Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Circus and the Search for Home

Across the Barbican’s vast stage – right across, east to west – is a wall. It could be anywhere: Berlin pre-1989; the West Bank, anytime over the past 30 years. It could be now: Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary; the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Calais. It’s perhaps 3 or 4 metres high, a mottled rusty-grey metal. Six figures, dressed in muted blues and greys, are dotted around the space in front of the wall, lit by a tunnel of light that casts them as puppets on a marionette stage. Or rabbits caught in the headlights. Or, indeed, fleeing people illuminated by searchlights. Over the next hour, the six acrobats – three men and three women – act out a painstaking choreography. They are caught in the wind, or perhaps the waves, tumbling and rolling across the stage in pairs, hanging on to each other in desperation. They are grouped backs-against-the-wall, staring out at us pleadingly. They form towers, or create tortuous hand-to-hand balancing poses as they scramble up and over each other, but without any of the usual ‘aids’ into those difficult positions: often, there is no prep, no jumps or braces, they just have to – get there, somehow. Even more unnerving, they often don’t make eye contact with each other, giving a terrifyingly tentative look to many of the moves.

It’s a very clever game to play: these are some of the top circus performers in the world, and often their director (Circa founder Yaron Lifschitz) has created scenes in which their safety nets are taken away. There are wobbles, and shakes, and trembles – but these aren’t faked, they come from the arduous situations that have been set up. This is circus, not theatre: everything you see is real.

Circa’s The Return is not exactly a ‘version of’ but a kind of poetic re-interpretation of Monteverdi’s opera Il Ritorno de L’Ulysses de Patria, bringing together the Circa acrobats and an ensemble of five musicians and singers. Monteverdi’s opera, and Circa’s show, are inspired by one of the oldest poems in Western literature – Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus (or Ulysses as the Romans renamed him) finds himself far from home, and cast adrift on a flimsy raft, tossed on rough seas, and washed ashore on a small Greek island. Yes, it is a story that has great contemporary relevance.

Circa: The Return

In the post-show discussion at the Barbican, where the show had its UK premiere as part of the London International Mime Festival, Yaron states with complete honesty that the current refugee crisis wasn’t the starting point for the show. It is, he says, a reflection on the core themes of the Odyssey – desire and absence – exploring the story of the 10-year separation of Odysseus from his wife Penelope, the tests that were placed on both of them, the desperate desire for re-unification, and (in Odysseus’ case) the longing to return home. Yet as the piece was being made, the constant, depressing news of Europe’s refugee crisis intruded upon the work. Yaron talks of the day that he, like so many of us, was stopped in his tracks by the image of a small Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a Greek beach. As the creation process continued, the terrible photographic images (and the images conjured by the galling words of the news reports) that we have all been inundated with over the past year or two informed the development of the piece, which Yaron says has changed considerably since its first outing in their hometown of Brisbane, Australia.

For example, almost all the usual circus props have been discarded along the way – there is only one section with equipment, a scene in which the three women are each, independently, in their own space, working – one with straps, one hand-balancing, and one in a kind of cage-like metal cube serving as a type of static trapeze. Mostly, the cast are just there onstage together, telling stories through their bodies, without the equipment. But it is always circus that is the form doing the telling: ’I have only two rules. No acting. and no dancing,’ says Yaron.

So the six acrobats are not actors playing characters – there is no one Odysseus or one Penelope on stage, everyone is contributing to an abstracted reflection, a poetic expression in movement, of those key themes of desire and absence. And they are not trying to act out the feelings of being off-kilter, displaced, dispossessed – they are demonstrating that through the physical actions they have been directed to take. What we witness is a poignant portrayal of what it feels like to have everything cut from underneath you; to be cast adrift; to be displaced. Unlike Homer’s poem, there is no happy ending; no reuniting – we are left with an image that suggests that the uprooting, the moving on, the being pushed forward, is continuing, over and over and over again…

T1J: Les Inouis

Belgian-based Theatre d’un Jour’s Les Inouis (seen in the UK as a work-in-progress at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, and probably returning in 2016) also reflects on the struggles of displaced people, but has a rather different starting point. Creator/director Patrick Masset was originally intending to make a biographical piece about his Belgian father, who had migrated to Canada many years earlier, having lived and worked in what was then the Belgian Congo in Africa. He had been intermittently filming his father talking about his life for about four years, and at one point his father started complaining about the ‘crazy migrants’ Canada was taking in. No amount of arguing on Patrick’s part could make his father see that he was a migrant who was now showing the same prejudice to new migrants that was perhaps shown to him when he arrived in Canada with no family and no friends. ‘It’s not the same’ his father argued stubbornly.

This set him thinking – and the nature of the piece changed, to become focused on the plight of refugees and migrants, past and present. ‘It is not the artist’s role to provide answers, but to ask questions’ says Patrick, when I speak to him towards the end of the Edinburgh run. At this point, the show had had a brief development time, pre-Edinburgh, working for a month with Belgian migrants on their stories. Patrick was now working on a plan to take a new, smaller version to small villages, performing in a truck, and engaging people in the question of how to view the migrant ‘problem’. This show is now touring, and is called Les Inouis 2, and it aims to show how the reality of the emigrants of yesterday echoes the prejudice experienced by the migrants of today. The word ‘inoui’, incidently, has no exact translation to English – the nearest is probably ‘the unheard’ or ‘the voiceless’.

Patrick believes passionately that circus – like physical theatre, puppetry, film, and music which are all also elements of his work – can be used as a tool to explore difficult questions. There are many ways to tell stories, so ‘why not speak with circus?’.

When I see the show, it is still very fresh and new, but brimming with startling images. It weaves the story of a nameless man washed up on a shore, imagined by the girl who finds his dying body, with a bigger story of migration and environmentalism. The famous bicycles of the Calais Jungle, a makeshift migrant city, are suggested by a unicyclist moving around the space at the start of the piece, as three washed-up bodies lie on the ‘beach’ next to two carved wooden dolphin.

The central puppet is a human-size figure that alternates cleverly with a real human playing the migrant on the shore. The simple but effective animation, with human interaction from behind the translucent material that forms the screen, is used to tell the story – from both a human and an animal perspective – of a journey across the ocean. The movement work is sound, with some strong acrobalance sections. There is a beautiful slack wire act on which a woman gives birth to a puppet baby – it fits very well into the piece, suggesting the shaky vulnerability of women migrants giving birth whilst in transit.

The piece also tells a story of a border crossing with a wagon filled with caged birds. The birds can’t cross, because they don’t have the right documents. Their carer opens the cages and they fly across the border – a beautiful and pertinent image of a world without borders.

Palestinian Circus Company: B-orders

Also presented at Edinburgh Fringe 2015 was Palestinian Circus Company’s B-Orders, which won a Total Theatre / Jacksons Lane Award for Circus. ‘Imagine a world without borders and a life without prejudice’ is its tagline. It is created and performed by Ashtar Muallem and Fadi Zmorrod, both totally engaging onstage.

The pair use dance, acrobatics, Chinese Pole and silks in the telling of their story of the desire to break free of the boundaries of nationality, gender, religion. Also object animation and manipulation: each has a pile of bricks that are used to build walls, and houses, and human figures; to throw and kick; and to use as stepping stones to walk over to each other. Their onstage relationship is beautiful, poignant. They are all things to each other: sibling, friend, alter-ego, lover.

Afterwards, I speak to Fadi Zmorrod about the making of the show. He and Ashtar (Ash) have known and worked with each other since they were 15, and part of a growing youth circus scene in their hometown of Birzeit, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Training is not easy in Palestine, and he has luckily been able to exit the country to attend short courses in Belgian, French or Italian circus schools. There is also YouTube, and Fadi says that to a great extent he and Ash are ‘self-taught’. Things are often hard, but ‘we have a sense of humour,’ he says. B-orders was made in a five-month spell in 2015, with spells of work of two to three weeks, devising different sections and working with different circus trainers. Part of their process involved interviewing people, old and young, to ask about what bothered or restricted them; their experiences of provocation on the streets; and the things that block people’s freedom. The piece is political, but it isn’t agit-prop. There is no single message, and many of the issues of ‘freedom’ explored relate as much to gender within Palestinian/Arab culture as to the specificities of the West Bank. ’Palestine is a masculinist society’ says Fadi. ‘In the villages, a young woman will have to take orders from her little brother.’

What he wants do in the work is to ‘hold up a mirror so people can see themselves’. His is a long-term displaced nation with no signs of any resolution to the dilemma of being, essentially, a refugee in your own country.

What he hopes for – for himself, for his circus company and school, and for his country – is ‘Belonging. Togetherness. Having a space.’

Ultimately, all three circus shows reflected on here are about that: belonging, togetherness, having a space to call your own. In other words, coming home.

Circa’s The Return was presented at the Barbican Theatre as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016. The post-show discussion was chaired by Dorothy Max Prior on behalf of LIMF on 28 January 2016.

See Total Theatre’s review by Thomas Wilson, here. For more on Circa, and full details on The Return and all the other shows currently in repertoire, see http://circa.org.au/

T1J’s Les Inouis and the Palestine Circus Company’s B-orders were seen at Circus Hub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015. Some of the material in this feature was taken from a previously published post on work seen at the Circus Hub, August 2015, for the Total Theatre Awards.

Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) is a cross-discipline company that makes works in many genres, under the artistic direction of Patrick Masset. In 2015, the company celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Currently touring shows include L’Enfant Qui, and Les Inouis 2. For more on Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) see: http://www.t1j.be/

The Palestinian Circus School / Palestinian Circus Company is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, established in 2006 and registered with the Palestinian Authority since February 2007. It teaches circus in Birzeit and in other cities like Jenin, Hebron, Ramallah and Al Fara refugee camp. http://www.palcircus.ps/

Urgent call: 23-year-old Mohammad Faisal Abu Sakha, who works with the Palestinian Circus School, was detained by the Israeli military, without charge or explanation, on 14 December 2015, as he was on his way from his parents’ home, in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, to work at the Palestinian Circus School in Birzeit, near Ramallah. See Amnesty International’s campaign here: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-palestinian-circus-performer-held-israel

This feature is published as part of an ongoing collaboration between Total Theatre Magazine and The Ragroof Players related to the company’s research process for their site-responsive and community-specific show Bridges y Puentes. See http://www.ragroofplayers.co.uk/bridges-y-puentes.html Research material related to the project will be gathered on www.bridgesypuentes.com

Small World

Dorothy Max Prior has the pleasure of two intimate performance pieces presented at London International Mime Festival 2016

Two shows for small audience groups, set around tabletops, in rooms squirrelled away in the basements of arts centres. But oh such different shows!

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra

David Espinosa’s Mi Gran Obra works on creating distance; playing with scale. Although we are tightly grouped around the table – tall people on high stools at the back, shorter people on low stools upfront –we view the scenes enacted with tiny models on the tabletop through opera glasses. When Espinosa’s hands come into view, we jump back at the sight of the hands of a giant. Or of a malicious god toying with his creations – this is, after all, a show exploring the theme of megalomania.

The piece works as an evolving series of tableau in miniature. Tucked beneath the operator’s table (Espinosa does everything in this show – object manipulation, lights, sound) are trays of tiny model railway people, plastic animals, and toy helicopters. Also to-hand are a reading lamp, a couple of red bike lights, a pot plant, and a tambourine. On the table, a pair of mini speakers each sport a band of musicians perched aloft: a rock group and a military brass band.

The first tableau gives us a procession from cradle to grave, a diagonal line across the table. Later, we see a fabulous wedding photo group that features a Mexican Mariachi band; a beach scene sporting posing athletes and a posse of toy bulls, with a car crash to the side; an even more surreal scene featuring elephants, monkeys and Santas; and a magnificent miniature sex scene, in which the earth moves… and moves. The pot plant serves as a graveyard; the bike lights turn the tabletop into a disco, replete with pole dancer; the tambourine becomes the podium for a kind of open-topped doll’s house, where the beds get put to good use, until the savage god hammers nails into the tambourine, sending everything flying. The soundtrack gives us an eclectic mix, from Mexican marches to Latino covers of hits like Hotel California.

If there is a reservation, it is in the use of a tablet screen, integrated into the action on two or three occasions. It is hard to see the screen if you are sitting to the side of the table, and in any case it feels an irrelevant addition.

That aside, Mi Gran Obra (subtitled ‘an ambitious project’) is a fabulously clever adult take on the childish pleasures of play – anyone who has ever enjoyed Playmobile, Lego, or Sylvanian families, or perhaps liked those bargain packs of plastic model soldiers, will appreciate the appeal. In David Espinosa’s hands, his little model people (bought from Hornby Trains and numerous other companies across Europe) become the actors in a grandiose theatre with a cast of hundreds. Life, death and everything in between is played out before our eyes, with humour and pathos. When the tiny people are squashed by giant hands, or bulldozed into a pile, there is an audible intake of breath in the room. Luckily, the piece ends with an image of hope – a great relief. A postmodern puppetry for the modern world.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten

Xavier Bobes’ Things Easily Forgotten is a very different beast; a show that from the outset celebrates intimacy. Espinosa delivers a mini-lecture at the start of his show, explaining his motivations and outlining the provenance of the show, giving us the intellectual task of imagining that what we are about to see would exist at 37 times the scale, if the little people where life-size. Bobes, on the other hand, keeps things close to his heart. As we enter the ante-room, he is firmly in performance mode: not quite ‘in character’, but certainly ‘in persona’, dressed in a neat brown suit and tie, and sporting an elegant wristwatch. Our vintage tickets are clipped with a hole-puncher, and we enter a dark room.

As the audience of five sit down, placing our hands on the table as a candle is lit, it feels for all the world as if a seance is about to begin. And indeed this is not so far from the truth – what we get for the next thrilling 75 minutes is a cross between a seance, a family gathering, and a magic show, as the dead of Spain’s twentieth century are conjured up for us through an extraordinary array of printed ephemera, everyday objects, and crackly sounds that come from a vinyl record player. Our host holds the space beautifully – sometimes silently, sometimes drawing us in with text. At the end, we are asked not to reveal too much about the show, so I will honour that request and refrain from saying what he does and how he does it, and focus instead on how it makes me feel.

It leaves me with the sort of bittersweet melancholy you feel when you find a cache of old photographs in your grandmother’s wardrobe; or you find an old newspaper in a junk shop that is from the year of your birth. It appeals to the part of me that is fascinated by portraits of people I don’t know; whose lives are frozen in a moment in time – forever young, or forever ‘just married’, or forever walking down that seaside promenade. If you are a hoarder, who keeps old matchbooks, redundant banknotes, and souvenir keyrings in dusty corners of your loft, then this is the show for you. There is an added poignancy for anyone with an interest in the painful history of Spain over the past 100 years, particularly the Franco years.

It is a theatre that finds a novel way to create a linear narrative – a timeline that tells the history of a people through the things they leave behind; creating a shared space of evocative sounds and images that I leave feeling touched and nurtured.

I applaud the brave and good decision by the London International Mime Festival to programme these intimate works for such small audience numbers. Small in scale, big in ambition: Mi Gran Obra and Things Easily Forgotten are both beautifully crafted visual theatre works that added something special to the festival – grand works that won’t easily be forgotten.

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra was seen at Tate Modern, 13 January 2016.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten was seen at Southbank Centre, 20 January 2016.

Presented as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016.

Ockham’s Razor: Tipping Point

Will the circle be unbroken? And is a better world awaiting in the sky? Ockham’s Razor breathtaking new show Tipping Point opens with the drawing of a circle, in salt and chalk, around the edges of the performance space, a square with the audience on all four sides. A safe space, a sacred space. May the gods and spirits guide and protect them. On the soundtrack, Tibetan bowls and church bells gently chime.

Long hand-held poles are carried in by the five performers, and a game ensues – Ockham’s like their playground games, they’re a feature of all their recent shows. There is teasing and running and jumping and swinging, as the poles are used to create constantly morphing shapes to move on or through – crosses and triangles and parallel lines. As the metal poles are swung around, they come very close to us – close enough to feel the danger, sending a tingle down our spines, and reminding us that in circus we are encountering the real, not just the representational. Eventually, the focus moves from the ensemble to the smallest of the five, Emily Nicholl. A pole becomes a novel sort of ‘tightrope’ that she balances along; two poles become an odd pair of wriggling parallel bars that she negotiates with a cartoon-like running on the spot movement, a cheeky grin on her face – the personal relationships played out between the performers here and throughout the show are theatrical in a gentle and low-key way. The until-now quiet audience bursts into a spontaneous burst of applause.

All change. Now there is just one pole, which is rigged from above the central point of the circle with a surprisingly quick click into place. (Any rigging or tethering and untethering of equipment is done calmly and methodically throughout the show as part of the stage action. There is no need to hide the process, we are entranced.) The focus is now on Steve Ryan, and we are into more familiar Chinese Pole territory – his smooth and fluid moves presented with elegant precision. Meanwhile, we’re looking at the four tethered poles at each corner of the space, outside the circle – as yet unused. Now’s the moment, and down they come. There’s a lovely choreography of raising and lowering, and the poles become dancing objects in the space. It’s lovely to see the show’s directors (Ockham’s Tina Koch and Charlotte Mooney) allowing the objects the time and space to be themselves, making patterns in geometric harmony. There’s a scene later in the piece where all five performers stand with the poles, which are attached at the top, swinging them to and fro, then climb to hang beside them from the truss, a gorgeous still image of vertical shapes; a landscape in which bodies made of flesh and poles and trusses made of metal co-exist.

More game-playing – lifts and drops and swings. Telma Pinto takes the spotlight, the strength and suppleness in her pole work (and elsewhere) is stunning. The scene shifts into a chase through the forest of poles, then into a toe-curling game of Blind Man’s Buff. There’s another major equipment change: the central pole gets detached from the top and clamped to a bar hung on bridles – so that the pole becomes a kind of see-saw or swing boat that can go a full circle (a little bit like a Wheel of Death without the wheels). Ockham co-director Alex Harvey and Nich Galzin are the daredevils who get to ride this contraption, flying through the air with the greatest of ease, two daring young men on a – well, not a flying trapeze but you get my drift. The pole is re-attached at the top, and Alex dons a sling for a beautiful cradle-style double with Emily, the other company members also basing from the floor, so that the scene becomes one of tender support, as Emily moves hand-to-hand from Alex in the air to the others on the ground and back again.

The piece comes full circle, to end with everyone on the ground, the lights shifting to intense violet to highlight the white of the salt and chalk markings. There is no great big grand finale, just a gentle winding-down that is mesmerising in its calm beauty; a spiritual moment, in which science and art unite to create a profoundly satisfying final image. You could hear a pin drop, and then – bang! – the house lights are up, and Ockham’s Razor get the standing ovation they so richly deserve.

Ockham’s have a great track-record in deconstructing and re-inventing circus equipment. Tipping Point gives us a fabulous exploration of the possibilities offered by the Chinese pole, which in their hands becomes the subject of an extraordinarily creative investigation. Perfectly pitched – their best show yet.

Tipping Point runs at Platform Theatre 11–23 January as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016. www.mimelondon.com

Kill Your Darlings

Dorothy Max Prior speaks to Alexander Vantournhout and Bauke Lievens about the creation of ANECKXANDER: ‘a tragic autobiography of the body’.

Is it circus? Is it dance? Is it performance art? Clown, even? ANECKXANDER, which comes to Jacksons Lane 22–24 January as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016, is all and none of the above. It is a collaboration between two extraordinary Flemish artists, performer Alexander Vantournhout and dramaturg Bauke Lievens, who tussle with the questions of what defines an artform, and how you can explore the gaps in between those definitions. Lest this all sounds rather cerebral, rest assured that their work together is totally embodied – physical, visual, visceral performance.

Bauke Lievens – who started work on this piece as dramaturg, but soon found herself in at the deep end as co-author and director – has a formidable reputation, having worked previously as dramaturg with Les Ballets C de la B, and Un Loup pour l’Homme, amongst many others.

Alexander Vantournhout is just 26 years old, yet already has an enviable track-record in contemporary circus. After graduating from ESAC circus school in Belgium, with Cyr wheel (a large single wheel that the performer spins in and around across the floor) as his specialty, he created his first show Caprices (2014), which was very favourably received. But this is only part of the story: he is also a graduate of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s PARTS school, so is also a seasoned dance-theatre performer.

Alexander Vantournhout. Photo Bart Grietens

ANECKXANDER is the first collaboration between the two artists, and it has proved to be a fruitful one. An early work-in-progress version of the piece won the prestigious CircusNext competition in late 2014. They then took what was a 20-minute piece and worked together to extend it into a full-length piece, which has been shown around 25 or 30 times throughout 2015, travelling from homeland Belgium to Holland, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia.

So acclaim in the contemporary circus world is theirs – but the question of whether or not they belong in that world is core to their artistic investigation together. Key to the resolution of that question would be to define the thing they are conforming to or rebelling against. So, what in their view, is circus? ‘A question we ask of ourselves all the time’ says Bauke.

Circus, Alexander believes, is ‘dance plus several specificities’, and it is in essence about the human body’s relationship to objects. ‘There is no circus without objects,’ he says, dismissing acrobatics and acrobalance as ‘not circus’ – although he adds with a grin that he feels that ANECKXANDER is also ‘not really circus’. (Shhh – don’t tell the CircusNext judges!) At another point in our conversation, he offers another definition of circus, inspired by Peggy Phelan’s views on the nature of performance art: ‘She talks of performance closing the gap between the real and the representation – perhaps the same could be said of circus’.

Circus, in his experience anyway, is essentially a solo endeavour – the person and their equipment – whereas dance, or dance-theatre at least, is in essence collaborative. (I think about asking where flying trapeze fits into this theory, but I resist.) It is very true, we agree, that physical objects play an important role in circus, contemporary or traditional. Alexander may have abandoned his wheel in ANECKXANDER, but there are objects a-plenty in the piece. Boxing gloves and platform boots, for example.

Alexander Vantournhout in ANECKXANDER. Photo Bart Grietens

In discussing the objects used in the show, Bauke talks about her interest in prosthetic limbs; and how the use of the chosen objects (the cumbersome gloves and boots) become something resembling prosthetic objects that both enable and inhibit the body’s movement. It is exactly this balance between restriction and expansion offered by the objects that interests her. Also, as Alexander is otherwise naked in the performance the objects both ‘compensate for and accentuate’ the vulnerability of the body. ‘We are trying to re-define objects,’ he says.

For Alexander’s part, he talks about the early stages of the work where his movement research centred around observing and measuring his own body: someone had once told him that his neck was rather long, so he set out to objectively observe his own physical form. His neck might be longer than average, but his legs are shorter – hence the decision to explore the donning of platform shoes to both ‘compensate and accentuate the vulnerability’. It was either that or high heels…

A more conventional circus performer might have settled for stilts, which similarly enhance and inhibit the movement of the legs, although of course in rather different ways – but Alexander is insistent that he ‘didn’t want to use traditional existing circus disciplines,’ instead choosing to bring a circus-informed approach to the exploration of ‘ready-mades’ and ‘entering the domain of a new language’. He says that his work is ‘non referential’ to other artists’ work, but is ‘self referential’ and ‘hard to situate within one artform’. We talk a little about the different ways that objects are used in performance, and how the same object – a stick, say – might be used by a juggler, a puppeteer, or a performance artist. Which brings us onto the topic of the real versus the representational: at the heart of theatre lies illusion; whereas circus, dance and performance art trade in the real. Bauke declares that ‘the circus object makes the body of the performer into an object’ and that conventionally in circus the chosen object becomes a tool to elevate the capacity of the human into the realms of the super-human ‘who is often seen as a freak’. Take away that tool and what do you have? ‘It is like Iron Man, worthless without his suit!’ Ultimately, the interest here is in ‘the person behind the tricks’.

So Bauke and Alexander are keen to explore what happens when you take away the safety net, so to speak, of the familiar circus object: the prop that holds you up (be it wheel or hoop or ball or rope). In ANECKXANDER, there is an interest in exploring the ‘handicap’ that these alternative objects offer – chosen for their functionality rather than for any meaning that they offer.

We talk a little at this point about the role of the dramaturg in the creative process – although both are quick to point out that Bauke quickly ‘lost her role as dramaturg’ in the making of ANECKXANDER as she become more and more involved, so is now a full-blown creative collaborator and co-author of the piece.

ANECKXANDER. Photo Bart Grietens

Another point of discussion is the subtitle of ANECKXANDER: ‘a tragic autobiography of the body’. The ‘autobiography of the body’ part is clear enough, having already learnt that the beginning of the process for the show was the detailed exploration of the measure of Alexander’s physical self and own ‘body proportions’. But what of the ‘tragic’?

‘Circus is a very tragic business,’ says Bauke, going on to give another definition of circus, which she sees as ‘ the promise of, and escape from, tragedy’. Yes, that makes sense to me: every time we see someone soaring above us, we know it could all go horribly wrong at any moment. This is not acting – this is for real. And every circus performer (and dancer too of course) is in a constant battle against age, infirmity, injury. She also talks of the tragedy of circus in terms of it as a form in which the artist is ‘reaching for a goal that always displaces itself’.

Alexander voices an interest in the relationship between the comic and the tragic, citing the writings on laughter by French philosopher Henri Bergson, and his view that if the tragic is repeated and repeated, it becomes comic (something well known amongst the clown community). He talks of the well-documented link between laughter and the release of tension; and the relationship between laughter and discomfort: ‘that’s really what happens in the performance…’ So Aneckxander, in its investigation of the tragic, is drawn almost inevitably towards the comic.

Another interesting aspect of the piece is its use of music – a composition by Arvo Part (a piano piece called Variations for the Healing of Arinushka) that is played on a keyboard onstage (by Alexander), then looped, and deconstructed – the left hand and right hand playing the same melody slightly out of synch. ‘The choreography is written precisely to this’ says Alexander, and he talks of how the music can create the story. Narrative is important to the work, says Bauke, although it is not a conventional linear narrative – and music provides a ‘tool’ for creating a narrative, an arc that takes us through the performance. Part of her role in the creation of the work was to help to build an ‘evolution’ between one movement and another.

Like many contemporary practitioners, both Alexander and Bauke express a desire to explore ‘presence’. Bauke talks of wanting a presence that makes the process clear, and shows the transition from one form to the next, rather than ‘presenting a series of acts,’ and of making visible the mechanisms of the performance, ‘to show that the performer is human, not superhuman’. They also talk of the specific situation of working in Flanders, which has a very vibrant and progressive theatre community in which definitions of theatre are perhaps a little different to those in the UK. ‘What we call theatre you might call performance,’ she says. Bauke speaks of perhaps being part of a theatre practice that is ’making palpable the gap between personage and performer,’ as opposed to conventional acting.

Ultimately, what they are both interested in is creating work that is very clearly ‘made by people not machines,’ noting that much high-level contemporary circus is missing the humanity. ‘Beautiful machines – but machines,’ says Bauke of Cirque du Soleil…

When I speak to them, Alexander and Bauke are in rehearsal, tweaking ANECKXANDER for its UK debut at the London International Mime Festival. They are also about to enter the research phase for the next show together – in which even the objects will be discarded, leaving just the body as object to play with. It will be a duet, and the second performer will be playing a dead body. The possibilities for both comedy and tragedy are endless…

ANECKXANDER is presented at Jacksons Lane 22–24 January 2016, as part of the London International Mime Festival. Book at www.mimelondon.com

Post-show discussion on Saturday 23 January, facilitated by Dorothy Max Prior.

For more on the work of Alexander Vantournhout and Bauke Lievens, see http://alexandervantournhout.be/

ANECKXANDER was created as part of Bauke Lievens’ 4-year research project, Between Being and Imagining (KASK, Ghent). Other aspects of the research will include masterclasses, writings which will be edited in their English version by Sideshow Circus Magazine’s John Ellingsworth, and a series of ‘encounters’, which comprise three days of structured conversations in different formats, the first in Ghent in 2016 and then subsequently in Bristol in the UK and in other European cities, 2016-2017.

Theatre des Bouffes du Nord / Jos Houben & Marcello Magni: Marcel

Oh what joy! Such clever clowning! What skilled Lazzi! In Marcel, the art of the gag lives on in objects that fight back (umbrellas, fold-up seats, cigarettes that won’t light), endless entrances and exits through invisible doors, and raincoats dragged on and off and inadvertently shared. But it is more, so much more. It is laugh-aloud funny, yet in parts so poignant that tears prick your eyes. The whole world is here in this marvellous onstage world: human endeavour, success and failure, friendship, love, ageing. It doesn’t get easier, life. Yet still, on it goes, relentlessly. Do we measure up to what it takes?

Marcello Magni and Jos Houben are a classic comedy duo. One is tall and lean, the other is short and sturdy. One is in charge, setting the other evermore difficult tasks. ‘Wait here’ says Houben, and reappears moments later in a different outfit: a dark suit, jogging pants and shades, a doctor’s white coat. It is, of course, the little guy who is being tested – although for what we never quite know. Clown license renewal? A Matter of Life and Death style assessment at heaven’s door?

Marcello Magni as Marcel (a name suspiciously similar to his own) is poked and prodded and measured, running and jumping not through hoops but up and down and under and around the wooden slide occupying centre-stage. He finds a thousand ways to get on, and fall off of, the slide; he hat-juggles; he mock-ice-skates along a suddenly slippery floor. Whenever alone, he keeps up a barrage of sotto voce Italian, reminiscing about his family and his life ‘mi ricorda, mi ricorda…’

The minimal set also includes an empty metal door frame, the site for an endless number of plays on the classic mime entrance. We are brought into the play right from the start, as Marcel questions the ludicrous opening and shutting of a non-existent creaky door: ’They’ll get it. It’s theatre. It’s a mime festival…’ The audience are an important part of the action throughout – fed sweets by Marcel, invited to be complicit in the hiding of damage to the equipment – and all moments of interaction are handled with aplomb, as you’d expect of these seasoned performers.

Often the lights are bright, the action a fast-paced medley of gags. But there are passages with a different feel: a lighting change turns the backdrop curtain a deep velvety maroon, and the figure of Marcel stands at the top of the ‘slide’ with an enormous shadow rearing behind him as his circus act is announced with a drum roll (from Houben on snare, below). Later, the backdrop turns midnight blue as Marcel, now a Pierrot with a newspaper ruff, reaches for the cardboard moon above him. A moon which becomes a harp, which becomes a gondola – all in the twinkle of an eye. In between these scenes, a wonderfully surreal pantomime horse moment, as the ‘horse’ (Houben sporting a horse-head mask, Magni with a fine long tail) tries to climb up the slide.

The ultimate test set for Marcel: can he keep a minute’s silence? Will the audience help or hinder? I’ll leave you to imagine the outcome.

Marcel, created and performed by Houben and Magni, is presented under the auspices of Peter Brook’s Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. It comes to London after a long run in Paris, and it has the feel of a well bedded-in show: everything onstage is timed perfectly, balanced beautifully. Of course, these two bring to the stage not just the experience of making and playing this show, but decades of working together in Complicite (they are both founder members) and beyond. Set and costume design (Oria Puppo) and lighting design (Philippe Vialette) are just right, elegantly serving the stage action.

The perfect show to start the London International Mime Festival – a reminder that top-notch physical comedy is alive and kicking in 2016.