A tale of love and luck told with dolls and toy vehicles, Ulysses for children featuring pop-up books and paper cuts, and a deconstructed King Lear replete with puppets and projections. Then, there’s a beatnik poet pickled onion, a story featuring animated lesbian vampire bunnies, and a crisp-stealing flock of birds. Some of the visual theatre treats seen by Dorothy Max Prior at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 

Visible Fictions’ show Up – presented at Gilded Balloon, and aimed at a teen and young adult audience – is a breathless two-hander exploring luck and love, the odds of surviving a plane crash, and Heraclitus’ Union of Opposites. As the piece starts, we encounter two people who find themselves sitting next to each other on a long-haul flight. One, Jay, is the luckiest man in the world – as a baby, he was the only survivor of a plane crash that killed his parents, subsequently got supported by an anonymous benefactor, became a trader who made a million, and has now quit to tour the world. Jayme, on the other hand, is also an orphan, raised by her granny – but has encountered bad luck at every step of the way, her mournful history of trips and falls, bangs and crashes, and tragical lost loves relayed with sharp humour.

Blending new writing, physical theatre, and object manipulation, the piece is skillfully directed by Duggie Irvine, and performed with enormous precision and feeling by the two actors, Zoe Hunter and Michael Dylan, who have a fabulous on-stage complicity, fielding a dizzyingly complex choreography of tiny figures and vehicles, toy animals, dolls, suitcases, umbrellas, balloons, cakes, wine glasses, playing cards, and photographs. Phew, it is exhausting just watching them!

Some of those suitcases turn out to have tiny worlds inside – from Hawaiian volcanoes to the elusive Loch Ness Monster. Unlucky Jayme and Lucky Jay’s life stories unfold in between scenes of plane turbulence (and worse), performed with excellent physical theatre timing and panache; and tongue-in-cheek whiteboard lectures on airplane safety statistics, speculation on what is actually meant by ‘good’ and ‘bad luck, and that crucial theory of the Union of Opposites. What goes up, must come down. But what comes down must also go up…

A refreshingly ambiguous story that gives no trite answers to conundrums posed, and offers us numerous possible endings to the tale – but it is clear that whatever the outcome for our two protagonists, love trumps death.

Meanwhile, over at Pleasance Courtyard, Branar’s You’ll See offers us James Joyce’s Ulysses for children. Really? In under an hour? Yes, really! Solo performer Helen Gregg pulls it off with the help of three beautifully designed pop-up books (the story’s told in three parts, naturally) and a whole ensemble of paper-cut people, plus a lovely little mechanical diorama, which gives us the passing streets of the city as Paddy Digram’s funeral carriage passes slowly by. There’s a great soundtrack of waltzes and found-sounds of Dublin streets, bars and sea shores; and Helen Gregg delivers it all in a very deft and welcoming storytelling mode that manages to convey the essence of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom’s 24-hour odyssey without ever talking down to the young ’uns. 

As the piece proceeds, we learn that ’‘Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves’.

The pop-up books are truly a thing of beauty, giving us gorgeous representations of key sites in the book. Thus, we encounter the start of the story, the dawn of 16 June 1904, with Stephen Dedalus on Sandycove Strand, musing on the ‘snot green sea’ – one of many inclusions of tiny snippets of Joyce’s text into the piece. The children in the audience enjoy Stephen taking a wee, then picking his nose and depositing a bogy on the rocks. We move into town, passing through the National Library, the Freeman’s Journal offices and printing press, and Davy Byrne’s pub. Switching to Leopold and Molly Bloom’s stories, we enter their house on Eccles Street; the butcher’s shop where ‘Mr Leopold Bloom [who] ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls buys his breakfast pork kidney’; Sweeny’s Pharmacy, where Bloom purchases lemon soap for Molly; and the Post Office, where the content of the letters Leopold has been exchanging with a lady friend are brushed over nicely by our storyteller, who tells us that ‘we’ll have to miss some things out of the story as we haven’t time, and this is one of them’ – with an ironic nod to the adults in the audience. 

Of course, this is just a taster of Joyce’s Ulysses – but is it an enjoyable one, and does it make us want to read (or re-read) the book? Yes, yes, and yes!

Another Irish company – this time an ensemble – and a retelling of a very different sort can be found at The Traverse, where Irish playwright and filmmaker Dan Colley’s Lost Lear plays out as a deconstructed, reimagined version of Shakespeare’s King Lear – or perhaps, more precisely, the production uses Lear as a springboard for a meta-theatrical exploration of a whole host of ‘difficult subjects’ including dementia, absent parent-neglected child dynamics, honouring the needs of ‘the child within’, setting relationship boundaries…  

‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ We start in a rehearsal studio, where a young actress (played by Venetia Bowe) is working through her preparations for her exciting new role – she’s to play King Lear. The first big twist of the story comes early (so I feel OK about this revelation), as we discover that in fact we are inside a nursing home, and what we are witnessing is an elderly dementia patient, Joy, engaged in a Groundhog-day series of rehearsals for a production of King Lear that will never happen. Her director and co-actor Liam – who is in fact her therapist (played by Manus Halligan) – explains to Conor, her estranged son come to visit (played by Peter Daly), that this charade is vital to preserve her sense of self-worth. Imagined as a foil to the female Lear, the son has been cast as Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia in the latest ‘rehearsal’. Conor is not convinced. As the play progresses, the difficult history of Joy and Conor’s relationship is unearthed.  

The cast are all great. I especially like Peter Daly as Conor – played with fantastic subtlety, a powerhouse of shifting emotions. That Joy is played by a young woman – and her rather over-the-top stage presence – seems odd at first, but all makes complete sense as the story unfolds. It is a visually rich show, with  puppetry, projections and live-feed video playing a vital part in the piece. The two puppeteers, Em Ormonde and Clodagh O’Farrell, do a sterling job, not just with the large-scale puppet when it eventually appears, but in ‘puppeteering’ Venetia-as-Joy, and the space itself with (for example) hand-held fans creating the ‘winds that blow’.

A thought-provoking show broaching difficult subjects – and a clever dramaturgy, with the reveals coming slowly but surely as the piece progresses, until eventually the jigsaw puzzle is completed. And what a joy to see a big, bold stage design (courtesy of Andrew Clancy and the rest of the design, film, costume, AV, sound and lighting team) and a five-strong ensemble onstage. So many of this year’s Fringe shows, even at the Traverse, seem to be one-person shows. 

But one person can populate the stage with a whole array of wonderful characters, for sure. Take Ruxy Cantir’s Pickled Republic, for example – a fabulously absurdist piece, in which we are invited into a world of vegetables sat inside a pickle jar. 

We meet a melodramatic tomato (‘Eat me! Eat me!’), a crooning potato-head burlesque queen, a Beatnik poet silverskin onion who delivers killer one-liners like ‘I have layers’ and ‘I’ll make you cry’; and a breastfed baby carrot with a melancholic penchant for sludge. Plus, best of all, a trance-dancing, strip-teasing pickled cucumber mime artist trying to get out of aforementioned glass jar.

If I have a quibble, it’s perhaps to wonder if potatoes and tomatoes do get pickled. Perhaps they do! But never mind – this is a great show. Surreal clowning, puppetry and mask – performed with panache by Ruxi Cantir; directed by Total Theatre Award winning puppeteer Shona Reppe. Totally batty, totally fabulous physical comedy. My kind of funny, for sure…

I had high hopes of Surreally Good by Scott Turnbull. We are promised ‘live lo-fi animations on an old overhead projector, catchy songs played badly on a miniature Casio Keyboard, and a series of unexpectedly tender moments’ and yes – all of this happens, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. On the ‘minus’ side, I find the framing device of an ‘edu-tainment’ lecture by the son of a famous projectionist wears thin after a while, and whilst the arts funding bodies’ obsession with ‘youth engagement’ and ‘the environment’ does deserve to be mocked, the send-ups here don’t quite hit the mark. The songs are awful – not funny awful, just plain awful. He says ‘fuck’ a lot, as if it were something naughty and alternative, rather than the bog-standard go-to of every emerging Fringe comedian – which gets tiresome. But comedy is a funny thing – one man’s meat is another woman’s poison, and I just didn’t find the show funny a lot of the time. 

But now for the plusses. I like a lot of the visual art/theatre work. I enjoy the Tony Hart-Vision On audience portrait drawing scene. The use of the OHP is great – in-character one-man-band fumbling and all. The little stories within the story, featuring some very lovely hand-drawn and live-animated illustrations, colour acetates, and shadow-puppetry silhouettes are great. I especially like the lesbian vampire bunnies story; and the drowned dog wearing glasses is great. When the ‘how my dad met my mum’ story – threatening to be told at various points in the show – finally comes, via the OHP, it is worth the wait, a wonderfully tall tale of life at sea. 

So, some very lovely things in here, but it feels as though the artist/performer has thrown all his eggs into one basket to make this show, and it is not quite working for me, although the Summerhall audience were laughing merrily. And we were given badges, always welcome – even if it’s not a Blue Peter badge (one of very many BBC TV and radio show references in the show!). For me, the visual theatre and animation aspects of the piece were the most interesting element. I’d happily see those lovely little illustrated stories framed in a simpler way…  there’s a great show in here trying to find its way out.

Finally, renowned Scottish family theatre company Red Bridge Arts celebrated its 10th anniversary with the UK and European premiere of Pekku at Zoo Southside, as part of the Made in Scotland Showcase. Created as a co-production with Japan’s ROHM Theatre in Kyoto and Ricca Ricca Festival, Pekku has already delighted audiences throughout Japan – the show is word-free, and a physical and visual delight, so crosses boundaries with ease. It’s devised by award-winning children’s theatre artists Andy Manley, Ian Cameron, and Shona Reppe – the award-winning team behind the Total Theatre Award winning show White. 

Pekku ‘takes a playful look at what happens when you just want to be left alone and others have a very different idea’. It is aimed at 3 to 6-year-olds, so I brought 4-year-old Juno and 6-year-old Saorsa with me… 

The solo performer is the highly talented Andy Manley – such a lovely, gentle clown presence, who the children warmed to immediately. From the start, we know we are in a safe pair of hands. The stage is set with just two ‘washing lines’ stretched across the performance space. Andy appears flapping like a giant bird in a big yellow-green garment that turns out – once he has disentangled himself from it – to be a tent. Somehow, from within the tent, or inside a small brown suitcase he is holding, the following objects materialise: a small table, a chair, a toilet roll on a dispenser, a red flag, a bat (and imaginary ball!), and a packet of crisps. Meanwhile, on the washing line, we see a little yellow bird – a peg, but we immediately believe it is a bird when it starts to chirp. There then ensues an escalating battle between man and bird – or birds, as more and more arrive – over those tasty crisps. Crisps eaten, Andy calls Deliveroo and orders more… and more… and more…

It’s a totally delightful story, told through visual imagery, physical action, and a terrific soundtrack of cheeps, squealing tyres, delivery van honks, and the loud crunching of crisps. We all have our favourite moments, but agree that the birdie disco inside the tent is truly terrific. Oh, and I said it was word free but my young companions remind me that there is one word: “shoo!”. And the girls have a theory about the character Andy is playing: he’s not a man, but a big bird, called Pekku, who disguised himself as a man! And who knows, perhaps they are right. 

Such a great show to see on my final day in Edinburgh for this year’s Fringe – ticks all the total theatre boxes brilliantly!

Featured image (top): Ruxandra Cantir: Pickled Republic

Visible Fictions: Up, Gilded Balloon at 5.40pm

Branar: You’ll See, Pleasance Courtyard at 12.00

Ruxandra Cantir: Pickled Republic, Summerhall at 1.15pm 

Dan Colley: Lost Lear, Traverse, various times

Scott Turnbull: Surreally Good, Summerhall, 11.35

Red Bridge Arts: Pekku, Zoo Southside  1–9 August 2025

For more information or to book shows, see www.edfringe.com 

Dorothy Max Prior reports on the São Paulo Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025

Stepladders and big steel bins painted yellow and red that are converted into trolley buses, trains and planes; hats sprouting bananas and flower pots; reversible jackets, big shoes, and prosthetic noses… This is classic clowning of the sort that seems to be done so well by Brazilian companies – and The Mequetrefo (aka The Scoundrel) is a prime example. It is a four-man show presented by leading clown company Parlapatões who are based in central São Paulo and have toured extensively both in Brazil and across the world for the past 30 years. 

The Mequetrefo is billed as a show for all the family, but I would view the age guideline of 3+ as optimistic. These clowns are a little scary! Within the first five minutes of the show, at least two pre-schoolers have started sobbing and need to be escorted out from the auditorium – always a sign of a good clown show, in my experience. Meanwhile, the seven-year-olds and their parents are howling with laughter as the four clowns – all called Day –  run through their absurd daily routines. It is no coincidence that Beckett wanted Vladmir and Estragon, in Waiting For Godot, to be played by vaudevillian clowns – clowns perfectly mirror our human fears and foibles back to us – but whereas Beckett’s clowns spend all day doing nothing but waiting, this lot don’t get a moment’s rest in their busy day.

To a soundtrack of electro-swing Charlestons and Gypsy Jazz classics – fortified by the sounds of buzzers, bells and sirens – our four Days create a sometimes elegant often anarchic choreography of beatings with rubber mallets, formation dancing in and out of their jackets, taking showers with water pistols, and aping the monkeys in the zoo cage constructed with those ever-versatile stepladders. There is talking, in broken English, that works mostly – although some gags are lost in translation a little, and when the ensemble move into banter in their native Portuguese, the spoken text immediately springs to life. I think they could allow themselves more Portuguese or even Commedia dell’Arte style grammelot, in to the verbal mix. 

The visual and physical elements are top-notch. As well as all those breathless transformations of aforementioned stepladders, there’s a fabulous ‘humanette’ puppetry scene; a spooky ‘upside-down face becomes puppet’ moment; and a wonderful rocket launch using a steel can and an umbrella, to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra. The sound and lighting design is excellent, and despite the height restrictions of the Underbelly Fresian venue almost cramping their style, the show moves along at a great pace, these seasoned performers never missing a cue.  

 Over at the beautiful Bijou Spiegeltent, sited outside the Assembly Rooms, Brazilian actor and one-time restaurant owner Eduardo Estrela of Cia La Troupe leads an immersive storytelling show, What’s In The Kitchen, which celebrates the range and regional diversity of Brazilian cuisine. As we are welcomed in to the space, given a ginger-flavoured shot of cachaça and a lunch bag of numbered goodies that we are asked not to open until told, the space fills with the sound of classic Samba and Bossa Nova – ‘Girl from Ipanema’, ‘Mais Que Nada’ and more…

Eduardo is a relaxed and convivial host, drawing parallels between the life of an actor and the life of a restaurant owner: both work when other people have time off; and in both cases, the show must go on, regardless.We learn that the enormous diversity of cuisines in Brazil is down to the influx of migrants – whether that’s the forced migration of the slave trade, bringing African influences to the North East region of Bahia; the enormous São Paulo Japanese community, which is the biggest outside of Japan; or the spread of Italian families throughout the south and south-east of Brazil.

Throughout the piece, Edaurdo alternates between narrator/storyteller mode and character actor. Behind him is an old-fashioned wooden coat rack, and the different characters are brought to life by the donning of a few simple articles of clothing, the transformations taking place quickly and simply, in front of the audience. Thus, we meet TV cook Ricki (silver lurex jacket and extravagant gestures); working-class Bahian chef Genésio (white chef’s jacket and black headcovering, serious demeanour with dedication to the job at hand); and the wonderful Teresa, matriarch of a large Italian-Brazilian family (simple red apron, a heart full of love and lively stories). Each character takes up the baton of an ongoing cooking project: first, a bowl of dough – which prompts Eduardo to marvel at the magical transformation that is undergone when flour is mixed with water and salt. A miracle, no less! TV cook Ricki introduces a couple of famous chefs (little mannequins) who share their experiences and bon mots. Then, the dough is rolled out on to the table and Genésio gives us his life story, from impoverished and hungry orphan, to cooking for a rich family, astonished by how much food they have in their larder; and eventually running a restaurant kitchen. Finally, the dough is cut into tagliatelle ribbons and hung to dry, as Teresa tells us of her joy in cooking for the whole family every Sunday. Meanwhile, each time we return to storyteller Eduardo, a bell is rung (Pavlov’s dogs respond!) and we are allowed to open up another small package of food – for example, item 2 is a little marshmallow and a home-baked savoury cracker, demonstrating the balance between the tastes of sweet and umami.   

What’s in the Kitchen joins a noble tradition of Edinburgh Fringe shows based around cooking and eating – see, for example, the 2024 Total Theatre article Soul Food. Eduardo Estrela’s take on it all is a very welcome addition – an interesting speculation on Brazil’s history and culture, as determined by its cuisine; an adventure for the senses provoking much food for thought.

Meanwhile, over at Dance Base, the São José dos Campos Dance Company and internationally renowned choreographer Lili de Grammont present a dance-theatre double bill, Voyeur / Samba and Love. The first piece, as the title might imply, is about ‘the gaze’. As we enter the space, we see five chairs placed in a diagonal line across the black vinyl dancefloor. Each chair is occupied, and as we walk past and take our seats, we feel the eyes watching us. The house lights dim, and two more figures enter the space. There follows a clever play on watching and being watched; performing and witnessing. At times, it all seems benign – rather like a session of Authentic Movement, in which movers are witnessed supportively by non-movers. At other times, it feels more ominous – for example, as the chairs are moved into a circle, and a couple enact a physically strenuous power struggle that (to my mind, anyway, knowing that they are from São Paulo) seems to have echoes of the Baile Funk dancing that sees girls subjected to some pretty aggressive moves. The choreography of the chairs is really lovely – at one point, a chair sits alone centre-stage, illuminated by a single violet light. The piece mixes duets and ensemble work. There’s a great scene set in traverse, with some of the company shining hand-held spotlights onto two dancing couples, creating a four-way medley of beams that the dancers move in and out of, shadows cast on the walls, whilst the sound of a projector ticks over.

Talking of sound: the second piece, Samba & Love, is inspired by Brazilian musical giant, Chico Buarque. The brilliant soundtrack, by film composer Antônio Pinto, best known for his collaborations with British filmmaker Asif Kapadia (on films such as Amy and Diego Maradona) deconstructs Chico Buarque’s samba and bossa nova classics – slowing down, adding in, and mulching with found sounds; here, a bird song, there a cuica or cowbell. The ensemble form a samba roda or circle, with different pairs – male and female, or all-male or all-female – moving in to the centre, capoeira style, to battle out their moves; or in a humorous scene set on an inflatable sofa, they play out a therapy session to a background of the collaged city sounds of horns, sirens and revved motorbikes. Then, there’s a really excellent scene as a couple fight, a table and two chairs their battlefield, the rest of the ensemble ‘puppeteering’ the scene by moving furniture and bodies around the space, a batucada beat building…

Two very different dance-theatre pieces, both excellent – cleverly choreographed and performed with great gusto and enormous skill. A great addition to the São Paulo Showcase programme.

These were the shows that I managed to catch in the first week of the Edinburgh Fringe. There were others that I would have liked to have seen, but couldn’t fit in to the schedule – a full list follows, for anybody interested.

There seemed to be a rich and varied selection of work presented, although I would have liked to see some circus and some experimental live art/performance in the mix – next time, hopefully! And some big São Paulo theatre names were surprisingly missing, most obviously São Paulo-Campinas based legends Lume Teatro, who make work of many types and scales; and it would have been good to see the long-established ParaladosanjoS, whose work spans circus, physical theatre and site-responsive genres, in the programme. But perhaps they’ll come another time – it would be great if this showcase could become a regular fixture at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As it is, this year’s programme is a great start to what hopefully will be an ongoing collaboration.

São Paulo Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 – full programme

Another Sight by Blind Theater (Teatro Cego) and C3 Cultural Projects 1 – 24 August @ Zoo Playground, 20.45

Cheese and Guava or Romeo and Juliet by Cênica 31 July – 25 August @ Summerhall, 10.35 

Honest Fraud by Fundo Falso 30 July – 25 August @ Underbelly, Bristo Square, 16.40

The Mequetrefo by Parlapatões 30 July – 10 August @ Underbelly, Bristo Square, 11.20

Double Bill: Voyeur / Samba and Love by São José dos Campos Dance Company and Lili de Grammont 31 July – 24 August @ Assembly, Dance Base, 13.00

What’s In The Kitchen by Cia La Troupe 31 July – 23 August @ Assembly Rooms, Bijou, 14.10

Supported by São Paulo State Secretariat of Culture, Economy and Creative Industries, in association with InvestSP and Consulado-Geral do Brasil em Edimburgo, and produced by Associação Paulista dos Amigos da Arte. 

As Kamchàtka’s Fugit comes to IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2025, Dorothy Max Prior speaks to founder member and co-director Gary Shochat about the company’s extraordinary body of site-specific and outdoor theatre work, and the creation of this and other shows

I’m on a beach in Great Yarmouth, on the first day of Out There Festival, awaiting the start of Kamchàtka. There’s a murmur moving through the crowd, and heads turn towards the sea. We see a horizontal line of people, dressed in drab clothes of an indeterminate time or fashion, each clutching a small suitcase. A hush falls. It is hard not to immediately think of the very many heartbreaking stories of people arriving on beaches, seeking asylum. Especially here, in a town that has recently voted in a Reform MP vowing to ‘stop the boats’.

The group of eight – six men and two women – move slowly and silently towards us, communicating just with glances and small gestures. A rope is pulled across the sand, and we are ushered wordlessly across or under the rope, away from the promenade. The eight-strong ensemble are insistent and determined – although never a word is spoken. They seem to communicate with each other by telepathy! People trying to sit out on a bench are offered a hand up and escorted across the ‘border’. There are stand-offs with groups of teenagers, some of whom eventually succumb; some of whom run away. Two company members lift a pram (with a baby still in it) over the rope, the parents trusting all will be OK. And it is – the utmost care is taken.  Eventually, absolutely everybody in sight has crossed the rope border.

The action then moves to the street. Suitcases are piled up on the pavement; audience members have their bags taken and added to the pile, before being invited in to join the action, climbing on street furniture or lying on the ground. 

Bags returned to their owners, the group of eight move on to the road, stepping in front of cars to try to stop them, climbing onto a bus, and when the Dotto tourist train approaches, trying to hitch a lift. Cars and buses hoot, drivers shout out. The Dotto train driver joins in the joke at first, then tires of the game and tries to move on, but the company aren’t having it, sitting on the front, and clambering on the roof, joining passengers in the open carriage. It’s an amusing moment, but I’m also thinking of the terrible tales of Central American migrants who risk life and limb (literally, many lose lives and many lose limbs) riding the notorious La Bestia train through Mexico in the hope of reaching the USA.

Kamchàtka, made by the Catalan company of the same name,is an extraordinary piece of work which I’ve seen three times in three different locations – and each time it is completely different, but always sparking an uneasy mix of laughter-inducing tableau and poignant commentary on our attitudes to the eternal and ongoing story of human migration.

Speaking to company member Gary Shochat – first in person at the Circostrada FRESH Streets conference in Great Yarmouth, and later via email – I learn how the Kamchàtka collective came into being, and what has led to them staying together for two decades, creating such an extraordinary and exciting body of site-specific and street theatre work, with an appearance coming up soon at IF: Milton Keynes International Festival (July 2025) for the UK premiere of Fugit. 

Most of the members of the company met for the first time in Barcelona in 2006, at a street theatre workshop led by Adrian Schvarzstein. The workshop ended with a final improvisation session on the street, wearing suits and carrying suitcases. Following this experience, some of the people who had participated in the workshop started meeting on a weekly basis to train and to continue improvising in public space together. (And we can note that nowadays the company run their own Migrar street theatre workshops.)

‘We were people with quite different backgrounds,’ says Gary. ‘Some of us were immigrants who had recently arrived in Barcelona; some of us had day jobs; some had considerable experience as performers, story-tellers, clowns or puppeteers. But what made us stick together and continue meeting regularly was our common interest in performing in public space, our need to delve into the subject of immigration and its significance on a personal and social level and, most importantly, a sense that we were discovering a new form of collaborative theatrical work where the power of the piece and the fluidity of improvisation really depended on teamwork and generosity, without the use of words.’

Through these training and improvisation sessions, they started developing a unique theatrical language which was inherently collaborative and which ‘depended not only on our curiosity but also on our ability to be generous, ego-less, and patient when faced with real-life situations’. Less a specific theatrical technique than a process of developing the awareness, discipline and trust required to improvise as a group. As some of the members of the training group were already seasoned performers, friends and colleagues often came to see them as they improvised on the streets of Barcelona and unexpectedly they were invited by an acquaintance to perform in a festival he was organising in a village not too far from Barcelona.

‘Suddenly, we had to create a show,’ says Gary. ‘We had to decide on a name, the length of the show, how many people would perform each time. We were over 15 people in the group at the time so deciding that the show included only 8 performers was not an easy task.’

Nearly 20 years have gone by since they met and started working together, but the group still functions as a collective and their shows are led by the same principles which had fascinated them and brought them together all these years ago.

That first Kamchàtka show continues to be booked by Outdoor Arts festivals worldwide. It remains, as Gary puts it ‘highly relevant in terms of its subject matter: examining our collective ways of seeing and reacting to the other is always relevant and fascinating, but furthermore, the decisive importance human migration has had in forging our culture has become more and more evident in this media-frenzied world so a lot of people can still easily identify with our timeless and generic immigrant image. 

‘The fact that we do not speak also helps underline a message which I think is deeper and more universal as years go by and keeps fascinating the public. Most importantly, I think the main reason for the long life of the show is due to its improvisational essence which requires us to be very alert and reactive even after all these years: even after being performed more the 650 times the show maintains a sense of freshness which is hard to find in other shows which have such a long trajectory.’

The sense of risk taken as they hit the street, without really knowing what will happen next, is what gives Kamchàtka such an edge: ‘We make a point not to discuss the space we are performing in pre-show and usually don’t even see the space in advance so we really have to react to real stimulation and situations in real time, and put all the weight of our presence on the here and now. Unlike many other improv forms, we are not improvising just in order to entertain our audience, but rather in order to make sense of the world (a sense which is at times endearing and at times absurd), and in order to act and react to the real world which surrounds both us and the audience. This makes every show different and timely.’

At a panel discussion in Great Yarmouth Gary talked about creating work in a site-responsive way, encountering the ‘past, present and future’ of a place. In our email exchange afterwards, I ask him to elaborate. 

‘This sense of placemaking comes first and foremost by the nature of how we use public and private spaces in our different shows: we truly observe the space we are in and adapt to it according to its nature, regardless of whether the show is an improvised show, where we have to observe the space, or a site-specific show, which has set scenes which we customise to the different spaces we are offered or find when location scouting. We always consider the space, observe it, explore it, react to its nature and interact with what is happening in it in real time.’

Gary speaks of creating ‘visual and emotional souvenirs’ which are shared with the public they are with – whether they be ticket holders or passers-by – and which later affect the way these spaces are viewed and experienced once the show is over.

As an example, ‘If while performing in a place which is usually loud, indifferent and neglected, we are able to create a moving and silent scene, or a movement which explores a place in a surprising way, we are injecting new meaning to this space and creating a place which is more open to the inherent surprises and contradictions public space holds and to the acceptance of the other as part of this shared space’.

This sense of placemaking is even further heightened when the company are able to explore local history and heritage either through prior research (in site-specific shows and special projects) or ‘by coincidence’ when stumbling upon local traditions, shared memories and emblematic places.

Kamchàtka have a strong ongoing relationship with IF: Milton Keynes International Festival, and are back again this July. At the last edition, in 2023, they presented Alter, a night-time show set in the woods. The show was named as one of The Observer’s top ten theatre events of the year. I ask Gary to tell those of us who didn’t witness this a little more about the piece.

‘Alter is a journey into the memories, existence and gaze of the other, of our fellow men and women. The show started off as an idea of exploring the past of these timeless travellers, before they joined as a group, and triggered by our need to express our individual character within this group which is very homogenic and always united in our other shows.

‘We knew we wanted to work in a different space and different context, hence the decision to create a show performed in the dark and in a rural area, outside of the streets we were accustomed to work in.’

The show also provided the opportunity to introduce video and live music, elements that Gary says ‘we were very hesitant to work with at first’.

Regardless of all these novelties, the key to the show’s emotion remains, Gary says, ‘in the same tools which have led our work ever since the company started performing, and those are: eye contact, collaboration, the sense of belonging to a group, and joy’.

Fugit, the show that Kamchàtka is presenting at Milton Keynes for the 2025 edition, is described as ‘an homage to all those with the courage to abandon their home and strive for a better world’. At the FRESH conference, Gary Shochat and fellow company member Luis Petit tell us that the Fugit creation process involved ‘intense work in many neighbourhoods with different communities’. They spoke of the value of ‘creating shared memories’, noting that ‘people are not ‘objects to use in your show’ and speaking of ‘leaving a trace’ in the community after the work has finished.

Later, I ask Gary to tell me more about the IF iteration of Fugit, and his role in the process.

I learn that Fugit was actually created before Alter. It premiered in 2014, and, like other works by Kamchàtka, is a collective creation, with all company members as co-creators.

‘It is a site-specific show,’ says Gary, ‘and every time we put on the show different members of the company assume the role of artistic coordination and direct the show locally; their tasks range from technical coordination, to location scouting, working with local volunteers and organisations, adapting the show’s skeleton to the territory and managing the team. I am lucky to be coordinating the show in at IF Milton Keynes together with Andrea Lorenzetti. 

‘The show originated from our need to explore the emotion and physicality of fleeing (fugit in Latin): the moment in which one is forced to flee from a place, and what the ensuing journey might provoke in them and in society. The creation process took three long years of trial and error: exercises, games, experiments, a lot of group discussions and collective decision-making.’ 

Gary goes on to explain that through this process they ‘explored spaces we have never worked in before, and discovered new theatrical tools and group dynamics’.

Nonetheless, he believes that both for the company and for the public, especially for the people who have previously witnessed other Kamchàtka shows, Fugit’s core features ‘ the same things which run through all our work and which bring emotion and depth to all our other shows. In that sense it has a lot in common with Alter, only in a completely different context, setting and scale of emotion’.

Fugit has been described as ‘horribly apposite at the moment’. How does Gary feel about Kamchàtka’s work on migrancy still being so relevant to the world in 2025? 

Kamchàtka’s conviction of the importance of exploring these themes hasn’t faded; only nowadays it is mixed with what Gary describes as the rage and fear over the rise in popularity of fascist and populist politics and xenophobia. 

‘Unfortunately we have been surprised time and time again by just how relevant and timely our shows, especially Fugit, have become over the years in face of the different wars and humanitarian crises the world has witnessed in the past two decades, and the waves of human displacement it has created worldwide. Fugit was conceived before the civil war in Syria or the war in Ukraine had started, so in that sense I can say, quite sadly, that in a way our work has become even more relevant by the escalation of tragic events and catastrophes around the world.’

But regardless, Kamchàtka remain determined to continue to present their message that migration is essentially a positive, not negative, occurrence for humankind. 

‘Part of what kept us going and energised the group from the very first stages of working together till now was our belief that the story we tell is a universal and timeless story’, he says. ‘Human migration is a phenomenon which is central to the human experience and is recurring and cyclical throughout human history.’

Featured image (top): Kamchàtka: Fugit. Photo Julie Melando

Dorothy Max Prior interviewed Gary Shochat in person at FRESH Streets conference in Great Yarmouth, May 2025, presented by Circostrada in collaboration with Out There Arts,; and later via email. www.circostrada.org

Kamchàtka: Fugit runs from Thursday 24 July to Saturday 26 July at 1pm and 7.30pm, as part of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival. 

Starting point: Wolverton, Milton Keynes (exact location sent to bookers in advance). Tickets £15, under-16s £10. Booking: https://ifmiltonkeynes.org/

Concept, joint creation and performers:  Cristina Aguirre, Maïka Eggericx, Sergi Estebanell, Claudio Levati, Andrea Lorenzetti, Judit Ortiz, Lluís Petit, Josep Roca, Edu Rodilla, Santi Rovira, Gary Shochat, Prisca Villa.

Additional performers: Amaya Mínguez, Jordi SoléArtistic direction: Kamchàtka / Adrian Schvarzstein

For more on Kamchàtka, see https://kamchatka.cat/   

Kamchàtka’s Fugit is part of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival which runs from Friday 18 July to Sunday 27 July 2025.

Other highlights of this year’s IF:

Four years in the making, Transe Express’ DNA, Vertical Odyssey is a show in the sky which began as an engineering project. The action – a vertical choreography of climbing, aerial dance, circus, precision drumming and the singing and playing of an original score – takes place on a 40-metre-high sculpture under a 200-ton crane. (France – UK Premiere): Friday 25 July & Saturday 26 July, 9.45pm

Mark Anderson’s four-hour durational Warning Notes in Fred Roche Gardens is a captivating sound and light installation-cum-performance. Striking instruments give voice to the social and ecological alarm rippling across our planet. Anderson was one of the artists who took part in For the Birds seen at the 2018 IF Festival. (UK)
Thursday 24 July to Saturday 26 July, 6pm – 10pm

Tania El Khoury is a US-based British artist and academic of Lebanese origin. Her interactive sound installation, Memory of Birds, was created in collaboration with a trauma therapist. Lying in a scented pod hidden in the trees of Campbell Park, audiences will hear a soundscape featuring migrating birds, exploring political violence and the impact of war on contested land, the environment and wildlife. (UK / Lebanon)
Friday 25 and Saturday 26 July: on the hour between 11am and 6pm
Sunday 27 July: on the hour between 11am and 4pm

For further information on all shows and to book tickets, see https://ifmiltonkeynes.org/ 

Teenagers: Who’d have them? Who’d work with them? Dorothy Max Prior says yes to both…

“Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and despise authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter instead of exercise… They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food and terrorise their teachers.”

Oh, those terrible Millennials. Or is it Gen Z? Or Generation Alpha, I believe we’re up to now. But no, this was written by Socrates, around 400BC. 

The quote features in La Mecànica’s A Teen Odyssey – a fabulous, physical, immersive, and interactive theatre show, aimed at young people aged 12 and above, as well as adults (who, of course, were once adolescents!). When I say ‘features’ it is not spoken by an actor on a stage. It flashes up on our phones as one of numerous quiz questions we experience… But I am ahead of myself. Let’s step back.

I am in Great Yarmouth, here for the Out There Festival. I am wearing many different hats: reporting on the Festival for Total Theatre Magazine; doing webradio broadcasts for Circostrada’s FRESH Streets conference; and working for Out There Arts’ Creative People and Places (CPP) collaboration with Freshly Greated, a Yarmouth-based organisation that provides opportunities for young people to participate in arts activities.

In that last capacity, I had, a few weeks previously, visited a community centre where an Our Space session is held weekly, a kind of contemporary youth club, to see if I could persuade people to join a scheme for budding young reporters, to be mentored during the Out There Festival. It went well, with 16 people signing up. Out There’s communications manager Marcin Rodwell joined me in offering workshops over the following weeks leading up to the Festival. There’s sessions on writing about performance in general and outdoor arts in particular, reviewing skills, PR and marketing know-how, and looking at broader issues of festival programming choices. 

So far so good. Worryingly, though, when it came to the busy Friday and Saturday of the Festival – and actually going to see the shows we’d picked for the group – the turn-out was disappointingly rather low. But there were good reasons, as I discovered later…

A Teen Odyssey was on our Saturday afternoon list. We were sure there would be a good turn out for this one! I’m here at the venue, but where are my young people? Ah, there’s some of them! But rather than accompanying me as audience, it would seem that they are one step ahead and have volunteered to take part in the show, in which the core team of professional performers is joined by a number of volunteer performers-cum-ushers.  

So, more about A Teen Odyssey…

The show requires your phone to run an app (designed by La Fura dels Baus’ Èpica Foundation) called Kalliopé 2. And of course my tired old Samsung phone tells me it doesn’t have enough space to download the app. Flustered, I try to delete apps I don’t need. Still no good. Damn shows that use new technology, I mutter under my breath. Grrrr. One of the teens comes over to help, and after a few minutes – in which my phone crashes twice – kindly sorts me out a far more up-to-date device, which comes pre-loaded with Kalliopé 2, for me to borrow. Hurrah! He shows me how to sign in with my birth year, which becomes relevant during the show, taking me to a series of questions, some of the pub quiz type and some personal.

Well , maybe it’ll be OK. But I’m still wary. Other than Janet Cardiff’s brilliant Edinburgh Walk, I really can’t remember taking part in a theatre show that uses phones well. 

Luckily my fears are unfounded. The phones become part of the scenography: moving round the dark indoor space, we are invited to turn our phone outwards or upwards, so that the space becomes illuminated by many little coloured rectangles. We then realise that the colours we are showing are determined by those quiz questions answered earlier, and we flock and de-flock in the space, fitting inside squares or triangles outlined in neon tape as instructed by our answers. Sometimes we find ourselves with people our own age – being aged 70, I’m what in Britain is called a Baby Boomer, but I learn that in Spain there is a Silent Generation of people who grew up in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, under the terrors of Franco,who choose not to talk about it. In other groupings around the room, there are all the usual alphabetical designations of X, Y and Z plus aforementioned Millennials and Alphas. On the pre-recorded soundtrack, we hear litanies of the usual complaints about teens – the lack of concentration, the unkempt rooms, the awful choices in clothes and music, the answering back… But it is all nothing new, as the Socrates quote reminds us. 

Then, we find ourselves regrouped in a way that ignores age, depending on whether, say, our affinity is to guitars or drums (I’m drums, of course); or whether we are a snuggle with a lover by the open fire sort of person versus romantic walk on the beach (beach, naturally). We are thus noting that there are things that draw us to and align us with people outside of our age group – fellow humans with whom we have a non-age-based connection. 

Whilst we – the ‘spectactors’ as Augusto Boal would have it – are moving in and out of various configurations, weaving amongst and through us are two company members. The young woman performer, Sienna Vila, has a beautiful, fluid physical performance style; and the older man, Joan Maria Pascual, is an equally solid presence in the space. Their duets are poignant demonstrations of the push and pull between the generations; the drive for independence versus the desire for safety. There is also a DJ mixing live, keeping the energy in the room moving along. The piece is directed by Pau Bachero, with Sienna’s mother Jenny Vila (the company’s co-founder) as lighting designer and creative producer. The company used a process of dramaturgical consultation with young people in the creation of the show, with local volunteers joining them in each place they play in.

By the end, I’m totally won over – such beautiful performances, such clever dramaturgy, such a wonderful design. A grand success. And the integration of the local community members is wonderful – there’s not a dry eye in the house as we hear one of the actors, with their arm round them, tell us that ‘Sonia’ never studied the art course that she wanted to, as she was told she’d never earn a living that way; or that ‘Paul’ used to cry alone in bed after his mother died, because he was told that boys don’t cry.

La Mecànica’s A Teen Odyssey is heading off to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, playing at Summerhall venue all through August. Which reminds me to mention that I’ve seen some of the best ever shows made in collaboration with teens at the Edinburgh Fringe. I’m talking about Ontroerend Goed’s teen trilogy of Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen; Teen Riot; and All That Is Wrong. As I wrote for Total Theatre many years back: ‘It is a powerful body of work, capturing the changes through the teenage years with extraordinary precision and insight – from the just-on-the-brink kids caught between childhood toys and adult pleasures that we meet in the first show, through the “I want to be understood but not by YOU” boxed-in horrors of the mid-teen years, to finally the dawn of young adulthood with a new mantra – no longer “you don’t understand” but now “I want to understand.”’ The star of the third show was 18-year-old writer and actor Koba Ryckewaert, who had appeared in both of the previous shows in the trilogy; the youngest in the group. 

I remember that I saw this trilogy of shows over a number of years, from around 2006 onwards, as my own sons moved through the teenage years. And indeed, I saw Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen – with its celebratory and riotous on-stage skateboarding, popping of streamers, and burning of Barbie dolls – on the day I arrived back in Edinburgh exhausted after hosting a party for 14-year-olds. ‘That’s my life, right there,’ I whispered to my companion Pippa Bailey as we surveyed the complete chaos exploding on stage at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. 

 

But back to 2025 – and the Out There Festival in Yarmouth. It also turns out that some of the other shows in this year’s Out There Festival featured engagement from some of our errant young people from the CPP group – too busy doing it to report on it, it would seem! Some of them are involved in the bamboo fest at the Beach of Dreams: helping out on Bamboology’s Bamboo Playground and  Compagnie Moso’s Morphosis, which involves the creation of a climbing ‘archi-structure’ made of bamboo, using hundreds of selected bamboo canes cut and prepared for maximum resistance.  

There is also the Young Out There (YOT) strand, in which young musicians and circus artists take to the Festival’s stages. They can be found on the seafront, at the Beach of Dreams stage – but there are also YOT takeovers on stages elsewhere. I catch some of them in St George’s Park, where they have taken over Mr Alexander’s Travelling Show – a colourful vintage theatre stage – for a mid-afternoon slot. There’s a juggler specialising in diabolo, an energetic acrobatic dance, and a psych-folk singer playing a shruti box. At other points in the day, on various stages, audiences were treated to pop, rock and folk bands; poets and dance troupes; and plenty of circus – hula hooping, aerial silks, juggling and more. Which might be the right moment to mention that many of these young people have trained with Out There Arts very own youth circus school and troupe, Drillaz Circus School, who presented their own cabaret show in St George’s Park. 

So there is ample evidence of youth engagement with the arts in Great Yarmouth – much down to the initiatives taken by Out There Arts and their partners, including Freshly Greated – with plenty more planned over the coming year, leading up to Out There Festival 2026 and beyond.

All things considered, the kids are alright.

Featured image (top): La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey. Photo Luca Rocchi

Dorothy Max Prior saw La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey at St George’s Theatre in Great Yarmouth on Saturday 31 May 2025, as part of Out There Festival www.outtherearts.org.uk

La Mecànica is a female-led international performing arts producing company based in Mallorca, committed to creating and supporting the highest quality work for the greatest community impact. See https://www.lamecanica.org/en

La Mecànica: A Teen Odyssey plays at Summerhall from 31 July 31st to 25 August, (except the 11th and the 18th) as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025. There are two shows daily, at 12noon and 1.30pm. See https://festival.summerhallarts.co.uk/events/a-teen-odyssey/

Young Out There is a youth-led creative programme bringing together inspirational experiences and creative activity produced for, with and by local young people from schools, colleges and other youth groups from the Borough of Great Yarmouth. Devised by the Young Out There Collective, the programme fosters collaboration with creative professionals, including local, national and international artists, and provides a platform for young talent express their creativity as part of The Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus. https://outtherearts.org.uk/young-out-there/

Freshly Greated is a community-led Arts Council funded project as part of the national flagship Creative People and Places programme with confirmed funding to end of March 2025. FG works closely in and with people living in neighbourhoods in the most socio-economically deprived areas of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston. https://www.freshlygreated.org.uk/

The 2025 Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus saw the Festival’s biggest ever programme, spread over four days during the May half-term holiday, and featuring around 50 different companies. Dorothy Max Prior weaves her way through, focusing on the healthy number of female-led circus companies presenting work

Oh what a week! Sunshine and showers, an outdoor arts festival brimming with top-notch street theatre and circus, an international conference with delegates from five continents… 

There was a ride on a ghost train, as Out There Arts had the end of the pier fenced off for exclusive use of delegates for a couple of hours on the first day of the FRESH Streets conference; mixing tunes outside the brand-new Ice House venue at a mobile ‘bar’ featuring musical glasses, bottles and even credit cards, courtesy of Working Boys Club’s Serving Sounds; and a stroll down a street converted into a garden, dotted with sofas and hopscotch games, in Out There Arts’ own production Up Our Street. If you had a bit of free time during the day, there was always the Beach of Dreams Village to hang out in, with its beautiful installations, a performance stage, a bar, and a Climate Cafe in a yurt, which served as a hub for talks, meetings and informal discussions. Come night time, a wander through St George’s Party in the Park, converted into a Fire Garden, with splendiferous sculptures, interactive installations and automata from the likes of Paka the Uncredible. Not to mention all those hearty meals with friends at the Drill House, mentoring a bunch of teenage would-be reviewers for a Freshly Greated project (more on that elsewhere) – and meeting Brian Eno. Great Yarmouth, you really came up trumps this time round! 

With a festival of this size, you leave aware that there were an enormous number of shows that you couldn’t squeeze in. C’est la vie! But let’s look on the bright side – and it was indeed a surprisingly bright and sunny Great Yarmouth for most of the festival week – I saw a lot of brilliant circus and outdoor arts shows, and came away nourished in every way – mind, body and spirit.

There are numerous ways to approach a festival of this sort, in which the work is mostly free to audience and presented in public space. You could just wander round and allow yourself to be drawn into whatever takes your fancy in the moment. You could have a strict timetable of things to see by familiar companies that you know will be ‘good’ (although that way you don’t get any fabulous surprises). Or you could follow a particular theme or thread, and try to see as much as you can that fits that remit. Which is the path I took, for at least part of the time, as I made it a quest to catch as many of the female-led circus companies that I could.

High on my list was B.O.B.A.S by the Spanish company Cia Jimena Cavalletti.

B.O.B.A.S is an acronym for ‘Beneficial Orchestral Band for Sepulchral Acts’, or at least the Spanish equivalent, and the show is enacted by a fabulous trio of female musical clowns. The theatrical device is that they are a humble musical band that organises burial ceremonies; but on this occasion the priest has scarpered with the ashes of the deceased person.

It starts with the audience in a processional line, sent through an archway and onto their seats by our three clowns: the small bossy one who tells us where to sit, offering commiserations in an officious manner; the tall gawky one who flusters about dropping Kleenex as she hands them out; and the totally batty one with the deep voice, wild-eyed stare, and smudged black make-up who slumps around growling, and usurps everything the other two do. Right from the start, even before we sit down, the clown personae have been established with expert ease. 

Then comes the entry of the funeral cortege, the brass-and-percussion band led by the bossy one, naturally – the solemnity of the occasion wrecked by impromptu shifts from the funeral march to the wedding march. Or even worse, to a rendition of the Birdy Song. At which point, our noble threesome clock that the priest holding the casket of ashes, who had been bringing up the rear, has disappeared. Now what? Find them? (Gawky clown with the long legs races around madly looking for them.) Find a new corpse? (Weird clown with the terrifying stare searches the audience for potential substitutes.) Pretend everything is fine and carry on regardless, minus officiant and deceased? (Bossy one blusters and tries to keep going, failing ever more spectacularly at each turn.) This is all played out on a site scattered with burial crosses and vases of roses, a grave dug and ready. Of course, it ends in tears. There are roses scattered. There are spilt ashes. There is mud wrestling in the grave. There are clothes rent asunder, whacked heads, and broken instruments. A fabulous demonstration of the art of the Dark Clown –glorious ripped-and-torn revelry! 

Right next door on an adjacent Trafalgar Road pitch, there’s another all-female company, France’s La Triochka, of a very different ilk. Their three-woman show, TopDown, ‘questions roles, the places we take with us and the places we leave behind’ and talks about ‘the relations of domination and submission in the social field, whether at work or in everyday life’. Although not explicitly stated in the publicity, the show seems to be specifically exploring relationships between women – as friends, as lovers, as partners. The three women, dressed in a pleasing neutral palette of everyday clothes, form constantly flowing patterns of weight-bearing, lifting and supporting. The base might be standing, or lying down, or in a bridge position. Sometimes a pattern presents as acrobalance, sometimes looking more like contact improvisation. A triple-tower might rise and fall, and morph into a completely new configuration, as flyer becomes base in the next pattern. In between the highly skilled and elegant acrobatic work, each of the three enacts a very lovely vocabulary of gestural movement motifs: strides or skips or teeny little steps; shoulders shrugged or hand to lips; small smiles or quizzical looks. It feels like a world of stories have unfolded, and just as we try to grasp the meaning of one, another has supplanted it. Echoes of elusive thoughts, memories and associations constantly float in the air. Here is a piece of circus work with intelligence that conveys its meaning to the heart not the head. Food for the soul!

A few minutes walk away, sited on a green near the old city wall on Deneside, I see Three Sisters by Estonian company Big Wolf. There’s a high aerial rig, with white silks attached – although it all starts on the ground (very grounded, in fact) with a woman in traditional peasant dress who sighs and groans, giving birth to a succession of babies – three daughters. This all done with great comic timing and physical skill – and a fair bit of role-swapping, as there are four characters but only three performers! So here we are: the archetypal three sisters. Three sisters in a war-torn land with few available men to do the heavy work, or provide the loving. The women chop the wood, and herd the cows, and occasionally give us a tune on the kannel, a beautiful Estonian plucked-string instrument. They are doing OK, but it would be good to find a man – a good man. The audience is scoured for suitable candidates, but none are found. You too, huh? says one of the sisters to the female audience members, raising many a laugh and more than one dig in the ribs as the men blush. 

As is always the case in the best fairy tales, the youngest sister is the most mischievous, tearing off her skirt and running to the rig to tangle herself up in the silks and dangle with gay abandon. The other two join her, all decorum abandoned. Skirts and petticoats and blouses are cast aside, and in their white cotton undies they spin and twist on hoops and hammocks – eventually climbing up on top of the rig with breathtaking ease, to lounge and doze far above the everyday demands of the world, a fabulous image of female emancipation.    

The show is a tribute to the women of the Baltic countries – the performers’ mothers and grandmothers and aunts who survived years of farming, housekeeping and child-raising whilst their menfolk fought and died in the many conflicts in the region over the years. Baltic wedding traditions, women’s roles in the home, and how women were perceived to be versus how they actually are (then and now) is the crux of the piece. Brilliant aerial skills, fabulous comic acting, some well-managed audience interaction – it all adds up to a heartwarming and challenging piece about what it means to be born female in a land without men – or in a land where the men leave something to be desired!

ElevateHer, by UK company Daughters of the Dust, also celebrates female struggles and strengths – this time, played out on three multi-height tightwire rigs by six feisty young women, who dance onstage to the upbeat tune of the Chicks on Speed classic ‘We Don’t Play Guitars’. With a soundtrack that samples what we take to be autobiographical reflections and affirmations, mixed in with a fabulous feel-good batch of tunes (great to hear Suzi Quatro’s ‘Can the Can’ capturing a new generation of fans), our wonder women dance, pose, tumble and walk the wires – in ballet pumps, in high heels or with unfurling red ribbons tied around their ankles. ‘Pray for baked beans on toast, pray for the bus to arrive, pray for the late nights and sunrises, pray for togetherness’ rings out the voice on the soundtrack. Utterly joyful and life-affirming – ElevateHer is a delightful first show from a UK company we shall no doubt hear a lot more of in the future.

I also get to see perennial favourite Dulce Duca (from Portugal, but now based in Norfolk) with Um Bello Dia –  a show previously seen indoors (at Ficho Festival in Mexico, 2017), now transposed to outdoors. So, first a word on the site, as Duca has negotiated with the residents of Fox’s Passage, a close near Out There’s Drill House with a tiny green space between the short rows of houses, to place her show here. Which works very nicely as it is a gentle and whimsical piece which needs a quiet, contained space. Duca is a juggler, but so much more – an adept painter of pictures in the performance space, and a clever manipulator of objects. So, not only every-which-way with her juggling clubs (integrating some good audience interaction along the way) but also employing an intriguing combination of whirling circular skirts and colourful flowers which are plucked from the skirts. As Dulce whirls around and around, flowers flying in every direction, she is at once a dancing diva, a dervish, and a playful child delighted with the world she finds herself in. The show evolves into a celebratory communal waltz, with people plucked from the audience and paired up to dance together – and at the end, we have the unexpected bonus of Brian Eno leading off a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday To You’, as it is indeed Dulce Duca’s birthday. Um bello dia indeed! Belleza, belleza, belleza!

Solarte Producciones are a Catalunyan company presenting two shows in this year’s Festival. (Out There Arts have a long history of supporting and collaborating with artists and organisations from Catalonia, and this year is no exception.) Sadly, I don’t catch Miss Margherita – a solo circus and comedy show by the company’s Swiss/Catalan lead artist Jessica Arpin Olar; but I do see their other show, Siku, an ensemble piece presented indoors – the first ever show at the newly restored and opened Ice House, Out There Arts’ second venue in Yarmouth. 

So a few words first about the venue. A Grade II listed building of brick construction with a thatched roof, the Ice House was originally used to store ice to preserve fish, herring fishing being the main Yarmouth industry for many centuries – the only building of its kind left in the country. With support from the Architectural Heritage Fund and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, alongside other funding, Out There Arts has repurposed it into an arts and circus training hub, which doubles up as a flexible performance venue.

On the opening night, we get to see the space empty of seats – a fabulous arena, lit with a swirl of multi-coloured lights and projections, with a long bar and a DJ station. Outside the building, Belgian circus company Sur Mesure, led by the enterprising acrobat and musician Seraina de Block, present Protocole – a two-hander perfect for the occasion as it focuses on the celebratory raising of a flag. Aided and abetted by a male companion (Oscar Willems), Seraina and her trusty trumpet first give us a fanfare, before she attempts, and finally succeeds after much comic business, to climb the flagpole her partner is holding, to triumphantly unfurl the flag and play another ‘trumpet voluntary’. A great little show, and a lovely ritual to open the Ice House.

A couple of days later I’m back. Now, the auditorium is filled with tiered seating for the sold-out premiere show, Siku, presented on a regular end-on stage. The four-strong ensemble take us on a journey ‘through the Arctic of yesteryear’, much of the content inspired by the Jessica Arpin Olar’s research with the Inuit people of Canada, ‘the last indigenous people to be colonised’. It’s a far more text-heavy work than I was expecting, with circus playing less of a key role than I’d anticipated – although of course that is commentary on my expectations rather than on the intention of the artist! The fragmented storytelling mixes research, biography and autobiography – circling around Jessica Arpin Olar’s encounters with the Inuit; and the stories of the many explorers who turned up on their doorstep, so to speak. We learn that there is no Inuit word for ‘vegetable’ because there aren’t any – and no fruit either, other than a few berries in the summertime. We learn that if you eat a whole seal – brains and all – you’ll get all the nutrients you need; and that the caribou sometimes trip out on magic mushrooms. Oh, and caribou antlers made for the first-ever sunglasses – protectors against the glare of the snow. Famously, there are many words for ‘snow’ in Inuit – and ‘siku’ is one of them. One of the most common words in the Inuit language is ‘maybe’ – apparently a suitable answer to almost any question asked.

Of those famous explorers: well, they perished just about sums it up. Some brought ponies with them that starved to death. They were prone to poetic farewells: ‘I’m just going to go out. I may be a while,’ said Scott of the Antarctic. ‘Rough notes on our dead bodies must tell the tale,’ said Franklin of the Arctic. Expeditions sent by Lady Franklin to find the explorer’s ships inevitably fail as nobody ever looks in the right place. ‘The ships are over there,’ say the Inuits. ‘They can’t be,’ reply those sent to find them, ‘because our information on their last known location indicates…’ In 2017, almost two centuries on, an expedition finds Franklin’s ships. ‘They’re over there’ say the great-great-grandchildren of those Inuits – and there they are. 

All of this fascinating information is weaved into a show that employs clowning and physical comedy, object manipulation, live music (banjo, accordion, and some very nice musical saw and bowing of objects around the space)  – and some highly skilled aerial work on pole and silks from Jessica Arpin Olar and her team-mates. Oh, and after a long wait the oft-referenced Nanouk – the highly dangerous (to humans and seals) arctic polar bear – does eventually appear, riding a bicycle, in the show’s grand finale. I could have done with a little more of the circus work – integrating circus acts into a narrative-driven show is always a challenge, I know – but it’s an interesting piece of work, very well received on its UK premiere here in the Ice House. 

Moving away now from the female-led companies, but staying with circus: the big outdoor evening show of the Festival, presented on Friday 30th and Saturday 31st May, is AIthentic by Gorilla Circus, a British company that has been consistently nurtured and supported over recent years by Out There Arts. This large-scale show is a co-commission, building on their relationship with the company; a collaboration between Gorilla Circus, When Time was New, and Citrus Arts that merges circus, street dance and what is loosely called ‘technology’. The show invites us ‘to explore what we want our relationship with technology to be, and how we could achieve that’.

I go to the premiere, on Friday night. We arrive at St Nicholas’ Car Park just as the sun is setting. We enter a fenced-off space, and see an enormous truck with a crane attached. The crane has a head: a humanoid robot, but with a snake-like feel. There’s a large screen stage-left that is flashing up ‘Digiverse’ propaganda: Connect, Curate, Celebrate, it tells us. Escape the difficulties of reality and find your purpose in the Digiverse. Over on the other side, and spreading out into the crowd, is a motley crew of Free Minds Collective members, who carry cardboard signs daubed with painted slogans and XR-style stencilled graphics urging us to protect ourselves from the AI generated Digiverse, which is trying to steal our information and utilise our quest for connection against us. ‘If the system fails, I’m locked out of my own home,’ says a plaintive voice.

It’s now almost dark and the mighty crane with its humanoid / snake head cranks into action. The structure beams out electric blue and Matrix green light. A platform rises from the truck, and we see a chorus of workers, whose day plays out in an excellent street dance and acrobatics choreography, as the platform, ladders and crane structure become their playground. 

A hero, Loki, emerges from the chorus, and the crane takes him up to another level, to what we now assume is home at the end of the day. Our lonely hero has a dilemma – he has been on a date with a girl called Sage, but she doesn’t seem to want to continue the relationship. He’s debating with the head  (who is starting to sound more and more like HAL from 2001 – A Space Odyssey) whether he should take up offers to move from reality into the Digiverse – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live and work in the ‘real world’ as more and more businesses and people move over – even the trains have stopped running. The clinching factor is when he’s led to believe that Sage has moved over. But has she? He takes the two-day trial and heads in to the Digiverse to find her. And there she is! A surreal sci-fi scene plays out very nicely – a lovely duet between the two lead characters. But is it actually her, or is she a walking, talking living doll? Or a figment of his imagination? Whose reality is this, anyway?

AIthentic gives us a fabulous hour of street dance and circus (acrobatics, pole, rope and more), and an ambitious narrative addressing some of our current concerns about AI; all played out on an awe-inspiring set. Great to see British outdoor work of this scale hitting the streets and skies!

Other British circus companies featured in the Festival include NoFitState Circus who bring us Bamboo, which has a delightfully simple premise: the company construct a set from long sticks of bamboo, and use it as their playground for a very lovely medley of circus games. That’s it: the performers, the empty stage, the sticks of bamboo lying there ready to be utilised. Different temporary structures rise and fall. There is balancing, swinging, object manipulation, as the performers interact with the bamboo. There is co-operating and competing – but mostly co-operating – as the performers interact with each other. The skill level is supreme – everything is done seemingly effortlessly. And all this to the tune of an excellent live musician on full drum-kit, and occasionally on other percussion instruments and electric guitar. Although it is a simple idea, Bamboo has complex reverberations, exploring the necessity of co-operation between human beings; and setting up the notion of the inter-connectedness of the human and vegetable worlds, fellow occupants of our one and only planet.

Featured image (top): Big Wolf: Three Sisters

Total Theatre writer and editor Dorothy Max Prior attended Out There Festival and FRESH Street conference in Great Yarmouth, 28–31 May 2025. 

For other shows seen by Total Theatre Magazine at Out There Festival, see the round-up piece here by Lisa Wolfe.

Out There Arts produce the annual Out There International Festival of Street Arts & Circus – now in its 17th year and one of the three largest free Outdoor Arts festivals in the UK – with 30-50+ artistic companies and audiences of 60,000+.

Out There Arts – National Centre for Outdoor Arts & Circus is a registered charity and Arts Council England funded National Portfolio Organisation.

www.outtherearts.org.uk   

FRESH STREET is a flagship conference for the outdoor arts and circus sector, held every two years, bringing together key European and international artists, programmers, and policymakers for three days of dynamic discussions and stimulating exchanges on how we can imagine the outdoor arts of tomorrow.

 FRESH STREET#5 was co-organised by Circostrada Network and Out There Arts in the frame of Out There Festival, in partnership with Outdoor Arts UK. It took place 28–30 May 2025 at The Hippodrome, England’s only surviving dedicated circus building.

https://www.circostrada.org/en/actions/fresh-street-5