This May saw two major UK festivals – Brighton Festival and the Norfolk & Norwich Festival (NNF) – presenting a hefty amount of circus work from across the world. Unsurprisingly, Quebec and Australia were heavily represented… The Quebec crew first: it’s hard for outsiders (and even insiders) to understand how a circus company could come […]

Tempting Failure 2013 promised ‘an immersive experience of live art & noise’. It certainly delivered. Curated and produced by Thomas John Bacon, the festival is now in its second year. The setting? The Island, a disused police station situated at the heart of inner city Bristol. The site itself stank of a rich history of […]

This cleverly devised production from the Marlowe Studio’s first resident company seeks to deconstruct and explore memory and inheritance through visual metaphor, direct address and imagined meetings with long-dead relatives. The stimuli is John Berger’s semi-autobiographical book Here is Where We Meet, a disparate narrative which travels across Europe as the elderly protagonist ‘John’ reflects […]

The stage is bordered by the three high walls of a grimy, empty office, cut each side with bright yellow doors. As we settle down a tall bald man in a dark grey suit walks in and out, looking like he’s rehearsing for a speech. He yawns, mumbles to himself. A flipchart stands in the […]

Kitted out in headphones, I am lead through the corridors of The Island, an old police station at the centre of Bristol now used for circus training. I am listening to typical circus music, and feel like I am approaching the ring, like I am about to perform. I am with one other audience member […]