Catch em if you can!

All the way from Quebec – although in this case, Quebec City rather than Montreal – come Flip Fabrique, with a feel-good street-wise circus show that gets down with the kids. There’s a bunch of friends reunited,  there’s beat-boxing, there’s trampolining, there’s big red bouncy balls, there’s chalking on walls., there’s camping chairs, and there’s ‘dancing slug’ sleeping bags – an ingenious take on what someone (somewhere away from this cheery teenager-y world) might describe as whole-body-mask performance. 

Most of the show is upbeat – I Like to Move It, Move It – with plenty of zippy juggling and hooping (I’m reminded of Circus Oz quite often in the frenetic cheeriness of the whole thing). There’s a fantastic diabolo act – one of the best I’ve seen – in the form of a kind of diabolo duel. But there are some moments of calm, including a stunning straps act to Cinematic Orchestra’s melancholic To Build a Home. There is also a very lovely clowning-morphs-into hand-to-hand scene that is funny and tender all at once. The trampoline-and-wall bounce-off finale is stunning. I start off a little resistant to the show’s vibe, but they win me over with their brilliant technique and charming stage characters.

The team of six – five men and a single jaunty female (Jade Dussault) who flies like an angel in the acro scenes, and is a great hula hooper – all have prestigious pedigrees, having between them chalked up work with all the Quebecois big names: Cirque du Soleil, Les Sept Doigts, and Cirque Eloize. Under the direction of founder-member Bruno Gagnon, the team have come together because they genuinely are a group of friends who wanted to be reunited. Hence the show. Here are a bunch of young adults who want to resurrect the art of play – to retain and celebrate all they loved best as children.

This is circus with a young heart. It’s clear that they are here to have fun, and the fun is infectious. You can’t help but love them.

Four chairs, four performers – two male, two female. A rope, a tying-up game – which turns into a powerful corde lisse routine by Lauren Hurley (who was first seen seen and admired by Total Theatre in previous show What Will Have Been).

The frenetic soundtrack breaks into a cheesy Cha Cha and all four throw and catch and swing and tumble, this leading to a painfully beautiful trapeze act to a spooky version of the Sonny & Cher hit Bang Bang – as always with Circa shows, musical choices are spot-on – that uses air and ground inventively. Later, a great straps act to the Nouvelle Vague cover of The Killing Time (good to see a woman using this equipment, which is often seen as the territory for the beefiest of the male acrobats); a breathtaking hand-balancing sequence by one of the men, again really using the floor as well as the air; and a solo trapeze act by the other man, which very cleverly integrates Makaton (or similar) signing into the routine. If there were programme notes I could name the other three performers for you, but sadly not! It goes without saying, but will be said anyway, that all of the four are equally magnificent in their skills.

But what I enjoy most in this show is the complicity and playfulness between the performers. The acrobatic sequences that break up the specialty acts are no mere fillers – they are truly lovely ensemble pieces in which the four flirt and tease and tumble like puppies, capturing all the joys and pleasures of love and friendship without a word being spoken. As always with Circa, gender stereotypes are challenged, and the women are often bases, particularly Hurley, and the men often perform tenderly together. The facial expressions, and little glances and nudges between the four members of the team, are gorgeous – I love them all!

I will confess to some confusion about this show. I thought at first that it was a slightly rejigged version of Close Up (which played the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015, and featured a mix of live and screen action), but no – Closer is a new show, although retaining a few scenes from the now-aborted Close Up. The two scenes I remember from last year – which have now been remodelled and fit better into the dramaturgy of this show – are both involving the chairs. These chairs have become the silent stars of Closer…

One of the retained scenes is an audience participation number, in which eight chairs are lined up and the four performers each go out into the audience to find a partner to place in a chair and waltz around and with. It could be a cringy moment, but they pull it off.

They have also kept the breathtaking chair-and-human-body tower scene, which is now the finale. A suitably jaw-dropping ending to what is a lovely, lyrical and highly entertaining circus show. At the more mainstream end of the Circa spectrum – but that’s OK, there’s room for it all!

Ada and Ava are twin sisters. We first meet them in their home as elderly ladies, taking tea as the clock tick-tocks. But are they both really here? Where does one self end and another begin? It transpires that Ava is dead and Ada is holding tight to her memory. The mourning is a painful affair, and we sit sadly with Ada and watch the kettle boil.

It is a dark and stormy night, and as the lightning strikes and the thunder crashes, Ada (and we with her) are thrown into a world of dreams, memories and fantasies. Or are they? Perhaps Ada really does head off down the hill on her bicycle (the tandem now sadly no longer needed) to go to the carnival fairground and get herself locked overnight in the Mirror Maze…

Back we swirl in time to see Ada and Ava as little girls on a seaside trip, dipping their toes in the waves. Then, we are propelled back to Ada as an old lady – but now the twin sister she is sharing her life with has a skeleton’s hands and feet, and a skull head that needs a wig to hide the bony truth. In this new scary version of her familiar world, toothbrushes and hairbrushes have a life of their own, and no matter how hard Ada tries to persuade her sister to return to the grave, she’s having none of it.

We experience all of this fantastical, supernatural wonderment through a plethora of live and mediated imagery. Two actor-puppeteers (Lizi Breit and  Julia VanArsdale Miller) play Ada and Ava live in front of a screen, their shadow images projected (with no digital manipulation, so reversed out) on an even larger screen above and in front of them. But that is only part of the story…

Ada/Ava, created by Manual Cinema from Chicago, is a magnificent artistic and technical achievement, in which gorgeously crafted shadow puppetry (using handmade black-block silhouette figures); live-actor mask and shadow theatre; cinematic techniques making use of vintage projectors, two large screens, OHPs and live-feed cameras; and live music combine.

Everything we see and hear in this completely word-free show is made, here and now, in front of our astonished eyes. For UK audiences, the points of reference might be some sort of amalgam of the work of Paper Cinema and 1927. Coloured acetates in a beautiful palette of charcoal greys, faded indigos, Indian yellows, and Northern Lights greens form the backdrops, onto which the gorgeously crafted silhouettes of skylines, or trees, or kitchen hobs, are placed. Ada and Ava, appearing either as the shadows of the actors or as tiny little shadow-puppet figures, depending on the scene, move within this cleverly created background scene. We see the ‘making of’ as well as witnessing the final result simultaneously. de.natashaescort.com The two actor-puppeteers (who move back and forth from performing in front of the back-lit rear screen to the OHP light-boxes, never resting) are joined by a further three puppeteers/visual artists on stage. They are augmented by three musicians (cello/electric piano, guitar, clarinet/vocals, plus live Foley sound effects) give us  a couple of beautiful jazz tunes (All of Me, and the Duke Ellington classic Solitude) as well as providing all of the rest of the soundscape.

A breathtakingly beautiful and clever show that explores the fear of the shadow of death with gentle humour. There is so much to see on stage and screen and in between – I could easily watch it again and again.

Five performers, two female, three male, walk through the audience, down the aisles, making their way onto the small, round stage in the centre of the Spiegeltent. They are dressed in a tasteful palette of maroon, stone, and dove-grey. A red pendant lamp hangs over the performance space and the five group around it – a beautiful oil painting. An ensemble acrobatics number explodes out of the huddle, in which the five bodies twist and tumble and form astonishing Chinese Puzzle shapes. Men and women base and fly. Three-person-high towers grow and fall as bodies scramble up and down other bodies. Pyramids are built with a body in backward-bridge position astonishingly holding the weight of others clambering on top of her. They organically morph from one shape and formation and cluster to another. What skill, what beauty. And my goodness these three-high shoulder stands look so extraordinarily high and frightening when you are just yards away from the performers – the pleasure of seeing circus work in the round, with everyone close to the action.

This opening section sets the bar for an hour of immense and awe-inspiring circus skills, elegantly packaged into a nicely designed show that sets out to investigate joy and intimacy. There is no narrative beyond the stories intrinsic to the scenes themselves, which have a very lovely gender-loose mobility, suggestion encounters between friends and encounters between lovers (of all sexes). The performers are the three (male) Casus co-founders Natano Faanano, Jesse Scott, and Lachlan Mcaulay, with two new female members of the ensemble, Abbey Church and Kali Retallack, joining them for the creation and presentation of Driftwood.

Skills-wise, the emphasis is on acrobatics/acrobalance. Equipment is used sparingly, although we do, along the way, get aerial hoop, hula hoop, trapeze, and rope. All, it goes without saying, are used with great skill and flair. The trapeze act sees an elegant alternating of singles and doubles work; in the hula-hoop act, two women and one man (and nice to see a man hooping!) act out a kind of joyful playground game. There is a gorgeous acrobalance routine between two of the men which plays on capture and release, with one placing his eyes over the other’s eyes as they cartwheel and tumble together. The women capture our attention with their ability to base and fly with equal assurance. Natano Faanano gives us outstanding strength and beauty when working in partnership with Abbey Church, in a choreography that seems to swing between acrobatics, martial arts, and ritual dance. He also allows himself the indulgence of a little bit of burlesque-ish mime, reminding us that he is also a co-founder and star of the boylesque Briefs company. He’s older than the others, and brings a gravitas to his work that I’ve always admired. The structure of the piece works, for the most part, although I find the placing of ’s corde lisse act a few minutes before the very end a little odd as it seems to interrupt the concluding rhythm of the show.

Scenography relies mostly on the bodies in space and the lighting: that pendant lamp is used in little interludes of whimsical physical comedy, between the major scenes.The lighting design is excellent – moving from low and moody, the red shade of the pendant the focus, to a whirligig of lights flashing a rainbow of colours off of the stained glass windows of the tent. The company work to an eclectic selection of music tracks that includes jazzy rhythm and blues, moody contemporary ballads, and whimsical waltzes.

Casus are the company that made the highly successful show Knee Deep – although their enterprising and inventive co-founder member Emma Serjeant has parted company with them, and is presenting her own show, Grace, at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016. Another sometime performer in Knee Deep is also in Edinburgh for August, with Perhaps Hope at Circus Hub.  Both of these productions are shows that aim to smudge the boundaries between circus and theatre; to push circus into something other than well-executed skills.

Driftwood is a clever creation that is elegantly designed, and beautifully performed. It is a highly tasteful and well-executed piece of new circus – but it pushes no boundaries. It is, however, great circus – and that is no doubt more than enough for the sold-out crowd of 400 punters at the Palace du Variete Spiegeltent, who were suitably wowed and stunned, and showed their appreciation with rapturous applause.

Please NOTE this performance contains: HAZE, GUNSHOTS & LOUD NOISES, FLASHING LIGHTS, FOOD THAT YOU MIGHT BE ALLERGIC TOO, AUDIENCE MOVEMENT, SHEEP.

Well, with a welcoming notice like that, you can’t help but be excited! What will happen? What will happen to us? As it turns out, we are the sheep.

Right from the start the start, and all through the extraordinary, exhilarating, heartbreaking 90 minutes that follow, there is a dichotomy set up – a tussle between life and death. Glorious exuberant live music and the silence following a death. Wedding waltzes and the sound of a barrage of bullets battering the barricades. TV and YouTube footage of rioting crowds projected above the heads of audience members who sit at long dining tables laid with white linen cloths. There is drink; there is Ukranian food (on the menu tonight: a rather nice beetroot salad, and then dumplings with mushroom sauce); there is the opportunity to have a riot – a riot of your own.

As the 15-strong team of ‘guerrilla-folk party-punks’ from Kiev pull audience members up to dance a jolly mazurka or polka, chaos breaks out. Tables are trashed, tyres piled up into heaps. Facing us is a row of cops with riot shields.  We have bricks. On your marks, get set, throw…

The exuberant spirit of resistance is infectious. Onstage, onscreen, all around us we are bearing witness to the true-life stories of the performers and their friends – the protesters marching and demonstrating daily against the Ukranian president’s corruption and the Russian interference in their country – and we enjoy casting ourselves in the romantic role of fellow freedom fighters. Hard-hats on, hand-painted banners waved, a communication tower climbed and adorned with the blue and yellow flags of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the sheep-masked musicians playing a fabulous mix of folk / street / gypsy jazz on a variety of instruments – trombones, tubas, drums – and there is beautiful polyphonic choral singing. Bring it on, we’re with you.

Then it turns nasty – a protestor is killed. We see the TV footage of the real-life funeral projected onto the three enormous screens above, and live, weaving through us, we see the cortege of performers carrying a draped body through the space. The cortege halts. The mournful, soulful singing stops and there is total, absolute silence, other than the sound of a woman sobbing quietly. Without spoiling the surprise for anyone who goes to see the show, there is, breaking this silence, a genius moment of theatre…

On the screens above, we see the statistics reeled out. The hundreds of protestors who are killed, with official numbers far lower than unofficial estimates, yet still – even officially – in their hundreds. The statistic that cuts me to pieces is the average age of the dead. 24. The age of my youngest son. The terrible reality of events in Kiev in 2014 (and continuing – the war is not over) is hammered home. But this skilful theatre company does not send us home desolate and with open wounds; there is a rounding-off, a closure, a coming together in peace and harmony.

At every Edinburgh Fringe there is one show that you unequivocally tell anyone who asks that this is the show to see –this year, Counting Sheep is that show for me. A wonderful piece of immersive, interactive, politically engaged, and inspirational ‘total theatre’.