A message of the greatest importance from John Ellingsworth: the Roundhouse's CircusFest is coming.
CircusFest is coming: Kicking off on April 7th with a visit from Trash City, that 360 degree blur of fire and mechs and trash and flesh, it then moves to a calmer mode with the Sugar Beast Circus. I saw Sugar Beast when it was at Jacksons Lane last year and can recommend it on more than the usual hearsay and precognition.
It's a double bill, with the first part a sort of magic realist travelogue about the artist's time in an Indian circus. It mixes film footage and flattened, ciphered performance into a slippery narrative of showmanship and disappearance. The second part – an enjoyably bizarre, camp and chaotic tangle of associations – centres on an imagined meeting between Charles Darwin and P.T. Barnum. It has the best circus lion you will ever see.
The other company at CircusFest that I've seen before, or seen bits of before, is Circolombia, who won a bronze medal at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain last year. At Demain they did an acrobatic piece coloured strongly by the style of... whatever you want to call it: 'street dance' or 'urban performance'. The mix of swaggering attitude and technical rigour was a little strange, but their energy and sheer appetite for stage-time was not to be denied. At CircusFest they'll be showing a full-length piece, Urban, that will set the skills more firmly within the context of their everyday lives in the city of Santiago de Cali.
Also in the CircusFest line-up: fresh-faced Compagnie XY with Le Grand C, a large, bright ensemble piece of French-level (meaning high-level) acrobatics; Dystopian Wonders, a new work from live artist Marisa Carnesky occupying the sinister world of the travelling sideshow; and an exhibition of darkly humorous circus-themed images by London-based photographer Matilda Temperley. Then there's the broadly-pitched and family-friendly slice of vaudeville from Slightly Fat Features; and, closing off the live programme, the Australian company Acrobat. Acrobat are famous in the circus world – for the quality of their shows and skills, for the rigour with which they train, and for performing naked Spanish web. This latest piece, Propaganda, puts Jo Lancaster and Simon Yates on stage with their two sons, for a new take on the family circus.
There's not much more to say other than that buying a ticket is not only recommended but absolutely compulsory if you're interested in physical performance, or think that you might be interested in it, or aren't interested at all but have a little disposable income and the evening to spare and don't mind being proved wrong
Circusfest runs at The Roundhouse from 7th April to 16th May 2010
Photo Credit: Matilda Temperley
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