Sideshow

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.

And I think mostly they’re successful. Not, perhaps, in those deliberate moments when the smallest girl bases the tallest guy, or when the stage-action stops to make way for an all-female tower, which by their isolation and framed specialness are just glimpses into a novel mirror world: the same thing but the other way round. Instead it’s when the company are absorbed in the high demands of their technical performance that your basic trad. two-way gender dimorphism fades out, the cast dividing, if anything, into successive matryoshka dolls of Base Lord > Base > Flyer > Fly Girl. There are male-female pairings who work together particularly (e.g. the teeterboard flyer, for reasons I suppose of consistent propulsion, does most of her material with the same base), but in all cases it feels, I don’t know, platonic — an unusual thing in doubles acrobatics, where the encoded narrative is so often about relationships, yet true to the spirit of a show that looks down on life from a great height, and with humour, and shows us how we all might be if we lived in the air.