Sideshow Circus Magazine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.