Sideshow Circus Magazine

'Equestrian ‘performance’ holds a special interest for me. In my younger days I competed as a sport equestrian vaulter, a little-known discipline that shares more with circus or ice-skating than it does with the usual round of equestrian disciplines in the sporting world. Despite training at the time in theatre and dance, it was in equestrian vaulting that I first experienced the tangible feeling of ensemble and of a certain kinaesthetic sympathy with another performer – in this case the sympathetic bond between equine- and human-kind.'

Former prince of the ring Thomas Wilson reflects on the horse in contemporary circus performance. 

Fuse Medway, City of London, Glastonbury, Watch This Space, Greenwich + Docklands, Surge, Theatre Meadows, Stockton International Riverside, Edinburgh Fringe, The Big Splash...

Sideshow boils and reduces the summer festival programmes into one combined guide.

"I go to Stoa; a cold afternoon, a light rain. Walking out the back of the building where they load and unload the stage equipment there's a rank of entranceways with drawn-down metal shutters. No numbers or signs to differentiate the doors, but something catches the eye out on the concrete steps in front of one: two big lumps of ice, not sculpted, side-by-side, creature-like with melted runnels and reaching limbs. They're a little beautiful, and a little ugly, not really scintillating now in the weak sun, and they put me in mind of a throwaway replica of the stone statuettes that certain families place at the end of drives or on porches: for the time being at least, Compagnie Non Nova lives here." 

Sideshow goes to Helsinki to see Philippe Ménard's Position Parallèle au Plancher, a work of fear, elation and longing played out within a stark landscape of ice.

'Nights were spent brainstorming about London and how to capture the essence of London through circus. We ended up with notebooks crammed with words and crumpled-up pieces of paper. On them were scribbled ideas such as the parallels between London and circus (i.e. violence or immediacy), words (rain, grey, loneliness), physical ideas of how to use the space, and some indecipherable things that have been forgotten.'

Collectif and then... on the lead-up to the first performance of their first full theatre piece, Like the rain when it stops.  

'Over the previous few months, we had been collecting questionnaires from people – about London, and their feelings toward the city. We read, and we read and we read. London is the colour of a bruise, violent, yet beautiful. London is grey, grey, grey, grey, grey. London is full of surprises round every corner.' 

‘I think similarly to probably all circus disciplines, there's a way of working with Wheel that makes it very easy when you kind of get the feel for the timing and start working very much with the equipment rather than using your strength to manipulate it. And I think once you’ve trained on it long enough to have a feel for the timing, a knowledge of where bars are and what’s happening around you as the Wheel moves—then it can be really nice choreographically, the way you move with it rather than it being something you're kind of using.’

Sideshow talks German Wheel with Acrojou Circus Theatre and hears about their first full-length indoor production, Wake.   

‘Attention spans will be even shorter than now, perhaps too short for words. Stitched together from the strongest limbs of circus, puppetry, movement and dance, visual theatre is an unconquerable monster destined to overcome all other modes of discourse.’ - Joseph Seelig, co-director, London International Mime Festival.  

Sideshow searches for the strongest monsters in the 2010 line-up, including work from six countries and nine companies.    

A short preview of the circus-rich autumn/winter season at Jacksons Lane including fragments of a short interview with the venue's artistic director, Adrian Berry.

‘It’s about a body of work. Everything we do here there’s a strategic reason for putting it in the programme—it’s about getting the artist in, giving them space, giving them time: so they feel an ownership of Jacksons Lane and Jacksons Lane feels an ownership with them. With two or three exceptions everything in this programme’s a collaboration—it’s all work being created here.’  

Ockham’s Razor’s latest production plays out on a giant aerial wheel, man-sized, metal and wood, spiked by twin ridges of naked bolts: The Mill.

Sideshow talks to them about the difficulties and benefits of developing work for custom apparatus, their status as a circus company, and the addition of two new cast members—at the same time accidentally uncovering the provenance of the modern, running zombie.

'We didn’t really know yet what we could do on it technically—it was more the kind of idea of it. Appealing visually and what it would sort of signify and then we’ll build it and see what technically you can do on it. We thought it would be a lot more terrifying and impossible to do things on—but actually it’s hard and it’s tricky and it’s difficult but it is conquerable—there are things you can do on it.'