Norwich ahoy! Tagged as ‘one of the UK’s big four’ festivals, Norfolk & Norwich (NNF) is also one the country’s oldest, if not the oldest, arts festival – it can trace its roots back to 1772, don’t you know! This year’s programme at NNF is a little depleted, compared to some recent years, it must be said – but nevertheless offered an interesting and engaging mix of local, national and international work.

The big international theatre draw of the 2014 programme was Dmitry Krymov’s Opus 7, also presented in three other UK venues/festivals (and reviewed by Total Theatre at the Brighton Festival). Obviously, it makes sense that work of this scale from countries far afield (Russia, in this case) travels to a number of venues. But it would have been nice to see some N&N ‘exclusives’ on the international theatre front, as has been the case in previous years. National touring talent on show included David Leddy’s Long Live the Little Knife, previously seen by Total Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe 2013 and Brighton Festival 2014. The programme also included the world premiere of Pioneer by Curious Directive, a Norwich-based company with a national profile. But that was it for theatre – there seemed to be an emphasis on music in this year’s festival. A mere three theatre shows programmed seems rather slight, unless we count the street arts programme and the late-night [Live] Art Club  – more on both of those later.

Local but on a grand scale was the site-responsive Souvenir by The House Project, a music piece which sounded delightful, featuring a quartet of composers (including Orlando Gough, who is well-versed in quirky crossover music/contemporary performance /audience interaction projects), the Bold as Brass ensemble, a choir, and numerous singers and performers animating hidden corners of Holkham Hall and its grounds. Word is out that this one-night-only extravaganza (and NNF exclusive) was an immense success.

The other big NNF exclusive that I did manage to see was the UK debut of S, the new show by Australian circus superstars Circa. Norfolk & Norwich Festival have a great reputation for promoting and celebrating the best in international circus – last year they presented the only UK appearance of the latest show by Montreal’s 7 Doigts de la Main with Séquence 8, and not one but two shows by Circa, the Spiegeltent special Beyond, and the captivating and beautiful How Like An Angel, seen in the equally captivating and beautiful Norwich Cathedral – this a site-responsive classical music/circus collaboration which was the brainchild of former N&N director Jonathan Holloway. S is a very different kettle of fish to either of the aforementioned Circa shows – although with some inevitable overlap in the ‘tricks’ and motifs used. Yes, there were clear glass bowls of water involved! (For those readers not familiar with Circa’s work, they have developed a trademark object manipulation scene using clear glass bowls of water balanced on various body parts that seems to find its way into every show in some permutation. But that’s OK with me – visual artists repeat motifs from exhibition to exhibition, so I think it is fine if performing artists do too.)

What makes S different to anything else I’ve seen by Circa is the tenderness. The first 45 minutes of the show involves no circus equipment, and is a beautifully soft, sinuous, seductive, sensuous (you get the idea) meditation on the individual / group relationship and on the nature of ‘support’, which sits (stands, climbs, falls) very comfortably between dance and circus. In what can perhaps be described as a marriage made in heaven of acrobalance and classic contact improvisation or ‘release’ techniques, bodies move and sway in standing groups; are swung and caught with breathtaking ease; climb into three-man (or woman) towers, then topple; test the ability to ‘take weight’ to its limits – a woman in a full backbend ‘crab’ position bases a man standing on her stomach. Sometimes things are gentle and flowing; sometimes there’s a more staccato or chaotic energy. The soundtrack is sublime: mixing works by Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen and the Kronos Quartet with live amplified breath, silence (yes!), and the sounds of ringing phones or chiming bells.  I think I heard a didgeridoo as well at one point. After 45 minutes, it’s a rather different show as the equipment comes into play: hoop, often just one, used with wonderful precision; a very able straps act with a lovely upward climb; silks – a tempestuous routine set on three pairs of black hanging cloths, the black-on-black aesthetic throwing the hanging bodies into the light; and the aforementioned glass bowls. Costumes are deceptively simple: leotards, leggings, body-suits, fitted trousers, of different designs but all in the same soft body-hugging black material. Lighting states remind me of previous Circa show Wunderkammer: a dark stage with atmospheric spots focused on the lone body or group, or dramatically lit by back-wall Perspex blocks of colour (electric blue, red, green), or highlighted by rows of duel-coloured overhead LEDS – violet and orange, say – clear-cut, geometric, stylishly in service to the performance. Although the visual aesthetic of the piece recalls Wunderkammer (which wowed crowds and won awards at Edinburgh Fringe 2013), this is a very different show. Gone is the cynical ‘circus soft porn’ sexiness, and in its place a beautiful reflection on, and demonstration of, the human state – sometimes alone, sometimes together, always in relation to ‘the other’. The sinuous S is a far finer show than the crash-bang-wallop audience-pleaser that is Wunderkammer, in this reviewer’s opinion, and its UK debut deservedly garners a standing ovation from the circus-savvy Norwich Theatre Royal audience.

Elsewhere, a new initiative for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2014 was the late-night [Live] Art Club, presented by Norwich Arts Centre in collaboration with East by South East – a showcase led by the Basement, Brighton. So even when I escape Brighton for a weekend, Brighton finds a way to follow me…

The Norwich Arts Centre is a delightful venue, set in an old church on the edge of the city centre. Artists presented over the festival include Total Theatre favourites Rachel Mars, Chris Dobrowolski, 30 Bird, Ross Sutherland, Kindle Theatre, and Sylvia Rimat (with a linked appearance in a pop-up café somewhere in Norwich by Hunt & Darton). A magnificent line-up! On the evening I was there, I had the pleasure of seeing Stacy Makishi, performing her new solo show The Falsettos. Sitting somewhere between stand-up and performance art, this is an entertaining and engaging show born of autobiographical material – American born in Hawaii, menopausal, re-evaluating her relationship with her ageing mother – which is weaved expertly into musings on murder real and fictional: a family killing in Hawaii; the artist’s obsession with Tony Soprano. At one point, she voices the taboo thought that killing off her elderly mother might be kinder than letter her slip into further dementia and decay. Then, there’s the dazzling joy of hearing Barbra Streisand sing ‘On a Clear Day’. Life goes on! Stacy is a very amenable performer – she starts off in an armchair onstage, greeting the audience as they come in, and moves with ease from gentle banter into a more poetic and abstracted use of text and physical action, interweaved by snatches of film clips, news bulletins, and excerpts from TV drama The Sopranos. It’s just not been the same since the ducks left… The subject matter of the show is ageing, decay and death – actual death and the death of fertility that comes with menopause. This could be depressing but it’s not: ultimately, this is a life-affirming show – life has its challenges, we all die, but for now, here we all are, sharing something together: ‘hope comes in many forms’.

A word here also for the artists (whose names I missed) who post-Makishi were animating the corridors and bar of this lovely building with gentle interventions that included rolling on bubblewrap, and tying objects to balloons – I had to hurry away so didn’t have time to engage with what they were doing with full attention, but I enjoyed what I saw and appreciated the whole-building-animation that seemed to be the order of the day at Norwich Arts Centre – a venue I intend to return to another time.

Finally, no mention of Norfolk & Norwich Festival would be complete without a reference to Chapelfield Gardens, host to the Adnams Spiegeltent and The Garden Party. The Spiegeltent programme for 2014 was, as always, an eclectic mix of ‘tent’ favourites: vintage dancing delights with Ragroof Tea Dances (declaration of vested interest: these are my reason for being here in beautiful Norwich), buffoonery from Red Bastard, a greatest-hits show for Bourgeois and Maurice’s 7^th Birthday Party, spoof Kunst Rock from Die Roten Punkte, and sultry torch singing from the fabulous Camille O’Sullivan, who I think of as the ultimate and archetypal Spiegeltent performer. On the night I’m there (post- tea dance), it’s the turn of Orkestra del Sol, presenting their fabulous mix of Ska, Balkan and Klezmer merriment – how lovely to be invited to dance a polka on a Sunday night!

Out in the garden, which was luckily graced with a weekend of early summer sunshine, Wet Picnic presented their latest street theatre show The Lift, which looked to have a similar aesthetic and tone to their highly successful first show The Dinner Table.  I missed the show, being in tea dance mode at the very time Wet Picnic took to the gardens, but I heard the company rehearsing backstage saw the marvellously designed lift go trotting by like a kind of Art Deco sedan chair on its way to its spot! I like the concept – the audience experiencing fragments of life through encounters in the lift – but can’t comment on how successful it was. One of the problems with performing in street festivals is that you think you are going to catch lots of work by other people, but are inevitably performing yourself, or doing a get-in or get-out, at the very time the thing you really want to see is on…

Ramshakilicious’ Grime I did see as it was on in the evening. It is an update of the Punch and Judy story (with a touch of Sweeney Todd), an ‘ordinary everyday tale of a dysfunctional family’ set in a dodgy burger bar. It’s a step up in scale for the company, whose previous work I’ve enjoyed greatly. Grime features a fabulous set: a kind of open-fronted steampunk doll’s house, with higgledy-piggledy rooms, wobbly walkways, and shaky staircases built above and to the side of the chrome-fronted burger bar. The show goes up as the sun goes down, and the house is lit up with fairy lights, like some sort of terrible take on the witch’s cottage in the woods in Hansel and Gretel. Live music and clowning combine to tell the terrible tale of ‘meat, meat, meat’ – a tale which on the opening night of the show was a little too long and drawn out: an hour and 20 minutes is 30 minutes longer than any street show needs to be, and although some of the over-length was due to technical problems, it also needs a great deal of dramaturgical chopping to really cut the mustard. Always a dilemma – street theatre has to be rehearsed in public, and shows tend to come into their own in their second year. In their previous work, Ramshakilicious have had a lovely direct engagement with their audience – in Grime they feel distant and cut-off from their audience for most of the show, so apart from problems with the length and structure of the piece, work needs to be done on how to translate their skills into larger-scale work. They are working under the direction of veteran street theatre performer Flick Ferdinando, so I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.

The Astronaut’s Caravan, on the other hand, is a small but perfectly formed piece (created by the resourceful fairground engineer Tim Hunkin and legendary sculptor/automata maker Andy Plant) that falls into the kind of alternative sideshow/booth territory occupied so well by companies like Whalley Range All Stars. A caravan is suspended on an axis, spinning round 360º like an odd-bod fairground ride – which is almost what it is. Audience groups of around seven or eight people enter the caravan, and are seated in a row on a bench with a roller-coaster style safety bar in front of them. The caravan is kitted out in vintage 70s style – duck-egg blue cupboards, Formica, orange plastic cups, gingham curtains. Our friendly astronaut-pilot – who has the air of a Norfolk Broads boatman – gives the all-clear to his companion outside, through a mouthpiece that looks like a sink plunger connected to a hosepipe. Then off we sail to see the Milky Way – or at least, to see the tree-tops of Chapelfield Gardens. Around and round we spin, giddy as goats. Or do we? It’s the old ‘is our train moving or is the one on the adjacent platform moving?’ conundrum – very clever, a perfect piece of fun for all ages that for me was the highlight of The Garden Party 2014. Well, that and our Dirty Dancing themed tea dance anyway!

 Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014 ran 9–25 May.

Dorothy Max Prior attended the festival 17–18 May 2014.