Author Archives: Thomas JM Wilson

About Thomas JM Wilson

Thomas JM Wilson has been writing for Total Theatre since 2001. His own performance work lies at the borders of dance and theatre, with a particular interest in solo performance. He is an Associate Artist of Gandini Juggling, working as Archivist and Publications Author. He also currently teaches on Rose Bruford's BA European Theatre Arts, and is a co-editor of the Training Grounds section of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.

Spirited Away: SPILL 2015

Mind, body, spirit. Thomas Wilson reflects on the closing weekend of SPILL 2015

SPILL Festival has, over the past decade, gone from strength to strength, firmly establishing itself as one of the key London arts festivals, programming adventurous and rigorous work from established and new artists, across a number of venues – which for the 2015 edition included the Barbican, National Theatre/ NT Studios, Toynbee Studios, Hackney Showroom, and numerous off-site and public spaces. The established artists category this year included two pieces by veteran US performance artist Karen Finley, Written in Sand (live performance) and Ribbon Gate (installation), both responding to the subject of AIDS. Finley’s inclusion is a marker of the ways in which SPILL founder Robert Pacitti has championed work that directly addresses lived experiences, and also clearly embodies SPILL 2015’s theme On Spirit – defined by the festival as: ‘From the Latin spiritus meaning breath, Also: soul, courage, and vigour.’

This theme was also embodied in the work of the younger generation of artists, such as FL Alexander’s No Where // Now Here; Daniel Oliver’s Weird Séance, and the headline-grabbing Site by UK artist Poppy Jackson. Jackson’s actionist work, in which she installed herself, naked, on the roof of Toynbee Studios, sought to question the place of the female body in space and as a space. The widespread coverage in the tabloid press, and the articulate defence by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, and by the artist herself on London Live TV, is a clear marker of how the work that SPILL presents is often the start of difficult and necessary conversations about art in contemporary society.

FK Alexander: No Where // Now Here. Photo by Holly Revell / DARC for SPILL

Elsewhere at SPILL 2015, Zierle & Carter created three different site-responsive works (in the masonic temple at the Andaz Hotel, Liverpool Street; in the tropical plant conservatory at the Barbican; and outdoors at the National Theatre) investigating ‘the shapeshifting qualities and gifts of three different totems… Swan, Moth and Horse’; Kris Canavan enacted a processional, psychogeographical ‘aktion’ in public space, Dredge; and Robin Deacon’s White Balance: a History of Video investigated the truth of autobiographical material, telling a series of stories on ‘time-travel, haunting and hallucination’ armed with a number of vintage video cameras and players. The packed two-week programme also included SPILL Think Tank Salon talks, live experimental music events (including a show by cult hero Othon), and a showcase of work by emerging artists presented at the National Theatre Studio.

In the final weekend, Toynbee Studios continued to play host to the installation In My Room (Dorothy Max Prior), which explored punk, porn and popular culture in the 1970s; and a one-on-one performance about memory, Recall, by Ria Hartley (both reviewed here in Rebecca Nice’s first-weekend Toynbee round-up). In addition, there were two further works: The elegiac double-diptych of films La Salle d’Attente by Pacitti and George Stamos; and Lauren Jane Williams’ viscerally fleshy performance-cum-sculpture Here is Not the Place for Nostalgia….

Pacitti and Stamos’s two films both take their content from encounters with ‘legendary author, raconteur and professional homosexual’ Quentin Crisp; using film footage of these meetings to open-up the nature of the relationship between gay men of different generations.

Pacitti’s film, played on two parallel monitors, was shot on black-and-white Super 8 in 1996. It follows Crisp (who was 88 at the time) and Pacitti (28) as they take a walk through New York City. The soundtrack for the film, listened to on headphones, is Nico’s Chelsea Girls. This 1967 song tells the stories of some of the residents of NYC’s famous bohemian Chelsea Hotel. Released in the same year that Pacitti was born and that homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK for men over 21, the track provides a sense of the context of the meeting of Crisp and Pacitti.

The distinctive figure of the elegantly dressed Crisp, accompanied by the towering and more soberly dressed Pacitti, lies in stark contrast to the graffiti-covered streets and vans of Manhattan. The camera shifts between capturing the two men’s conversations and scanning the various buildings they pass – mostly prosaic fast-food joints, or shuttered shops, but also famous art organisations (Cooper Studios and Tisch School of Arts). A subtle sense of historical context echoes in these tracings of landscape, though it is the gentle dynamic of the two figures that sits at the heart of the work. It is clear that Pacitti’s meetings with Crisp are a fundamental part of Pacitti’s make-up as an artist, but this film has a homely quality that erodes the notion of the inspiring figure and his trans-atlantic acolyte. Instead there is the simple human act of two men taking a walk. Although not present in the work, it’s hard, knowing of Pacitti’s work, not to connect this to they way he has sought to create a similar open, conversational relationship between emerging artists and their more established forebears during the various SPILL Festivals of the past decade.

Quentin Crisp and George Stamos in The Waiting Room

Visually, Stamos’s part of the work, also a diptych of films, strikes a notable contrast. Projected onto two large screens set at an oblique angle to one another, the film has a rich but faded colour to it. One screen sets Crisp in the mid-ground, seated in a plush high-back chair in front of the bottom part of a neo-classical painting. In the foreground, a lemon-yellow chaise-langue, on which a naked Stamos ‘dances’ for Crisp’s pleasure. An ex-go go dancer, Stamos’ movements are sinuous as he shifts position, writhing and twisitng on the chaise-langue, his naked form drawing Crisp’s knowing gaze. At points the film stutters back and forth, replaying brief moments of Stamos’ actions. It particularly lingers on the moments when Stamos adopts languid and seductive poses – his eyes on Crisp who casually savours Stamos’ naked form. The camera angle positions us looking from behind Stamos, and its hard not to see this as a film that sets up multiple-layers of gazing – the pleasure in watching Crisp’s pleasure in watching Stamos, who in turn take pleasure in being watched. There is an added layer added by the knowledge that Crisp himself earned his living for many years as a nude model for life-drawing (hence, The Naked Civil Servant) – now the subject rather than the object of the gaze.

This focus on Crisp’s gaze is foregrounded by the image on the second screen: a close-up of Crisp’s face, as he watches Stamos off screen. Without the sexual context of the subject of Crisp’s observation, the subtle shifts in Crisp’s eye-line and the sagging tones of his facial muscles humanise this ageing figure. The sexuality of the elderly is rarely a topic for conversation, but here it is clear to see the pleasure of this aspect of human nature is not limited to the lithe and toned. in both of Stamos’s frames there is the sense of a complicit circle of gazes, that rub sharply against the more removed gaze of Pacitti’s film. In downplaying Crisp’s iconic flamboyance, though, both films conjure a gently soulful, melancholic and elegiac sense of the ageing Crisp.

Where Pacitti and Stomos’s work deals with male relationships, Lauren Jane Williams’ Here is Not the Place for Nostalgia… is a phantasmagorical, sculptural landscape that almost literally turns the body inside out. Blending film, sculpture, body adornment, and performance, Williams crafts a world composed of three different-sized cubes: a television, a large aquarium and a performance space that resembles a shanty-town shack. These cubes are set into, for want of a better phrase, a hellish landscape of the fleshy fragments of particularly earthy dreams. A collision of human and animal flesh – breasts, feathers, penises, folds of skin – all meld with what appear to be other natural forms – trees, rocks, jewellery and bone.

On the TV, a short film of two naked performers in several rural settings plays out. They are connected at the chest by by a thin rope, sewn into the skin of their sternum. They move slowly, rising and falling, their umbilical connection tensing and releasing. In one frame they are surround by horses, who gently nuzzle them. In another, the two figures rise and fall within a stable.

On the right, the large glass aquarium paints a vision of fused human and animal parts. Real live crabs and clams are housed in a mini-tank inside the aquarium, bedecked with pearls. Atop this sits a mountain of ‘stuff’, organic and inorganic, topped by a cascade of jet-black feathers – damp and silky in the light. At points a human arm emerges – blood red finger nails echo the blades that cut into flesh on projections that back the central cube.

The centrally-placed shack contains two other naked female figures (not the ones in the video, and apparently there was a male body in the ‘shack’ on other occasions). One is stripped bare, and moves sinuously across the floor. With her mouth sewn up at one point, the second figure airbrushes her body with a fine mist of what looks like fake tan. This other figure, adorned in gaudy false eye-lashes, nails and wigs, shifts between posing for the audience, manipulating or administering to her partner, and reclining to insert metallic objects and jewels into her vagina and anus. These acts are carried out without fuss, but still retain a powerful theatricality. There is a deliberate invitation to the audience to approach the work and visually savour the texture of the bodies and the other materials. The measured manner of the performers heightens the feeling that Williams’s work sets out to render the body as fleshy matter. At times it is hauntingly beautiful, at others viscerally repellant – regardless of this, though, it is an uncompromising work that is always vigorously compelling.

Cassils: Inextinguishable Fire, Burn for Portrait 2015. Photo Heather Cassils with Robin Black

Just as physically courageous as Williams’s work was the closing performance of this year’s festival. In this, the artist Cassils presented a live version of Inextinguishable Fire for the first and last time. Titled after Harun Farocki’s 1969 film, in which Farocki addresses the way the audience might respond to images of napalm burns victims, Cassils work plays out in two parts. The first section saw Cassils perform a live act of self-immolation – a ‘fullburn’ stunt. Standing on the National Theatre’s Dorfmann stage, Cassils is systematically dressed in protective clothing and then set alight for a full 14 seconds.

Three masked male figures carry out the dressing of the near-naked Cassils. The multiple layers of gel-covered, protective clothing forcing a shiver from Cassils’ naked skin. Like motor-racing pit-lane crew, they move with precision and alacrity – a kind of detached care for their subject. As the work begins, with Cassils standing naked except for a pair of briefs, it is hard to not to read the work in relation to Cassils trans identity. Such that, as Cassils endures the preparation, it feels as if it is an act of inuring the body against the forthcoming flames – a symbolic act of self-sacrifice that embodies the violence visited upon bodies that are ‘other’, whilst also acting as a bold statement of presence in front of the audience.

A short walk to an outside wall of the Royal Festival Hall, and the live event is followed by a 14-minute film. This film replays the 14-second burn, but in a slow-motion zoom-out from Cassils boiler suit-covered chest. As the camera gradually recedes from Cassils’ body, it creates a series of echoes: a masked villain in an action film; the Hollywood film The Hurt Locker; Joan of Arc at the stake; an immolated christ reaching out to his flock.

It recedes further. In the background a blood-red sky, marshmallow-clouds stained with reflected light of the flames: echoes of Platoon and Apocalypse Now spring to mind.

Still further, and the infrastructure of the film-making process becomes visible: the tracks for the camera dolly, fans blowing the flames away from Cassils’ face and then two masked figures emerging from the shadows. Their fire extinguishers drawn ready, for all intents and purposes this could be that action film – the bad guys running to gun down the hero. The CO2 gushes in strong, slow streams from the barrels of the extinguishers, washing Cassils in a white mist. It obscures this fallen figure, expunged from the landscape.

And then we are in reverse – the camera tracking back towards Cassils’ body, as Cassils slowly rises from the floor, Lazarus-like, to re-enact these previous poses. The camera tracks closer and closer, until the screen is just the white of the boiler suit again.

This shift between two states of obscuration echo Farocki’s observation that when we shut our eyes to pictures of napalm victims, ‘we close [our] eyes to the facts.’ Taken together, the live-action and the film serve as a meditation on the nature of violent images. They foreground the glamour of the image of destruction, the gloss of filmic images of war and terror, whilst at the same time revealing that these images aim to give us sensations, but not necessarily an emotional response.

As with Pacitti and Stamos’s and Lauren Jane Williams’s works Inextinguishable Fire opens a window onto heightened experiences and transformations – experiences that we can attempt to sense through their performances. These are communicated through our visceral response to the work – the way in which we take in, and respond to, the spirit of each of the works.

Interestingly, a further noticeable manifestation of the theme in some of the festival’s works is the way in which the artists set up a dialogue with times past: for Pacitti and Stamos it is the 1960s and 1990s, for Prior the 1970s, for Finley the 1980s and 90s, and for Robin Deacon the opening decades of the 21st century. In reaching back into these periods, each artist acts as a conductor (like a lightening rod) of the spirit of that time. By doing so, they allow us to understand the spirit of our own time, and the dialogues that need to be had.

Robin Deacon White Balance. Photo Chloe Pang

Featured image (top) is Lauren Jane Williams’ Here is Not the Place for Nostalgia… Photo by Manuel Vason / DARC for SPILL

SPILL Festival of Performance ran 28 October to 8 November 2015. Karen Finley’s Ribbon Gate installation continues at the Barbican until December 2015. See www.spillfestival.com for full details of all works, and also for SPILL TV, writings, and other documentation.

Circumference: Shelter Me

This atmospheric debut performance from contemporary circus company Circumference tantalisingly seeks to merge theatrical content with spectacular circus, questioning how we interact in a world of increasing ‘social networks’. Shelter Me emerges out of a significant gestation period, with early versions of the work tested during Theatre Delicatessen’s SPACED Festival (at 35 Marylebone Gardens) and during their time as associate artists of Jackson’s Lane. Also supported by National Centre for Circus Arts, Circumference are a new company that have come far in the last 18 months, producing a show on a scale far larger than many companies of similar age.

What marks this out as an innovative and intriguing performance though, is the way the company have embraced working across three floors of Theatre Delicatessen’s latest base at #119 Farringdon Road. Shelter Me is an eclectic work, made up of an array of vignettes – each with a distinctive atmosphere defined by the scenography of the different spaces it occupies throughout the old Guardian newspaper office building. What it lacks in overall cohesion and dramaturgical unity it makes up for in the richness of the individual parts.

For want of a better word, this is a search for an ‘immersive circus’ – but unlike the work of Fuerzabruta say, Circumference are able to conjure moments of intimacy between the audience and performers that conventional contemporary circus rarely achieves. At the core of this intimacy is the way the company establish an easy rapport with their audience – at times mediated by technology. Key to this are company members Nich Galzin and Aislinn Mulligan, whose interactions with the audience are both gently enlivening and reassuring.

Shelter Me opens in a ground floor split-level bar, the performers gently and amicably guiding small groups of people through a variety of activities at different times: we learn a short phrase of a song, draw ‘selfies’ on a glass window, and gradually begin to ‘help out’ with brief circus tricks. This erosion of the distance between performer and audience is key in setting up the dynamic that will play out across the rest of the evening – establishing a sense of liberty and autonomy within clearly defined parameters. The tricks in the bar become more spectacular, with performers leaping from a mezzanine or walking across up-stretched hands. The easy-going, party atmosphere shifts when the performance moves to a Chinese pole duet atop an old caravan, glimpsed through the windows of the bar.

This evocative duet is made more so by the text messages we receive on our phones, which we’ve been asked to leave on. These messages sketch out the relationship of the two performers, their real relationship we are assured. This intriguing theatrical device succeeds in shifting the work’s attention from the spectacular to the dramatic, providing a tangible glimpse behind the circus form and a very interesting way to deliver narrative content.

It is this sense of peeling back the surface that the company work to sustain throughout the work, as we wander from room to room. There’s a room transformed into a maze of white drapes and a slate grey corridor where we are pushed up against wall as Galzin sails up and down its length poised in a German wheel. Each conjures a palpable atmosphere, often embellished by the delicacy with which the company deploy their routines.

The strongest moments of Shelter Me are those moments where we become part of the action, when the audience are able to interact with routines or view it from a specific angle: six people gently laid down under a silks routine for example, or crammed into a kitchen space and tasked with making a cup of coffee together. Less successful are the spaces without a performance element – a ‘hidden’ room dressed with string and luggage labels feels half-complete, and the naive questions written on the labels need some form of mediation to move from the glib to the poetic.

In preparation for the final act (a series of strap solos and duets) the audience is paired up (again using mobile phones), and we are escorted to the roof. Here we witness the performers arc across our heads with the skyline as a backdrop. This stunning location amplifies the thrill of the routines, the sensation that we too are raised off solid ground allows us a glimpse of the kinaesthetic thrill of the aerial tricks. In this Circumference really embrace the spectacular possibilities of circus. We listen to music on wireless headphones, and strangely this brings you closer to the performance rather than distancing you. This sensation is seized on when we are invited to remove our headphones (one ear piece at a time) and sing the refrain that we have just been listening to (the one we learnt in the bar earlier). The communality of this, whilst perched atop London’s skyline, is a transcendent moment – akin to that which Fuerzabruta conjure in their works – though more reflective and melancholy in tone.

What is most satisfying about the whole of this promenade through different rooms is that the inherent fragmentary structure makes clear sense of the inherent ‘act-ness’ of circus. Instead of attempting to elide their discrete tricks the company have embraced the separation. Whilst there still needs to be more dramaturgical unity in unpicking their chosen theme, this is a lovely way to experience circus, and most pleasing in the moments that Circumference craft an atmosphere that swallows you up.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Ahnen

Running hot on the heals of Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (On the Mountain A Cry Was Heard), also at Sadler’s Wells, Ahnen continues Tanztheatre Wuppertal’s revivals of the lesser seen pieces from their repertoire of works choreographed by the late Pina Bausch. This appears to be the principle strategy as they search for a choreographer to lead the first new work since Bausch’s death in 2009.

Ahnen, though, is a delightful taste of Bausch’s output from the late 1980s, and is one of her most surreal of theatrical worlds – replete with striking visual and musical contrasts. From the opening appearance of a kilted and leather-jacketed punk, striding with brooding intent across the stage, to the final image of a fully-dressed woman floating in a glass tank, this is a piece that exemplifies the shifting intangible sensations of Bausch’s work.

As with many of Bausch’s other works, Ahnen is notable for its scenography, in this case, centred around a series of giant cacti dotted across the stage. This conjures up the sense of a vast exterior landscape, redolent of American deserts and reinforced by the use of the full depth of the stage. Figures glide upstage of the cacti, pausing half in view before moving on. The glimpses of these human figures marks them out as frail creatures striving to survive amongst the arid and inhospitable world.

In amongst this vast suggested landscape, accentuated by subtle changes in the lighting, Bausch stages small pockets of domestic interiors. Occupied by solitary figures these interiors feel divorced from the outside world. As if in a kind of stasis, their occupants gaze into the distance as they perform mundane domestic tasks – hemmed in by these actions as much as the walls of their abode. As if to underline this, the domestic chores are disrupted by absurd actions, such as the moment in which a group of men surround a woman, gently brushing her exposed skin with pieces of bread.

As if to underline the tensions between the landscape and the domestic, upstage a solitary dancer works tirelessly to fashion a house of red-brick. In vain she builds this supposedly secure shelter, even as the lack of mortar hints at its inevitable temporary nature.

Whilst the tension between internal and external worlds is a common element of Bausch’s work – indeed the disjunction between the two is one its guiding components – there is a less familiar element to Ahnen. This is particularly noticeable in the less conventional costumes, such as the silent, semi-nude male figure in pale blue cowboy boots and large white circular headdress. With these come certain echoes of the First Nations of the American landscape, and inevitably these images raise further questions. It is these questions that tie the work back to Bausch’s preoccupations, that of the history and fragility of the people who inhabit her landscapes. It is this fragility that ensures Ahnen is another of her captivating and beguiling works.

Home Sweet (Circus) Home

Ephemeral Architectures, oodles of Noodles, and anarchic magic: Thomas JW Wilson follows the circus caravan at the London International Mime Festival 2015

Returning for its 39th year, London International Mime Festival (LIMF) continues to be one of the UK’s strongest advocates for contemporary circus, programming well-established companies, such as the ever-popular Circus Ronaldo, and the ever-innovative Aurelien Bory of Compagnie 111, alongside the latest generation of emerging artists. This year has been no different, with a particularly strong showing for UK-based artists, the likes of pioneering Mime Festival regulars Gandini Juggling featuring alongside feted newcomers Barely Methodical Troupe with their Total Theatre Award winning work Bromance; Joli Vyann, presenting their latest dance-circus hybrid, Stateless; and Knights of the Invisible’s Black Regent, featuring Scottish contortionist Iona Kewney.

LIMF has also come to serve as something of a barometer of the health and direction of contemporary circus. A careful glance at the programme notes highlights the extent of pan-European collaboration that facilitates the wide range of current circus work. Paris-based Thomas Monckton is a prime example of this collaboration, his piece The Pianist supported by the powerhouse of Finnish circus Circus Aereo – a company who are adept at collaborating with circus artists of various disciplines. This is borne out by the fact that Maksim Komaro, Circus Aereo’s artistic director, also has a hand in another Mime Festival show, No Fit State’s Noodles.

NoFit State Circus NOODLES © Sean Purser

Founded in 1985, No Fit State are one of the longest-running UK contemporary circus companies. Retaining the spirit of the classical circus, ‘travelling in trucks, trailers and caravans’, they have built up an impressive history of striking and subversive performances. Their latest offering, Noodles, ‘facilitated’ by Holly Stoppit, is something of a departure for the company as they put, in their words, ‘a circus into a theatre’. In other words, they are not in their own familiar tent, but presenting in built theatre venues.

At the heart of this vibrant indoor work, as the name suggests, are an increasing array of giant ‘noodles’ made from rope of differing lengths and diameters. The five-strong cast proceed to manipulate and climb these noodles, as well as often finding themselves at the mercy of particularly disobedient groups of noodles. Noodles is essentially a fusion of object play and classical circus disciplines, including cloud swing, tight rope, hand-balancing, clown characters and magic, amongst others.

The most engaging sections of Noodles are those which emerge out of the magic tricks or Ilona Jäntti’s aerial choreography – particularly a robust and well-paced aerial quartet, set on five overlapping cloud swings at the back of the stage. The close-proximity magic is ably executed by Miguel Munoz Segura and has some genuine surprises.

All five performers work the crowd hard, but the scale and pitch of the broad clown characterisations doesn’t quite fit the intimacy that a theatre space like Jacksons Lane creates. Playing at this scale, these clowns need more vulnerability and a little more subtlety. Noodles might also well benefit from a younger audience than the night I saw it, as well as a tighter running time.

OKTOBRE © Daniel Michelon

Magic, or rather misdirection, is also a central feature of newcomer Oktobre’s eponymous first show. Set in a darkly surreal world, Oktobre sees a series of striking and inventive vignettes that, when played together, construct their own dislocated logic. These vignettes are often populated by disobedient objects: a red balloon that moves of its own accord; small red balls that appear and disappear, to the frustration of a seated figure; and an acro-balancer unable to control his own body, leading to a growing sense of an unstable and shifting world. All of this anarchy is absolutely precisely executed by the four prodigiously skilled performers, their physical plasticity allied with the meticulously controlled staging, contributing to an unstable and shifting world.

Eva Ordonez Benedetto’s static trapeze sequence creates a marvellously tantalising and palpable sense of danger. Composed of a series of slow and purposeful movements Ordonez Benedetto conjures a sense of her painful obedience to an unseen force. This hinges on her apparent ability to defy the rules of gravity, particularly in the moment when she moves from hanging from the bar by her knees to hanging from the backs of her ankles, slowly and meticulously sliding down the backs of her calves. It is astonishing moments like these that appear throughout Oktobre, moments in which technique is artfully married to dramaturgy.

Another richly rewarding element of Oktobre, which was less present in Noodles, is the harmony the performers achieve with each other, fusing their varied disciplines through deftly pitched personas. Eva Ordonez Benedetto’s austerely commanding presence is a well-judged foil to the confused, and harassed Yann Frisch, whilst Jonathan Frau flips and capers with an urgent sense of foreboding.

At points Oktobre plays with Marx’s oft-quoted observation that history repeats itself ‘the first as tragedy, the second as farce’, with the company replaying earlier images and sequences several times, each subsequent time further distorted and comic. These comic elements though retain the dark and foreboding ambience the company have crafted. This results in Oktobre‘s genuinely surprising and captivating quality, reinforced by the performers ability to shift easily between brooding poise and anarchic activity.

Gandini Juggling: 4 x 4 Ephemeral Architectures

Sharing the technical precision of Oktobre, but staging a markedly different kind of work, is another of the UK’s longest standing, most prolific and innovative circus companies, Gandini Juggling. 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures is the newest of Gandini Juggling’s creations and sees them exploring the possibilities to be had in blending ballet and circus. With 4 ballet dancers and 4 jugglers, backed by a string quintet from Camerata Alma Viva, 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures crafts a dizzyingly interplay between thrown objects, dancing bodies and the shifting rhythms of Nimrod Borenstein’s score. Working in partnership with choreographer and ex-Royal Ballet dancer Ludovic Ondiviela, Gandini Juggling return to many of the concerns of their early work – a rigorously technical deconstruction of dance and juggling, fusing this with Sean Gandini’s precise and adventurous mathematically-driven patterns. This time, though, their interest is not in the creation of a hybrid vocabulary, part-juggling, part-dance, but rather an exploration of two vocabularies; Ondiviela’s choreography retaining a clear degree of separation from Gandini’s patterns. Thus the dancers carve punching and arcing positions in space in response to the juggling patterns, or gracefully and stridently spring through the pathways of the flying objects.

In crafting the juggling patterns, Sean Gandini has drawn on several of the motifs that Gandini Juggling have created over the course of the last two decades. Utilising, in turn, the three classic juggling props (balls, rings, clubs), the patterns are, in effect, offers to the dancers to respond. An arcing four-person, multi-ring, passing pattern creates three ‘archways’ parallel to the audience. Behind these archways the dancers move in short bursts to strike poses that echo the trajectory of the airborne rings. This visual harmony is one of the chief pleasures of 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures.

The invitation for one artform to respond to the other is at the heart of the work, and is most explicitly stated in juggler Owen Reynolds’ question to the audience: ‘Is it possible to dance whilst the ball in the air’, to which the sylph-like dancer Kate Bryne answers with fragments of popular dance as Reynolds tosses one ball high into the air. The air of humour this generates is a vital part of Gandini Juggling’s work, and arises and recedes throughout 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures – tempering the more austere and complex moments.

There is, though, an increasingly darker side to Gandini Juggling’s work, and in 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures this emerges in a driving, impassioned and arresting duet between anarchic juggler Sakari Männistö and dancer Erin O’Toole, whose steely calmness works to gradually reel Männistö in before ‘clipping his wings’. This moment is one of a number of small flashes of images of narrative that Ondiviela inserts into the work – like the humour ensuring that 4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures is not just an experiment in form.

Despite Gandini Juggling’s initial intention to keep the two vocabularies distinct, there are still moments where the dancers juggle and the jugglers dance – their roles blurring. This is exemplified in the section titled ‘Yellow Yellow’ where a 20-move, three-ball juggling sequence is divided amongst the seven other members of the company, grouped together centre stage and each one throwing one ball. At the same time, using three different coloured balls, Kati Ylä-Hokkala juggles the same pattern in its entirety downstage left. As the septet throw their individual balls (or not) they variously call the colours of the balls that Ylä-Hokkala throws. This mathematically complex and visually striking motif gradually expands as the septet add lunges, lifts and jumps to their score, creating a living and breathing architecture that swells beyond the physical space it occupies. This architecture though is not just a visual and spatial one, but also has its own rhythmic musicality – a musicality that gives juggling, like dance, its life.

It is the moments of overlap between dance and juggling that Gandini Juggling’s thesis that the two artforms share the same core principles is most evident. Gandini’s assertion, that this can be seen even in the most prosaic of facts that both sets of artists must ‘count’ the beats of their performance with a ferocious precision, only hints at the very beginnings of the richness of this collaboration.

Lonely Circus: Fall, Fell, Fallen © Philippe Laurençon

A different form of cross-discipline collaboration is the basis of Lonely Circus’s Fall, Fell, Fallen. This slow-moving and atmospheric work sees acro-balancer Sébastien Le Guen’s precise, shifting poses set in dialogue with Jérôme Hoffman’s electro-acoustic soundscapes. Where Gandini Juggling’s dialogue is richly nuanced, Hoffman and Le Geun’s is rather more concentrated.

Fall, Fell, Fallen is a series of short vignettes – interrupted, driven and shaped by Hoffman’s electronic compositions. These vignettes are slickly composed, and visually striking, but they lack a clear sense of development and it is never quite clear what their payoff is. Although at times Le Guen falls, impressively so too, the implications of these moments aren’t clear. There are moments, though, where the sound and action become greater than the sum of the parts. First is a playful tense sequence in which Le Guen ‘plays’ a tight rope rigged to an amplifier. As Le Guen strikes and slides his feet across the rope, it feels like he is ‘jamming’ with Hoffman, who darts around his amplifiers, striking at different buttons and twiddling different knobs. This moment of heightened animation is unforced: Le Guen teetering and darting back and forth across his rope – agile, poised and risking missing the beat.

The second moment where Fall, Fell, Fallen transcends the two disciplines is close to the end of the show. With one end of a plank of wood resting on the floor, and one attached by a cable to the ceiling, Le Guen, ‘surfs’ the inclined plank – the plank pivoting and swinging in response to the pressure of Le Guen’s feet. In this moment, Le Guen’s stately quality makes perfect sense and Fall, Fell, Fallen finds a poetic register: Le Guen alone with and against the physics of his art.

It is these moments, when technique and dramaturgy combine, that circus is transported into something greater than the sum of its parts, making us aware of the power of the form. And as the supporter of so much groundbreaking work, LIMF has established itself as the natural home for contemporary circus, in all its diversity.

That contemporary circus continues to embrace such an astonishing array of performance practices and collaborations, as witnessed at the London International Mime Festival 2015, also marks out the form’s rude health.

Thomas JM Wilson saw the following shows at the London International Mime Festival 2015:

No Fit State Circus: Noodles, Jacksons Lane

Oktobre, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre

Gandini Juggling’s 4×4: Ephemeral Architectures, Linbury Studio, ROH

Lonely Circus: Fall, Fell, Fallen, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre.

Featured image (top of page): Gandini Juggling’s 4×4: Ephemeral Architectures. Photo Beinn Muir.

Spring 2015 will see the release of Thomas JM Wilson’s book on the history of Gandini Juggling company.

Shunt: The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face

Since moving out of the Arches at London Bridge to make way for the Shard, the performance collective Shunt have continued making large scale-works in different found spaces, often playing with immersing the audience into a series of environments. With The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face though, they have less taken over a found space and rather built their own on the Greenwich Peninsula. The Jetty, as this new venue is called, is perched on the edge of the south bank of the Thames, and it is this location that provides much of the context for this labyrinth-like show, creating a space that feels on the edge – of both society and time.

Built from an assortment of shipping containers welded together, this pop-up venue’s ramshackle furnishings jar against the looming presence of the adjoining Emirate Airline, the sleek cable cars that span the Thames. The view from the water’s edge embraces both the O2 Dome and the grubby industrial buildings on the north bank. Positioned in this no-man’s-land between hypermodern entertainment, industrial landscapes, and the timeless murky river, there is a sense that the world we inhabit is a liminal space, excluded from society, and left to fabricate our own world.

The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face is a brief experience, no more than 40 minutes. The audience is thrust into the darkness of the first container barefoot and clutching their shoes in a shoebox. Initially disorientating, what follows is a sequence of theatrical vignettes, as you progress from container to container. Each vignette is mediated by a solitary figure, all differently attired but clad in the same prosthetic mask. The blankness of this mask renders these figures bizarrely vacant, ciphers rather than characters, suggesting the anonymity of these inhabitants who have abandoned their individuality.

The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face clearly suggests that the audience are refugee-like, wandering from dingy back-room club to desolate landscape and to interrogation room. This resonance is made more acute given the recent discovery of 35 Sikh refugees in a shipping container at Tilbury Docks. By placing the audience in this position there is a clear attempt to open up our proximity to these experiences. To get us to recognise that we are literally only a few steps removed from the unseen world of those who are trying to find safety by braving illicit journeys across seas and national borders.

There are moments of surprise, and bold performances from the performers you meet on the journey. The brevity of the work is both a strength and an issue – the rapidity with which the audience are moved through the spaces begins to foster an unsettling sense of the uncertainty of these journeys. However, the individual environments themselves don’t quite reach enough intensity to capitalise on our kinaesthetic experience of this immersion.

The final vignette though, with the audience stood atop the containers enjoying a panoramic view of the Thames and listening to the haunting strains of guitar and voice, provides a kinaesthetic sensation of the liminal. It is here, in this moment, that it is clearest that in our daily lives we do not notice the real world.