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.
Reviews
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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). 
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. 
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.
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. 
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. 
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. 
Review of the circus quotient at the Royal Opera House's Firsts 2009 programme: Gemma Palomar, Silence to feel; Jon Young, Dancing Like No One is Watching; and Collectif and then..., A view from down here. 
Circus is relatively run-of-the-mill, almost a given, in the theatre I see, but acting and sets are out of the ordinary. Proteus' Dracula has both.
Directed by James Roberts, formerly a performer in NoFit State’s Immortal, and Bridie Doyle, who also teaches with NoFit, Wardrobe Diaries pulls together a set of discrete scenes and ideas, soundtracking them heavily with the warm, domestic music of Ted Barnes.
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.
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). 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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 Zimmerman and DJ Dimitri de Perrot, featuring also a small assembled cast of European circus talents. 
A couple move into an apartment, and it's wonderful. There's space for his office, light for her study. Great views. All their furniture fits, and the only friction is over whether the coffee table should be at an angle to the throwrug (stylish!) or neatly parallel to its edges. But then the phone rings. 
It’s not actually that rare—not so rare—to find narrative in circus, at least not the kind that plays on theatre stages, but it is quite unusual to see contemporary circus that engages in explicit, linear storytelling. 
Within the first ten minutes two audience members have been pulled up on stage—Tom, who’s busy peddling the bike that provides the theatre’s electricity, and Saga, nervous and clutching a handbag, who’s philosophically brutalised by the ringmasterish whiteface (Does her life have any meaning? Is she really living at all?) before being left alone, on a slowly darkening stage, with the levitating corpse of a recently dead tightwire artist. 
It’s strange really that there aren’t more instances of magic realist or fabulist circuses. Fiction writers understand and use the overlap, but I think Milkwood Rodeo is the first piece of stage work I’ve seen that successfully stakes out ground in the territory. 
Upcoming Events
| Wed Mar 10 @20:00 - The Seven Fingers: Traces |
| Mon Mar 15 @19:30 - The Seven Fingers: Traces |
| Mon Mar 15 @19:45 - So & So Circus Theatre: The Hot Dots |
| Mon Mar 22 @19:30 - Ockham's Razor: The Mill |
