Sideshow Circus Magazine

A round-up of the acts on Bristol Harbour Festival's Circus Stage, including material from Circomedia, the LIT Circus Company, Beyond the Bounce and Joanna Palmer.

Combining flamenco and circus, Malaje sees the musicians on stage with the performers, physical skills entwining with the music in sequences where an acrobat stamps and somersaults to the beat, or a juggler uses rubber balls to strike out the rhythm the musicians then improvise around.

Anonymous Ensemble’s Wanderlust brings us the story of Tall Hilda, a girl with legs that reach to the sky; a girl who runs away and lives the circus dream, now here to tell us her tall, tall tale. Review by Dorothy Max Prior.

Tedros Girmaye devastates club-wielding ninjas; Pablo Meneu Barreira breaks free on straps after brushing his teeth continuously for 30 years; Maximilià Calaf Sevé is …Somewhere… Nowhere! in a hot dusty trampoline solo that draws inspiration from the writing of Paul Auster; frustrated Circus Space janitor Sergio Gonzalez Gallego impresses the ladies with acrobatics cribbed from the real students.

Held in the Astroturf square outside the National Theatre where it was almost magically cursed by bad weather, I’m not sure how much of Watch This Space’s third week was either cancelled or abbreviated—but the days I was there the Gandinis (jugglers in residence) seemed like the perfect company to take the problems in their stride.

In a festival overloaded with interesting collaborations Greenwich+Docklands this year brought together Australian street arts and circus company Strange Fruit, who work atop custom four-metre sway poles, with disabled-led theatre company Graeae. Performed in Cutty Sark Gardens with its back to the Thames, the result, Against the Tide, is a funny and richly evoked piece of storytelling with all the emotional depth and compression of a folk tale.

A double review of two recent productions that combine aspects of hip-hop (music or dance) with circus performance: Tom Tom Crew at the Udderbelly, and Avant Garde Dance (with Gemma Palomar and Telma Pinto)'s The Silver Tree, part of the Paradise Gardens festival.

Stilt-walking has always been the most lavishly costumed circus discipline—a lot of times the pleasure is in seeing the bespoke detailing and the ways in which the weaknesses of stilts (the need to cover up the legs, the jerky movement) have become strengths of the design (cloven hooves for pegs, insectile limbs, giant stilt robots, etcetera).

Wayward children, lost lovers, murder, cannibalism(?), suicide to protect another, madness--Cirxus is a multi-strand distributed story where the audience are free to walk about the performance space-a warehouse round back of the Arcola’s main theatre-encountering characters who themselves move constantly, following separate tracks that complexly intersect. 

Ilona Jäntti is a tremendous aerialist. She’s been in circus a long time and has the consequent deep well of physical resources, but it’s style, really, that sets her apart: graceful but not too-clean, having an all-body approach where elbows, teeth, anything can be used to keep her in the air.