Sideshow Magazine

Reviews 2010

Table of Contents

Introduction

Cirque du Soleil: Varekai

Zimmermann & de Perrot: Öper Öpis

6½ Flying Circus: Canto – The Last Flying Chance in the North

Ockham's Razor: The Mill

Okidok: Slips Inside

Collectif Petit Travers: Pan-Pot

João Paulo dos Santos: Contigo

Circus Klezmer

Okidok: HaHaHa

Compagnie Bal / Jeanne Mordoj: Eloge du Poil

Compagnie Ieto: Ieto

Layla Rosa: What If...

Collectif and then...: Like the rain when it stops

Circus Space: Migrations

Compagnie XY: Le Grand C

Tilanne: Muualla / Polar

The 7 Fingers: Psy

Race Horse Company: Petit Mal

La Manœuvre: Mue

Acrobat: Propaganda

Circolombia: Urban

Giffords Circus: Yasmine - A Musical

Graeae & Strange Fruit: The Garden

The Loons Circus Theatre Company: The Butler

InStallation

Atempo Circ: Atempo

Les Argonautes: Pas Perdus

Vesturport: Faust

Collectif AOC: Autochtone

Cie Jérôme Thomas: Ici

Burencirque: Nord/Sud

CirkVOST: Epicycle

Cie BaroloSolo: O Temps d'O

Cie Akoreacro: Pfffffff

Théâtre d'un jour: L'Enfant qui...

Leo & Yam: Panoramic

Les Apostrophés: Cabaret Désemboîté

Tr’espace: Le Cercle

Ea Eo: m2

End

Introduction

What up.

Welcome to 2010, the Second Year of Sideshow, an era roughly analogous to the Bronze Age in taking the first steps to codify rudimentary knowledge and crude beliefs, and in beginning, for the first time, to look outwards across the water. This was the year the magazine first covered work overseas – in Finland at Cirko Festival and France at Festival Circa – and the year that it first made contact with Circostrada Network and the great big world outside.

Result: saw some killer shows. Abroad there was Race Horse Company's rough and tumble Petit Mal, Théâtre d'un jour's poignant L'Enfant qui..., and Ea Eo's smart and funny m^2, while presenting back in the UK Collectif Petit Travers' warped time and space with Pan-Pot, Atempo Circ scandalised and wowed the crowds at Watch This Space, and Swiss contemporary tented circus InStallation proved the leading light of Milton Keynes' IF festival.

Not a bad year! Read on and I'll tell you more...

John Ellingsworth

Cirque du Soleil: Varekai

Plot: an angel falls from the sky into a sort of forest kingdom. He has lost his wings, and while trekking around to find them meets an insectile princess in a deep-green costume of spikes and ridges. They fall in love, but the princess is kidnapped by slender women with green hair who winch her into the ceiling and celebrate with a quadruples trapeze routine. Later, the princess emerges from a cocoon and is reborn as a high-level contortionist and handbalancer; she is reunited with her angel; they acquire headdresses and long gowns and are married at length.

It's fairly standard Cirque du Soleil, romantic and vague, with the characters talking in a burbling made-up language that sounds like a racially insensitive impression of an indeterminate nationality. The audience's ability to follow the narrative is probably further impaired by the decision to combine several plot-critical moments with the introduction of an entrancingly beautiful helium balloon—a sort of mini-zephyr with planes of intersecting light sweeping across its skin, projected from under its skin, which is walked on a tether around the stage, high above it, so the whole audience can look happily up while below the princess and angel go through the motions.

All the good stuff is up. Starting from within a forest of pole-trees, a seemingly freehanging scaffold staircase wends up to the ceiling where a central opening like a cathedral oculus is bathed in green light. It's from this aperture that our angel falls in the dramatically lit and genuinely captivating intro. His aerial hammock routine, too, was probably my favourite of the night—because it was great seeing the vocabularies of aerial loop, silks, and straps brought together in one routine; because there was so much height, combined with some neat counterbalance; because it was just about the only piece where the performer didn't wear a skin-tight bodysuit; and because Mark Halasi is just a very good aerialist, having lightness and fragility to offset the endlessly rehearsed confidence and strength.

With the plot sketched in the background, Varekai proceeds more or less like a typical Cirque du Soleil show, presenting the usual formula of acts which, on this occasion, includes some wildly swinging aerial hoop (making good use of the Royal Albert Hall's massive circular space); a fairly bizarre piece combining partner acrobatics and foot juggling which is hard and esoteric enough to make you laugh and shake your head (if you're not already laughing at the costumes: gold Lycra with cowboy-esque red flaming tongues at the arms); and a dance on crutches by Dergin Tokmak, whose sinuous upper body seems to move forward and back in a wave.

Also in the line-up are tiny Chinese boys in puffed-out graduated blue costumes coloured like blendable pencil demonstrations – they (the children) spin bolas that are weighted by what look like representations of scales, and they (the children) are profoundly unchildlike and deeply uncanny. In a head-to-head, act-against-act I suppose I would pick Quidam's robotic head-tilting Diabolo girls, but the two sequences are quite similar in that both make choices of choreography and direction that mechanise the performers and, as mentioned, give them a generally unsettling aura of aged creepiness—the bola boys in fact are brought onstage after two characters, looking for the princess, open a trapdoor and call into the depths, the children clambering up like an ancient evil never meant to awake.

For the Albert Hall run Varekai's clown duties were fulfilled by a man and woman playing the classic roles of bad magician and unglamorous assistant. It wasn't quite my cup of tea; I preferred a later section, featuring the bad magician, Steven Bishop, again, but this time in the role of a slimy cabaret singer whose heartfelt lip-synch of Ne Me Quitte Pas is interrupted by a spotlight that repeatedly cuts out and reappears, first just a step to the side but progressively further and further away, sending him running stage left to right, up the pole-trees, and finally careening through an open trapdoor.

There was nothing in Varekai quite to match the closing sequence of Quidam—though it has its own spectacular group finale using Russian Swings—but I think that Varekai probably hangs together a little better, overall, and has to its credit a suffusing atmosphere of benevolent weirdness that provides a little room to excuse the narrative fragmentation and design inconsistencies. Don't expect rigorous dramaturgy, deep thinking, or anything groundbreaking for the present day, and you can sit back and enjoy the show.

John Ellingsworth, 5 January 2010 @ Royal Albert Hall, London

Zimmermann & de Perrot: Öper Öpis

What's it got? Beats, rhythm, skills. What hasn't it got? Structure, narrative, dramatic sense. Played out on a raised square stage that tilts in all directions (slowly) as performers move their weight across it, Öper Öpis is the latest collaboration between clown Martin Zimmermann and DJ Dimitri de Perrot, featuring also a small assembled cast of European circus talents. De Perrot has a turntable-set at the side of the stage, and mixes and scratches the music live; at the start of the piece he is a controller, his beats dictating movement for cartoonish effect (a scratch is a nod of the head; a squeak is a slide downstage; silence is stillness), while toward the end the music functions as an overlay to the frenetic stage action, a soundwall that drives the piece on and, in part, disguises its failings.

So what happens exactly? A cast of six, three women and three men, act out meetings and small conflicts—either on the blank nowhere of the stage or in sketched out environments of discothèque, bar or gym. The tilting stage which was the show's main marketing draw allows a few tricks of perspective and scale—a low wall grows high as the floor before it subsides; a seated Zimmermann, about to be flattened by the descending stage, is saved as his head pushes open a hidden trapdoor—but otherwise has a fairly superficial connection to the material of the piece: the lurching, shifting landscape matches the chaotic onrush of the show, always changing direction, never on sure footing, but can't quite extend into the emotional/metaphorical space the company seems to intend.

Öper Öpis' biggest weakness is its character work; it's very much a piece that's been devised from a basis of group interaction, but the flat constructions we're presented with—large clown, small clown, over-voluptuous sensate, lothario, etcetera—can find no purchase. It's unreal in the sense that there's nothing to recognise, and the only moments that break through are those that appear fleetingly and by accident: a misplaced chair being audibly crushed by the tilt of the stage before Zimmermann can pull it free; a particularly heavy catch in the flying section that sends its ripples out through the audience.

The most interesting onstage dynamic is between Victor Cathala (quite large; playing a giant) and Kati Pikkarainen (an impassive and seemingly slightly stonily drunk woman who everyone desires). They've worked together doing doubles acrobalance before Öper Öpis, and toward the middle of the show they bring out a routine that looks like it was substantially pre-constructed. It's very good. After the noise and frantic action of the first half—dominated by cartoon exaggeration and tits / kung fu lines of humour—it's a welcome moment of attention and focus, the stage dimming and de Perrot's accompaniment shifting to a cold scape of echoes and birdcalls. Their act moves between fluid movement and absolute rigidity—and here Pikkarainen's stiff compliance feels like a tool of aggression: a hurtful silence. To some extent, it thaws, but even though the act has a satisfying arc when taken in isolation, in the context of the show it isn't supported by what goes before or continued by what comes after.

Öpis has its strengths. It can, for instance, be charming. I liked the final appearance of a dark basement, under the stage, where two puppets nod their heads to the music—their heads in this instance a box speaker and a bright ball of clothes. And there's a lovely trick where a single triangle of wood, sort of a large doorstop, is balanced point-first on Cathala's chin, becoming the base for a whole castle of multi-hued blocks, balanced yet asymmetric—an unlikely construction that seems to emerge from his thrown back head like a dream. There are as well some great skills on display and satisfying moments of aural and visual synthesis, but when toward the end the action and sound intensifies, you feel there's nothing really to climax, or no structure to dissolve—ultimately nowhere for it to go.

John Ellingsworth, 13 January 2010 @ The Barbican, London

6½ Flying Circus: Canto – The Last Flying Chance in the North

With the same director, same performers, and some of the same tricks, Canto nonetheless distinguishes itself from NoFit State's tabú as a warmer and wittier production—thrown together with greater haste yet more robust in the face of its own weaknesses; diffuse and open-ended but content to be so. The setting that emerges, partway, from the narration and dialogue is an old train station, while without establishing a specific era a recognisable time is evoked: it's Sunday; it's afternoon; it's the past, perhaps a generation ago.

Characters float by. The buff and ever-shirtless cradle base Petri Ekqvist does a fine impression of a vain bodybuilder addicted to (flexing a muscle here) 'the feeling of Pump', while his cradle routine with Kadja Karjalainen hits different (comedic, charming) notes to the tabú equivalent that left me feeling slimed over; Gareth Jones provides live accordion music and proves himself a naturally engaging narrator in his opening monologue; clown Marcella Manzilli—who in tabú competed with the aerial and was always somewhere on the periphery of vision, even for people who didn't, like me, ungraciously, turn away—is consistently amazed by the contents of her handbag.

There's something about the production that hits the right notes. Proximity is important—in the Riverfront's small studio the audience are under and around the flying rig, able to hear the catches, never more than a short distance away (for the final scene, a long flying sequence, the audience is led up onto a balcony, at a height with or slightly above the action)—and maybe as well the raw mathematics of ratio come into play: there are enough performers and few enough audience members that the space between is forgettably small. But I think, aside from the thrill of the trick, the immediacy of the physical action lies at the heart of the piece in exerting a constant pull against its airier tendencies—bringing it down to earth, essentially—and establishing what in circus is a rare thing: audience rapport.

Not everything comes off. There are aspects of the production's technical stage management that the company will probably want to sharpen, and a sweet final coda on the importance of saying goodbye feels like the end but gets followed by an enthusiastic Say Yes sequence that doesn't so closely fit the mood of the piece. Still, it was a quick build, with rigging and rehearsals going to the wire, and the night of the first performance Firenza was obviously still on the job, pacing constantly around the studio perimeter as if dissatisfied not with the production but with the allowable angles of scrutiny in the context of a public performance—I remember thinking very clearly that she was probably irritated not to be able to levitate. Quite where Canto goes from here, and how it develops when expansiveness and imperfection are so much a part of its language remains to be seen, but it is worth seeing. Plans are to tour a reworked version in 2011.

Ockham's Razor: The Mill

The Mill: a giant, suspended wheel, human-powered, wrapped in rope that runs out over a network of high pulleys to several smaller cogs. Four people tend it: one on the big wheel, one inside; two to perch upon the littler reels and walk them forward. Their drudgery is interrupted only by a voice, sounding from a loud speaker, which at periods commands them to rotate positions—and the system runs, absorbing and correcting human error, until a fifth worker appears and unbalances everything.

The Mill is Ockham's Razor's first full-length show, and it retains many of the strengths of their shorter pieces—particularly a keen awareness of the lyrical qualities of aerial work. During a mandated rest stop, sleeping twined in the pulley ropes they sweat over, the characters are lifted through darkness and light—swung toward the audience and away in a beautiful depiction of a dream of flight. The production is, as well, very good at lightness, very good at fun. Having broken the factory system and failed several times to remake it, four of the characters ride the outer spokes of the great wheel and laugh and shout: life's a fairground.

Of course for them to be able to ride the wheel a fifth person has to be powering it—a systemic inequality which has been the driving force in earlier work like Every Action, but which is not operating here as a set-up for sweet resolution: they want to cast shadows. For me this is where the production falters. The company perhaps tend most toward lightness and joy in invention, and the darker material at present doesn't sit so comfortably with their signature style. When the interloper who broke the system fetches a hefty slap and the five descend into a free-for-all brawl without control or allegiance, the fight has the character more of a ruck, and the inclusion of some vicious stomping feels out of place in a scene that ends with the Mill being turned into a gigantic spanking machine.

The Mill can be a fairground ride and a device for mild correctional punishment; what it isn't, or isn't in this production at least, is alive. The apparatus has an incredibly powerful presence, a malevolent energy or promise of danger, that the practical necessities of this large-scale production have mostly defused. The creaking and ticking soundscape has been composed from recordings of the wheel itself, but that sound, amplified and pushed through speakers, comes to belong to the building rather than emanating from its operational heart. The factory voice that pipes-in instructions has the same sort of effect: putting the authority outside.

The one moment when the Mill does come alive is when it first breaks—something comes free and the main wheel goes into a wild spin, pulling the detached rope violently through its pulleys. It was genuinely thrilling (not least I suppose because I was sitting stage-front and -right, very nearly under one of the pulleys as the rope thrashed its way closer), and had a kind of consequence which elsewhere seemed to be played down by the slow elephant walk of the music (Nothing will go wrong, it says, Everything is fine) and the static beauty of the lighting—primary colours that bloom over the stage backing and make The Mill's programme one of the lushest in recent memory.

Despite all of which: subtracting the circus in-crowd, who were palpably disappointed that the Mill wasn't used more extensively as technical apparatus, the audience were more than taken by the piece, and I think for some of them it will be a seminal moment in their art-watching, one that will overwrite their idea of circus with something fresher and more expansive. For myself, I'd like to visit the show somewhere further down the line. I saw Arc in its early days and again a year or so later and it had, without changing very much, changed entirely. At the heart of The Mill is the story of one character, played by Paul Evans, who pretends that he might shake the system, but in truth relies on it for stability and is profoundly disturbed at its sudden absence. It's a narrative told with care, in small gestures, and if the company finds a way to settle it with the production's other ambitions then The Mill will be larger and span greater spaces than their previous works.

John Ellingsworth, 19 January 2010 @ Linbury Studio Theatre, London

Okidok: Slips Inside

Okidok got all kinds of laughs over the course of Slips Inside, but seemed particularly to generate isolated giggleloops that they would always stop to chastise, absolutely worsening the situation for whichever audience member was at that moment trying to control herself. They practically murdered a girl in the front row who was having trouble breathing and kept fanning at her face with spread fingers. They got plenty of regular laughs too.

I guess I don't know anything about clown lineage, but Okidok reminded me of Gamarjobat with their disappearing thumb tricks and fast sight gags, and Slips Inside has some of the flavour of an outdoor show (it doesn't really need the stage or its lighting) with much of its material generated on the streets. Starting dressed in twin white dressing gowns before stripping to underwear only (there's a running gag about the artificially increased contours of Xavier Bouvier's pants), the duo compete to see who can perform the most incredible number of press-ups, the most beautiful dance routine, the most devastating kung fu move. Despite the immensity of their physical gifts they do occasionally overreach themselves, and one of the more memorable images is of Bouvier staggering around like a newborn foal after a particularly bitching somersault leaves his legs inextricably crossed.

The show moves forward headlong. There's a great switch where, for no reason at all, Benoît Devos becomes a silverback gorilla and inquisitively knuckles toward an increasingly nervous Bouvier. The audience accepts it instantly, and it's like a kind of slight of hand: make the audience laugh, and move onto the next thing while that distracts them. It works because the audience do laugh, and because Okidok are just very skilled mimes and physical performers: Devos makes an excellent gorilla.

To some minds Slips Inside will be a little overlong, though probably not to the point that it collapses under its own weight. Myself I found that by the closing stages Okidok's particular style of clowning had become very familiar: a sort of adolescent intensity in displaying skills—which run from traditional acrobalance to more esoteric tricks (e.g. sliding over the floor on a back slick with sweat)—and of course a canny ratio of failure (frequent) to success (rare). Even so, it ends strong with a daredevil leap into the extra pair of Y-fronts that have all night exaggerated Bouvier's assets. Standing on top of Devos' shoulders as the pants are stretched wide, he makes the jump. One failure, one reprise; and in the brief moments before the second attempt the theatre was cloaked in the thickest and most significant silence imaginable.

John Ellingsworth, 20 January 2010 @ Purcell Room, London

Collectif Petit Travers: Pan-Pot

Sometimes it seems there's scarcely a juggler who's not deeply interested in mathematics and the sizeable body of music that closely abuts it. Whether it's Bach or barcodes or microtones, jugglers can be relied on to reach far outside the usual circus repertoire of tango and Yann Tiersen—and, in the nerdiest instances, to let that music score the technical aspects of their work.

Pan-Pot, subtitled Theme and Variations for Three Jugglers and Pianist, puts Julien Clément, Denis Fargeton and Nicolas Mathis on stage with musician Aline Piboule, a huge supply of white juggling balls, a mannequin (sometimes), and nothing else. Lit with painterly care and extreme restraint, the three jugglers in dark suits, Pan-Pot takes the method of deadpan clown and develops its rhythms of anticlimax and silence within a completely abstract structure. Julien Clément is a relatively neutral presence, but Denis Fargeton and Nicolas Mathis's clown personae are both subtly present—Fargeton with classic ruffled vacancy; Mathis in his walk and small, satisfied smile slightly but resonantly recalling a mincing courtier, a character he obviously hugely enjoys.

Pan-Pot divides into four movements—four distinct movements according to the programme, but while I was faintly aware that the pianist would open and shut the key cover to mark the sections, I was too caught up to have much of a sense that the piece divided into quarters. I think though, approximately, its movements were obfuscation, revelation, time and climax. The first two are simple enough—the three begin juggling with their backs to us, concealing their manipulation so that the balls appear to leap like silver fish, and then we see the same patterns as they face stage-front, and the focus becomes the eccentricity of the timing—what appeared simply a pause before is filled now by a juggler shaking his ball like a malfunctioning clock. The third quarter, which I'm saying rather fatuously is about time, is profound, warping and occasionally baffling—because now balls fly wildly to the wings not because there's no one there to catch them but because there's no one there to catch them yet: Clément and Fargeton pass at top speed for a minute as Mathis crawls across the stage, incredibly slowly, and raises his hand, incredibly slowly, arriving at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, to catch a sudden fastball. Watching patterns appear, break, reappear and conclude as the jugglers (here sort of facilitators) step in and out of different time streams is as musically compelling as a symphony—building and dissolving and building its motifs, each time a little higher. In Pan-Pot's final section, which is set up like an encore with the performers leaving then returning laden with whole baskets of balls, patterns and intricacy are less important than sound and shape, and there's nothing, after all the structure and order, quite like seeing twenty balls bounce every which-way across the stage.

But where on Earth do they go from here? Having successively stripped back the theatrical machinery of their shows to the point where they can get a laugh from, entirely, a mannequin and a light cue, how do they move forward? Perhaps it underestimates their intrepidity as a company, but you almost feel that Pan-Pot is the end of the line: as good as it can be; a piece which can, like music, with one expansive movement, send the mind flying outward.

John Ellingsworth, 21 January 2010 @ Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

João Paulo dos Santos: Contigo

There is a stone. A deep, obsidian black, it is wrapped in white cloth, held in a square of light, until a man comes to unwrap it. It is not something he's found, but something he has been drawn back to, a token of his past that he swallows and carries like the memory of a sin. When he climbs the pole set centre-stage and tosses the stone in the air, his body drops in time with it; whatever it is, it is equal to him.

Contigo is a bold piece. For one, it has to be among the physically most challenging solo shows I've seen: a solid 50 minutes of movement, much of it acrobatic, with brief rest afforded only when João Paulo dos Santos hikes a metal chair to the top of his Chinese pole and affixes it on hooks—and then the whole thing wrapped in a narrative character itself seemingly inspired by the imprisoning repetition of an exhausting dream. But there's something gutsy too about the choices that Contigo makes in presenting itself: it's a piece that makes you understand it by the intensity of its own conviction, and at its most lucid João's willingness to undertake risk, to climb, feels both driven and held back by the stone and its weight.

There are stretches which exert less theatrical force. João is more parts acrobat than dancer, and where he is confident whipping his body around the pole, his footwork in the opening scene is a little unsure—but the distraction disappears as the piece progresses and moves from agitation into the meditative introspection of a calm dark voyage. João is of course a very good pole artist, but that's not the focus here, and actually the most nerve-wracking moments are seeing him climb over the top of the pole to stand in the fixed chair—nearly touching the ceiling of the high, high Linbury Studio—then to grasp the arms and lower his whole body, face-first, over the edge.

Though the truth of it all is felt more sharply in some scenes than others, it's a pleasure to see work of this ambition and accomplishment: bizarre, ritualistic; not something you can easily explain, and not something you'll soon forget.

John Ellingsworth, 22 January 2010 @ Linbury Studio Theatre, London

Circus Klezmer

Gosh, I wouldn't have wanted to be the man, just across the aisle from me, who got pulled up on stage and held there for the production's entire second half. Less an audience participant than an extra, improvised cast member, he wins Best in Show: the perfect victim in displaying just the right levels of resistance and compliance, and, crucially, someone who very clearly did not want to be on stage. We all know the only thing worse than a participant who's nervous and horrified is one who enjoys the attention, and Circus Klezmer lucked out in picking a man balanced always between unwillingness and equanimity as he was lead on stage for a comedy striptease, tied to a chair, discovered by the cuckolded husband, and hidden by the cast when same husband returned with a sledgehammer. By the end, still tied to the chair, he'd been given a violin to play along with the back rank of musicians.

So then Circus Klezmer, the story of a Jewish wedding that's derailed when the clown (Adrian Schvarzstein, credited as the 'village idiot') loses the rings. There's circus mixed in, and it's neither entirely spectacle nor a deep channel for emotional or metaphorical drama: acts, then, but played down, and fitting closely enough with the narrative that they don't pause or overwhelm it. Bride and aerialist Eva Swarcer performs silks, trapeze and Spanish web, of which the trapeze best suits her neat, rhythmic style; the couple experiencing marital strife act out a comic, aggressive acrobalance routine; and then there are several juggling sequences, with the best a trio sequence of plate and bottle juggling characterised by the increasing drunkenness of the jilted husband (our participant still tied to a chair in the background, a cardboard box over his head). After a frantic search for the lost rings which sees the village idiot tossing bags and coats all over the auditorium (I can still feel where the metal buckle of a thrown handbag fetched me a whack on the head) two members of the audience give up their own so that the couple can marry. Everyone dances round.

The juggling groom probably wasn't having his best ever night, but on the whole the production is a solidly executed night of entertainment that you wouldn't, or shouldn't, visit with the expectation of seeing artistic risk, subversion, or great originality—but it's fun, and the music is great, and you can take anyone, of any age. What I'm saying I guess is that it's largely review-proof, and you should have a fairly good idea in advance of whether or not you'll like it.

John Ellingsworth, 23 January 2010 @ Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Okidok: HaHaHa

I think really I had my fill of Okidok with their first Mimefest showing, Slips Inside, and going back within a week to see their second piece was never going to show them in their best light. By about the midpoint of HaHaHa I wanted it to end, and for most of the show found myself somewhere outside of and underneath the general appreciative flow of the audience response.

That said, I think HaHaHa has some problems, and is perhaps a weaker piece (or has become a weaker piece) than Slips Inside. Dressed in voluminous white smocks, with whited-out faces and red noses, Xavier Bouvier and Benoît Devos cycle through a series of discretely presented scenes or acts. Some work better than others, and I think where the show is strongest is in its simplest moments—soundless conversations between the two clowns through a minute but densely communicative language of raised eyebrows and titled heads. Beckett is used as a touchstone in the marketing pitch for HaHaHa's visual style, and certainly there are moments of intensely desolate humour and profound stasis (that perhaps draw some of their truth from the fact that Bouvier and Devos have been performing the show for nearly a decade)—but this subtlety starts to fade as the production moves closer to a broad slapstick style that feels as though it has been developed for a bigtop: a setting where the action necessarily has to be viewable and comprehensible at a greater distance.

The audience seemed to flag a little as the show went on, but for the most part they were entertained, and there's no denying that Okidok are technically very skilled mimes/clowns. I just won't mind too much if it's a long time before I see them again, and if the next show has greater and more ruthless economy in its presentation.

John Ellingsworth, 24 January 2010 @ Purcell Room, London

Compagnie Bal / Jeanne Mordoj: Eloge du Poil

Bring on the gallows! A trapdoor in the floor is thrown back and the gallows carried in, fixed in place over a tank of water, and strung with a perforated metal box that contains two animate badger skulls (brothers). In punishment for their disobedience, they are lowered into the water and held there for several minutes. One skull lives, the other doesn't make it; both are already dead of course. Later the survivor, sat atop a mountain of shells, recalls his death as a champion following a heroic yet ultimately lethal victory in an interspecies snail-eating contest.

Eloge du Poil (In Praise of Hairiness), Jeanne Mordoj's weird, beautiful, wilful solo, takes as its starting point the bearded lady and with a few quick leaps leaves that point vanishingly distant. In spite of a midpoint where Mordoj—who wears a beard for the performance, and who spent time researching the history of the bearded lady and eliciting contemporary reactions—addresses the women in the audience to ask them where they are hiding their beards and to explain how powerfully men are drawn to the extra hair ('I say “come into my beards!”'), gender politics mostly inform the material of the piece by subtler means. You're best off setting the word 'hairiness' here alongside the broadest definition of 'queerness', because what the piece praises and celebrates is a lived state of subversiveness, restlessness, disorder and marginality: short lives, uninhibited sensuality, ecstatic death.

It's the sort of show where you don't want to say too much, meaning that it's not just prohibitively difficult but against the entire spirit of the piece to try and collect its many lines of thinking. Its determination to unsettle itself, and the recognisably French humour of low interruption that runs throughout, gives rise to a loosely associative chain of scenes held together by Mordoj's stage character: her face is carefully blank except for the eyes, which seldom look straight at you, instead coming in askance to add a light cover of collusion and self-awareness. A sequence where she cracks an egg and saves the yolk to send it, whole, on a journey down her angled arm, across her chest—to give the unborn a taste of life, she explains—is funny and ridiculous and tense and remarkable, the yolk alive and resolute as it works its way around Mordoj's body. When it breaks you feel it had a good run—a short, good life. It's a feeling, like so many of those in Eloge du Poil, that you can't pin down or really look at—or don't want to because they have that same fragility. In the next sequence, having washed and clothed her bare arms, Mordoj brings out long bowed canes with wooden heads—birds or the ghosts of birds—and balances them on her head, shoulders and fingertips, setting them gently rocking. They move in sequence, cross, fly out and in. Mordoj is inside them.

I suppose that Eloge du Poil has its artistic influences, but for me its greater sense of disruptive individualism releases it from the burden of being a piece of theatre: stage images and effects arrive with no trace of their cleverness, registering as direct current. When Mordoj empties a sack of shells onto the stage and uses her forearms to push them rhythmically forward, their cascading sound mimics the sea so eerily it startles you. Eloge du Poil just feels fresh. Unsuited to any medium other than live performance, unperformable for anyone other than Mordoj herself (ventriloquist, puppeteer, contortionist, bearded lady), it will linger long in the mind.

John Ellingsworth, 27 January 2010 @ The Barbican, London

Compagnie Ieto: Ieto

Circus has always understood the appeal of the mechanical process. It's intrinsic to the artform at close examination, but just in the course of LIMF10 ideas in this line have taken more explicit form in The Mill (a giant, human-powered factory) and Öper Öpis (an unstable, tilting stage). Compagnie Ieto do it with benches. These are the shape of square brackets—perhaps ten foot long, able to be balanced on their ends so as to be ten foot high, and with small slot modifications that enable the construction of increasingly complex, moving structures. Early scenes where the two performers climb to stand on top of a single bench—or a T of benches with the two having worked their way to either end of the high, balanced horizontal—exert a wringing tension and grip the incredulous audience; later the designs become more intricate and four or more benches, tied with rope, are a clacking, animate tower that the performers clamber over and slide down.

Technically it's either the work of very extensive trial and error or ingenious minds (or both, most likely), but the company run into problems trying to work their inventiveness into the context of a theatre show. Everything depends on the relationship between the two performers, Fnico Feldmann who plays a quiet, austere type, and Jonathan Guichard who, in a tremendous non sequitur, is either a cartoon character or a wrecked, twitching junkie, his eyes bulging and flicking between the twin distractions of the real world and the persuasive whispery appeals of his own inner monologue (rough verbalisation: a bench! I should push it! Push it! No! Yessssssss). I chose very early on to reject the idea that it was—could be—a portrayal of a mental illness, and leant toward the cartoon interpretation as the one that generated the least ethical stress. Even so it's a weird choice; some of the longueurs in setting up the benches are covered by Guichard playing at making hoop faces from the rope, and he brings the disruptive element that Ieto's stern world of balance and ordered systems needs, theatrically, but I don't think it sits as well as the company might wish, and my guess is that in developing the character they worked backward from an existing act: Guichard's tightwire.

So the last build, and the last scene, is the tightwire. Except in this instance it's tightrope—building a cross base, Ieto raise two benches at 45 degrees and run rope between them, twisting it to raise the tension. The whole job takes a while, and though I don't think Ieto have fully worked out how to bring the raw appeal of large-scale architectonics into a wider theatre language, I was fairly happy watching the benches slot into place and the structure slowly emerge: in the end just some paint and props away from being part of an old SF film set, bizarre and imposing. Guichard mounts the rig, offkey sawing strings and a drunk trumpet start up, and we're treated to a spasmodic, undulant ropewalk where Guichard's character finally makes some sense—fitting the music, fitting the apparatus; it just works. It's a good end, and a last example of the company's fine skills—skills that they haven't yet found the best vehicle for.

John Ellingsworth, 28 January 2010 @ Purcell Room, London

Layla Rosa: What If...

After seeing What If... and feeling a little as though I'd skidded over its surface, I dug up an old interview with creator Layla Rosa where I asked her about the show, at that time mid-development prior to a performance in Normandy at La brèche. Perhaps it's unfair to quote it months later when the piece might have changed in the eyes of its creator, but I think that Layla's description of it as 'like a series of little essays on the subject of veiling' still holds true.

Extending roughly from the what if premise of what if Layla had known her Saudi Arabian father and grew up under different cultural conditions, the piece is less committed to a thorough exploration of that scenario than a strategy of dissonance and subversion that unseats any single narrative before it can dig in. Opening with a sitting, veiled Layla singing an excellent cover of Cole Porter's Night and Day (definitely closer to the night), it moves through states of romantic longing, fear, restriction and release as Layla, dressed in a black hijab, becomes doubled by Megan Saunders, who wears the diametric costume: jeans and a bright yellow raincoat.

It's more reflective of than responsive to the matrix of ethical/political questions that surround the veil, and so we get an aerial dance where a low bar of light illuminates only the feet, golden-heeled, as they skim across the floor; a literally reflective encounter between two women divided by a diaphanous screen; a swinging trapeze routine, in hijab—with the roving interest and diverse languages joined for the most part by the music. Substantially the work of Shunt associates Ben and Max Ringham, What If... features a soundscape that has that particular scratchy, intimate sense of the cosmic (something you only really get from music, and then only from music that's gestated on a laptop), seeming to move from space into a forest that is sometimes organic and more often digital; looking back I can't really understand why it fit or why I received it with such enjoyment—probably a good sign.

There are a few things that jar. If it's a 'semi-autobiographical' piece then the friction between the two halves isn't always productive—a blindfolded rope routine makes its way in as an echo of Layla's own life and livelihood, but is performed by Yam Doyev, whose stage presence is very different, very fierce in comparison to Layla's, but who more importantly just doesn't fit within the duet of mimesis and transference that begins to unfold between the two central figures.

What If... is the long-worked-on result of some highly refined stagecraft (and a large pool of collaborators), and there's pleasure to be derived just from watching a production that is so mature and confident in its use of silence and darkness, pace and light. It's easy to give a lot of attention to that, and doubtless the brilliance of the piece's surface was part of the reason I felt I didn't see much further, but it's also that the function of the veil in a western, principally unveiled, culture has been worked into the texture of the piece: you wouldn't call it coy, or flirtatious, but it's a part of the show's nature to simultaneously attract attention and reject it, to bring you close and send you away. It ends up being a queer thing: personal and not; private and not; communicative in its ellipses.

John Ellingsworth, 5 February 2010 @ Jacksons Lane, London

Collectif and then...: Like the rain when it stops

Ah, circus theatre! The age-old dilemma of how to combine two opposing forces: the drive from ‘theatre’ to present characters telling stories that reach us through memory and imagination (evoking ‘there’ and ‘then’), and the drive from ‘circus’ to be in the here and now, presenting bodies in space that explore the relationship between air and ground, or between body and body, or between body and object.

Collectif and then… are a young troupe (recent graduates from Circus Space, led by Francesca Hyde and Lucie N’Duhirahe) who handle this dilemma a whole deal better than most. They’ve taken their cue from the likes of 7 Doigts de la Main and Mimbre—opting for a whimsical/lyrical approach to storytelling, giving us sweet and touching duets and ensemble pieces that are more visual poetry than full-scale narrative drama.

They also cleverly bring the here/now versus there/then dilemma to the foreground as an essential element of the piece: ‘What better a time to begin than now…’ says a young woman into a microphone at the start—and so off we go into a delicately engineered tug-of-war between past and present, with performers stepping in and out of the onstage action to reflect on each other’s (real or imagined, who knows?) life stories.

On this journey we meet four twenty-something characters—Victor, Telma, Francesca, and Lucie, the names of the performers retained for their onstage personae—who are finding themselves and finding their way in the world. Snatches of personal history are presented through a stylised and sometimes surreal set of images—Victor’s former life as a city mortgage adviser, travelling daily from the Docklands to Bank station, is played out beautifully with one carefully manipulated juggling club representing ticket barriers, hanging straps, briefcase, other travellers. Just one example from the piece of a very interesting mode of object manipulation that exists somewhere between circus and puppetry, the object slipping easily in and out of representation/metaphor and a purer engagement with the material world. Victor Garmendia is a juggler to watch: he has something of the Sean Gandini about him; a fluid way of moving and manipulating that makes his relationship with objects into a dance.

In other sections, dislocated hands become animated objects, and the arm of a dismembered mannequin takes on a life of its own whilst also replacing the juggling club in its role of manipulated/balanced object—with no meaning beyond its physical existence in space as viewed in relation to the body doing the balancing. A recurring motif of a tossed coin reminds us that everyday objects are very often manipulated and invested with meaning beyond their immediate purpose and value.

Elsewhere in the piece we find Chinese Pole used elegantly and eloquently by Telma Pinto, who (as with Victor and the juggling kit) manages to make the pole morph from piece-of-equipment-to-be-conquered to metaphorical object, as she acts out the ‘dancing soul’ liberated from a body during a traffic accident. She also works very well with Victor, and together they create innovative inter-relationships between themselves, the pole and the clubs. I’m less taken with the Lucie/Francesca ‘double cloud swing’ aerial routine—not because of any lack of technique: it’s a clever routine, light-hearted and full of joyful play—but it feels like a self-contained circus act with little theatrical purpose in the show. In this case, the equipment stays locked into its literal existence—pieces of rope to be swung or dangled from.

The sound design deserves a mention: an eclectic mix of recorded music and generated-on-stage sound that veers from Adam and the Ants’ punk-pop classic Dog Eat Dog to live cello to body percussion. In one particularly lovely section a rhythm drummed by hand on a cello is echoed and built up on the Chinese pole, to be later refrained in claps and stamps.

Like the rain when it stops feels like it could do with a little more ‘cooking’ here and there: there are times when the pre-existing set-piece or the workshop exercise are too close for comfort onstage—but it is only a matter of time until these small creases are ironed out. We will, I am sure, hear a lot more of these young circus-theatre artists over the coming years…

Dorothy Max Prior, 25 February 2010 @ Jacksons Lane, London

Circus Space: Migrations

The programme for Migrations has as its centrefold a timeline of the history of diaspora, starting with the Phoenicians in Lebanon (c. -3000 BC), tracking the movements of the Huns, the Magyars and the imperialist British, and ending in 2007 with the arrival at Circus Space of the recently graduated degree students who are onstage tonight. Inspired partly by the UK press' lazy journalism, the migration theme is worked into the programme (which is actually a newspaper) and into the links between the night's acts (with the students arriving at the start, bedraggled, on a raft), but to be honest the whole frame could be readily dismissed without effect: it's pretty quickly pulled apart by the students themselves, whose performances respond to their own interests rather than any given brief.

Where the film introductions for last year's devised pieces pushed the students to contextualise their skills, Migrations has more acts in a cabaret/commercial style. I thought it was a little less interesting as a result, but there are still performers with engaging stage characters. Aurelie Bernard's bearded lady cloudswing is fun, and slightly unusual for bringing elements of corde lisse vocabulary to the swing, plus wins widespread horror/appreciation for a grotesque (but completely enviable) close shoulder dislocate/inlocate; Pablo Meneu Barreira's straps act left me slightly bemused (he tries to perform to Scissor Scissors but is continually interrupted by French voices talking about the comfort and utility of his beautiful rabbit-suit costume), but there's something likeable and game about him as a performer; Océane Peillet once again did swinging trapeze with great intensity and presence; Camille Francisci's slackrope piece, The One Where Camille Wears Goggles, was fey, but bearably, and eventually winning.

With so many students (it's a long night), there's a certain amount of repetition, and particularly there are three aerial hoop pieces which suffer from each other's company. It would be obnoxious to rank them, and anyway which you prefer will depend on surface features: whether you like your cerceau serious or broadly comic, how you feel about unitards, whether you prefer old crooning standards or the Native American chanting of a track that could conceivably be from an album called Sounds of the Spirit.

There were a couple of standouts. José Ángel Triguero Delgado performed a smart, abstract piece that played with the idea of a juggled loop as a dynamo, club spins and catches generating light in the darkness. In Why Do I Have Wings If I Can't Fly? Maximilià Calaf Sevé managed to pin down the Southern American vibe of his trampoline piece from last year. I've been trying to think how best to describe it and keep coming back to the idea of 'low pressure', like before a storm: there is something close and claustrophobic about it, with the trampoline made up by a few touches to become a sort of cramped trailer home. Starting with an accident, the piece sets Maximilià somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, a state for which the trampoline is the perfect ground: he can't fly but he can't fall down either.

Also refining existing material, Alice Allart has taken further her interest in working the trick cycle into a historic setting, and entirely overcome last year's performance nerves—possibly by the advantage of recasting herself as a cold-blooded murderess. A group of shabby Circus Space migrants are visiting a grave, and the tour guide tells them, and tells them only, that this is the resting place of Erzsébet Báthory, who lived 1560-1614. They mumble between themselves and file out as the stage darkens; when the lights come up there is a cruel, regal woman at a dresser and, at the back of the stage, a file of nine women, silent and in profile. When the woman, Erzsébet, goes to the cycle at the centre of the stage and pushes it to the ground, one of the nine crumples and faints; and as she begins to ride the cycle, laying back on it, standing atop it, the women fall in sequence. By leaving the narrative principally to intuition, the whole thing has the creeping insistence of a bad dream. I read about Erzsébet Báthory after.

John Ellingsworth, 25 March 2010 @ Circus Space, London

Compagnie XY: Le Grand C

Le Grand C might be disruptive to your normal breathing. Working with pitching (one of the oldest acrobatic disciplines, where groups of bases toss flyers to each other's waiting arms), Compagnie XY ensnare their audience in a constant action of tension and release: whether it's the short sharp shock of a high, thrown somersault or the knot of anxiety that tightens as a human tower grows ever larger, you find yourself complicit simply because you're watching.

It starts slow, with a single log (about 3ft high) placed at the centre of a dimly-lit stage so that the performers can, one at a time, slowly and deliberately mount it—giving us a demonstration of the technique that will later be used with humans as the base, and an opportunity to see the slight individual variances that can exist within a standard method. When the piece moves into a faster mode, with most or all of its seventeen acrobats on stage, it's harder to discern individuals within the fast-moving fleet of images. We see the abstract—one flyer arrowing underneath the high rotating arc of a second—but also the representational: a quick-formed rugby scrum; a witty construction of a circular triple tower that acts as scaffolding for another tower built within; an unforgettable image of a synchronised swim, the women drifting and turning softly on the shoulders of the men. It's subject and language is social life. At its busiest it feels like a town on stage.

In one sense it plays perfectly in the round—the openness suits its expansive, gregarious qualities—but I wonder if the staging also contributes a little in undoing some of the production's theatrical artifice. After a palpable sense of misgiving during the dark and mostly silent log intro (everyone presumably worried they were in for an unbroken hour of self-involved French weirdness) the audience became captive, and applauded more or less every trick. It can't be entirely snobbery on my part that makes me think that applauding the physical act itself can marginalise what goes on around it: when the piece is light and easy it doesn't matter, and even further expands the sense of community and support; but at the moment when a three-person-and-one-log tower collapses (which I think I'm right in assuming was a scripted action) the applause overwrites the signals, of irritation or blame, that then pass between the group: small dramatic gestures, elements of constructed character, are lost. Is that really important? That the audience should hold the performers very tightly to being only themselves? I'm not sure, but I'd be interested to know how Le Grand C plays in France, and whether the greater status accorded to circus there has also produced audiences who watch the work, and respond to it, on different terms.

Nevertheless, again: it's a work of beauty and great skill, and nowhere more so than in its closing scenes, where the performers suddenly start to speak, and to shout, and then to sing. A small simple song, a workaday song, is picked up by the group, passed around and repeated. It rests eventually with the base, who continues, alone, as a tower of flyers slowly builds on his shoulders—his breaking voice a measure of the phenomenal stress running through his body. When the fourth person mounts he falls silent, and the final moments of the show are in silence—with the towers built now under the spoken instruction of one of the group, and the rest gathered silently waiting to catch whoever falls, their arms outstretched.

John Ellingsworth, 19 April 2010 @ The Roundhouse, London

Tilanne: Muualla / Polar

Last year I saw and reviewed the first part of Muualla, a collaboration between exceptional Finnish aerialist Ilona Jäntti and animator Tuula Jeker, and was broadly charmed by the world it created—a child's realm of exploration and pantomime danger where both the pleasures and the threats were imaginary. The second part, Balloon, initially seems more of the same, with Jäntti sliding from a room in a house which then becomes an expressive globular creature walking on tapering limbs; when it tries to speak, the speech bubble itself grows legs and shuffles away. There are many of these beasts in the landscape of Balloon, always on the verge of slipping into another form, like an alien (a friendly alien) who can't quite get the hang of corporeality, and who changes form as easily as thought. When Jäntti picks up some juggling rings and holds them out, the projection (at this point somehow seeming overeager) mimics the shape, drawing lines of circles that propel out behind her along the angle of her upraised arms. In this moment, and in others, the live performance and projection don't combine seamlessly, but they're not meant to. Where in the first part of Muualla it's simply the hand-drawn aesthetic that frees the piece from the constraints of extreme precision and synchronisation, in Balloon the instances of obvious discordance are the narrative: there's meant to be a dividing line; it's the frontier of communication. At the end of the piece, Jäntti is in an aerial hoop, facing ranks of tiny cell-like creatures who divide and replicate and move as one, at first crawling around their circles to mimic Jäntti, but gradually coming to prefigure her movement—the whole scene reminding me incredibly strongly of the latter stages of Greg Egan's novel Schild's Ladder, when the team of scientists travel in a bubble of their own physics (it's a nerd's book, yes) into a separate universe where language and interaction is entirely new. Perhaps it doesn't go so deep as all that, and perhaps I'm predisposed to see SF narratives in everything, but I do think that at the least, and at the end, Muualla proves itself more than whimsy and casual gaming.

Polar, a new work created for Jacksons Lane with the collaboration of handbalancer Natalie Reckert and musician Luke Styles, takes a different tack: where Muualla is characterised by an environment in constant flux, Polar is devised around wire and metal props and apparatus, steel grids and rolls of wire that even when forcibly manipulated retain the memory of their original shape. Attracted by the scuffling sounds overhead, the audience look up to see Natalie Reckert, blank-faced, moving on her hands across the hard grid of the overhead walkway; on stage, Jäntti walks within a roll of chickenwire, kicking it out to create a path in front even as the back curls in behind; the two meet, among long strips of wire that are lifted up into a waving forest. What's it about? Distance, fencing, confinement. But what's it about? Couldn't tell you. Focusing inwards toward its materials, and, perhaps, its opaque premise, rather than outward to the presence of an audience, Polar isn't thoughtless but its thinking currently sits a long way abstracted from its public face. There's a great deal of metaphorical potential in the materials the company have picked to represent an Arctic landscape, one that can either endlessly preserve or immediately erase the traces of those that visit it, and the piece already has a surfeit of striking images (not least an aerial sequence performed on a stream of wire netting). Maybe in time it will become something very different. For now, it's raw and unworked, cold and formalist. I liked it.

John Ellingsworth, 16 April 2010 @ Jacksons Lane, London

The 7 Fingers: Psy

Mental illness is vivid and also soulful. The soundtrack of mental illness is turntable scratching or bass-heavy dance music. Obsessive compulsive disorder manifests principally in outbreaks of pop n lock. Jumping off a building (onto a crashmat, with back layouts) may be the best cure for schizophrenia.

In spite of a clever introduction that blocks out portions of the audience in squares of light to represent psychiatric statistics (delivered in monotone by software), and in spite of the assurance that 'the recognition and understanding of mental disorders has changed over time', at the end of the day Psy's just not that interested—not in the reality of mental illness or the ethics of its representation, not in understanding, not in connecting, not in looking for the humour that gathers richly in any desperate situation; only in getting laughs and an easy frame from the regurgitation of all the standard cultural misperceptions. The cast are presented to us like a new range of Mr Men: Mr Paranoid, Mrs Agoraphobia, Mr O.C.D. (actually his given name in the programme, incidentally), Mr Mania, etcetera. This is broadly the extent of their characterisation, and you spend the show both trying to remember which disorder adheres to which character (is he Amnesia? what was she again?) and to see past an overlay that brings no vital insight, no contextual benefit.

There are some good artists involved. Florent Lestage is a brilliant juggler and a fine stage presence (and the only member of the cast who even approaches a 3D character). His silver medal act from Cirque de Demain gets cut into Psy a little clumsily, but it's still powerful. Sitting on the psychiatrist's couch, an amnesiac, he starts to remember an event from his past, feels something, and the scene shifts to a park. Joggers and tramps and business men pass by oblivious, and Florent—a free agent or spirit among them, like a character moved back through time—slips the clubs they carry from under their arms, takes a coat, a newspaper, a crooked cane: what he needs. As he juggles the clubs—catching them in a balance on the arm of the walking stick, or lightly in the bed of its curve—music swells up. You're swept on its current, but captivated by Florent's skill and charm and his lightness as an acrobat, the way he controls his body with such apparent gentleness, and not by the connection, or the disjunction, between this state of grace and the manifestations of his disorder.

So it goes. You get a glimpse of something really alive, when a character is on a street and a stream of people walk through him, knocking him this way and that: circling round to come at him a second time, they pass beside him without touching him, but he twists and turns just the same. It's beautifully choreographed (some good flocking and deflocking if you're into that) and speaks eloquently of a state of mind where thought, anxiety and the contemplation of risk can have an immediate, physical effect. Along with Florent's routine, it's an early high point. There are other things to like about Psy—the abilities of handbalancer Naël Jammal; Guillaume Biron's trapeze routine (better I think without the information that he hears voices); the large, compact cuboid set that unfolds into a cross-sectioned house—but it doesn't come together, and by the second half the production has more or less abandoned internal consistency, the original conceit overrun by the need to hurry through and showcase the (admittedly high) skills of each member of the large cast.

Is it terrible? No. Is it enjoyable? Sometimes. Psy's concept isn't going to bother everybody—although I would suggest that you should be bothered, and that there are analogous situations of social insensitivity that an audience wouldn't stand for—and I'm sure it considers itself a light and quirky take on a serious issue. It would be easier to stomach that if not for the opening voiceover's statistical grounding (which is basically inviting the audience to reflect on their own experiences), and, similarly, if not for the end sequence, where the cast morph into psychiatrists and walk out to the edge of the stage to look out over the lighted audience, tilting their heads and making clipboard notes: perhaps the madness here is ours.

John Ellingsworth, 29 April 2010 @ Peacock Theatre, London

Race Horse Company: Petit Mal

By the end the stage floor is torn up, the Chinese pole has been felled, feathers and tyres are everywhere. The set is a wreck, but then it always was...

At the start of Petit Mal we find three characters idling in the middle of a dark junkyard, walking on tyres and climbing chains for want of anything better to do, testing the limits of their environment and boredom, starting fights. The music for these opening scenes—the louche, sly, weary voice of the elder Bob Dylan—says it perfectly: seen-it-all, been everywhere, don't much care. It's an attitude of unconcern that's settled into the rough execution of the piece—the fights may not be real, but the impacts and crashes certainly are, and there's a feeling that Petit Mal finds, if not happiness exactly, then satisfaction and exultation in confrontation and failure, collision and risk. Whether it's one performer heaving a heavy car tyre up to his friend then sanguinely waiting for it to be dropped back on his head, a breakdancer working in the cramped space under a trampoline who collapses every time he tries to stand, or the wild, thrashing descents of Petri Tuominen on pole, it embraces the consequences of action and ignores the safehouses of rest and comfort. You don't want to try any of this at home. Except that maybe you do. But you shouldn't.

After seeing the show I learned where the title comes from, and some of the inspiration for the piece, but in watching it I think there's only mood and rhythm and sensation. That doesn't mean either that it's unthinking, or that it's complex but inscrutable: it feels just that the narrative has been stripped away by the same mind that decided two tyres and a plank would do for a teeterboard. If you don't need it, throw it out. It's an approach that holds for at least the first half of the show, and when it comes to beauty and lyricism Petit Mal is incredibly strict and self-aware, always cutting its higher moments short by casual interruption—kicking out the acrobatic ball, turning off the lights mid-routine, or, in one case, literally cutting one of the guy-wires tethering the Chinese pole, sending it lolling backwards as the climber hangs on. In the second half the fierce energy of the performers—previously contained in their drifter personae—is let loose and it can be adolescently indulgent: there's a leafblower which might have been included only to fulfil a lifelong ambition to operate a leafblower; a sudden skit with a mountie and a pantomime horse is funny but feels like street work, out of place against the show's subtler textures; and when the stage is flooded with acrobatic balls for the cast to throw themselves on and over it starts to drift too far toward the spectacle of adults in the pit.

But I don't think any of that much matters, and even if there was genuinely nothing else to recommend it you should go to Petit Mal to see Rauli Kosonen on trampoline, an apparatus which he can only have been born for. It's not the tricks really, just the sight of him in the air, relaxed and weightless, running a few steps, kicking out a leg, executing a slow turn—I honestly can't remember the last time I was so excited watching nothing more than one person moving freely in the sphere of their exceptional ability. His final trampoline solo, at the end but not quite the end, provides the climax and prepares the ground for the show's last gesture: in the midst of the destroyed set and scattered feathers and ripped-up floor, one of the sweetest you'll see.

John Ellingsworth, 6 May 2010 @ Stoa, Helsinki

La Manœuvre: Mue

There's a disorienting scene in Mue where a woman with a mask on the back of her head—a mask with shoulder-length hair that obscures her ordinary face—climbs a rope, straddles and inverts and turns. Watching, you experience a disturbing constant Magic Eye flutter as you switch between either perception: is it a mannequin with joints twisted every which-way, or a real human body without a face? You can't see both at once.

It's a characteristic scene in a performance that uses the language of doubling and illusion—and particularly masks and prosthetic limbs (cast in plastic or rubber)—to continually disrupt the audience's sense of the body in space, and to populate the stage with ghostly presences. Gaëlle Bisellach-Roig is led this way and that by a disembodied arm she clasps at the hand, pulled nearly, gently off her feet as the sound of wind and rippling fabric sweeps her companion upward; a clutch of feet, cut off below the knee, lean forward as if about to sprint; a performer clasps a rope with her hand, which then detaches and clings to the corde in air. You are not sure if they're dead spirits or live ones. Midway through the piece the performers are quadrupedal; walking on their own feet and on clacking plastic replicas, they perform a dance, something like a rain dance, and shuffle expectedly to the back of the stage. Dozens of arms, rubber arms, fall at once from on high. Is it a joke, or a cataclysm? A little of both as one character constructs a small cairn and another sweeps the arms into a heap, running and flinging herself onto them as though they're nothing more macabre than a pile of leaves.

Objects come alive too, though briefly, as if by moving they spend the energy of their enchantment: a juggling club swimming upward from Marijke Gevers' hands is caught and returned to the pattern of her manipulation; a tail of rope rises and snakes so imperceptibly you can't be sure it isn't your stirring imagination. They're beautiful moments and part of the calm magical intrigue of a piece that constantly changes the angle of your viewing—as when a performer at the top of a rope she has recently danced on films another at the bottom, lying on the floor and clasping wildly at the slack so that in projection she appears to be falling through space; or when a small table of cotton threads is filmed and projected to overlay a curtain of long ropes at the back of the stage, Marijke Gevers' hand at the table appearing as a giant godlike fist over the ropes, chasing the tiny emerging head of Gaëlle Bisellach-Roig over and across.

Though you can recount the images, and they're worth recounting, it's hard to join them. There are repeated figures: a triangle sigil started by Gaëlle's own forearms and completed by a prosthetic third, is later made by the three women together, joining their arms to create a central window through which each twists and passes her head in turn, as if in the ritual of a dark spring dance; and the snake, captured in the animate rope and in lengths of chain that are shaken and woven across the stage, returns at the end in the sinuous flow of the performers' joined bodies. But even if you can spot the occasional sign of the greater scheme, Mue is on the whole directed by a process that remains hidden and discrete. Taking and encoding its material from the inner lives of the performers, it chooses to abstract that both from the context of any outer life, and, seemingly, from the present mood or state of the performers on stage, who feel like players or actors in their own set choreography. The music for the show, which loops and builds recorded samples (a stony rolling noise, water, clanking metal) is sound and rhythm, never melody, and matches the style of the performance: image and mood; layers rather than sequences; spirals instead of throughlines. You end up with a flat pace, but I suspect quite on purpose. Mue seems to me to achieve all the things that it intends, and if it remains a secretive and inturned work, difficult in a sense to warm to, then its interests don't lie in sociability and exterior connection. It doesn't reach out; you have to come inside.

John Ellingsworth, 8 & 9 May 2010 @ Stoa, Helsinki

Acrobat: Propaganda

There's a certain kind of artist for whom their life is their work—meaning not just that they dedicate themselves full-time to their art-making, but that what they present on stage, or in books or on canvas, is, or feels, very close to the way they must conduct themselves from day to day. You get this sense with Acrobat—that they don't really have stage personae, that they don't act, that any affectation is temporary—and in the case of Propaganda (a family show that sees Jo Lancaster and Simon Yates onstage with their two children) they have put together a piece that explicitly lays out the ethical basis of their living, communicated through a series of propaganda slogans, written or shouted: RIDE A BIKE, DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU'RE GOING TO DO, GARDEN NUDE, TURN OFF THE TELEVISION, BE YOURSELF. The sentiments are obvious, but that doesn't really matter. Just as truisms generally need the little extra push of personal narrative or lyrical expression to get our full attention, here it is the circus skills that are meant to light and reveal what is hidden in plain sight.

In this respect, I admit, and feel a little bad admitting, that Propaganda didn't on the whole work for me—or do it for me, or whatever the verb is. I think it's a charming show, willing always to pull down its own cleverness and beauty—Simon Yates' Chinese pole solo ends ingloriously as he has to derig it himself (it's his turn); an earthy Jo Lancaster, topless and wearing silky green tights, becomes a mermaid by the addition of a cardboard tail leaned at her feet, taking the laugh only for a moment before kicking it away—and yet to me it felt as though the question of how to be good and to live well, ostensibly the show's reason for existing, had been resolved and internalised, and thereby rendered inert. There's a moment between scenes when one of the androgynous Acrobat children displays slogan cards for the audience as (guessing the pronoun here) he spins softly on a single point trapeze, serene except when the rotation slows and he has to sort of swim-kick round, wearing a lovely pair of angel wings made from responsibly-sourced and sustainable materials; I read the cards, and felt warm, and that's sort of how it goes: more relaxing than engaging, more friendly than agitating.

Among the skill work in the piece, recycled in part from the last Acrobat show, smaller, poorer, cheaper, there's a memorable solo from Yates, who taps gently at his solar plexus in between outbreaks of circling acrobatics, as if trying only to locate some minute point inside himself, and then a brilliantly funny slackwire routine that sees a man trying to take breakfast and get ready for work, soaking and covering himself and the stage in milk and cornflakes as the wire bucks beneath him. But nearest to the heart of the show are the doubles sequences, and particularly the last, where Jo and Simon ride together on a single bicycle, climbing not always unawkwardly over each other to balance and counterbalance handstands and dramatic outward leans, wearing brown sacky coats and what I will describe as durable utilitarian underwear: a routine that is roughly beautiful, unpretending, and ended with a kiss.

John Ellingsworth, 13 May 2010 @ The Roundhouse, London

Circolombia: Urban

With a dearth of circus or physical theatre work in the Brighton Festival, it came down to the Fringe to fill the gaps. Enter the Freerange: a great red plastic geodesic dome which was parked on a church green in central Brighton—a temporary refuge for circus, variety and cabaret. Although some companies programmed struggled with the challenges that this cavernous and somewhat bleak space offered, it proved to be the perfect venue for Circolombia, whose upbeat and streetwise show Urban energised every square inch of the place.

The company is a product of the Circo Para Todos social circus project for Colombia’s street children. Had this project just satisfied its aims of ‘providing an alternative avenue to social and professional development for vulnerable youth through the teaching of circus arts’, then that would have been achievement enough. But the professional training school, then young company, that has emerged from this venture has proved itself to be world-standard.

Urban starts with an almost empty stage—the only thing occupying it is a large oil drum turned on its side. The beats kick in, and on bounce half a dozen young men in ripped-and-torn togs, faces smeared with white chalk. What starts as a b-boy exchange of dance moves escalates into a fight to become leader of the pack—a great excuse for some serious acrobatics, bodies building human towers and leaping through space alarmingly close to the audience (the front row is on the stage with them, and performers are often close to landing in our laps).

Exit ‘our gang’, leaving just the barrel—which turns out to be home to an almost-naked man smudged with blue and yellow body paint, a rapper whose angry words set the scene for the emergence of the second street gang. This lot are dressed in pristine white vests, and are wielding sticks and ropes. Cue a lively skipping act, in which both gangs try to outdo each other with ever-snazzier moves.

Lurking on the fringes of the action is a slight boy who is obviously the runt of the litter—hood pulled over his head obscuring his face, tugging his too-large jacket close to his body, he’s shunned by the others, and edges cautiously to the front of the stage. Then comes the reveal: ‘he’ is a ‘she’. She strips down to a shiny bodysuit and struts the stage, then there’s a breathtakingly beautiful acrobalance-with-hoop duet with oil drum man followed by a Cinderella moment as someone brings her a pair of silver stilettos, in which she performs a sinuous solo aerial straps routine—circus in heels seems to be something of a thing of the moment, but to my eyes it’s a shame that the only female performer in the show has gone down this road. Her placing in the action as the desirable ‘other’ is perhaps inevitable, but it would have been good to have expectations challenged. And the following ensemble scene is a particularly uncomfortable moment—a young woman being passed around the hands and bodies of a dozen crowing young men is an image that has connotations that can’t be avoided, although I suppose it could be argued that the subject matter of the piece is streetlife in the Colombian city of Cali, and the playing out of the threat of violence (be it male-on-male or male-on-female) is an inherent theme.

After that we are well into the swing of things—the gang rivalry between the ‘white vests’ and the ‘black vests’ gets played out through ever-more astounding acrobalance and acrobatic routines; dance and theatrical elements of the piece are developed through a very lovely dark and druggy dance-with-Death scene with candles, disturbing carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and pounded oil drums; there’s a pretty good Roue-Cyr (big hoop) piece and the grand finale is a (literally) ground-shaking act. Although the story seems to have fallen by the wayside by this point, no one is too bothered as the onstage energy has soared to fever pitch.

Cue standing ovation—there’s no doubt that the audience are wowed: brilliant circus and street dance skills integrated with an amazing Latin-rap soundtrack. What's not to like? The nagging doubts remaining are those that tag much circus-theatre: how to balance the skills with the story (starts well here, but falls apart); how to justify and integrate the circus equipment (again, the intro of the skipping ropes was great, but why, from a dramaturgical point of view, are teeterboards brought on?); and the challenge of avoiding the pitfalls of dealing with serious subjects flippantly. The darkness of much of the subject matter was referenced rather than engaged with—although perhaps for those who have encountered the violence of the streets of Cali, where ‘dance and music are the safety valves of everyday life’, a light touch is what is needed.

Dorothy Max Prior, 19 May 2010 @ Freerange Tent, Brighton

Giffords Circus: Yasmine - A Musical

The tent is an art object. A ceiling of translucent white fabric, sawdust in the ring, bales of hay, block and primary colours on the wooden walls, a red velvety curtain for backstage, check patterns and stripes. Everything that's painted is handpainted, in a palette of reds and browns and oranges and rich blue. You feel good about being there.

Giffords Circus has been going now for a decade, touring year-after-year to many of the same towns, and the afternoon I was at Yasmine I overhead a lot of talk about previous productions and Times When—there was that old pleasant sense of festival, and of a community temporarily finding its focusing point. The show itself sits within this, the frame of familiarity and warmth that the company has been patient in building, and resonates quietly with the same virtues of care and friendship.

Yasmine – A Musical is based on (or around) the life of the equestrienne Yasmine Smart, who appears in the show and trained the horses that walk the ring, but within this premise it strings together a run of acts. Sarah Schwarz performs strong, simple tightwire; He Yuan recreates Rudy Horn's famous trick, riding a giraffe unicycle with one foot and using the other to flick a saucer, a cup, then a spoon up to catch on her head (and one-ups the original by riding the unicycle atop a walking globe); Les Frere Taquin do a statue-come-to-life mime act with a slightly sickly piece of audience interaction; and there are dancing (women masked as) pigs. Picking favourites I'll go for jugglers Bibi and Bichu, whose half-smiles (sort of like: how about it?) and fraternal camaraderie win the crowd, and a wiry, capering Gabor Vosteen—outfitted in waistcoat and bowtie and besporting the sort of resplendently gelled electro-hair that you only see on children's television presenters—who plays one, two, three, four, then five recorders (with two in the mouth and one in each nostril, he invites the audience to guess how he might blow air into the fifth).

Then there are the horses, sending a thrill through the audience when they first rush into the ring. There's a raw kind of excitement or charge that they carry, different from the nerve-shredding sensation of watching voltige or handlers with big cats, but for me the experience was mostly nostalgia—I live in the city, I grew up more or less in the country; I was reminded of that.

Pulling everything together there's live music from the twelve-piece band—several of whom step into the ring for a duelling banjos stand-off or the odd bit of game transvestism—playing old-style swing with jazz choruses that the sheet music in the programme (get the programme) saves me the work of trying to phoneticise. They go like this:

Doo da__ Doo da ba -did-ly – o -doh doh Doo da ba – did-ly – o-doh doh doh

Pretty rockin', though I'll admit to not having a particularly firm grasp on the lyrics (when they were actual lyrics) and to coming away from the production with the vague understanding that Yasmine fell in love with a goose called Brian, then got older and was left at the dance by someone, then got older still and became a famous equestrienne. Now I've read the programme, that's not entirely inaccurate or even very incomplete. The production's less about presenting a narrative biography of Yasmine than it is about setting her at the head of a show which, by its very fabric, honours all the best qualities of the circus world she is from. I'll go back next year.

John Ellingsworth, 14 June 2010 @ Giffords Tent, Cheltenham Racecourse, Cheltenham

Graeae & Strange Fruit: The Garden

Four grey-robed Keepers tend the grounds of St Alfege churchyard and the gateway to the next life. From a list of names of the interred, three are chosen: Levinia Fenton, Gibson Grimly and Jose Manuel Fricachee—unquiet spirits who need to tell their stories in order to move on. One is a bride who sees her hopes reflected in the sheet of a mirror; another is a disobedient boy who disturbs the equilibrium of the forest by picking its plants and flowers; the last is a man who narrates a story of travel and displacement on a world made out of water.

Developed specifically for St Alfege's deconsecrated churchyard, The Garden is a benevolent and good-natured piece that reaches for, and doesn't quite attain, the heightened style of a folktale or fable. The problem I think is that it wants it both ways: it uses a mode of storytelling that is characterised by isolation, illogic, magical acts, yet seeks also to create very direct connections with the history of its setting. As a preface to the piece, one of the Keepers reads out the names of some of the churchyard's real interments—including the odd recognisable figure: Thomas Tallis is buried at St Alfege—and immediately sets up a conflicting pull between the lyrical ambition of the writing and the weight of the location. You end up being pulled out of the world the production then tries to draw you into: watching the Keepers in their heavy robes I was mostly thinking how hot they must be; I don't think I was being obtuse.

Strange Fruit, who work on six-metre high sway poles, take a backseat in the production, with the four poles nothing more nor less than a flexible piece of set able to represent a tree or become the invisible force that flies a spirit through the air. They allow some invention by their height and position, such as when a green vine is pulled out into an overhead canopy, then allowed to drift down to become a forest wall, but in the end it feels like the circus element lies on top of The Garden rather than reaching far down into it—just as the production falls short of a meaningful connection with its setting, or with its other cited inspiration, the poetry and vision of William Blake.

It is most successful in the final section, handled by Milton Lopes, a soft graceful presence who before the show was to be seen wandering the grounds of the churchyard. He stopped by people and signed to them wordlessly to take an envelope, on which were the few lines of a poem, and in which was a small handful of seeds; you took the envelope, read the lines, and poured the seeds into his hand—a small, silent interaction that somehow felt right exactly, and that outdid the whole rest of the production in tying together the threads of its inspiration.

John Ellingsworth, 26 June 2010 @ St Alfege Church, London

The Loons Circus Theatre Company: The Butler

Prurient, cacophonic, in bad taste (but not very), crude, annoying, overloud, overlong—The Butler is a play written for a cast of seven circus performers and one actor that treads familiar ground in using the brittle social dynamics of the dinner party as a starting-point for a narrative that wants to reveal hard truths of human falseness, self-interest and venality. In the course of its two hours, the show switches frequently between two modes: outbursts of frenetic acrobatic performance (strong on the whole, technically, and including an excellent web routine that condenses what would ordinarily be a three-minute act into about 30 seconds—just the right length, in my opinion) and dialogue scenes where the cast sit at the long dinner table, discussing issues of the day, sweating incredibly.

It's performed with energy: whether vigorously faking (one assumes faking) orgasms, performing a not-too-shabby rendition of Ne Me Quitte Pas, or hanging from the ceiling breathing fire, the cast obviously like what they do and do it well enough. But where The Butler really falls short is in its characterisation, which is content to take stereotypes and crank them to a gross maximum. Table conversation is universally played with a gurning, cackling, bellowing delivery, the falseness and overstatement of which was only slightly moderated by the interval trip to the Pleasance courtyard, where a leery birthday party were surrounding a woman, shouting 'CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!'. Regardless, the mannerisms grated, with special mention for the brutal keening wail/laugh shuddering all too often from the high, white throat of one of the female performers, used as a stop for obvious and unfunny stubs of dialogue about e.g. wine-appreciation. I wouldn't call it satire.

The active theatrical mechanism of the play—the thing that really works, perhaps even better than it intends—is to turn your sympathies and interests so fully from the dinner party guests that the butler becomes a luminously attractive personality. In the opening scenes, where he dresses slowly amid the fights and chases of a cast of circus savages, he's beaten, white-faced, submerged, like a person recently bereaved. Played by the actor Tom Trevella, he speaks with a musical cadence, his dialogue, in the main, stitched together from cut-up segments of various works of literature which contemplate either the specific social interplay of the dinner party or else, more broadly, simply, the joys and sorrows of life. The collage style is, like the rest of the play's dramaturgy, careless to the subtler cross-relationships of the elements it combines, and even though your attention may be caught by a great line or (most of all for me) a beautiful translation of the story of Bede's sparrow, all those great and wise words do are provide a measure of The Butler's quickness and shallowness. You're better off reading a book.

John Ellingsworth, 15 July 2010 @ The Pleasance, London

InStallation

One memory of InStallation is a chain of enduring images, seen through washes of blue and white light. A Chinese pole swings as a pendulum, casting a crisp shadow. Sawdust dropped onto a spinning diablo is flung outward in a shower. Thin strings of rope cascade and turn around a woman outfitted for rain. A stallion with bell-covered anklets trots around the ring, turns a circle, is joined by another, a third, a fourth—four white horses then, almost glowing, and a rhythmic sound of bells. An old grand piano is carried in, and stays in. The industry of setting a tightwire is half-seen, lit by a luminescent spinning diablo, carried everywhere balanced on a finger, thrown even to an aerialist wrapped above in black silks. A high, gentle melody plays on the piano.

These are brilliant scenes, but setting InStallation apart from productions that become over-involved in their own beauty is a remarkable confidence in its transitional moments, kept perhaps from its origin as a performance made for friends, and an underlying structural sophistication. There are acts, certainly—at times quite unusual ones: swinging Chinese pole isn't so common, and a rope drawn into strands allows a neat doubles routine crossing freely between straps, silks and corde lisse vocabulary (just one indicator of the cast's multidisciplinary talents)—but no neutral moments, nothing that you would call a set change or a rigging interlude. The production is delicate and complete—an echoing, unfolding, musical work where each scene contains the idea or materials of the next, and keeps what remains of the last. Human performers running the circumference of the ring become cantering stallions; a white horse becomes a black one; a man dashes in and out with half a bicycle across his back which will later return and play its part. Most striking, the image of the wire is taken and reflected in miniature by a spinning-top diablo, like a lady in white, that walks the line of a tight-drawn string.

Character doesn't feel like an operable concept here; nor does narrative. Autobiography is way out, too. The detail instead is in the interplay between the performers' various physical presences: Petronella von Zerboni's cool remove offsets the upright and wily Roman Müller, the duo's immaculately performed and reckless diablo routines moving across both circus ring and the top of the grand piano; Ulla Tikka's fluidity and grace is matched against the straighter muscularity of Andreas Muntwyler, an interesting aesthetic opposition that is most provocative on tightwire, where Tikka's cleanliness and beautiful form is counterpointed by Muntwyler's unorthodox, but basically still successful, technique (essentially: flail and stay on); horse whisperer, trainer and rider Niklaus Muntwyler is dark and sensitive as a medium, riding out on a black stallion like a circling premonition; then musician Lukas Staeger, at the piano and in the ring, has an enjoyable and slightly dissonant not-a-performer deadpan, almost like a controlled and superior version of the traditional audience participant.

What it all adds up to is a piece that hovers in the space between abstraction and literalness, where we're somewhere out of the ordinary but also at home, just as happy to spend a minute watching a man dig a trench in the sawdust to lay a wire as to watch another perform a back somersault on a perilously thin cable. It's strange and captivating; a piece that holds your attention but holds it gently, passed like the lantern diablo that visits every part of the ring.

John Ellingsworth, 17 July 2010 @ Campbell Park, Milton Keynes

Atempo Circ: Atempo

A scandalised woman in front of me is reaching round to cover her son's eyes as Marilén Ribot, wearing a knotted corset of rope, struts back and forth to a disco beat. Naked underneath, she teases the rope away while the audience reacts variously with: laughter, mild shock, bafflement, and (probably, covertly) arousal.

I love that Watch This Space programmed this. Situated in the Square outside the National Theatre, it's a festival that has its fair share of dedicated attendees (many of them families), but it also has a large accidental audience: senior theatregoers as they emerge from a play at the National, overspill from the adjacent BFI, curious tourists arrested from their walk along the South Bank. Atempo isn't really very risqué—or, as it markets itself, 'impure'—but at times it carries a cool and dissident attitude, funny at WTS in a way I don't think it could have been when the company were at Glastonbury. (The best thing, whether by accident or affront, was that the National Theatre bookshop's automated blinds began to lower the moment Ribot disrobed.)

A full-length street show, Atempo essentially structures itself around three excellent solos. On Chinese pole Miguel Soto's expressive vocabulary seems to work outward from the rhythm of breath, drawing images that evoke in- and exhalation as he climbs and falls, entranced perhaps by the woman or spirit who matches his gestures from a high and distant perch. Matias Marré gives by some distance the most exhilarating and theatrically complete performance I've yet seen on Roue Cyr, one that reminded me of learning how the apparatus' originator, Daniel Cyr, performed an act where the creative seed was that the wheel was his horse. Watching Marré run the turning Cyr over his hands, or push it back with only his forehead, the clean circle of the metal an antagonist to his long and angular body, there seemed to be so much truth in the personality of the wheel as a separate will, the artist existing in a fluid and interpretive relationship with it. And, finally, Ribot, having dressed behind the token modesty of a diaphanous black screen, is mercilessly captivating as she performs cloudswing very high on the WTS rig, flying up and falling through the square of onlookers on the first floor balcony, giving that sensation of resonance and amplification that comes when you are a part of an entirely attentive audience: a powerful thing.

I think if you asked the company they'd probably have the sketch of a plot ready for you—something perhaps about encounters between strangers and the blurred double-world of reality and dreams. In short, stuff you've heard before, and Atempo's only real faltering step comes in literal depiction: a two-man-one-woman contact-acrobatics sequence feels, unlike nearly everything else they do, like it could be performed by any company and belong to any show, the three haring around the stage-space, jumping into one another's arms and flying apart: the meerkat approach to characterisation. That excepted, the performance excels at using its transitional phases to shift the mood of the piece ready for each new scene/skill. Following Soto's solo, the three charge the pole repeatedly, finally knocking the base out and carrying it back so that one end rests on the NT Square and the other is suspended from a cable a few feet off the ground. Setting it swinging back and forth like the boom of a sail, Marré and Ribot perform a duet underneath that's dictated by its gentle parabola, perfectly reflecting the shift from the rigidity of the Chinese pole to the more responsive character of the Roue Cyr. I don't think there's really an explicit narrative embedded in the scene—or in the next transition where Ribot breaks the poetic mood with her unanticipated nudity—but that's to the show's credit: it's when it moves on instinct that it finds its own way.

Les Argonautes: Pas Perdus

Les Argonautes are, in essence, a troupe of musical clowns, ‘making circus, where movement is king and speech sleeps’ as they charmingly put it. Brussels-based, the company works under the direction of musician, actor and scenographer Louis Spagna, and the other four company members are gathered from the ranks of L’Ecole de Cirque de Bruxelles (where they all trained and some now teach), the ensemble comprising juggler (former Cirque de Demain gold medallist) Benji Bernard – the newest Argonaute, bearer of a rather splendid set of ‘Frankenstein’ shoulders and sideburns that are a rather shocking contrast to his bald head; musician-actor and equilibrist extraordinaire Christian Gmünder; acrobat and juggler Philippe Van de Weghe; and the vibrant and fluid physical actor Etienne Borel (these latter ‘three musketeers’ are all longstanding members of the company).

Pas Perdus (‘Lost Steps’) is not a new show – it has toured mainland Europe extensively since 2007 – but makes its UK debut here in Edinburgh, where the company achieved previous success with Zouff! at the late, lamented Aurora Nova festival of visual theatre.

Gentler and dreamier than the zany Zouff!, at least in the first half of the piece, Pas Perdus presents us with a puzzling parallel universe in which our valiant gang-of-four battle with their environment, facing and overcoming absurd challenges – a kind of existential Jeux Sans Frontières. Their main adversaries/obstacles are half-a-dozen giant wooden blocks that are rather like oversized pieces in a Jenga game. Other toys that they have to play with, which come onstage at various points to challenge or torment them, are ‘normal’ sized wooden bricks, long bamboo sticks, and various musical instruments including a full drum kit. With a kind of surreal internal logic, they move from one bizarre game to another, each vignette offering the opportunity both for the company to work as an ensemble, and for each member to show off his particular skills. First, there are little brick towers to be built, then there is a crazy twist on the pick-up-sticks game that turns into a ludicrously intricate balancing act, then we move onto the big Jenga pieces for an extraordinary set of balance-and-gymnastics tasks, and, with the arrival of the instruments, some very special musical clowning in which the whole stage becomes a kind of giant musical instrument as drum sticks are juggled and thrown from afar at snares, violins are played four-handed, and the Jenga blocks are tipped over to become big musical stepping stones. Throughout, our team are coerced and mocked by a Deus Ex Machina gamesmaster – a disembodied voice from above that suggests, in the worst sort of Californian self-help book mode, that they ‘relax’ and ‘take things easy’.

Les Argonautes are masters of ensemble comic circus-theatre, and the fact that most members of this troupe of highly skilled performers have worked together since 1995 shines through in the care and precision of every moment. In an example of what we might dub ‘the Torvill and Dean syndrome’ we actually fail to appreciate how difficult much of what they are doing onstage actually is, as they make it look so easy. Sometimes, though, in true clown fashion, they remind us of the difficulties by ‘getting it wrong’ before they get it right, and there are some extraordinary moments as performers are precariously perched on thin sticks, or excruciatingly stretched between blocks, dangling above the ground.

Yes, it could (as the company’s PR suggests), all be seen as a metaphor for life: ‘the boxes remember the time when they were trees. Men remember they will end in a box.’ Perhaps more importantly, it is a pure homage to the human spirit of play.

It feels, perhaps, just a little too long: knock ten minutes or so off the set-up and early juggling sections and it would be an even stronger piece.

Dorothy Max Prior, 25 August 2010 @ Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

Vesturport: Faust

Wham's Last Christmas on a gradual volume-build is as good a harbinger as any of the Devil's approach. In Vesturport's Faust it is something like the final straw – Johann, once a great actor, now a retiree in a nursing home, has just been gently rebuffed by his young nurse, Greta. Greta's brother has entered and seen the two of them, seen the truth, and reacted without anger, just patronising dismissal; it's Christmas and there's no family for Johann to visit, or to visit him; the home has emptied, and the last remaining resident, Johann's chess opponent, has slumped dead at the board. And then the Wham song. Johann resolves to hang himself with a string of fairy lights.

It's a great beginning, and I could have stayed there. As Johann, Thorsteinn Gunnarsson concocts a convincing blend of pathos and reluctance and self-absorption as Greta pushes him to remember his days on the stage – and to act out the one role that in all his career he never played: Doctor Faustus. His protestations that he is too tired, too washed-up, cannot remember are a cursory formality, and he begins a preface that imagines a wager between the forces of Heaven and Hell over Faust's immortal soul. Of course, he's captivating. But before Johann can play Faust himself, the performance is interrupted, events lead him to his attempted suicide, and when he shouts for help it is the Devil that comes to his aid.

It's when Johann enters a pact with Mefisto to restore his youth so that he can pursue Greta that Vesturport's production drops its subtlety and charm for brash spectacle. Archdemon Lilith flies in on a wire, devils bomb into the netting that stretches over the audience's heads; lights flare. During its mid-section, the production shuttles back and forth between slapstick and tragedy, never quite in control. This is fine most of the time, and obviously one facet of the Vesturport style, but the poignant and slower scenes don't have the support either side of them to really stand. Greta sending her brother to Hell is chilling (especially since the night I saw it a problem with equipment meant she had to actually herself push and pitch him into the Underworld's smoking maw), but doesn't have the time to settle. A couple of pantomimic moments when the performers reference their status as performers sit badly.

The theatrical aesthetic is disposability – fly in, fly out. Everything's a one-shot. It uses circus the same way – get an effect, then toss it out. So in spite of the illustrations on the poster image that depict lots of devils doing trapeze (with some dreadful sickle-feet), it uses circus shallowly and briefly. Sending Johann/Faust and Greta up on white strops for their moment of grace, it's not quite the L'Amour de Loin approach, but it's not a million miles away either. There's a sexy devil-woman/succubus who comes on to do a couple of cartwheels and backflips to tempt Faust, but otherwise the cast seem ill at ease with the small amounts of acrobatics and aerial. It's not that they don't 'make the grade' or whatever, but if you don't spend time with a discipline you can't go deep.

And in the end it's not deep, nor is it affecting past the strength of Gunnarsson's performance. As an adaptation it does the job, stripping out the poetry to replace it with a purposefully flat and bawdy register. It's enjoyable enough, and probably an effective antidote for anyone with the misfortune to have to study Faust as part of their education. The performances are hearty; the set design and lighting (by Axel Jóhannesson and Orri Pétursson, respectively) creates a lush and electric netherworld; the ungainly bird-like run of devils on the netting is consistently amusing; and you get to hear Mefisto sing a rock song called 'I'm Evil'. It's trashy, vampish; expensive but not fine; the stakes are low.

John Ellingsworth, 1 October 2010 @ Young Vic, London

Collectif AOC: Autochtone

It's all about the carrots. In a carrot-driven society where everyone wants more carrots and is not content with the carrots they have, human beings are reduced either to unthinking automatons or to cruelly acquisitive, carrot-hungry Machiavellists. Holding a single coveted vegetable aloft, Jules Beckman, Autochtone's limping, devilish consumer-preacher, turns the heads of the assembled men and women: they follow his hand, left, right. When he plays kick-drum and bass guitar and shouts MEDICATION TIME they run on with carrots strapped to their noses, Pinocchio-style. An act of defiance in this world is throwing your carrots to the ground; not giving a shit about carrots as a whole.

It's not so symbolically laboured or dogged as that makes it seem, but Autochtone does use shorthand in gesturing toward common social maladies, and in doing so gives away its power to change the way you think about things, to deliver more than a transient impact, to transform. The political dimension of its subject matter is collapsed into the caricature of Beckman's dark master, who begins the performance walking in circles to follow a suspended metal obelisk as it swings around the chapiteau ring, beating a rhythm to punctuate his proselytising on 'The New Paris, The New France', speaking in English with an American accent.

Covering its shortfalls with aggression, Autochtone is rock circus. The metal obelisk comes to ground and is fitted over a staircase to create a clattering slope down which domestic instruments are tossed – cutlery, wash basins, clothes; then performers are sent tumbling down too. Objects litter the stage. Two acrobats perform as a woman furiously cleavers a red cabbage. The preacher says: 'The human body is fragile. The human mind is fragile.' A pneumatic presser is brought on and used to crush inflated plastic, then a man is lifted in and slammed.

The production prefers for the most part to split or to highlight the members of its large cast – either scattering the performers around the ring and at the various levels afforded by the floor, the metal obelisk slope (which later is lifted at one end to become a kind of marquee), a raised trampoline, and the chapiteau rigging; or else focusing on a single artist for a skills piece. Some of these solos are very good. Fabian Wixe is remarkable on Chinese pole, swinging his way into fast, fluid sequences, and exhibits a way of carrying momentum that I haven't really seen before on the apparatus. A sequence on corde lisse by Fanny Soriano is beautiful and has a couple of especially stunning tricks for rope-nerds, but – and this is the problem for all of Autochtone – is contained within a superficial and disposable frame: as she descends the rope Fanny is obscured by a sheet of black polythene. It's visually pleasing as it drapes over to obscure her movement, and, released, floats down like a ragged ghost. I suppose that it's meant as a universal symbol of consumerism and waste (at the end two performers come on with wadded bin liners obscuring their heads), but there's no sense that the aerial work activates or draws strength from that metaphor. Likewise, a solo on trampoline is shadowed by a masked long-necked ghoul rolling in brackish water beneath the net, and I'm not sure what it was; it came on with a bucket full of I think human heads, harried the trampolinist, disappeared.

The choreography (by Karin Vyncke) drives a wedge between the character of the performance and its execution. It has moments of strange beauty – as when, toward the end, the cast gently press their master to the floor and arrange his limbs as though disjointed by a long fall – but there's nothing that feels random or improvised: even when the performers are falling down the slope or running full-tilt across the stage, it seems fussy and precise, an impression only heightened by the cold lighting and dark, muted colours of the costumes and scenography. With a piece of kit like the pneumatic presser, you feel they built it and wheeled it in specially – that it's careful anarchy, rehearsed and choreographed. And when the final scenes bring freedom and release, nothing has changed – not really. For all that it's processed through an abstract and purposefully adult language, Autochtone is yet another show telling you that you're in the machine and need to break free on swinging trapeze. Ask yourself: is that what you need?

John Ellingsworth, 24 October 2010 @ AOC Chapiteau, Paris

Cie Jérôme Thomas: Ici

Ici was my first encounter with Jérôme Thomas, a huge name in circus and new juggling, and it felt as though I'd come too late – that he's an artist who's climbed so high that he's cleared gravity and turns slowly now through outer space, intent on the stars.

How can you communicate something which doesn't itself communicate? It starts in darkness, two shapes part-visible under a sheet of think, clear plastic held up and lit blurrily from within by anglepoise lamps. The two figures are at a metal table pushing objects back and forth, the sound amplified to a thunderous grind and clatter; as the plastic sheet comes off we see it is two men, with long false noses, dressed all in white, using simple cutlery to scrape up and manipulate a green non-Newtonian fluid that shifts between liquid and solid, spilling over the edge of the tabletop like paint at one moment, in the next becoming malleable putty as it is briskly gathered with strokes of a knife. They square the substance away, and begin a series of looped actions – polishing and passing cutlery, wrapping and passing nondescript parcels – short loops with many repetitions and slow deviation. To the onlooker it is half a lab experiment, half a cafeteria staffed by insane witches – grotesque in the sense of unnatural, and suffused with a claustrophobic nastiness that rises until the two attack each other by dragging forks hard across the metal tabletop (and remember all table sounds are being amplified), some members of the audience going so far as to cover their ears, everybody suffering.

It's tedious and unpleasant, and later scenes, though different in tone, exhibit the same self-involvement. The two men, dewitched, seated at opposite ends of the stage in bright light, wearing now for whatever reason false ears, turn infinitesimally slowly to face each other. A kind of Meccano music box (Pierre Bastien's rhythm sculpture) sits at the front of the stage as the two walk in circles and draw thin plastic behind them – lambent, watery, almost as light as air; it's beautiful in its way, but Ici isn't interested in that. Each simple theatrical effect is repeated until it ceases to be that – an effect – and turns instead to a grating nonsensical cipher: after the slow build of the seated scene (which progresses to a lying down scene where the two are blown by a very, very gradually intensifying invisible wind), the first in a line of ground-lights switches on, a fan blows a tongue of paper up behind it, and a single, clear note sounds for a second; then the next light, then the next. It's pleasingly weird as it moves down the row and up the scale, and the paper casts a wavering shadow like the silhouette of a flame, but when it reaches the end of the line of lights, it loops and the scale starts again – and it goes on and on. With Ici this is the way of things. I became very aware of time, and the time I was spending, and how my resources of it were limited. I wanted to be somewhere else.

I wouldn't call it pretentious, for all that it might seem that. I think probably Thomas has a genuine and deep fascination for the separated elements of his art – for the formal workings of rhythm, patterning, scale, depth, texture – but I think as well that it's reasonable to question whether that interest includes attention to the nature of its performance, and care for the state of the audience. Another way to put it: he is not looking back. And while pushing far past the safe zone of regular human patience can be a productive means of discovery and exploration, it seems to me that in pursuing an idea to its furthest end sometimes you will uncover something true and forgotten, and other times – many times – you will come back empty-handed. Where is Jérôme Thomas, and what has he found there?

John Ellingsworth, 26 October 2010 @ Hall du Mouzon, Auch

Burencirque: Nord/Sud

On the Avenue de l'Yser, just past the laundrette, just before the MacDonalds, down the light slope of a stony drive, movement catches the eye. At first its the black, many-headed silhouette of an active crowd, but then, behind and above, there's a flowing contour of red and white, like the underside of a cloud, shapely and iridescent. Drawing closer, it's a high, high grid of wires, and a thousand triangle pendants, hanging in ranks. They form the fluttering roof of a large netted compound, which the audience stand outside, and which inside is mostly empty space – at one edge there is a row of unoccupied chairs, in one corner a triangle of coloured buckets; a cluster of red-white umbrellas appears mid-air, inverted and floating. In the centre of the compound, seeming to occupy its own world, there's a single tent; white and red.

Nord/Sud is an odd thing: an installation by the visual artist Daniel Buren in collaboration with the circus troupe Sikasu, co-produced and supported by a long list of organisations, but built for Festival Circa during a six-week residency at Auch. As a vast art object it practically warps space; it's dreamy, magnificent, exciting. The crowd is like a fireworks crowd – in darkness, gazing into light. As the performance begins (or the installation activates) a wire-walker ascends to the top of the structure, and walks the lines of the pendants, then on wires that cross them, stopping at points to ring a bell at his waist, marking a place like a bell at sea. It's mysterious and stately, but just the prelude; the audience are led inside the compound, and into the tent.

It took something like forty minutes get into the chapiteau, and by then the audience were restless and vocal and very expectant: the wrong mood in fact for Nord/Sud's interior component. Sitting on four sides around the performance area, the audience at first see no further than ten feet in front of them, the space divided by multiple, layered semi-transparent screens – thin and light, like mosquito nets. Figures appear walking around the edges of the ring, behind one screen, in front of the rest, dusty and obscured: a man carrying a suitcase, another riding a bicycle, a flatulent contortionist, a searching woman, and as they walk around the ring, passing in and out of sight, playing to each side of the tent, their actions repeat, build, play off one another – the communal mood of the crowd outside captured and drawn down to a quiet, local scale.

After that, Nord/Sud's separate intentions as a live performance and an installation start to conflict. Some of the screens are drawn back, so that each quarter of the audience can see their quarter of the ring clearly, and the remaining three opaquely. Performance vignettes move through the space – a burly man on silks, the contortionist once more, foot juggling, a bawdy piece of puppetry. Attention switches between the frontline performers and the shapes behind the screens, and myself I felt caught somewhere between the distance and individual remove of the art gallery and the cohesive, social experience of the live event.

There is, as well, an over-literal and too strong commitment to the four directive themes of the piece (water, lightness/darkness, transparency/opacity, public/private space – named in the programme as the grandes thématiques) which constricts and stifles the live performance; in retaliation the live performance disrupts the stillness and reflective intelligence of the installation. Perhaps with less ostentatious skills, ones that asked less of the audience in terms of applause and response, formal structure could have fully taken the place of pace and tone. As it is, what happens in the tent feels slight, a little, and misjudged, a little, but in the course of the week I thought about Nord/Sud often and went back to the installation, the outside, twice more.

John Ellingsworth, 26 October 2010 @ Chapiteau Caserne Espagne, Auch

CirkVOST: Epicycle

Unquestionably CirkVOST have an excellent wheel. Built from dark metal, two towering rings are joined by an intricate tangled network of ropes, pulleys and looping bars. Old hanging lights cast their glow in the centre; a dark plane of netting stretches the bottom. Tiny figures climb around like sailors through rigging, up to the top of the structure and almost to the apex of the tent. You could sail a ship through the centre.

It's an extraordinary piece of equipment, constructed at great expense to custom specifications for the first show from CirkVOST, a new company formed from the rebanded members of the disbanded and once-great flying troupe Les Arts Sauts. The audience are seated in reclined deck chairs with fitted neck pillows so that they can lie back and gaze up – it's all just so, and obviously for one or more of the company the realisation of a long-held dream. Yet in Epicycle you feel that, by getting what they want, VOST have removed the necessity of invention and transformation, and with their first show have ossified and stuck in place.

Epicycle is a style, a look. Clutter, junkyard complexity, overt mechanics. The performers wear leather-ish trousers, goggles, braces, lighted miners' helmets; a musician/technician, lit by the omnidirectional glow of several open laptops, is housed alongside the wheel in a kind of hanging basket embedded with cogs and running gear-chains that floats over a giant slow-turning propeller. Like a lot of steampunk, it's committed and grand but also witless – is the wheel a home, a vessel, a place of work? In fact none of these, and Epicycle's interest is neither in creating a narrative context for the structure, nor, more abstractly, in unpacking the associations and suggestions of its design.

There are some lacklustre attempts at character that come across as twee and fey – the quick-kicking legs of a dangling woman; the cross trotting/prancing way characters move when dropped to the net. They're not really people. There's a feeling perhaps of a kids TV programme that in the opening credits zooms through a telescope to the surface of another planet. (At the start there are even some Clangers-esque sounds for communication.) Every now and then a spotlight falls on one individual while the others freeze for a few drawn-out filmic heartbeats, but mostly this just seems like a cover for the moments when they aerosolise kilos of chalk. (There's a lot of chalking.)

What grace there is comes from simple effects – during a doubles swinging trapeze when a tiny fall of paper helicopters is released, or when the dark canvas of the tent behind is slowly picked out in stars – and I liked the principle male flyer and his apparent looseness in the air, but the technical material in the show, while accomplished, is honestly kind of repetitive: throwing people on the cradle, then between two cradles, then between another two cradles that are higher up and further apart, then with a swinging cradle. There are two possible planes of movement – with the ring and counter to it – and there's no room for flying trapeze. The structure is 13 metres in diameter and they make it seem both extravagant and insufficient.

Also, though: what next? Presumably the company will in short order run through the festivals and venues that can afford to programme them. And then? I like to imagine the wheel moved to the desert and opened as a creation centre – or left there forever as the artefact of an ancient folly – but probably it'll stick with the company and define their work going forward: it's striking and exceptional, but even if it's everything they asked for, I wonder if in the end it will give them what they want.

John Ellingsworth, 26 October 2010 @ Chapiteau Endoumingue, Auch

Cie BaroloSolo: O Temps d'O

The simplest premise: one man likes getting wet, the other does not. The stage is a pool of water three feet deep. Begin.

'Ce n'est pas un spectacle,' says the man who introduces the show, to explain that O Temps d'O is the product of a brief residency in the Village de Cirque's primary-blue tent and not a finished work, but as often happens with works-in-progress it's the informal atmosphere, the incompleteness, the undivided attention to the raw possibilities of the simplest elements that make it such a charming and involving hour.

In the pool of water, overhung by an arched rig like the skeleton of a bandstand, the two play out their roles, beginning with a joke where the two have instruments and their seats and sheet music are in the middle of the water. The one wades in, the other nervously skirts the edge and climbs the scaffolding. It's a slow start, but it adroitly builds the pitch and intensity of the slapstick (or the comedy of physically awkward and precarious situations – we need a word for that) before slipping into a scene of marvellous and sombre absurdity. Islanded on one of the chairs, the aquaphobe (William Valet) edges sidelong to the end of a ten-foot pole, held up by his wet partner (Mathieu Levavasseur) and recently used to a play at a distance a recorder fitted to the other end. On his head Valet wears a cymbol, like a wide-brimmed rain hat, which he flicks and plays as he slowly works his way across the water. Levavasseur has a Swiss hang, depending from the hook of a wide, leather weightlifting belt, on which he taps out a resonant, expansive tune – with the hang's special half-there quality, distant yet warm, evocative and faded – the pole for the time being braced across his thigh as he squats down. Reaching the end of the pole, Valet seems to lose his balance, is buffeted back and forth, spins quickly, holds Levavasseur, and kisses him on the cheek; then he returns.

It shifts back to slapstick (or whatever we're calling it) as Levavasseur wears a diving mask and acts as base for an acrobalance sequence where Valet is clawing his way over him to avoid the water – Levavasseur is constantly being pushed down and submerged, and each gasp for breath as he rises and shifts is matched by a shriek of panic from Valet as he sinks down. Eventually Valet falls (massive cheer from the audience), and, of course, naturally, discovers that actually he loves the water, circuiting the pool, swimming every kind of stroke and porpoising edge to edge as Levavasseur plays a hearty tune on banjo and harmonica. After a cathartic bellyflop, Valet begins to duet with Levavasseur, scooping up loops of water that he slaps and explodes in rhythm, throwing spray to the front rank audience of delighted young children. Sitting there in the glowing underwater blue of the demi-transparent chapiteau, crammed onto closely laid wooden benches, it felt purely happy. The show (which is not a show) was a simple thing, but it's one of the modes that circus is best at: to take one idea and take it all the way. This one flew.

John Ellingsworth, 24 October 2010 @ Le Chapiteau Bleu, Paris

Cie Akoreacro: Pfffffff

The press copy would have it as the sound of uncorked and irruptive champagne, or of a hissing fuse, but where it's voiced in the production the title phonetic is always this downplaying, cocky exhalation. It's Not So Great, I Dismiss This, I Dismiss You, I Could Do The Same Thing Better And Easier: Pfffffff.

It goes like this: timid, staid, dressed to conceal, a young girl walks into the world of seven vigorous, acrobatic and underoccupied men. They swagger over and she's pulled and spun from one to the next, lifted and thrown, her face rigidly surprised and wide-eyed – but with each somersault and executed trick her confidence and appetite for performance grows, becomes a hunger that outlasts the interest of her potential suitors. When the show ends and they start packing the set she's left sitting on a box, downcast, anhedonic. One man tries to coach her through post-show depression with feats of juggling, but it's not enough, she doesn't care, it doesn't matter. Pfffffff. She needs one last spectacular moment...

For the most part the performers have a rough, game charm, but Pfffffff is more like a street show, very broad, very simple. There's a thin thread of development in Solé's journey from fear to excitement (tracked by a series of gradually upgrading outfits that run from grey boilersuit to a final, fiery leotard), but otherwise the show meanders along, taking a number of veering diversions to make full, exhaustive use of the (admittedly broad) abilities of the cast. Sometimes you wish they had more restraint. A collaborative beatboxing duet evolves into a showdown between the beatboxers and the instrumentalists – the two forces storming one another back and forth to either end of the stage – and it's well executed and they're good musicians (/boxers?), but it actually made me feel hot and embarrassed; I might have even blushed, in the way that you do watching the spectacle of a person outstretching themselves.

They're an immensely talented and young cast – Claire Aldaya especially is an accomplished acrobat and handbalancer, and there are exhibitions of satisfyingly weird specialisations (my favourite: Maxime Solé basing in headstand on a pedestal affixed to a swinging trapeze) – performing a show stitched together from old and insubstantial ideas. Outside, much shorter, it would probably do very well; inside it slides right off.

John Ellingsworth, 27 October 2010 @ Chapiteau IUFM, Auch

Théâtre d'un jour: L'Enfant qui...

A boy with a shaved head padding over fine soil. Big coat, big glasses. Big, curious, unblinking eyes. He crawls forward on his stomach and watches visions of giants who climb the trees of the forest and work inscrutably. At first they ignore him, but when a spitting, terrible seizure comes he is lifted bodily in the air, his small feet grasped and made to stamp at nothing. His wooden head lolls this way and that, out of his own control.

I think back to L'Enfant qui... and what I remember most is the boy, the puppet, and his simple interactions with the audience. When he enters the space, carrying an old lantern, he hands it to a woman to hold; picking himself up after the seizure he gropes for his glasses and takes a pair from an audience member in the front row, but they don't work, and he returns them; someone receives a thin branch as a gift.

And what are the audience? We are benevolent I think; and perhaps powerless, and definitely sad, watching this world unfold for the boy and then fall upon him with such cruelty and suddenness. L'Enfant Qui... is inspired in part by the early life of the Belgian sculptor Jephan de Villiers, who as a child went from illness to illness, frequently bedridden, seldom in school, but who during this time found the materials that he would later work with all his life: fallen branches, earth, dead leaves. Rather than document his literal experiences, Théâtre d'un jour have found a sense, a shape, a world that speaks of sickness, and memory, and the strength of the imagination both to sustain and to oppress.

The three acrobats who populate the piece and act out its scenes with the materials of the forest – rough staves of wood; a great, weathered rock – are certainly capable of violence. At the start one of the men drags the head of an axe over the earth and central strip of stage, slowly, in arcing patterns; then stands on a cut trunk of wood to slam the axe in again and again. He seems a minimum of eight foot tall, and always there is the feeling of closeness, largeness, heat that breathes and sweats through the sometimes opaque imagery of the piece. When the three acrobats stand on each other's shoulders, brushing almost the top of the tent, it feels like the largest human tower I've ever seen.

L'Enfant qui... is a show that seems to be in possession of truths, but it won't tell them, or at least not straight, and only in a whisper. In the chapiteau – this one white and small, with three rows of audience seating cut centrally by a traverse stage – the work has found a structure that acts as a resonance chamber for its delicate thematic tracery: indoors but no so indoors, by moments either intimate or confining. I felt entirely absorbed, carried along through a final bizarre song that begins with the line My body is a Jewish cemetery, and into the closing scenes as the body of the boy, the puppet, comes away in pieces – becomes dead leaves and twigs; the head removed and laid aside, replaced by a painted white face on a thin stick, that turns to look each of us in the eye.

John Ellingsworth, 27 October 2010 @ Chapiteau Lissagaray, Auch

Leo & Yam: Panoramic

Leo and Yam describe Panoramic as an ‘androgynous cinematic circus show’ which seems a pretty fair summary.

We start with an empty stage, bar a lone musician, Joanna Quail, who is teasing a mournful, yearning tune from her cello. Enter mic stand festooned with black feathers (brought on by stagehands who seem a little unsure about whether they are visible or not), and crooner Dusty Limits, who sings a melancholic version of I Wanna Be Loved By You. Then, as the moving images flicker on the silver screen, there’s a voiceover intro to our main themes, channelling the ghosts of Runyon, Chandler et al: the city at night; a woman who might not be what she seems; a tough man who might be hiding something…

To the searing trumpets and saxes of a big band blues-in-the-night medley, we meet our two main characters: a suited and booted tough guy who likes his whisky straight and his women loose; and a begloved and bejewelled femme fatale who knows what she wants and how to get it. Playing on the aesthetic and motifs of silent melodramas of the 20s and film noir of the 30s, their tangled romance is fought out through ringing telephones, golden guns, the turn of a playing card, and the sharp edge of a blade.

The twist is that he is a she and she is a he… the reversal allowing for all sorts of interesting play through some very funny mime and clown vignettes, and through aerial solos and duets that subvert notions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ movement, gesture, and physical expression. Thus, Leo as femme fatale does a pretty mean corde lisse cameo in heels, but is later defrocked to reveal a very manly set of pecs; Yam does a great boxing-gym-inspired straps routine that is as butch and beefy as you could desire, then pushes desire to its limits by pulling off the pin-striped suit to reveal a push-up basque and leather stockings.

Their doubles work similarly plays with gender; toying with the notion of ‘base’ and ‘flyer’, ‘lead’ and ‘follow’, ‘active’ and ‘passive’. The duets are occasionally a little too laboured and fussy– I could do with a few more moments of calm and stillness – and it sometimes feels a bit like pre-existing cabaret acts have been bussed in, or that they are concerned that the tricks need to be got in (they don’t – less is more!) – but generally it all works well. A special moment, later in the show, is a bathtime sequence which gives an opportunity for an unusual aerial routine on a hanging sheet of plastic – and a very funny parody of the iconic Psycho shower moment…

What works less well is an early scene starring juggler/object manipulator Hugo Olivera (of Cia Huma), featuring eight white balls manipulated every which way, a kind of puppet booth, and a roll of newsprint paper covered in symbols. It’s a lovely act by a very skilled performer, but I struggled to understand what it meant and what it was doing in this show – the performer is not really used anywhere else other than in a couple of tableaux, at the beginning and end of the show.

Also, as mentioned earlier, there is an odd vibe to the constant appearance of stagehands moving things around in the half-dark. They are neither unobtrusive nor a part of the action – so their role also needs thinking through in the future development of this show.

Singer Dusty Limits, on the other hand, fits perfectly well into the scenario, his beautifully delivered torch songs forming links between scenes or opportunities to introduce new elements – a particularly marvellous moment is his version of Piaf’s French cabaret classic Padam Padam, in which our femme fatale friend, now clad in black evening wear and clutching a rose, makes a dramatic re-entry into the action through the audience.

The music needs a special mention: it’s a great bunch of tunes – the live voice and that gorgeous cello mixed and matched with big band jazz tracks, contemporary electronica, toy instrument tinklings, and strings playing wistful waltzes. There are, however, some odd moments of clumsy mixing that is not bad enough to be deliberate, just a little jarring – so that’s another ‘homework’ note!

Panoramic is a highly enjoyable evening’s entertainment, full of delightful moments – there’s been some great work done to date, but this should be just the start: there’s work to be done! It all feels almost a developed show, but still a little too close to a series of circus acts and cabaret vignettes, and with a fair few dramaturgical glitches. Leo and Yam have a fantastic set of ideas here, have John-Paul Zaccarini of Company FZ as an outside eye, and have a skilled set of performers to play with. If those resources are built on, and that work gets done, then I’m sure we have the makings here of a truly great piece of visual theatre!

Dorothy Max Prior, 24 November 2010 @ Jacksons Lane, London

Les Apostrophés: Cabaret Désemboîté

Baguettes, coats, bags of onions, wicker hampers, a double-headed broom, a picture book, coffee cups and saucers, spoons, plastic funnels, cardboard boxes – everything can be juggled, everything will be juggled in Les Apostrophés' lengthy and exhaustively inventive Cabaret Désemboîté.

Essentially it's three productions stuck together, the beginning and end pieces taken from the company's street shows, and the middle section given over to guesting Apostrophé Jörg Müller, who reprises his older solo pieces exploring planar juggling – les tubes and mobile – in a piece of sly self-parody that replaces the original chimes with baguettes suspended on wires. It's the most successful of the cabaret's turns (and, tellingly, the only one developed as indoor performance), Müller nudging the baguettes into a miniature carousel, sticks following each other closely and cutely like ducklings in a line – then working in increasingly complex patterns, widening the arc of the circles and hurling baguettes side-on to whip through a gauntlet of spinning bread and wire (the audience gasp). It's very funny, very clever, quite surreal.

Elsewhere the material is skilfully performed, old-fashioned, charming, but always it feels like the stage isn't Les Apostrophés' natural home. They've got their shtick locked down: there's a guy who took the Getting Stuck to Things module at clown school; they know how to get a laugh from a plank of wood carried carelessly on the shoulder of a distracted man; there are many variations on the classic joke of one clown undoing the work of another; Bill Oddie – wait, sorry, Marcel Dreux – is there to support on accordion. It's clear they would rule the street. In the large, front-on Chapiteau IUFM, which is sort of the Udderbelly of Festival Circa, their simple, human-scale tricks lose most of their effect, and they've been tempted to too great a length. But really: catch them on the street.

John Ellingsworth, 28 October 2010 @ Chapiteau IUFM, Auch

Tr’espace: Le Cercle

I think I've watched enough physical/visual work now that the concepts of narrative and character have become fully detachable from my understanding of theatre. But, still, you put something else in place: rhythm or formal patterning or just an element of raw, pulsing narrativity that can come from the drama of technical material or the intrinsic communicative power of a moving body.

Le Cercle, for me, was almost entirely static. It moves through scenes distinguished by the equipment/instruments used, by the particular foregrounded performer, by the array of tricks exhibited by diablo artists Roman Müller and Petronella von Zerboni, by the live music, and yet each scene is discrete, drawing nothing from the last. There is no development, no progression, no sense of depth. Müller and Zerboni, despite duetting for most of the piece, have little friction or commonality, and instead of a narrative relationship – or else something constructed, grown more organically from their real and intrinsic characters – there are the flirty, challenging glances, man to woman, woman to man, familiar from countless corporate-grade double acts.

Devised as an exploration of the circle, of loops and circuits, at Auch Le Cercle was weakened by front-on presentation and constricted by the stage of the Chapiteau Cathédrale – such that the repeated shapes and figures were experienced too literally, too coldly. Its ideas, this time anyway, failed in execution: watching cups rolled in intersecting arcs as Mischa Blau, at cello, layered music felt hackneyed and clichéd; a sequence where Blau drums and Müller and Zerboni, positioned either side, participate by bouncing a diablo across the skin, was off-rhythm and ponderous. Simple in theory; laboured in realisation.

The use of Blau as a full performer is also a problem. He is not a natural actor – nor, as a confident guess, a trained one – and looks at times as though he is executing a simultaneous double parody of a pantomime and kabuki artist: excessive postural rigidity and inexplicably heavy make-up. Called upon to wield a cello bow like an épée he's kickably irritating – a prancing peacock, an insufferable dandy.

Certainly there are striking images – the line of a fast-spinning diablo tilting impossibly upward, like a free object in a space shuttle as it clears gravity; or Blau, seated, for a moment bearable, playing tiny bells stuck by suckers to the underside of a suspended drum, with the last bell, and last note, carried out of reach as the instrument is raised. But what Le Cercle feels like most is a large store of technical skill that might be drawn upon in the creation of a more ambitious and complete show; it's a little unfair to say it, but InStallation, which the three members of Tr'espace perform in, and which shares much of its material with Le Cercle, is where this all comes alive.

John Ellingsworth, 30 October 2010 @ Chapiteau Cathédrale, Auch

Ea Eo: m^2

As the audience files into the chapiteau, Compagnie Ea Eo are seated at the front of the stage: four young men, dressed casually, slouching a little, watching the influx of people as if from a park bench – as if it all has nothing to do with them. This is their style: natural and unaffected – not, as with some companies, too keen to be like us, just content to be like themselves.

First, m^2 is funny. The four company members, four jugglers, have an easygoing friendship that expresses here in that particular type of slightly cruel, needling male interaction – mock ostracism, play fights, rough love – and that lets the piece unfold by a series of idle games. Its comic instinct is to linger: denied a chair by a game of keepaway Bram Dobbelaere reads a book detailing Metro etiquette and dresses as an OAP to spend a beautifully slow minute coughing loudly and tapping at the legs of occupied seats with his cane; a memorable piece of rhythmic ensemble hoodie rearrangement (hood up, hood down, sleeves up, sleeves down, zip up, zip down – and permutations) has its symmetry broken as Éric Longequel absent-mindedly strips to his underwear and moons the audience, then takes the stage for some extended underwear posturing.

After a buoyant first half, the piece then sets out determinedly to kill that mood: the stage – a laid square of veneer wood – grows progressively smaller as strips of floor are removed, and the close relation and sympathy of friendships turns to irritation and flaring anger. In pushing a little too hard against the danger of becoming one of those old Sunday Times adverts with the post-football 'joshing mates' (or however you'd phrase it – definitely not my world), m^2's flashes of aggression can seem baseless and overly sudden, but it hits the mark in the final scenes, as the flooring is pulled up and flung out, and Éric Longequel, cramped onto a tiny square with the other three, sheds juggling balls as hands reach over and around to drag across his face and pull at his shirt.

Playing the same venue as Cabaret Désemboîté, and with the same make-up of four male jugglers, m^2 felt younger, fresher, sharper – a piece that wears its intelligence lightly but is nonetheless exact in relating the fastidiousness and kinospheric awareness of juggling with the troubles of living together. Ending Circa, it was one of the best.

John Ellingsworth, 30 October 2010 @ Chapiteau IUFM, Auch

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