Observatory is Sharmanka’s engaging creation: something that is a clock and space shuttle and time machine rolled into one; but also a home. Coloured cords run over a multitude of spoked wheels and bladed wings fan out to the sides. Clare Cunningham, playing the character of Jane Janes, the woman who wants to live away from Earth, clambers about the machine, using looped strops to stand sideways upon it. She’s alone, but has occasional radioed directions from the machine’s inventor (The Watchmaker) which are strangely slurred and indifferent, ‘spinn the wheeeel on yourrrr lefffft—no! not that one!’ There’s a muted, distant quality as Jane prepares for a take off that never comes: the twin washing machine drums at the top of the device rotate and throw out strips of gold; the wings beat; it stirs the crowd but goes nowhere.

Jane Janes has a blog. I read it after seeing Sputnik and it’s a nice thing: situating each individual performance within the context of a larger story so that you didn’t see something, you saw a part of something. Retrospectively I find myself playing games and wondering if the cow skull mounted inside the machine was just a residue of Sharmanka’s regular gothic vocabulary or whether it’s intended as a sinister clue to the possible motives of The Watchmaker. These thoughts aren’t unwelcome and I’d certainly be interested whether Sputnik has a larger arc that will be resolved at its final performance of the season (the Bristol Do in September)—but I do feel that any nested interior narratives don’t have enough visibility or counterpart in the show as it is presented live. With a little more thought on how to integrate the detail of its frame the dispassion and distance could become the restless, searching quality which I think is the production’s aim.

John Ellingsworth, 26 June 2009 @ Royal Observatory, London

Strange Fruit & Graeae: Against the Tide

In a festival overloaded with interesting collaborations Greenwich+Docklands this year brought together Australian street arts and circus company Strange Fruit, who work atop custom four-metre sway poles, with disabled-led theatre company Graeae. Performed in Cutty Sark Gardens with its back to the Thames, the result, Against the Tide, is a funny and richly evoked piece of storytelling with all the emotional depth and compression of a folk tale.

Living in the middle of a desert landscape, an engaging band of slightly piratical individuals lament the loss of water and, with it, memory. They play games and tell stories; sing and sign (Graeae’s work includes finding ways to creatively integrate sign language into theatre performance). The text is lyrical and compact, and each minor image is a gift: a bird is a man pulling a carriage of copper wings; a ship’s sail becomes the wedding veil of a bride marrying a seaman; a washing line of clothes is packed away and sent to sea as love and family are lost.

The rhythm of the swaying poles, mounted by both Strange Fruit performers and Graeae cast (who underwent intensive training at Circus Space), finds its analogue in the rhythm of waves, the rhythm of speech/signing, and the loss of memory and its return. It is, to look at, an incredibly beautiful piece, performed the Friday I saw it on an extraordinary day: the sky blue and the clouds white, the hot and cold colours of the costumes vibrant and very clear, the men and women atop their poles in a position of grace. (I caught a little of it again on Saturday, in the evening, having spent an hour of the afternoon hiding in Greenwich Market from an intense thunderstorm, water pouring in and up from the overflowed drains—and when Against the Tide’s character Flo recounted her birth during a huge storm the crowd thought it was funny, but there was a little extra electricity, too, from the close memory of the violence of nature, and when I left it that performance seemed to be headed somewhere sadder and darker.)

Running the length of human emotion and experience—going from orchestral string music to Dolly Parton—Against the Tide is a terrific success: a big adventurous step forward from where Strange Fruit were the last time I saw them (performing The Field at G+D 2007), and a great example of two companies combining their different skills so you can’t see the join.

John Ellingsworth, 26 June 2009 @ Cutty Sark Gardens, London

ENO: L'Amour de Loin

Following the collaboration in 2007 with Improbable on Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, the ENO have now turned from puppetry and devised theatre to circus, bringing in Daniele Finzi Pasca (Cirque du Soleil and Éloize) to direct a staging of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. Each of the opera’s three characters is given two acrobat performers to represent their spirit and dramatise their thoughts and emotions, with tissu, ground and wire work and capoeira some of the skills on display.

In practice it doesn’t really pull together, though you can see why the attempt was made. L’Amour de Loin has a thick, dour plot unleavened by opera’s best buoyant excesses of cross dressing, identity swapping, villainous dwarves, etcetera—all absent in the (drawn slightly from history) story of French prince Jaufré Rudel. He is tired of worldly pleasures and becomes entranced by a travelling pilgrim’s description of a countess from over the seas. Without ever having met her, he falls in love with her, crosses the sea to find her, experiences doubt, and dies from sickness shortly after their first meeting. Minus the ending its roughly a terrible Internet date.

So then: three characters, a spare plot, and no action—just dialogue and monologue. There’s possible perceived value simply in the visual attractiveness of circus, and the production certainly goes all out creating hyperbeautiful sets and effects elsewhere: big blocks of primary colour photoshopped to max saturation; a garden of suspended lights; lots of scenes with billowing fabric (there’s a great start where a rushing watery sheet drifts down from above the audience). But also the circus spirits are intended to compensate for the thinness of the characters and their motives by extending the dimensions of their inner lives—an ambition which I don’t think is fulfilled. Though the spirit doubles dress the same as their physical anchors, there’s no real link between them—and the interpretation doesn’t go much further than background capoeira for moments of doubt and turbulence. This detachment is irrespective of the strength or weakness of the circus elements as individual presentations of beauty or physical skill; they don’t work in context. How much enjoyment audience members can derive by singling the acrobats out for full attention will obviously vary, but I think they don’t have the space to ever really shine on their own merits: mostly a girl just gets floated on to do splits, floated off. It’s an indicator of this opera’s queer and needless reticence: the wraps happen offstage; you never see anyone climb.

Something is wrong inside the production: each part works alone, but the wheels don’t fit together. Jami Reid-Quarrell and Robyn Simpson are shadowbox puppeteers who depict sea crossings between acts—these vignettes lovely themselves, though typical of an implacably minimal opera that all the action, the travelling, should be reduced to shadow. These two characters play for laughs sometimes, and have a presence that waivers between invisible puppeteers and clowns—it’s not dramaturgically clear enough where they stand in relation to the core opera and exactly what they are when they’re on stage. Also misjudged are the insertions of visual imaging company and ENO collaborator Bashiba. At the start of Act IV a projected sea forms from wire meshes of geometric shapes—a digital, algorithmic aesthetic (it reminded me of Darwinia) that can be appreciated in itself but has no right place in the medieval era established by L’Amour’s costumes/libretto.

The opera’s not without pleasure, but its scarce, and there are only a few touches in Pasca's direction that really transmit, such as when the chorus come on stage with mirrors and reflect beams of light up and out as Jaufré passes to the next life. In a way the opera finds its measure in death, and the interrelations of body and spirit finally make sense: after Jaufré has died his spirits stand unmoving, and are picked up and carried off, one after the other, by the shadowbox puppeteers, agents in the end of fate and the theatre.

John Ellingsworth, 3 July 2009 @ ENO, London

Circus Space: Double Exposure

Tedros Girmaye devastates club-wielding ninjas; Pablo Meneu Barreira breaks free on straps after brushing his teeth continuously for 30 years; Maximilià Calaf Sevé is …Somewhere… Nowhere! in a hot dusty trampoline solo that draws inspiration from the writing of Paul Auster; frustrated Circus Space janitor Sergio Gonzalez Gallego impresses the ladies with acrobatics cribbed from the real students. Double Exposure is a fast running stream of ideas, and even if some of them couldn’t well survive outside the context of a degree showcase, still most are lively and eccentric, and benefit from the support of the short films that play before each act. These sequences, storyboarded by the students and directed by filmmaker Mark Morreau, are all short and charming—but it’s the students who use their film to introduce a world or sketch a frame narrative (rather than to introduce just themselves) that tend to be the ones presenting the most interesting work.

Joanne Foley’s film brings in a line-up of Cluedo characters: Reverend Green, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard are all in the drawing room, but where is Miss Peacock? On stage Joanne gets exactly the sleepy sexiness and disdain of the noir dame, and brings it to her performance on aerial hoop by her fluid, unconcerned negotiation of space and the character of her (unusual) sequences and transitions. It’s the night’s best aerial.

I was less taken with the swinging trapeze/cloudswing pieces; the technical material was often similar, and I felt more engaged watching a film of a trapeze artist’s POV than I did usually watching the live performances. Océane Peillet was the best of the swingers, I thought, and I especially liked the section of her act that was without music—I have no idea if it was intentional or a technical problem, but sometimes music glosses and smoothes a performance over so only its major actions are noticeable; in silence the smaller touches have greater presence.

There were a couple of pieces that didn’t quite come off on the night but have the scope to improve. Alice Allart’s trick cycle routine will be the lovely, quiet, graceful few minutes it can be when she is more comfortable with it and her face is able to show something more than intense concentration. A few of the jugglers/manipulators had more drops than they would probably like.

That said, the highlight of the night for me was a juggling piece: Sergio Pla Roig’s Alharaca. It takes its inspiration from the status of the jester or fool as a displaced individual: he is entertaining because he’s outside of the normal rules and gestures of court. The film, a series of paintings and a poem, sets it up beautifully. ‘He walks among the people, thinking about being happy, thinking about how what he does makes others happy.’ On stage with Roig, the jester, is a female mannequin which becomes a focal point for his shy foolish attention and a mirror of his own facelessness and isolation. Juggling seems like the perfect metaphor for the condition of a figure whose role is perpetually to entertain. As the film’s poem puts it: ‘Is there something more in your heart than only the impulse of walking?’ It’s small, but Alharaca has unexpected depth; it’s bittersweet and restless and open.

John Ellingsworth, 8 July 2009 @ Circus Space, London

Mimbre: Until Now

Drawing from their real experiences in the decade Emma Norin, Lina Johansson and Silvia Fratelli have spent training and performing together as Mimbre, Until Now is an attractive, friendly half hour of acrobatics and clowning that probably needs to be wound back a little in its development.

Drawing from their real experiences in the decade Emma Norin, Lina Johansson and Silvia Fratelli have spent training and performing together as Mimbre, Until Now is an attractive, friendly half hour of acrobatics and clowning that probably needs to be wound back a little in its development—to the stage before its jagged edges were filed away. Like countless mime / visual theatre / circus shows before it, Until Now uses suitcases (six here) as set, props and balancing blocks, and engages differently and variously with their status as an open metaphor: whether it’s a journey using just two cases as the road, the back case dragged round in front to become the next step; or opening another to reveal a miniature diorama and a memory of home.

The company’s acrobatic work holds back the aerial tricks to the final set, and mostly links long complex runs of fluid choreography that repeatedly return to the image of walking (through the air, over each other, upright or inverted). As a representation of their relationship it’s one note (even if the note’s a sweet one: cooperation and trust), and so the big standout balances, unusual triple combinations, are in a way just more of the same: beautiful rather than fully invested with the drama of the characters lives and experiences. To put it another way, the show is about journeying but it feels like no one really goes anywhere. A related problem is that it’s better perhaps at creating those diffuse moments where the mood and emotive content resides in an image—like one performer walking forward, slow-mo, using the shoulders of her friends as stepping stones—than really meeting and returning the intensity of the audience’s focused attention when an individual is alone and still and not doing a handstand. The pace is quick enough, and the composition slick enough, that it never falls flat, but it’d be a stronger and richer work if the solution to its introspective sections weren’t to hurry on from them.

I should say that when I saw Until Now it was meant to be presented outdoors, but bad weather moved it into Laban’s studio theatre. I think probably some of the material would have played a little better in its intended setting, but it’s an interesting trial run as this winter the show goes indoors for a period of redevelopment that will adapt if for theatre venues. The redux premieres at the London International Mime Festival 2010—worth returning to in order to see what has changed as much as to see it for the first time.

John Ellingsworth, 18 July 2009 @ Laban Centre, London

Gandini Juggling: Watch This Space Residency

Held in the Astroturf square outside the National Theatre where it was almost magically cursed by bad weather, I’m not sure how much of Watch This Space’s third week was either cancelled or abbreviated—but the days I was there the Gandinis (jugglers in residence) seemed like the perfect company to take the problems in their stride. Apart from the quick start and set-up of their shows, they have a natural warmth and affability that smoothes out the drops and wins them a little extra grace from their audiences—this quality of lightness and friendliness strongly present in the two repertoire pieces they brought to the festival, The Cube and Sweet Life.

The Cube is just that—a transparent box that Kati Ylä-Hokkala and Sean Gandini stand inside which allows them to rebound rubber balls off the walls in front and behind, and which has the useful second effect of childproofing the performance zone. Its means of dramatic escalation is the age-old One More Ball callout, but on the whole The Cube is relaxed in its tone and presentation—seemingly as an expression of the performers’ own personalities rather than as an aspect of feigned character. Sweet Life goes the other way and casts the Gandinis (six on stage for this one) as cool, carefree Italians with poor time management who ciao everyone in the audience before starting and take breaks to have their pictures taken. It’s a fun and frothy short that ends nicely with its big trick (‘un, due, tre, wooshy-wooshy’), which pulls a kid up from the audience and mildly terrifies him by trapping him at the centre-point of an X of flying clubs.

As part of the residency, the Gandinis also hosted Gandini Guests, a line-up of invited artists that included the baroque technical excess of French duo Denis Paumier and Sylvain Garnavault of Les Objets Volants, their act introduced as the most complicated ball juggling happening in the world (there’s a pattern in there, but for a regular audience it’s like trying to discern the pattern in the drum of a lottery ball randomiser); smooth cocksure extroversion from Aaron Sparks with a (mostly) yo-yo routine performed to buffed-up Can Can music; three-ball flurries from Reuben Harry, a young guy in a lime green tie whose hands travelled about three times further and faster than the balls he juggled; and crowd-friendly showmanship from club-passers Bibi and Bichu (who I am 90% sure I once watched for half an hour playing around at an outdoor festival in Bristol where they weren’t programmed or even collecting money—they like what they do).

I got more from some of the Guests than others, but I think seeing them in cabaret format, in all their differing styles, was part of the reason that two days later I was so touched by Gandini NightClubs, a new piece that Gandinis and Guests developed together in the NT studio over the week of their residency. It didn’t have a narrative or a theme or even costumes, but that was why it worked: it was about juggling. In 40 minutes of juggling clubs and (standard and rubber and giant-size) balls, fragments of the performers solo routines would arise as gestures of personality bound within the larger movements of flocking and deflocking, synchronicity and syncopation that ran through the work. And if you could hear Sean counting time during a particularly complicated, probably mathematical, section where the ten performers passed clubs as they wove in between each other it only lifted your sense that they were a band of individuals pulling off something extraordinary.

It was exciting, too, just to see so many objects in the air, and then the incidental images that came from them: columns of balls rising and falling like the bar readouts on a digital stereo, or luminescent clubs spinning fast enough that they lost their shape and looked like turning galaxies. It was spectacular and it had heart, and culminated in perhaps the nerdiest and most unlikely (but best) choice of finale music ever: French sound artist Alva Noto reading the digits of barcodes. Jugglers to the end.

John Ellingsworth, 15, 17 & 19 July 2009 @ National Theatre Square, London

Circa: C!rca

A woman in red heeled shoes walks over the body of her partner, leaving red inflamed marks where she treads; an acrobat loses, regains, loses again the control of his limbs as he tumbles across the floor; an acrobalance duo continually set up and dismantle the trick that never comes. C!rca is a show of beautiful images, but always the beauty is the body: there’s no set, no apparatus except, briefly, handbalancing canes and straps—just a high appreciation and control of the possibilities of line and form and movement.

The performance takes place on a white square floorspace down onto which are projected Open University-style graphics of moving geometric squares, spirographic designs and, at the beginning and end, a low-res galactic swirl (‘This is… space!’). The slight fuzziness and clumsiness of these projections (imagine a 90s screensaver) is a little odd, but their abstraction fits the ambition of the company: to present the audience with the raw matter rather than the final resolved work, to have not one narrative or set of characters, but many, at once, existing in the fine readable detail of movement and interaction. It’s a grand ambition, and sometimes it comes off, sometimes it doesn’t. There are a couple of middle sections of sound and noise where the whole cast is on stage, frenetic, and it’s affecting but affecting in the way that, say, a Coldplay song is—by being massive, by overriding or swamping your receptive faculties. It’s certainly not unpleasant, but I found my mind wandering the way it can with hyperbrilliant dance or physical theatre, when the movement and sound and design draw so tightly together that there are no gaps and, for me anyway, no point of admission. The emotive quality of these scenes is numinous and difficult to describe, but different I think from the subtler kind of ambiguity and slipperiness that exists elsewhere in C!rca’s doubles work. The red heels sequence takes the tension and focus of fakir art and complicates it with sexual powerplay (especially sharp as there’s a noticeable age difference between the older woman and the very young, Adonis-like man), but I responded more to a similar sequence where the same woman stood and walked on another man’s shoulders, circling slowly and haltingly around his head. There’s nowhere to go; as she edges out onto his outstretched arm, putting weight at points of immense mechanical stress, she edges them both towards overload and failure. You watch it queerly frozen by what is happening.

C!rca is actually a combined reworking of three previous Circa shows, and suffers a little for it. Trying perhaps to avoid over-fragmentation, the night goes too far the other way and creates a fast, smooth megamix that feels a touch (just a touch) too long. The smoothness in turn disrupts its other elements: it generates but does not ground its energy—so we see actions of character without having the time or space to process them: the next thing is coming along—and the show ends up being more spectacle, with more wow, than I expect the company intended with the original works. That’s fine; it will play very well at the Assembly in Edinburgh, where it is headed next—both a strong standalone and a spur to visit the earlier works.

John Ellingsworth, 29 July 2009 @ Riverside Studios, London

Anonymous Ensemble: Wanderlust

Ever dreamt of running away with the circus?

Anonymous Ensemble’s Wanderlust brings us the story of Tall Hilda, a girl with legs that reach to the sky; a girl who runs away and lives the circus dream, now here to tell us her tall, tall tale.

The show is presented in a regular theatre setting—a black box studio with tiered seats—but that’s where anything resembling a regular theatre experience begins and ends…

We enter the theatre space and take our seats, eyes turned expectantly to the stage area. There’s no set or props other than a dangling rope, a cabaret table, and a chair—at which sits slumped and slumbering a lady with voluminous skirts, circles of white silk cascading across the floor. Tall Hilda (for it is she) awakes with a start, rises to her full height—around 12 foot, I’d guess—and invites us to join her onstage. Or perhaps ‘invites’ is not quite the right word—we are ordered, in a deep and booming voice with a comedy Bavarian accent, to get up off our arses and get down there. ‘This is not a spectator sport, you are here to play.’

And who can resist a 12-foot-tall woman in a corset and crinoline? Not I. Astonishingly, every single audience member (and it’s a full house, so there’s a lot of us) is beguiled into the game—although some make a retreat for the safety of their seats after what they deem to be a decent interval of participation.

What follows is 90 minutes of carefully choreographed lunacy, in which we all join Hilda and her sidekicks Ludwig and Gretel in enacting the story of Tall Hilda: her extraordinary adolescence, in which her legs just grew and grew; her meeting with the Svengali who would entice her into the circus life; her failed love affair with a Gypsy violinist; and her journey over the sea to find her true homeland, her Jerusalem.

The telling of that tale takes in puppetry and object animation, verbal storytelling, shadow play, on-screen trapeze (from both human and puppet performers), and a variety of physical games and improvisations. The cascading white silk skirts become a parachute silk, which transforms first into a circus tent, then later into a turbulent sea. Water features strongly in this story: before we reach the open seas, Hilda’s journey takes us along the path of the River Danube, which turns out to be populated by Venetian mask-wearing go-go dancing fish (yes, that’s us). The tale of the unlucky lovers is enacted with ‘volunteers’ picked from our ranks: ‘You, would you like to be the violinist? Yes? Good! Ah, and you can be the pigeon!’

Behind all the frenetic and seemingly spontaneous activity is a very cleverly constructed ‘performance script’, with the audience expertly managed to suit the show’s needs. Although we are manipulated (like the puppets), we always feel that we are treated well—even fed vodka at one point to help us get through our tasks. Many a show predicated on audience participation falls at the first hurdle, but this troupe handle a crowd with the ease of an old circus family. And although Hilda is the obvious main point of focus—how could she not be, towering above us in her white silk, then red velvet, then silver lame, then back to white silk all-encompassing tent-dress—the other two cast members provide the all-important support as actor-musicians, and stage-managers, manipulating the space (and the bodies and objects in it) with ease.

It’s a show that uses circus skills (stilts, aerial, clowning), yet more to the point it’s a show—one of many, but this is a particularly interesting example—that takes circus as its metaphor in its investigation of ‘the freak’, the ‘other’, the ‘outsider’. That ‘other’ could be the physically different (like our Hilda), or someone from another culture, race or religion. And indeed the story of the journey through Eastern Europe to find a homeland in Jerusalem could, should we wish to see it as allegory, be taken to be the story of the Eastern European Jewish émigrés post-Holocaust.

It is ultimately a story that, despite all the fun and games, has a heart that beats with the concerns that inform all storytelling and theatre—how best to make our journey through this life, how to negotiate the bonds of love, how to find our true selves, and how to find our way ‘home’, wherever that might end up being.

Dorothy Max Prior, 30 July 2009 @ Jacksons Lane, London

Bristol Harbourside Festival

Opening the circus stage on a brutally hot Sunday, Circomedia presented a short variety style line-up mixing degree and BTEC students. The clear standout was Steven Allen’s corde lisse routine—no gimmick, no overlay, just beauty in movement, and a blend of influences that borrows from other artists while retaining something of Steven’s own character. The rhythm of it isn’t perfect—it goes too often between quick movements and sudden halts—but it's a leap forward from his routine in last year's BTEC Christmas show, and just the latest point on an upward trajectory that probably has a long way still to go.

There was a different style of corde lisse from Joanna Palmer, whose routine drew its musical and aesthetic style from Edward Scissorhands, and was performed on three spaced, adjacent ropes. It looks wonderful: the most common movements and positions made new by the triple-rope set-up, Joanna poised at the centre of a cone of radiating lines like a queenly spider. The gothic look actually worked fine on the sunniest day for months, but, through no fault of its own, the piece suffered as Joanna kept swinging into line with the cut of intense white light that reflected from the silvery sphere of the Millennium Square Planetarium like a spacecraft’s disabling weapon. You didn’t want to look away; there just wasn’t really any choice if you valued your retina.

More aerial from Boldo, who did a straps routine in some awful tight white trousers with flare and a little glitter, and then also a spinning cube routine—basically whipping a large, lightweight cuboid frame around himself; I might not have liked it so much in other circumstances, but on the day it seemed like the right kind of spectacle and the metal of the cube scintillated brilliantly in the sun.

Circus Space graduates Collectif and then… presented a doubles double cloudswing (i.e. two swings, at different heights, and two aerialists) piece that had an attractive practical simplicity—the performers directed their attention and energy toward each other rather than extroverting it. I think it worked better standing alone than, as I last saw it, in the Circus Space ensemble performance Say What You Like… for Watch This Space, but wasn’t sure what it drove at with the mesh of recorded voices that swamped the soundtrack toward the end.

Also performing, Beyond the Bounce were a suited German duo exchanging juggling balls from a suitcase like high-price contraband. I liked one performer especially (the handsomer one), who was either playing or just being a calm, dry introvert—a rare character-type for performers (although perhaps less so for jugglers). Acrobalance duo the LIT Circus Company worked very well as a double act—the physical difference between base and flyer drawn out into light and gravid personalities—while diabolist Asher Tea was the expert street performer, working the audience into a frenzy of booing before making his big trick.

John Ellingsworth, 2 August 2009 @ Millennium Square, Bristol

TBA Collaborative: The Grind Show

A lot of the time when circus is used as a metaphor in plays, it’s not—not really—a metaphor. It’s more just a backdrop and a texture: of mystery, timelessness, menace. Cirxus I think was fairly sophisticated in recognising these qualities, and others, and facing their abstruseness off against the cold, distant reality of a forgotten nuclear disaster; The Grind Show unfortunately is less successful, and less ambitious, never quite finding a way out of its own abstraction.

We follow a newborn—a singsong, birdlike creature who is sent by a sort-of God to the circus to experience… something; just to experience. There he/she (the play’s genders are confusing) is taken in by a bullying paraplegic ringmaster and introduced to the acts: Siamese boxing twins who are linked not physically but by mutual dependency, a mimetically doubled knifethrower who is both artist and victim, a trapeze artist who wants only to be caught, and a lion tamer with a lost son. He/she is insulted, beaten up, savaged and undressed by invisible lions of the mind, raped, and finally turned into a vent doll.

The style is Dell Arteish physical theatre—the trapeze artist performs her routine lying on the ground, the knifethrower mimes the toss and the cast clap the impact, the clowns fall and punch with weight—and it works fine while being all fairly familiar. Most of the performances are solid, and I liked the portrayal of the ringmaster, who pretends to protect and nurture the newcomer while moulding him/her for selfish ends, but the characters are weighed down by their status as symbols. It’s overwrought. The Grind Show’s scenes are divided by short sections where a schoolteacherly figure comes on with a book and reads an encyclopaedic extract—the definition of tabula rasa or a super-gloss of Schrödinger’s Cat—and I suppose these were intended as the ties that would join the play’s distributed elements. But while it might come together in the writer’s mind, on stage nothing connects; it slides right off.

John Ellingsworth, 5 August 2009 @ C Chambers, Edinburgh

Le Navet Bệte: Zemblanity

Smitten by an armless, legless doll our hero Hans is drawn on a quest when she mysteriously disappears—a quest that in best traditions sees Hans encountering a string of bizarre characters and reliving such critical turning points in his life as the sudden death of his pet sheep (‘Roy! [sob, sob] Royyyy!’). This is the basic frame for a show that combines pratting, clowning and punk anarchy with jokes about long German words and buggery. Le Navet Bệte are five clowns, who, according to their press release, are influenced by Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier—neither of whom seem particularly present in a work that gives wilful free reign to its worst (scatological) comic impulses, presenting uncut the filmy flow of its surface thinking without regard for whatever might lie beneath.

It’s absolutely not my cup of tea, and I didn’t find it funny, mostly, but I did sort of like it, or Hans anyway, who had poise, good timing and presence, and, in a way, dignity. Certainly he pulled off wearing tights and no trousers with real aplomb, and to me that’s the most engaging and sympathetic clown: the one who retains (or tries to retain) integrity in the midst of chaos. Hans has, too, a very handsome, vintage toy car that is propelled at a stately pace by furious pedalling—as good an analogy as any for Zemblanity, an energetic performance with minimal effect.

John Ellingsworth, Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh

Airealism: Noir / Tales of the Apocalypse

In a largely uncurated festival, the Gilded Balloon nonetheless rises above the other Edinburgh Fringe venues to present the strangest and most various programme. So Tales of the Apocalypse, a dystopian circus cabaret, was delayed while the Balloon’s Debating Hall disgorged 300 screaming, unsteady, overstimulated women who had just enjoyed a performance from the Chippendales—that show in turn preceded by comedian Janeane Garofalo, and her by the Nearly Naked Chef. The thing is the Debating Hall isn’t actually a good venue for Tales, and I don’t think the show really works there. It was originally produced in the Shunt Vaults as an immersive event—where the proximity of the artists would have given them greater impact than they could manage on the Hall’s high, far-back stage, and where the rigging changes wouldn’t have created so many dead points. Perhaps, too, it would have felt less like a series of themed acts and more like a cohesive show. As it is a much better ticket is Airealism’s stage show Noir.

I first saw Noir at the Albany in London a few years ago. It’s changed a great deal since then, and for the most part for the better—the Albany was a better venue (having a thrust stage and probably greater flexibility with its rigging points), but the technical skills of the company have improved and the plot, a traditional noir story of love and betrayal, has become tighter and faster. There are some great touches now and the aerial work is extremely well integrated—whether it’s the gang boss sitting atop a high trapeze as a vertical reading of his status and controlling influence, or the henchmen crawling down ropes to chloroform our detective hero. A dream sequence works beautifully, the detective slumped on a trapeze while white fabric billows behind him and the threatening characters that form his story and dominate his mind come out to express their shifting relationships and loyalties through aerial performance. There’s a little that’s obvious: red silks falling to mark a death for instance, but part of the pleasure of the show is that it’s drawn with clear lines. It’s never hard to understand; you’re never left behind. You know who’s a bastard.

Chief among bastards, playing the gang boss, Will Davis has an exultant smarm, but elsewhere the company would benefit hugely from working with a mime to strengthen the physical acting during the floor sections—the one weak link in the production, but an important one as it keeps Noir a pulp fiction: compelling and extremely fun, but without a true emotional frequency. Still, maybe the aim was to create a genre piece, and with that ambition Noir is an extremely successful hour of theatre—fluid and engaging; an improbable combination pulled off.

John Ellingsworth, 6 & 7 August 2009 @ Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh

Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée: Le Cirque Invisible

There’s a scene in Le Cirque Invisible where Victoria Chaplin walks out on stage with a number of furled umbrellas. She dances, and opens them one by one until they obscure her—more umbrellas than two hands could hold or control. As a final flourish a giant parasol spreads up and outward and, with Victoria invisible, the structure becomes suddenly a shuffling, aquatic creature. Another umbrella beast, different-looking but of the same species, drifts on and the two enact something between a showdown and a courtship ritual, circling one another, breathing and inflating and rattling. The scene is typical of Victoria’s work, which creates complex prop costumes that are constructed on stage and, oftentimes, severally, reconstructed, becoming something entirely new like a dementedly intricate version of a child’s toy that’s a robot and a spaceship. Cirque Invisible mostly alternates between Victoria and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, between her obsessive costume machines and Jean-Baptiste’s shtick, which is fast, jokey magic. His humour is escalation (he produces a pair of binoculars to look at the back audience, can’t see them, reaches round to pull out another set, this one about four feet wide), disruption (a heavy object thrown off stage makes no sound, a tiny one queues a terrible crashing) and surprise (a dove!).

It’s charming for a while, and interesting for a while, but in the course of Cirque Invisible’s two hours it becomes increasingly clear that neither Jean-Baptiste nor Victoria are offering anything past their virtuosity. Each has their own ruinous impulse that drags the show further and further down, though both are in the grip of desperateness—to entertain, to embellish, to move things on. I found Victoria the more engaging, but the complex assembling costumes that at first delight become, gradually, to exert an almost tyrannical influence on the stage: a sequence where Victoria waits and takes tea at a revolving café table, her chair rotating in time, counter, ends when whoever she is waiting for doesn’t come, everything goes still, and she puts up the chairs—a beautiful way to close the scene, but you know it’s not the end because of course the whole assemblage is going to become a huge, shuffling table-chair café dragon. Without question. What makes it so hurtful—and it is painful, in a way—is that every one of these creations is amazing, incredibly amazing—to create an aesthetic effect something like, say, a Miyazaki animation within the strictures of physical laws; it’s genius, of a kind—but to separate that from any context or meaning. For all that it gestures to the audience, or draws them to participate, the Cirque Invisible becomes impersonal: they’re not paying attention to you, not recognising you as anything other than an audience. They’re certainly not talking to you; the theatrical language is communicative only of itself: its own inventiveness, and cleverness, and the present state of its perpetually shifting self-image.

The creation of new tableaux is so fast and unconsidered that there’s no space to attach any meaning: the audience applauds as Victoria (savaged by the slack gaping jaw of a greedy fish that was previously her dress) kneels on the floor, her guts pouring out in one long silky intestinal sheet. It’s just a trick. The circus skills that are in the piece don’t fare any better: at the beginning of the second half Victoria walks wire and it’s a joy: just to see her walk, casually, with all her experience, but this too can’t last—it has to become something rather than simply be itself, and so she clips on at the waist and swims a length.

You can see the theatrical lineage connecting Cirque Invisible with Victoria and Jean-Baptiste’s son James Thiérrée, but his work is a world apart: Cirque Invisible’s throwaway trick-prop rocking chair becomes, in Au Revoir Parapluie, the perfect metaphor for riding out inner turbulence. Titling his new show Raoul, which in Cirque Invisible is the name of a depressed suicidal fish and nothing more than a five-second joke, starts to seem like a kind of challenge. It’s needed. Cohesion and renewal are beautiful only as they entwine with chaos and stasis, and what Cirque Invisible needs, simply, is for someone to mess with it.

John Ellingsworth, 7 August 2009 @ Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Malaje - The Flamenco Circus

If you want (or have) to experience it as such, the Edinburgh Fringe can be the world’s densest theatrical market: it’s possible to see eight shows a day for three weeks, and what you remember is usually the extremes—the shows that are either great and life-changing or harrowingly awful. It may seem like in this environment productions that are all spectacle would do very well—they’re self-contained and undemanding and there’s nothing to consider or resolve after—and in a way they do. They pull in the audiences and get good press, but the noise and saturation of the Fringe tends to shorten the life they have in the memory.

It would be a shame if Malaje slipped beneath the waves. It could do very well at a big London venue with strong publicity, and while it’s shallow in the sense that all of its pleasures are surface-level and instantaneous, it certainly hasn’t been put together cynically or without heart. Combining flamenco and circus, Malaje sees the musicians on stage with the performers, physical skills entwining with the music in sequences where an acrobat stamps and somersaults to the beat, or a juggler uses rubber balls to strike out the rhythm the musicians then improvise around. The characters speak (or shout across one another) in Spanish most of the time, which is fine—it’s easy enough to follow the push and pull, the mock aggression, between the men and the women which moves the show from one scene to the next and defines all onstage relations. It’s Boys v. Girls, basically. But not without lightness. The brash swagger of the men and sultry heartlessness of the women is leavened by some very good clowning (you might not identify them as clowns, is how good), and there’s a disruptive line of randomness that runs through the production: a musician is suddenly able to control a performer with his instrument; after an especially frenetic acrobatic sequence, a character falls down dead and is carried away in splits, everyone funereally sombre; a woman cries a lake of tears, swims in it.

The circus routines don’t have anything new—contact, stick and ball juggling, acrobatics, and handbalancing are the disciplines—but are pleasantly unaffected by anything other than flamenco rhythms. Beautiful shapes and patterns, and a straightforwardness of presentation that in the end is part of the charm and success of the show—even if you won’t remember it forever.

John Ellingsworth, 8 August 2009 @ New Town Theatre, Edinburgh

Gaitzerdi Teatro: Otsoko

The wolves are very good. Otsoko is Gaitzerdi Teatro’s fire and circus remake of Little Red Riding Hood, and its first point of deviation from the original tale is to have a whole pack of wolves, these depicted by the snarling, loping cast, using crutches as forepaws and wearing muzzles and long dark coats with the spines picked out in lights. At the beginning they spread out and climb over and among the audience, looking undeniably wolfish but having also some of the cowled stalking intelligence of nazgul, extracting some squeals from the people (mostly girls) they snuff and rub up against.

The on-stage work isn’t so engaging. Otsoko’s relationship with its source material is one of visual and structural suggestion—clearly it is Little Red Riding Hood, but don’t expect it either to resonate strongly with the well-documented understuff or to alter your understanding of the original story. As a parade of dark, fiery images it’s moderately successful—grandma’s rocking chair is a gothic, high construction, like a small segment of an immense spoked wheel, that is rocked and overturned by the wolf pack; the branches of the forest are angled sticks threaded through the stage, the flowers are thrown darts; the wolves and Red climb trees (vertical poles) for vantage and escape. Some of it is eye-candy, close to the high surface gloss of a 90s pop video. There’s an especially shameless scene where a wolf comes on with a backpack and pressure hose and Red (in hot pants) is sprayed down with water, and sometimes it seems that the opportunity to show-off overrides the integrity of the story (before they even don their costumes and characters, the performers playing Red and Grandma come on stage and spin on two poles, smiling lushly at the audience, posing).

It degenerates towards the end. Despite a horribly over-enunciated voiceover (‘lots of red apples’) there’s little sense of narrative progression, and when the stage flies apart into its constituent squares, Red lost and stranded in a distant corner of forest, it’s difficult to feel much of anything as the pack closes in.

John Ellingsworth, 20 August 2009 @ National Theatre Square, London

ThisSideUp Acrobatics: Controlled Falling Project

ThisSideUp Acrobatics is an Australian all-male combo, currently (summer/autumn 2009) touring Europe, although sadly the only UK dates being the run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Controlled Falling Project invites us to ‘enter a laboratory of acrobatic impossibilities, where old science meets new circus in a heart-stopping, high-energy creative experiment’ – and, for once, what we get is pretty much what it says on the can….

The show is indeed full of thrills and spills, a clever piece of circus-theatre that manages to find a not-too-taxing narrative vehicle for a set of pretty impressive acrobatic/acrobalance tricks and turns, with the circus kit employed (teeterboard, Russian bar, and the deceptively simple looking Roue-Cyr hoop) woven into the story, which circles around a mad professor clown character obsessed with measurement, our bold three-strong team of acrobatics being his willing guinea pigs.

The Edinburgh Fringe version of the show seen by this reviewer is set inside a circus tent of sorts—a great purple upside-down cow run by the Underbelly venue and once called, unfortunately, the Udderbelly—a name that has stuck despite its re-naming as the E4. The audience are sat in steeply raked seats, on three sides of the performance space, which affords good views for all of a show with a great deal of floorwork.

The boys enter with a swagger to a Tommy Dorsey swing track, sporting 40s suits, ties, and hats. Easy does it at the start, with gentle clowning, hat juggling, and some simple but beautifully soft and easy tumbling, as ‘Professor Archimedes’ dons his lab coat and sets the scene—fussing with his blackboard and pulleys, tripping over equipment and taking a fair few pratfalls—and the trio establish their characters. There’s lots of teasing, jibing and good-tempered male rivalry games played out onstage, with many a flirtatious nod or toss of the hair (or hat) directed at the audience.

Later, we are taken to greater heights as the suit jackets (and eventually, shirts) come off, and the trio move onto flashier tricks, such as the three-man human pyramid, a seamless series of teeterboard flips, and that lovely Roue-Cyr work. (And for those that don’t know—and I didn’t—this is the name for a kind of overgrown hula-hoop that is used rather as a German Wheel, the performer twisting and turning on the floor like a mad human spinning top.)

It’s a rare thing to find circus performers with this skill level equally at home with physical theatre and comedy, but this lot are true all-round entertainers, and the whole piece flows easily throughout the hour, finding just the right balance between show-stopping tricks, storyline and comic character play.

Mention must also go to the music, which is mostly a recorded soundtrack that mixes 40s swing, waltz, ethnobeat, and drum and bass effortlessly, but augmented by live percussion (played by ‘the professor’ on a miniature drum kit, and also—Stomp style—on anything else to hand on the set) which cleverly adds the classic circus in-the-moment tension-build (and also provides a kind of ‘oh well, try again’ response to the very occasional drop or failed trick).

Then there’s the set design—a kind of cartoon version of a physics lab, with lovely old-school pulleys, ropes, and cogs powered by a bicycle; a blackboard covered with mathematical symbols; numerous chairs and desks; and a selection of oversized measuring tools, including a wobbly giant ruler that somehow turns itself from Chinese pole to beam to tightrope.

Thrown into the equation are a life-size jointed model figure (used as both crash-test dummy and dance partner), and a selection of smaller wooden models that provide a puppet theatre prelude of tricks to come.

All in all an exceptional circus-theatre show—skilful, witty and well executed. Not only do the company manage that near-impossible task of finding a suitable storyline for a circus-theatre show, and then justifying dramaturgically the tricks and turns demonstrated as part of this story (which is, essentially, one big physics experiment), but also the physical theatre and circus skills levels are extremely high. A pleasure to behold.

Dorothy Max Prior, 22 August 2009 @ E4 Udderbelly, Edinburgh

Fidget Feet: Raw

There’s a rather untypical theatre audience waiting to go into the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, a venue that’s a fair way out of Edinburgh’s centre—a long line of chattering twenty-somethings who look like they are up for a night of clubbing rather than a Fringe show.

This, no doubt, is exactly what Irish company Fidget Feet were hoping for when they decided to bring Raw, a show about rave culture and clubbing, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—their stated aim being ‘[to make] contemporary circus and aerial dance accessible to a non-theatre-going audience’.

Entering the space, an airy high-ceilinged gymnasium, we are led to tiered seats at one end of the hall, behind the large square performance space, which is set on three sides with an assortment of ropes – some hanging free, some slung in loose ‘swings’ or coils. At the far end of the hall, high up on the back wall, is a DJ in a booth, dancing his heart out as he spins the tunes.

In front of this wall are two ceiling-high poles, and a selection of bungee ropes and harnesses, ready for action. The lighting set is a very 90s combo of purple, turquoise-blue and fuchsia-pink. To the side, four people (two men and two women) stand in a line, dancing on the spot in eager anticipation of being let in. ‘How do I look? I’m a very stylish girl’ booms out from the DJ booth as the would-be clubbers chomp at the bit, fenced in and then, at last, released….

Once in, our four ‘ravers’ (aided and abetted by the DJ and a couple of onstage performer-riggers cum counterweights) play out a succession of vignettes exploring the clubbing world—a world apparently rife with attention-seeking characters, angst-ridden dramas, romantic trysts, night-time traumas, and soul-searching dilemmas.

This is all enacted using the tricks of the aerial dance trade, which for the most part means harnessed bungee rope flights and spins—solos, duets, quartets. As is often the case with good aerial dance work, it is the relationship between ground and air that becomes of most interest dramatically – as demonstrated in a rather exciting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon influenced mock-martial arts catfight between the two female performers.

Off the harnesses, there’s a fair amount of sinuous polework and beefy floor-based dance. Raw was directed by David Bolger of the renowned CoisCéim Dance Theatre company, and his characteristic postmodern and ironic style was on show here. Bolger seems particularly at home enacting sexual rivalry and passion in dance form, and this is evidenced in Raw’s choreography (although the show is co-choreographed by Fidget Feet’s own Chantal McCormick, and it is perhaps dangerous to make assumptions about whose work this is!)

It all bounces along quite nicely, but the ante is upped with some beautiful rope work, played out on the set of ropes nearest the audience. Perhaps it is because we now have the performers right in front of our noses, rather than viewed from afar; perhaps it is because, off the harnesses, they are suddenly very human and vulnerable. Whatever the reason, we are transfixed as a man and a woman edge towards each other, rope by rope, and meet each other with a tenderness that comes as a welcome contrast to all the brash and breezy choreography of preceding sections.

The close proximity of the performers in this section of the piece invites the thought that it would have been great to have seen the show close-up in a promenade setting—the obvious comparison being with NoFit State Circus, who similarly combine contemporary circus, dance, and music to attract a young ‘non-theatre-going’ audience. Yet as soon as the thought is out, it is countered with the responding thought that it would be mighty hard to find a way to do that, given the amount of space the aerialists use when in full flight—a very different spatial dynamic to static trapeze or corde lisse—and given also the interplay between ground and air that is so crucial to the piece.

A final scene adds a touch of physical theatre excess to the proceedings as the floor is flooded and the performers splash their way to the end of their clubbing evening. It’s hard to say what purpose this serves dramaturgically—although someone afterwards suggested to me that the creation of this onstage lake represents the desperate desire for water experienced after taking Ecstasy. Perhaps—but it seems a pretty pointless piece of stage trickery, and although it is perhaps a crowd-pleaser, I feel that the piece would stand up well without it.

Dorothy Max Prior, 23 August 2009 @ Dance Base @ Out of The Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh

Cia La Industrial Teatrera: Rojo

The damp cold and restless wind that blew through the open boards and wire fencing of Rojo’s miniature arena probably helped the performance as much as hindered it. Something in the character of the weather seemed to suit the weary sleeplessness of Jaume Navarro and Mamen Olías’s clowns, who at the start of the show troupe in with the audience to begin (separately, competitively) the serious business of staking out maximum seat-space for personal use. I think I liked this extended intro best: after a good long time spent queuing outside the performance area—sort of like a large, roofless chickencoop with a semi-circle of raked seating—the audience are let in by Rojo’s intense, staring soundman and spend a good 10 minutes trying to cram onto the tiny seats while Jaume and Mamen do everything possible to preserve and expand their own small kingdoms, draping feet over seats and using large suitcases as pushing blocks to force more legroom. They’re trying to lie down and sleep, but the audience—bothersome, incommodious—are keeping them up.

Of course eventually they notice the plump inviting mattresses of the double bunk bed arranged out in the stage area and their attention shifts. Even there it’s not so easy—they’re kept awake by each other, but also by outside anxieties and threats that seep in: an air raid siren intermittently sounds, there might be something under the bed, using newspapers to keep their dirty boots from the floor they keep catching sight of articles that illicit a single response: ‘no! no no no no!’. The release from these pressures is the world of dreams, Jaume and Mamen having their own separate scenes where they overcome fear and find happiness, love, escape in risk. Maume climbs red silks that tumble down from nowhere, her terror turning gradually to giddy infatuation. Jaume on aerial hammock is at sea—a great, rustling air tunnel expands below him; each time he bounces down the push and papery rush of the escaping air is the sound of a breaking wave.

The final exhortation to ‘dream… dream!' comes across a little strained and might have gone down better on a sunnier evening, but Rojo is still a warm and attractive two-hander, sustained by Jaume and Mamen’s excellent clowns, one dour and short-tempered, the other airy and absent-minded—already a dreamer.

John Ellingsworth, 28 August 2009 @ National Theatre Square, London

Les Colporteurs: Les Etoiles

A member of the audience is stepping over the guard rope and posing in front of the Colporteurs’ rig, a confused triple wire structure where the underbeams run slanted to the ground, hitting a pose while her friend takes a picture. A flustered Watch This Space team coax her out, and she circles around awhile before creeping back in, not to be dissuaded. She and her friend lay hands on the structure, walk around inside it, and finally try to climb atop it, starting the Colporteurs’ piece Hautes Pointures. I’ll admit to realising very late that the two were plants, but it's easy to be taken in by their pitch perfect costumes and characters: chewing gum, trashy stylish, totally unembarrassed. They make a precarious ascent climbing the diagonal main bars in their high heels, clinging to each other for support, sliding down, a dropped handbag tumbling open to spray the WTS Astroturf with unmentionable personal items. At the top they walk the wire in heels, gradually with more confidence. Then, ditching the shoes, they run the wire with their bare feet—flat, loose and long. It’s a great piece of street art, exactly the right length, with a reveal that sets up a nice perspective shift—troublesome audience members to performers and awkward amateurs to high-skill wire-walkers.

Three hours later, after dark, Les Colporteurs’ second piece Tarina inhabited a different mode. There’s a sense in which tightwire is a very raw art: its technical workings are bound tightly with its aesthetic presentation. You see plenty of aerialists and acrobats who mask the physical difficulty of their work so that their body becomes a shape, a line, not a working tool—but with wire the effort of controlling balance and mastering the equipment is never invisible. In Tarina, a duet for a man and a woman, the struggle not just to keep but to regain balance is the heart of the piece: jumping from wire to wire the man pitches alarmingly forward and back; when together, the two both help and hinder each other—stepping over the other’s feet their progress is halting, but between themselves they can give and borrow stability. They stay on. There’s enough in Tarina to construct a relationship and a narrative if you feel you need to, but it’s broader and better than one interpretation—something fragile and bittersweet; a night journey—and I haven't seen many images more ravishing or evocative of romance and longing than Tarina's simplest: two people on wire, walking backwards toward each other.

John Ellingsworth, 4 September 2009 @ National Theatre Square, London

Sugar Beast Circus: The Sugar Beast Circus Show / Milkwood Rodeo

It’s strange really that there aren’t more instances of magic realist or fabulist circuses. Fiction writers understand and use the overlap, but I think Milkwood Rodeo is the first piece of stage work I’ve seen that successfully stakes out ground in the territory. Mixing projected film of an Indian circus with live performance and narration, it tells the story of Frank, acrobat trainer and animal-keeper, who acts both as the lynchpin for a circus that would otherwise be pulled apart by its own corruption, and as the clairvoyant who foresees its downfall.

Film and animations are projected onto a thin, gauze-like screen. The footage is slowed-down, with its sound removed or distorted, and the animations are of stars and symbols—a queer doubling of reality and interpretation. When Geneva does splits on the rope she sits in a cat’s cradle of joining lines, and the animation behind her draws stars into a constellation. Frank disappears after an argument with the circus proprietor, and the animals go with him, but cause and effect don’t follow so closely.

Milkwood Rodeo isn’t like the clean connecting lines of a constellation shape—the structure of interrelations is closer to a root system: complex and organic and mostly hidden. Frank reminds the narrator of Frank Sinatra, in a way, and Sinatra’s songs provide the backing and weave in and out of the facts and implications of events at this remembered circus. Some of the sides Milkwood Rodeo turns to face you are pretty inscrutable—I’m not at all sure what to draw from the projected husky dogs whose faces fade out to reveal dark clowns behind—but I think that’s fine, and true to the tightly-wrapped and half-obscured story it wants to tell: some productions are like a gift that unfolds in your imagination afterward.

The Sugar Beast Circus Show has many of the same virtues as Milkwood Rodeo. If anything, it’s technically more sophisticated. There’s a thrumming, forbidding soundtrack that keeps breaking down into staticky, insectile discordance, playing a vital role in controlling the tension and movement of the piece. And the show is brilliant at composing images: I was particularly taken with the miniature candy-stripe big-tops, lowered from the ceiling, that pulsed with inner light like deep sea jellyfish, but the whole production is very adept at using its lighting to control perspective and scale—you don’t really feel as though you’re in Jacksons Lane.

Sugar Beast is harder to précis than Milkwood Rodeo, and the company’s own copy must have been written before they were very far into making the piece. We’re told a couple of times that the year is 1859: a tipping-point for the weighting of science over faith, and I think probably for the maker Sugar Beast is an extension of the thinking that went into Milkwood Rodeo: the fakeness of performer narratives (the Russian is not Russian) and circus acts (the bear isn’t really juggling and the ball is on strings; anyway it’s not a real bear) is run up against the cold observation and dissection of scientific enquiry. Mostly I think it aligns itself in the grey middleground—it’s real, it’s not real—and in doing so casts itself a little too far adrift. It’s definitely more interesting and thoughtful than most iterations of the faux-Victorian steampunk aesthetic (and just to be clear this isn’t, and isn’t trying to be, steampunk; and it’s not quite Victorian either: the slide projections and some of the costumes seem more 30s/40s), but the source material feels often detached from the action on stage, which is, itself, a series of discontinuous images and revelations. I couldn’t make anything from the scene where the performers were entranced by throbbing green organic towers that lowered from the ceiling—the performers walking slowly toward them, opening mouths which played then with swallowed lights, screaming, their screams the noise of a distorted saxophone. And while in Milkwood Rodeo what you don’t understand just becomes part of the rich (and sinister) underlife of the production, in Sugar Beast these scenes don’t live in the same way—they’re only beautiful and strange.

But maybe that’s OK. There’s a lot of beauty and a lot of strangeness. No one could be disappointed by the Jimmy Saville of circus lions—his mane due a re-perm, his eyes slightly sequined—and who hasn’t yearned to speculate on the outcome of a meeting between P.T. Barnum and Charles Darwin? You’re not going to get this anywhere else.

John Ellingsworth, 17 September 2009 @ Jacksons Lane, London

Citrus Arts: Wardrobe Diaries

After being substantially rained on earlier in the day I turned up at the Wales Millennium Centre wearing three different people’s clothes, including a too-small purple hoodie under an Iranian wool cardigan—by chance the perfect ensemble for Wardrobe Diaries, a devised circus piece that uses six Chinese Poles fixed to a large truss structure, but takes its inspiration and content from a charity shop’s worth of secondhand clothes, on display rails and heaped in piles on the floor.

Directed by James Roberts, formerly a performer in NoFit State’s Immortal, and Bridie Doyle, who also teaches with NoFit, Wardrobe Diaries pulls together a set of discrete scenes and ideas, soundtracking them heavily with the warm, domestic music of Ted Barnes. Near the start two of the cast pull over rails of clothes and pick out garments for each other; seeming at first to be the comic spectacle of two people selecting just the most awful or inappropriate or smallest items, the sequence gradually clarifies into a kind of time-lapse of age as the clothes track generational habits—with the performers sort of pushed down and isolated by the character of the layered clothes. It’s a fertile idea, that the information of lives is compressed and stored in everyday objects, and one that might have been illuminated and complicated by the status of the performers as blank canvases (their default costumes are simple white)—but it appears only once, and what starts to supersede it is the slightly generic flirtatious playfulness of devised theatre characterisation, and the onstage wardrobe shifts from being a store of residual identities to being a prop resource for object manipulation. Still, this later-stage material gives us two funny pieces of puppetry: Paolo Locci’s irate Italian child, about two foot tall, bobbing hyperactively as he alternates between threatening the audience and hankering after a delicious banana; and a handbalancing act where Craig Turner wears shoes on his hands, trousers on his arms, and a large hoodie over his legs (the hood rounded out by a football) and toughs it out through an extended sequence of advanced one-arm handstands, his trainer yelling at him all the while.

The Chinese Pole work in the piece makes great use of the expanded possibilities of the multiple poles, which are close enough together that a performer can traverse one side of the rig to the other, but it’s difficult to say exactly where the circus skills sit in relation to the piece. It’s not about what they mean; just about what sort of tensions they build or release, and what role they play in managing the various threads of the production—and for Wardrobe Diaries the circus is principally a mode of lyrical image-making. It’s exceptionally beautiful to watch the cast walking in sequence across the line of poles, diagonally and up, in each others footsteps rather like a party of mountain climbers, or to see one performer hoisted on a strop, swinging the breadth of the stage as a storm of paper shreds is shaken from her dress. When the same eye that can create these sorts of stage pictures focuses closer on the minute workings of the piece, Wardrobe Diaries—or whatever work follows it—will really come alive, and be something more than a collection of enjoyable and affectionate vignettes.

John Ellingsworth, 7 October 2009 @ Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Cirkus Cirkör: Inside Out

Within the first ten minutes two audience members have been pulled up on stage—Tom, who’s busy peddling the bike that provides the theatre’s electricity, and Saga, nervous and clutching a handbag, who’s philosophically brutalised by the ringmasterish whiteface (Does her life have any meaning? Is she really living at all?) before being left alone, on a slowly darkening stage, with the levitating corpse of a recently dead tightwire artist.

It’s very funny, thanks to the charisma of Fefe Deijfen as the whiteface and thanks to the performers who play Saga and Tom, convincing as displaced audience members for just long enough. Once we realise they’re plants the tone of the production shifts and they slip a little into the background. What Inside Out is, mostly, is a series of extremely good, fairly self-contained, fairly straight-faced, skills pieces: Anna Lagerkvist (playing Saga and having ditched her inhibitions) gives us a Chinese Pole sequence full of close-cut open drops; Angela Wand walks slowly and silently across the tops of upright bottles; Mirja Tuulikki Jauhiainen and Sanna Kopra’s fast, intricate trapeze routine has a lot of new or unusual material and a nice physical complexity in the relationship between base and flyer. Overlaying it all, and doing more work holding the show together than the actual story, are the band Irya’s Playground, live on stage. The band have a very large sound; it’s great, and I think Cirkör make the right decisions about when to use it. The music has immediacy and excitement, but also erases close detail—so they keep silence for the bottle-walk, but as André Farstad turns the Roue Cyr the band sing ‘My Angel’ and attention rests somewhere in the warm, blurry interzone between sound and action.

Set among all this is Saga’s (Tom’s as well, but mostly Saga’s) story of being sucked into the circus and finding happiness and release, this told mostly through some quite clunky symbolism (Saga is tied by the ankle to a massive blocky heart; she has to untie herself to do some teeterboard). I’d say it’s more the sort of narrative where the story buys time and grace for the routines—which isn’t necessarily bad, but does mean the production follows a path of diminishing narrativity, so that by the end there’s space enough for an extended juggling sequence where Jay Gilligan, working with clubs and rings, is paired with the band’s drummer (the rest of Irya’s Playground having disappeared off stage), who improvises progressively weirder vocal riffs to match Jay’s patterns and catches, settling finally on just a massive, distended Metal—maybe Death Metal—roar/scream. There’s some backchat between the two and it’s relaxed enough that after a couple of failed attempts at one of the bigger tricks Jay can lean into the mic and give his own press night review: ‘The juggler kept dropping. 4 stars.’ I liked it: that the drummer and performer talked to each other, that Jay toughed out something like five failed attempts before he made his trick, and most of all that the edges of the sequence stuck out from the smooth, streamlined movement of the story itself.

John Ellingsworth, 16 October 2009 @ Peacock Theatre, London

Proteus Theatre: Dracula

Circus is relatively run-of-the-mill, almost a given, in the theatre I see, but acting and sets are out of the ordinary. Proteus' Dracula has both: the set is a sloping floor bracketed by walls that receive projection to become, variously, a crypt, an asylum and a moonlit sky; and the five performers switch costumes and modes to take on the cast of the book. As you would expect the company have had some work compressing Bram Stoker's novel, and in doing so have added a frame of psychiatric treatment (a broken Jonathan Harker is counselled by Van Helsing)—an alteration which, though it ultimately changes the fate of some of the characters, is probably more a means to convert the letter structure of the novel than an attempt to radically rework its character. The dialogue too, even though it patches together material from the book and the company's own writing, stays close to Stoker's dense, heady prose. There are moments of ellipsis—how did they get there? when did he change his mind about that?—but nothing to throw the piece from its rails.

There's a trapeze on stage, and some silks to the side, put to different representational uses. When a trapped Jonathan Harker is crouched at the bottom of the sloping stage, Dracula is up on the trapeze in a stage picture which holds its effect somewhere between a filmic interpretation of the Count's stature and power (an upshot, basically) and a literal depiction of flight and levitation, the trapeze gently swaying as he pushes the ropes out wide. It works; other moments don't, or don't so well, with the final confrontation between Dracula and his pursuers depicted as a sort of all-in aerial battle royale. It's best when it's not really circus—at those times when the trapeze and silks are used as props or tools to manipulate status or to divide the stage and add planes of elevation. During a storm at sea the captain stands atop the trapeze—the bar, the deck, slipping and tilting beneath his feet—and the silks are spread and pulled across the stage, a projection of rain falling on and behind them—literally there are sheets of rain. Amid the chaos, Dracula rises from the floor to hunt the crew.

I am actually genuinely a little unused to people on stage pretending to be other people. Here there was mostly good acting (Dracula's player, particularly, coping well with the Romanian accent) partway unravelled by some weak acting: the audience came back from the interval more willing to find it funny, and even though in some places it wasn't the company's intention to go for laughs, I don't think it's necessarily a destructive reaction to high drama—especially not the kind which, like Dracula, moves its readers/audience apace through an eventful and scenic plot. In all the production is quick, smooth, not very dark, canny with its resources, handy with projection—fun.

John Ellingsworth, 4 November 2009 @ Greenwich Theatre, London

So & So Circus Theatre: The Hot Dots

It’s not actually that rare—not so rare—to find narrative in circus, at least not the kind that plays on theatre stages, but it is quite unusual to see contemporary circus that engages in explicit, linear storytelling. The Hot Dots follows the on- and off-stage relationship of Frank and Evie—he a juggler, she an acrobat and singer, both stars of late 1920s vaudeville theatre—who meet by chance and form acrobatic dance duo The Hot Dots. They fall in love, they’re wildly successful, but over time the joy they find in performing together is slowly erased; everything falls apart.

At the centre of the show is the act, Frank and Evie’s act, but also So & So (Kaveh Rahnama and Lauren Hendry)’s standalone cabaret piece: an energetic, floridly-costumed union of swing, lindyhop and quick acrobalance that gets several performances in the course of the evening. With some slight modifications and compressions it’s mostly technically the same, but each time it encodes differently the state of Frank and Evie’s relationship, expressing exhilaration then escape then growing apartness. In a way these are the most substantial scenes, and returning to the Hot Dots act anchors down a plot that otherwise pursues a sort of time-lapse effect, speeding through probably months of real-time and updating the audience on developments rather than really letting them unfold—which isn’t really a fault, just a choice of depiction, and the show does manage to find its quiet moments, including a single, precise use of film when Frank and Evie, alienated, anhedonic, inturned, go to the cinema and can see nothing on screen but a reflection of their own thoughts and feelings.

In the aftershow talk Hot Dots director Kristine Landon-Smith talked about how she had encouraged Lauren and Kaveh not to assume characters but, essentially, to be themselves on stage. As a strategy for coping with drops and the branching uncertainties of physical performance it works very well—when they miss a trick it doesn’t get ignored or glossed; it’s welcomed in. It doesn't map so effectively onto the vocal acting—perhaps because they’re less comfortable finding and manipulating the full expressive range of a fixed script than they are a sequence of actions—and personally I think the slow-motion advert music they match to moments of sadness or introspection is so saturated with market connotations that it homogenises the individual experience they're trying to draw from and project. Still, on the whole you have to feel that Kristine has put So & So on the right track, and while Lauren and Kaveh will develop and strengthen as performers, the company are already getting most other things right—the lighting, designed by Nick Flintoff, moves subtly between the different worlds of stage and dressing room, street and theatre—and without ever needing to reconfigure Sue Mayes’ simple, evocative set. It's very different fare to the endless rhizomic narrativity of Sugar Beast or the loosely interlocked scenes of Wardrobe Diaries, but So & So have their own style and stories to tell; let's see where they go next.

John Ellingsworth, 11 November 2009 @ Jacksons Lane, London

ROH2 Firsts

The Royal Opera House's Firsts season, pulling together short work from dance, physical theatre and circus, is becoming an important stopping point for circus graduates: a chance to rethink and extend degree material, and a bridge between cabaret work and the very distant and distinct prospect of a full-length stage show. Gemma Palomar (previously a part of my favourite hip-hop circus crossbreed The Silver Tree) presented her piece Silence to feel, a Chinese Pole solo that sets silence and stillness against the rush and noise of life, choreographing an organic, breathing movement between the closed and the open—tight in-turning spirals alongside drops and big, extravagant flares. It is, in one sense, a very focused piece. The shape of the lighting, the central magnetism of the pole itself, and the traceable lines Gemma draws as she moves across the stage create a compelling sort of arena—a bounded circle, and a space of silence and intense concentration that lies close to the heart of what I think the piece wants you to feel. Silence is least coherent when it tries, intentionally, to break out of that state or reach beyond it. It’s either awful or entirely appropriate that the piece makes the least sense when it communicates directly—Spanish and English language speech meshes with and overlays the performance, and while the unpacked meaning and intuited value of the Spanish does good work, the English sections feel at once too explicit and too poetically abstract. A few times, as well, the house lights come up and Gemma stares the audience out—a moment of connection that, truthfully, doesn’t feel so authentic, and ultimately doesn’t find its mark: even though the audience are told that it’s their silence too, and are thanked for their silence, the houselights haven’t even ended their slow fade to black before the theatre erupts in tumultuous applause. None of which, though, should be taken as failure, because Silence to feel is a fascinating addition to the subgenre of introverted circus, exactly the sort of thing Firsts should be putting on, and further proof that Gemma is a brilliant, brilliant technician.

Nerdy mouth-breather Jonathan Young brought an altogether different style of Chinese Pole performance—with thick NHS glasses and long-term postural problems he begins Dancing Like No One’s Watching, embarrassing dance steps and gyrations giving way to explosive Pole acrobatics. It’s a common enough strategy, implanting high skill in an everyday character (the apotheosis of the acrobatic take on the genre being the old man who covers scene changes in ebullient Korean martial arts import Jump), and it seems a little strange programming DLNOW, which is very much an Act, in a season like Firsts—but I suppose the attraction was in the contrast between it and Gemma’s piece, and possibly they just wanted to give the audience some fun going into the interval. The night I was there Jonathan wasn’t quite nailing his tricks, which I guess you could argue is in line with the premise of the act, but I don’t know—I think he wanted to nail them. In the end he made up for it with a series of travelling pelvic thrusts and got the biggest audience reaction of the night. People can relate.

I saw Collectif and then... at Bristol's Harbourside Festival earlier this year, and felt at the time that the piece they presented had shed some critical weight in order to appear in an outdoor format. On stage, at length, fully audible, A view from down here is funny and warm, interested and resolutely outward-looking. It begins with Lucie N'Duhirahe braiding Francesca Hyde's hair—Francesca hanging upside down and talking constantly, lightly, about whatever's on her mind: the performance to come (she likes the gazelles because they're easy but satisfying), what happened on the bus the other day, whether she should have been to the loo beforehand, and how Lucie shouldn't pull on her hair because she hates it when people pull on her hair (finishing the braid, Lucie of course takes a quick swing). The two go up to the ropes, a double cloudswing, and never really lose that starting mood—they talk to each other to coordinate tricks, and if you care to imagine Jessica Stevenson doing cloudswing you might get a little of the way to Francesca's aerial style. As they move through their routine, letters float down from the ceiling. Written by children and read in voiceover, a couple are about Jimi Hendrix ('so interesting') and Bob Dylan (not so great), and a few are addressed to Barack Obama, one suggesting that he pull all the troops from Afghanistan and commit them fully against Brian Murphy ('I know Bin Laden is bad, but even he wouldn't want a wedgie from Brian Murphy'). The letters are sweet of course—kids say funny things—but their real influence is in situating A view from down here in a context of sociability: it's friendly in the sense that it searches out resonance and sympathy, not grand or spectacular apartness. I don't think the piece makes much headway into its stated intention—to 'explore some of the grave mistakes we make as adults, and how this affects future generations'—but it's doing a lot else besides, and when the pace of the aerial routine kicks up, the audience go with it, accepting a slightly choppy recut of a sunny Four Tet track, obviously wanting to be a part of a performance that wants to be a part of everything. A view from down here is a great piece—gently provoking, playful but not slight—ending, appropriately enough, with a hairhang and the hairhang's unavoidable, default expression: raised eyebrows.

John Ellingsworth, 20 & 27 November 2009 @ Linbury Studio Theatre, London

Green Eyed Zero: In the shadow of picture frames

A couple move into an apartment, and it's wonderful. There's space for his office, light for her study. Great views. All their furniture fits, and the only friction is over whether the coffee table should be at an angle to the throwrug (stylish!) or neatly parallel to its edges. But then the phone rings. No one knows they've moved in, no one knows their number; they don't know their number. When they answer the caller hangs up, but the phone won't stop ringing. It's a distraction at first, then an annoyance, finally an unnerving presence in the room. Someone might be watching. Who was the previous occupant? Faultlines begin to appear in the couple's relationship, and as their happiness turns sour In the shadow of picture frames reveals itself for what it is: a dark Parisian thriller driven by the freaky compulsions of surveillance paranoia.

And it is compelling. The writing is sensitive, particularly when characters speak through letters or diaries, and the structure coldly ratchets the tension, aided fortuitously by the distant, forbidding chime of the Clocktower. It might be a problem that I found Mark and Louise's, the couple's, happy / in love personae less appealing than their stress-fractured, aggravated selves, but it's not a dealbreaker and the main part of the show is dramaturgically very tight. The circus is programmed into the regular drama the way a film uses montage—as a moment of introspection and emotive focus that compresses time and steps outside of a realist language. Troubled by the phone and her suspicions, unable to confide in Mark, Louise twists underneath a crystal ball. It circuits the cage of her folded arms, is caught by a flexed foot before it can roll away, and when she balances it on the side of her head it seems to push her down like the burden of her very worst thoughts. In another scene Mark, determined to ignore the darkly unfolding implications of their situation, juggles three balls, low, no tricks, his back to Louise as she paces and draws hesitantly nearer, nervous to disturb him again with her fears. Projected on a screen behind her a flow diagram runs through possible scenarios: who the caller might be, the nature of their motives—just one instance of the production's intelligent, often unexpected use of film, sometimes direct and othertimes tangential (my favourite instance of the latter being a little film that showed only the legs and feet of a couple, cutting between flirting summer feet and funereal formal shoes that angled awkwardly away from each other—lightly played, but an early foreshadowing of the story's eventual outcome).

Not quite so successful is the production's final scene, which explores the impact of the narrative's grim climax on Mark and Louise's relationship. It abandons the closely interleaved language of text, film and movement for a piece of pure expressionistic circus performed on a grounded cube (constructed from scaffolds and with a back wall decorated like a shabby bedsit). There's not much feeling of what is spelled out in the repetitions of the ensuing aerial choreography, or, more critically, not much of a sense of the emotional ambiguity and complexity that I think was the company's aim—and so when the holding pattern dissolves and their dance is refreshed it doesn't bring the needed catharsis (plus circus-to-tango has cleared the threshold now to qualify as cliché). Even though it has great metaphorical potential in reflecting the itchiness of co-habitation in a situation of grossly heightened self-consciousness, the cube sequence feels very separate from what went before.

It's probably worth saying that In the shadow of picture frames is Green Eyed Zero's first theatre production, and that, with the exception of direction from Bim Mason, it has been fashioned exclusively from the skills of the company's two members, Rachel Pollard and Sebastien Valade. The Clocktower performance was the last for picture frames, but they're now starting in on the next piece. Follow it with interest.

John Ellingsworth, 3 December 2009 @ Croydon Clocktower, Croydon

End

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