The above is a vignette from Flagrant Wisdom, shown at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland last year as a work-in-progress of Rose English’s very-large-scale piece Lost in Music. You can hear the glasses chime because they’ve been designed (by Simon Vincenzi) with a small imperfection that makes them unstable.
Lost in Music is very exciting prospect, I think: a collaboration with twenty artists from Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe that works from their existing skills but takes them into untouched aesthetic territory. I did an interview with Rose for the Crying Out Loud blog that I think gives a good sense of the shape of the work — its enormous scope and high ambitions. Coming in 2012, all being well.
Tags: flagrant wisdom·lost in music·rose english·shanghai acrobatic troupe
OK, first and foremost: as a catalogue and celebration of the absolute superiority and crushing might of French contemporary circus, Le Nuancier du Cirque is inspiring and exciting, richly cross-connective, LONG (nearly 6 hours), curiously structured, and very, very frustrating. Or frustrating at least for someone who lives outside of France and has little prospect of seeing much of the work so attractively trailed in the 178 short clips—clips of exceptional intrigue which include: a four-armed man smoking twenty cigarettes (Tide Company, Grunsvägen 7); virtuoso mouth-to-mouth ping pong ball juggling (Compagnie Galapiat, Risque ZérO); a matchmaking clown called Proserpine whose work is she goes to villages and talks to the inhabitants about their lives and relationships and dreams, writes it all down in a tiny notebook, then gathers the community together to make the connections between them they never knew existed (L’Apprentie Compagnie, La Fabrique de Liens); a woman who was once a man drawing a spiral through a circle of ice chips (Compagnie Non Nova, P.P.P.); trick cycle ballet (Compagnie 3.6/3.4, Trois-quatre petites pieces pour vélo); a man skateboarding on a large metal parabola which swings back and forth semi-obscuring the live portraiture being created behind him (Compagnie Mauvais Esprits, Léonard…Malagomie); an aerialist tangled in a web of hundreds of strands, to harp music (Compagnie Lunatic, Ariane(s)); a burly naked man bounding on all-fours through the woods, through leaves, over burning logs (Compagnie du Singe Debout, Le Course en Forêt); a man juggling sheets of paper and sonically propelling ping-pong balls from speaker cones (Compagnie Les Singuliers, Hodja); a game of snooker played out along the contours of the human body (Compagnie Les Argonautes, Pas Perdus (which is in Edinburgh, btw)); a man flying stage right and left astride an airborne double bass (Cirque Plume, Mélanges (opéra plume)); a cat climbing a rope then performing a perilous doubles trapeze routine with its human handler (Cirque Romanès, Romanès, Cirque Tsigane (WHY IS THIS NOT ON YOUTUBE?!?!?!!!)); a twisting dance piece, or performance of ‘body juggling’, inside a 10ft columnar tank of water, plus a ferociously complex and thorough investigation of horizontal and multi-planar juggling using long bronze chimes suspended on wires (both from artist Jörg Müller: c/o & Les Tubes); corde lisse in a pig mask (Volodia Lesluin, The Pink Room); lute playing and juggling finally combined (Compagnie Chant de Balles, Le Chant des Balles); a man balancing on the necks of bottles in steel curled shoes, plus a weird grooved hedgeball rolling independently around the stage of an empty auditorium (Johann Le Guillerm / Cirque Ici: Secret & La Motte – prototype IV (incidentally, Johann Le Guillerm, bodily: the Iggy Pop of circus)); a flying trapeze show about a legendary monkey (possibly; my translation: La Troupe Circus Baobab, La Légende du Singe Tambourinaire); and an outdoor juggling interpretation of Stravinsky’s entire Rite of Spring to an audience of approx 25 (François Chat, Le sacre du printemps des rues).
To name a few.
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Tags: French Circus·hors les murs·jean michel guy·julien rosemberg·le nuancier du cirque
Usually I don’t much like wired aerial (too anesthetised), but this is really nice — like astronauts dancing on the side of the space shuttle.
Tags: FRIKAR Vertical Dance
It was suggested to me that I was less than fully overwhelmed by my first outing to Compagnie XY’s Le Grand C because I am a relentlessly and heartlessly critical tin man — which may be true, but having thought about it, and having seen the show a second time on Friday, it seems like perhaps a lesser, a secondary, reason is that I don’t respond with great warmth to material where technical difficulty squeezes out individualism. On a repeat viewing some of the production’s smaller details do come to the fore — one man sat on the edge of the stage, taking off his shoes, casually, his back to the spectacle of the human tower rising steadily behind him; the charm of the bases’ stylised movement as they assist flyers in climbing to their shoulders, holding their hands and arms in front, behind, in front to act as stepping stones (creating a gestural sequence which, if mimed without the flyer, would describe a dance not entirely unlike the Macarena); the wry status of the log as the 18th (and most popular) company member; the rituals of wrapping and unwrapping the long cloth belts that support the lower back and give climbing acrobats an extra foothold — but it remains the case that Le Grand C as a theatre-construct continually pulls your attention out to the total spectacle, and it occurred to me, as it hadn’t before, that perhaps the company’s choice not to telescope in to the personal reflected their aim (part, I think, in fact, of their codified practice) to unsettle circus’ calcified gender roles. In this case: girls on top, and boys below.
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Tags: circusfest·compagnie xy
‘It is 100% safe,’ says Jean Vinet, standing 12 metres above the ground on a reticulated net of this twisted silver wire that looks like it was graded for a sheep pen: thin, I mean. Very thin. I have a hand resting on a cylindrical matt-grey beam; and the beam is thick. This seems important. My hand rests lightly, casually, but I know that when the wires – inevitably – strain and snap I will be able to catch hold and pull myself to safety. Whatever happens here, I will survive.
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Tags: acrojou·cherbourg·cirque·cross spring·genius sweatshop·la brèche·ockham's razor·spring·sugar beast circus·upswing
Jeunes Talents Cirque has selected the ten projects it will financially (and otherwise) support:
- Race Horse Company, Petit Mal (Finland)
- Compagnie DeFracto, Circuits fermés (France)
- Raquel Veganzones & Janne Timothy Gordon, Losing Grip (Spain/Finland)
- Sirkus Aikamoinen, Värinpuutostila (Finland)
- Frenetic Engineering, Bed (UK)
- Nomaden, I, Mistress and Wife (Belgium/Sweden/Germany/Switzerland)
- Mosjoukine, Mosjoukine (France)
- Subliminati Corporation, File-Tone (France/Spain/Italy)
- Zebraman, My! Laïka (France/NL/Germany/Italy)
- Positive Force, C8H11NO2 (Croatia)
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Tags: Jeunes Talents Cirque
A few items of note from within the usual morass of stories about escaped/abused/sick/disappearing circus elephants:
i) Giffords have released some info about their show for 2010: Yasmine, a performance biopic of Yasmine Smart (featuring Yasmine playing Yasmine). According to this brief article it’s going to be a musical too?
ii) Head to the Telegraph for the barnstorming obituary of Ali Hassani, who was kidnapped as a child by a troupe of acrobats to be an enxaneta (the topmost human in a human pyramid), and who once overpowered a bear.
iii) Mimefest post-show talks are now up on Theatre Voice (though the one I really wanted to listen to, Jeanne Mordoj, was so poorly recorded it’s basically impossible to hear).
iv) The Roundhouse’s upcoming CircusFest is going to be all naked all the time.
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Anyone who’s worked or has much more than a passing interest in physical theatre knows there are shows and companies, pretty much all from the last century, who have attained mythic status by being enormously influential while leaving behind only the thinnest documentation of their work. The one that exerts the most powerful grip on my imagination is The Carrier Frequency, a collaboration between Imapct Theatre Cooperative and the writer Russell Hoban (who also produced the seminal novel of disappearance and liminality — Fremder), but Archaos for me have a little of the same status and effect.
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Tags: archaos·Circus History
Lyn wrote about the David Metcalf letter in the Guardian, and while I b r o a d l y agree, I don’t think the newspapers necessarily picked the circus schools (as opposed to the colleges running acupuncture or ancient medicine courses) for their headlines because circus is the most ridiculous—I think it has something more to do with the quality of circus, just the word circus, as a hook. It’s readable, clickable; looks great in bold. Traditional circuses are either more savvy about the marketability of their artform, or else contemporary companies don’t want to buy into a network of misapprehension and prejudgement for the sake of a little attention. But seeing something like Big Top—Amanda Holden’s ill-starred sitcom—using its premise to pull in attention which it then betrays by having only the shallowest connection to the world it purports to exist in makes me wish someone would do it right: bring an audience in with circus’ symbols and archetypes, only to confound them. Then that audience might be longer-lived than a packet of steam.
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Also, as a note: punctuation criminals Collectif and then… are beginning to devise their new show and want people to fill in this short survey about living in London. The richer, darker, more terrifying, queerly stilted, violent, perverse, X-rated, nauseating and intensely personal your answers the better their show will eventually be. When we talk about people working with ‘material’ for a production I suppose I imagine something light and quick—thoughts belonging after all to the element of air—but in this case ‘the material’ should have a menacing self-possession: a night-black extraterrestrial ooze that cannot be captured, knowing only how to grow and consume.
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