The 2025 Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus saw the Festival’s biggest ever programme, spread over four days during the May half-term holiday, and featuring around 50 different companies. Dorothy Max Prior weaves her way through, focusing on the healthy number of female-led circus companies presenting work
Oh what a week! Sunshine and showers, an outdoor arts festival brimming with top-notch street theatre and circus, an international conference with delegates from five continents…
There was a ride on a ghost train, as Out There Arts had the end of the pier fenced off for exclusive use of delegates for a couple of hours on the first day of the FRESH Streets conference; mixing tunes outside the brand-new Ice House venue at a mobile ‘bar’ featuring musical glasses, bottles and even credit cards, courtesy of Working Boys Club’s Serving Sounds; and a stroll down a street converted into a garden, dotted with sofas and hopscotch games, in Out There Arts’ own production Up Our Street. If you had a bit of free time during the day, there was always the Beach of Dreams Village to hang out in, with its beautiful installations, a performance stage, a bar, and a Climate Cafe in a yurt, which served as a hub for talks, meetings and informal discussions. Come night time, a wander through St George’s Party in the Park, converted into a Fire Garden, with splendiferous sculptures, interactive installations and automata from the likes of Paka the Uncredible. Not to mention all those hearty meals with friends at the Drill House, mentoring a bunch of teenage would-be reviewers for a Freshly Greated project (more on that elsewhere) – and meeting Brian Eno. Great Yarmouth, you really came up trumps this time round!
With a festival of this size, you leave aware that there were an enormous number of shows that you couldn’t squeeze in. C’est la vie! But let’s look on the bright side – and it was indeed a surprisingly bright and sunny Great Yarmouth for most of the festival week – I saw a lot of brilliant circus and outdoor arts shows, and came away nourished in every way – mind, body and spirit.
There are numerous ways to approach a festival of this sort, in which the work is mostly free to audience and presented in public space. You could just wander round and allow yourself to be drawn into whatever takes your fancy in the moment. You could have a strict timetable of things to see by familiar companies that you know will be ‘good’ (although that way you don’t get any fabulous surprises). Or you could follow a particular theme or thread, and try to see as much as you can that fits that remit. Which is the path I took, for at least part of the time, as I made it a quest to catch as many of the female-led circus companies that I could.
High on my list was B.O.B.A.S by the Spanish company Cia Jimena Cavalletti.
B.O.B.A.S is an acronym for ‘Beneficial Orchestral Band for Sepulchral Acts’, or at least the Spanish equivalent, and the show is enacted by a fabulous trio of female musical clowns. The theatrical device is that they are a humble musical band that organises burial ceremonies; but on this occasion the priest has scarpered with the ashes of the deceased person.
It starts with the audience in a processional line, sent through an archway and onto their seats by our three clowns: the small bossy one who tells us where to sit, offering commiserations in an officious manner; the tall gawky one who flusters about dropping Kleenex as she hands them out; and the totally batty one with the deep voice, wild-eyed stare, and smudged black make-up who slumps around growling, and usurps everything the other two do. Right from the start, even before we sit down, the clown personae have been established with expert ease.
Then comes the entry of the funeral cortege, the brass-and-percussion band led by the bossy one, naturally – the solemnity of the occasion wrecked by impromptu shifts from the funeral march to the wedding march. Or even worse, to a rendition of the Birdy Song. At which point, our noble threesome clock that the priest holding the casket of ashes, who had been bringing up the rear, has disappeared. Now what? Find them? (Gawky clown with the long legs races around madly looking for them.) Find a new corpse? (Weird clown with the terrifying stare searches the audience for potential substitutes.) Pretend everything is fine and carry on regardless, minus officiant and deceased? (Bossy one blusters and tries to keep going, failing ever more spectacularly at each turn.) This is all played out on a site scattered with burial crosses and vases of roses, a grave dug and ready. Of course, it ends in tears. There are roses scattered. There are spilt ashes. There is mud wrestling in the grave. There are clothes rent asunder, whacked heads, and broken instruments. A fabulous demonstration of the art of the Dark Clown –glorious ripped-and-torn revelry!
Right next door on an adjacent Trafalgar Road pitch, there’s another all-female company, France’s La Triochka, of a very different ilk. Their three-woman show, TopDown, ‘questions roles, the places we take with us and the places we leave behind’ and talks about ‘the relations of domination and submission in the social field, whether at work or in everyday life’. Although not explicitly stated in the publicity, the show seems to be specifically exploring relationships between women – as friends, as lovers, as partners. The three women, dressed in a pleasing neutral palette of everyday clothes, form constantly flowing patterns of weight-bearing, lifting and supporting. The base might be standing, or lying down, or in a bridge position. Sometimes a pattern presents as acrobalance, sometimes looking more like contact improvisation. A triple-tower might rise and fall, and morph into a completely new configuration, as flyer becomes base in the next pattern. In between the highly skilled and elegant acrobatic work, each of the three enacts a very lovely vocabulary of gestural movement motifs: strides or skips or teeny little steps; shoulders shrugged or hand to lips; small smiles or quizzical looks. It feels like a world of stories have unfolded, and just as we try to grasp the meaning of one, another has supplanted it. Echoes of elusive thoughts, memories and associations constantly float in the air. Here is a piece of circus work with intelligence that conveys its meaning to the heart not the head. Food for the soul!
A few minutes walk away, sited on a green near the old city wall on Deneside, I see Three Sisters by Estonian company Big Wolf. There’s a high aerial rig, with white silks attached – although it all starts on the ground (very grounded, in fact) with a woman in traditional peasant dress who sighs and groans, giving birth to a succession of babies – three daughters. This all done with great comic timing and physical skill – and a fair bit of role-swapping, as there are four characters but only three performers! So here we are: the archetypal three sisters. Three sisters in a war-torn land with few available men to do the heavy work, or provide the loving. The women chop the wood, and herd the cows, and occasionally give us a tune on the kannel, a beautiful Estonian plucked-string instrument. They are doing OK, but it would be good to find a man – a good man. The audience is scoured for suitable candidates, but none are found. You too, huh? says one of the sisters to the female audience members, raising many a laugh and more than one dig in the ribs as the men blush.
As is always the case in the best fairy tales, the youngest sister is the most mischievous, tearing off her skirt and running to the rig to tangle herself up in the silks and dangle with gay abandon. The other two join her, all decorum abandoned. Skirts and petticoats and blouses are cast aside, and in their white cotton undies they spin and twist on hoops and hammocks – eventually climbing up on top of the rig with breathtaking ease, to lounge and doze far above the everyday demands of the world, a fabulous image of female emancipation.
The show is a tribute to the women of the Baltic countries – the performers’ mothers and grandmothers and aunts who survived years of farming, housekeeping and child-raising whilst their menfolk fought and died in the many conflicts in the region over the years. Baltic wedding traditions, women’s roles in the home, and how women were perceived to be versus how they actually are (then and now) is the crux of the piece. Brilliant aerial skills, fabulous comic acting, some well-managed audience interaction – it all adds up to a heartwarming and challenging piece about what it means to be born female in a land without men – or in a land where the men leave something to be desired!
ElevateHer, by UK company Daughters of the Dust, also celebrates female struggles and strengths – this time, played out on three multi-height tightwire rigs by six feisty young women, who dance onstage to the upbeat tune of the Chicks on Speed classic ‘We Don’t Play Guitars’. With a soundtrack that samples what we take to be autobiographical reflections and affirmations, mixed in with a fabulous feel-good batch of tunes (great to hear Suzi Quatro’s ‘Can the Can’ capturing a new generation of fans), our wonder women dance, pose, tumble and walk the wires – in ballet pumps, in high heels or with unfurling red ribbons tied around their ankles. ‘Pray for baked beans on toast, pray for the bus to arrive, pray for the late nights and sunrises, pray for togetherness’ rings out the voice on the soundtrack. Utterly joyful and life-affirming – ElevateHer is a delightful first show from a UK company we shall no doubt hear a lot more of in the future.
I also get to see perennial favourite Dulce Duca (from Portugal, but now based in Norfolk) with Um Bello Dia – a show previously seen indoors (at Ficho Festival in Mexico, 2017), now transposed to outdoors. So, first a word on the site, as Duca has negotiated with the residents of Fox’s Passage, a close near Out There’s Drill House with a tiny green space between the short rows of houses, to place her show here. Which works very nicely as it is a gentle and whimsical piece which needs a quiet, contained space. Duca is a juggler, but so much more – an adept painter of pictures in the performance space, and a clever manipulator of objects. So, not only every-which-way with her juggling clubs (integrating some good audience interaction along the way) but also employing an intriguing combination of whirling circular skirts and colourful flowers which are plucked from the skirts. As Dulce whirls around and around, flowers flying in every direction, she is at once a dancing diva, a dervish, and a playful child delighted with the world she finds herself in. The show evolves into a celebratory communal waltz, with people plucked from the audience and paired up to dance together – and at the end, we have the unexpected bonus of Brian Eno leading off a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday To You’, as it is indeed Dulce Duca’s birthday. Um bello dia indeed! Belleza, belleza, belleza!
Solarte Producciones are a Catalunyan company presenting two shows in this year’s Festival. (Out There Arts have a long history of supporting and collaborating with artists and organisations from Catalonia, and this year is no exception.) Sadly, I don’t catch Miss Margherita – a solo circus and comedy show by the company’s Swiss/Catalan lead artist Jessica Arpin Olar; but I do see their other show, Siku, an ensemble piece presented indoors – the first ever show at the newly restored and opened Ice House, Out There Arts’ second venue in Yarmouth.
So a few words first about the venue. A Grade II listed building of brick construction with a thatched roof, the Ice House was originally used to store ice to preserve fish, herring fishing being the main Yarmouth industry for many centuries – the only building of its kind left in the country. With support from the Architectural Heritage Fund and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, alongside other funding, Out There Arts has repurposed it into an arts and circus training hub, which doubles up as a flexible performance venue.
On the opening night, we get to see the space empty of seats – a fabulous arena, lit with a swirl of multi-coloured lights and projections, with a long bar and a DJ station. Outside the building, Belgian circus company Sur Mesure, led by the enterprising acrobat and musician Seraina de Block, present Protocole – a two-hander perfect for the occasion as it focuses on the celebratory raising of a flag. Aided and abetted by a male companion (Oscar Willems), Seraina and her trusty trumpet first give us a fanfare, before she attempts, and finally succeeds after much comic business, to climb the flagpole her partner is holding, to triumphantly unfurl the flag and play another ‘trumpet voluntary’. A great little show, and a lovely ritual to open the Ice House.
A couple of days later I’m back. Now, the auditorium is filled with tiered seating for the sold-out premiere show, Siku, presented on a regular end-on stage. The four-strong ensemble take us on a journey ‘through the Arctic of yesteryear’, much of the content inspired by the Jessica Arpin Olar’s research with the Inuit people of Canada, ‘the last indigenous people to be colonised’. It’s a far more text-heavy work than I was expecting, with circus playing less of a key role than I’d anticipated – although of course that is commentary on my expectations rather than on the intention of the artist! The fragmented storytelling mixes research, biography and autobiography – circling around Jessica Arpin Olar’s encounters with the Inuit; and the stories of the many explorers who turned up on their doorstep, so to speak. We learn that there is no Inuit word for ‘vegetable’ because there aren’t any – and no fruit either, other than a few berries in the summertime. We learn that if you eat a whole seal – brains and all – you’ll get all the nutrients you need; and that the caribou sometimes trip out on magic mushrooms. Oh, and caribou antlers made for the first-ever sunglasses – protectors against the glare of the snow. Famously, there are many words for ‘snow’ in Inuit – and ‘siku’ is one of them. One of the most common words in the Inuit language is ‘maybe’ – apparently a suitable answer to almost any question asked.
Of those famous explorers: well, they perished just about sums it up. Some brought ponies with them that starved to death. They were prone to poetic farewells: ‘I’m just going to go out. I may be a while,’ said Scott of the Antarctic. ‘Rough notes on our dead bodies must tell the tale,’ said Franklin of the Arctic. Expeditions sent by Lady Franklin to find the explorer’s ships inevitably fail as nobody ever looks in the right place. ‘The ships are over there,’ say the Inuits. ‘They can’t be,’ reply those sent to find them, ‘because our information on their last known location indicates…’ In 2017, almost two centuries on, an expedition finds Franklin’s ships. ‘They’re over there’ say the great-great-grandchildren of those Inuits – and there they are.
All of this fascinating information is weaved into a show that employs clowning and physical comedy, object manipulation, live music (banjo, accordion, and some very nice musical saw and bowing of objects around the space) – and some highly skilled aerial work on pole and silks from Jessica Arpin Olar and her team-mates. Oh, and after a long wait the oft-referenced Nanouk – the highly dangerous (to humans and seals) arctic polar bear – does eventually appear, riding a bicycle, in the show’s grand finale. I could have done with a little more of the circus work – integrating circus acts into a narrative-driven show is always a challenge, I know – but it’s an interesting piece of work, very well received on its UK premiere here in the Ice House.
Moving away now from the female-led companies, but staying with circus: the big outdoor evening show of the Festival, presented on Friday 30th and Saturday 31st May, is AIthentic by Gorilla Circus, a British company that has been consistently nurtured and supported over recent years by Out There Arts. This large-scale show is a co-commission, building on their relationship with the company; a collaboration between Gorilla Circus, When Time was New, and Citrus Arts that merges circus, street dance and what is loosely called ‘technology’. The show invites us ‘to explore what we want our relationship with technology to be, and how we could achieve that’.
I go to the premiere, on Friday night. We arrive at St Nicholas’ Car Park just as the sun is setting. We enter a fenced-off space, and see an enormous truck with a crane attached. The crane has a head: a humanoid robot, but with a snake-like feel. There’s a large screen stage-left that is flashing up ‘Digiverse’ propaganda: Connect, Curate, Celebrate, it tells us. Escape the difficulties of reality and find your purpose in the Digiverse. Over on the other side, and spreading out into the crowd, is a motley crew of Free Minds Collective members, who carry cardboard signs daubed with painted slogans and XR-style stencilled graphics urging us to protect ourselves from the AI generated Digiverse, which is trying to steal our information and utilise our quest for connection against us. ‘If the system fails, I’m locked out of my own home,’ says a plaintive voice.
It’s now almost dark and the mighty crane with its humanoid / snake head cranks into action. The structure beams out electric blue and Matrix green light. A platform rises from the truck, and we see a chorus of workers, whose day plays out in an excellent street dance and acrobatics choreography, as the platform, ladders and crane structure become their playground.
A hero, Loki, emerges from the chorus, and the crane takes him up to another level, to what we now assume is home at the end of the day. Our lonely hero has a dilemma – he has been on a date with a girl called Sage, but she doesn’t seem to want to continue the relationship. He’s debating with the head (who is starting to sound more and more like HAL from 2001 – A Space Odyssey) whether he should take up offers to move from reality into the Digiverse – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live and work in the ‘real world’ as more and more businesses and people move over – even the trains have stopped running. The clinching factor is when he’s led to believe that Sage has moved over. But has she? He takes the two-day trial and heads in to the Digiverse to find her. And there she is! A surreal sci-fi scene plays out very nicely – a lovely duet between the two lead characters. But is it actually her, or is she a walking, talking living doll? Or a figment of his imagination? Whose reality is this, anyway?
AIthentic gives us a fabulous hour of street dance and circus (acrobatics, pole, rope and more), and an ambitious narrative addressing some of our current concerns about AI; all played out on an awe-inspiring set. Great to see British outdoor work of this scale hitting the streets and skies!
Other British circus companies featured in the Festival include NoFitState Circus who bring us Bamboo, which has a delightfully simple premise: the company construct a set from long sticks of bamboo, and use it as their playground for a very lovely medley of circus games. That’s it: the performers, the empty stage, the sticks of bamboo lying there ready to be utilised. Different temporary structures rise and fall. There is balancing, swinging, object manipulation, as the performers interact with the bamboo. There is co-operating and competing – but mostly co-operating – as the performers interact with each other. The skill level is supreme – everything is done seemingly effortlessly. And all this to the tune of an excellent live musician on full drum-kit, and occasionally on other percussion instruments and electric guitar. Although it is a simple idea, Bamboo has complex reverberations, exploring the necessity of co-operation between human beings; and setting up the notion of the inter-connectedness of the human and vegetable worlds, fellow occupants of our one and only planet.
Featured image (top): Big Wolf: Three Sisters
Total Theatre writer and editor Dorothy Max Prior attended Out There Festival and FRESH Street conference in Great Yarmouth, 28–31 May 2025.
For other shows seen by Total Theatre Magazine at Out There Festival, see the round-up piece here by Lisa Wolfe.
Out There Arts produce the annual Out There International Festival of Street Arts & Circus – now in its 17th year and one of the three largest free Outdoor Arts festivals in the UK – with 30-50+ artistic companies and audiences of 60,000+.
Out There Arts – National Centre for Outdoor Arts & Circus is a registered charity and Arts Council England funded National Portfolio Organisation.
FRESH STREET is a flagship conference for the outdoor arts and circus sector, held every two years, bringing together key European and international artists, programmers, and policymakers for three days of dynamic discussions and stimulating exchanges on how we can imagine the outdoor arts of tomorrow.
FRESH STREET#5 was co-organised by Circostrada Network and Out There Arts in the frame of Out There Festival, in partnership with Outdoor Arts UK. It took place 28–30 May 2025 at The Hippodrome, England’s only surviving dedicated circus building.