A big white yurt stands in a quiet Edinburgh square off the beaten track of the Fringe. This is the Chapiteau, and inside is a floor of soil and a circle of wooden benches. We are here for the circus – although this isn’t any sort of regular circus – it’s a piece of word-free circus theatre by French company T1J exploring the troubled childhood of sculptor Jephan de Villiers, whose work mostly takes the form of wood-carving. We know this last fact because someone announces it pre-show, in the midst of the housekeeping notes about mobile phones and photography.

Not ideal, as it is good to get one’s theatre content from the piece of theatre presented, not from a pre-show announcement. So it is hard to say whether that starting point and theme would have been clear or not without being told, as once told you know, and that is that. Perhaps it is because this sculptor is better known in France than in the UK so it is felt that we need this context? Anyway, no matter – what is clearly presented, using puppetry, acrobatics and visual imagery, is a story of a small child who wavers between wonder at the world and distress; an exploration of childhood joy and pain.

We start with an axe-man chopping into a large log – really chopping, pieces flying off into the audience. A puppeteer and her puppet (carved wood, attached to her feet, with her hands as his) appear. The puppet-boy is a kind of Pinocchio figure who is intrigued by his own wooden-ness and seems to want to become flesh and blood – stroking the leg of his puppeteer (Morgan Aimerie Robin) with obvious interest in the warm, living material that it is moulded from. The puppet-boy wanders round the space, peering through thick-lensed glasses at anything that takes his childish interest – my bag is stolen and rummaged through, my water given to someone else.  When his glasses drop off, he steals someone else’s.

Playing around and sometimes against the puppet-boy are a trio of acrobats, two men and a woman (Michael Pallandre, Adria Cordoncillo and Caroline Leroy), whose lifts and balances are enacted up close to the audience, giving everything an edgy feel. Perhaps because of our proximity, we really feel the relationship between earth and air in their work. Standing in a three-person column, they reach to the ceiling of the yurt, giant-like. Feet planted in spoil, head reaching to the sky. Tree branches, ropes and planks are brought into play – as is a creaking metal-framed hospital bed that comes hurtling into the space, and is the stage for a pretty distressing scene of puppet and puppeteer separation. This is a show about childhood, not a children’s show (the company programme advices 16+ although this isn’t upfront in the Fringe marketing) – although there are fair few young children in the audience, and they seem, on the surface anyway as there are no tearful exits, to be coping OK. Ah, the power of puppetry to tell harrowing tales in a safe way! There is also mask used – lovely carved round faces echoed in tiny sculptures placed in the soil.

The mix of puppetry and circus is an unusual one. It works, mostly – the skilled acrobatics playing out all the outer obstacles and inner worries of the child who is growing up in a violent world; the wooden boy puppeteered with tender care. The visual aesthetic of the piece is rough and earthy: Hessian, wood, unbleached calico, brown wool. And of course the soil, which by the end of the show covers the acrobats’ limbs.

I must also mention the live music – beautiful cello by Florence Sauveur. And my favourite moment from the show, when the acrobats carry her aloft, and she continues to play…

T1J (Theatre d’un Jour) are an established group, led by Patrick Masset – they’ve been going for 20 years and have played at festivals worldwide, including the acclaimed Festival d’Avignon. They seem to like eclectic mixes  – their next show will apparently be a mix of opera and circus.

Although I don’t see L’Enfant Qui as a wholly successful show – I’d have liked the dramaturgy developed so that we didn’t need an explanation of what we were about to see – I applaud it wholeheartedly for its ambition merging of form.

L’Enfant Qui is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Circus at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014.

A cacophonic darkly comic live collage. A piece of tomfoolery from the void. Their words, not mine, but they’ll do very nicely, thank you. Words are important in this piece: words begged, borrowed and stolen from a series of parlour games. Words as in Merz declamations. Dada rants. Concrete poetry. Percussive noises. Song. Words that play to and with the physical presence of the performers. Words, words, words, words, words. And animal noises. And indeed stuffed animals.

‘Stop Making Sense’ could be the Livingstones Kabinet catchphrase, as we are invited (through the crazily beautiful singing of talented musician and performer Pete Livingston) to Step out of Time. In KLIP words, phrases, sentences are pulled apart violently, as if by teams of wild horses. Hung, drawn and quartered, rather like the hock of ham we see swinging from on high. Cautionary tales and aphorisms (‘If a woman forgets the words to her lullaby and just sings “la la la”, her child will still sleep’). Tongue-twisters (‘Red lorry, yellow lorry’). Mundane or meaningful social talk (‘Why don’t you come home with me tonight?) All are not merely deconstructed but torn to shreds and reassembled. Words sung, words danced, words dallied with and batted around the stage from performer to performer.

And what performers! The four-strong ensemble, two women and two older men, are all great. Particularly the men – Scottish actor/singer Pete Livingstone and Danish actor Sven E Kristensen (a man of many talents – he is apparently also the creator of the theatre of neo-puppetry and a sound designer – although not of this show).  I could watch and listen to these two forever.

Objects are also important – objects physically presence in the performance space, and objects evoked through words. A hock of ham. A Pink thong on a middle-aged man. A blow-up green plastic alligator, the type children use in swimming pools. A stuffed chicken – as in taxidermy, not as in Sunday roast. What does go in the head of a chicken? Cue song. There are lots of songs. And dances. Dances using gestural movement motifs, featuring much play with clothing, that have echoes of Pina Bausch and Nigel Charnock, yet are very much their own thing. There is also a great big back-projection screen, helpfully announcing ‘first part’ and ‘next part’. A keyboard. A trumpet. Cube-masks with painted faces. Ropes. A harness.

There’s a lot of stuff. And a lot happens. A lot of incidences coincide. I’m interested to learn in the programme notes that Danish director/performer Nina Karels trained at Ecole Philippe Gaullier. It would never have crossed my mind that Gaullier’s work was an influence on this piece, but now you come to mention it – it makes sense. Or rather, it makes nonsense.

It’s all, like, totally total. Really, as total as you could imagine. An extraordinary piece, challenging if you are desperate to ‘understand’ what things mean. If, though, you enjoy the anarchic fight back that words and objects can offer to logic and semantics, or even if you just like people impersonating chickens and dropping their trousers to reveal unexpected underwear, then this is the show for you.

KLIP is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Physical and Visual Performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014.

You may be stronger than me, but I have a weapon. I can SCREAM. And so she does, and so they all do, these women before us, they scream. Very loudly. This is an immediate, clear, unequivocal feminist statement. We are women, we have voices, and we will not be silenced.

Sirens is a show made by women, about women. The cast of six women actors are credited as the writers of the piece (with direction, as always with Ontroerend Goed’s shows, by Alexander Devriendt). These women – many of who have performed in other shows by the company – represent a wide variety of ages and experiences, and here present a wide variety of women’s voices. Women talking about feminism. Women talking about body image. Women talking about sexual violence. Women talking about everyday sexism. Women talking about ironic sexism. Women pleading guilty to stereotypical behaviour, and women berating men for their stereotypical behaviour. Women reflecting on the place of women in the world, and of the work that still needs doing. Part of me feels tired of the same old talk, the things that still need to be said – I’ve been an unreconstructed feminist for 45 years, and there is nothing here I haven’t heard before. But it’s not the fault of the show that this all still needs saying – it’s the fault of the world. Carry on…

I love the chosen form: a concert delivered by six vocalists, each in evening dress and heels, each standing behind a mic. The shouts and squeals and screams of the opening section of the work are at times like a serious experimental music piece (echoes of Cathy Berberian’s work with Ligeti) and at times clownish and silly. Both – and everything in between – works beautifully.

Musicality – specifically, the musical play with words and with vocal sounds – stays a constant throughout the piece. Lists are often used. A list of skin creams, what they claim to do, and their price (Estee Lauder, £55 for 50ml down to Aldi’s £1.79 offering). A list of female celebrities hated (‘I hate Cameron Diaz.’ ‘Sarah Jessica Parker is a skank.’). A list of casual sexual assault on young women (‘I was 16’ ‘I was 12’ ‘I was 19’).

Everything is beautifully constructed, well paced, nicely delivered. It is polemic, but it needs to be. There are moments of irony, visual counterbalances to the feminist tracts – for example, dimly-lit porn projections, onto the (black) curtains at the back of the stage; a mock (male) wanking scene. I’m not sure I’d have bothered with either; the former seems a pointless addition of men’s gaze on women, not really the subject of the piece; the latter is funny but doesn’t add anything much, seeming to be just an opportunity to do a bit of retaliatory man-mocking.

These are minor criticisms. It’s a strong piece of work, and a great showcasing of women’s voices – in many senses of that word.

Sirens is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award 2014 in Innovation & Experimentation. 

Sometimes a show is such a total delight that it is hard to write about it without just gushing ‘See it, see it!’ – Pss Pss is such a show. See it, see it. Winner of a Cirque du Soleil prize, and playing the Edinburgh Fringe after successful appearances worldwide, including at the London International Mime Festival, it comes with great expectations. Fulfilled – I was entranced from beginning to end by these two gorgeous clowns, who here demonstrate circus skills galore and comic timing to die for. Poetry in motion.

They start very slowly. A lunch box, an apple, an envious glance, a raised eyebrow, silence.  She juggles with her one apple. The audience applaud loudly – it’s just a few minutes in but she’s already won our hearts, looking at us quizzically with her big eyes from below her little grey skull cap, bunches of unruly brown hair escaping from the sides. He looks at her with a pitying, mocking look and places his apple on his head. She splits it in one killer blow.

Throughout, they play the status game – with twists. He appears to get the upper hand a lot of the time, then she trumps him. They hug, he tries to disengage himself, she resists and clings to him like a baby monkey, this turns into a beautiful and fluid acrobalance sequence – piggy-backs to shoulder stands with scarcely a pulse between; dead man drops that end an inch from the ground and immediately melt into something new. Their softness and agility is amazing.

The circus skills are worked into the clown relationship effortlessly. The diabolo section is a classic demonstration of merging circus skills with clowning – he spins the diabolo, there are drops. She does a dippy dance to cover the drops.

There are some great moments of audience interaction, for example, an ultra-silly scene bringing a stepladder onstage over the heads of the crowd. The grand finale is a trapeze act, featuring broken ladders, tangled limbs, and a fantastic frog-hang. I don’t know if such a thing exists in aerial circus, but there is no other word for it that I can think of to describe this fantastic image of our green-legged clown dangling from on high, abandoned by her partner. She does get down – with a little help from a friend. I won’t say how…

The performance by both clowns is world class. The costumes are just right, a mix of classic and contemporary clown imagery (he’s in a brown pin-striped suit and a trilby; she’s in red pixie boots that match her velvet bloomers). The use of music is beautifully considered, with silence playing an important part. I love the way a whimsical waltz or fairground oom-pa-pa polka suddenly stops as the performers freeze to stare each other out; or the way Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is played live by blowing through ladder rungs, to be picked up in the soundscape. In another section, the talented twosome have a battle of musical instruments, she on accordion, he on trumpet (louder, brasher – of course).  She takes lots of solos; he retaliates with pure volume. The battle ends in the longest stage hug in history.

These two are such delightful company that inevitably they bring the (full) house down and receive a noisy standing ovation from a delighted, mostly young, crowd at Zoo Southside. So good to see such timeless and beautiful clown work receiving this sort of response.  See it, see it. No really, see it.

Pss Pss is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Physical and Visual Performance at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014.