THEATRE

Performance art has always had a trace: Installaction Artspace considerable presence in . Phil Babot, an artist who has been living in Wales since Debra Savage 1981, believes that is ‘the strongest centre of performance art outside of ’. The opening of trace in 2000 Away from Cardiff’s city centre on a with a performance by Alistair Maclennon terraced lined street in Adamsdown, the coincided with an overall shift in power black door of 26 Moria Place is initially within the Welsh performance community. unremarkable. Only the small brass plate The bi-annual Cardiff Art in Time (CAT) engraved with the word trace provides a Festival was coming to an end, and a clue that there is something unusual about number of artist-led initiatives were this particular house, a house that is home beginning to spring up across the country. to a small but internationally renowned The result of these two simultaneous performance space. changes led to the development of what Since its conception by curator and Babot and theatre programmer James Tyson cohabitee Andre Stitt, trace: Installaction refer to as ‘performance hubs’, including Artspace has developed a life of its own. Ointment in West Wales, Coed Hills in St trace’s front room has attracted Hilary, tactileBOSH in , and performance artists from around the world, and trace in Cardiff. including names like Jimmie Durham, Eve They have become a network of initiatives Dent, Stuart Brisley, Irma Optimist and that work primarily in conjunction with Valentin Torrens, and as trace reaches the each other, linked by the formation of end of its fifth season, it has already become Second Wednesday, a forum dedicated to a main focus for performance art in Cardiff. providing a critical discourse for Welsh

Jeffrey Bird, Holy Ghost, 2004 (photograph by Phil Babot, courtesy trace gallery)

82 performance and live arts. The overall effect does what you make and what is left change is to produce a varied artistic landscape, and transform over two or three weeks, and enhancing the position of performance in perhaps become an exhibition?’ Wales. As Stitt explains, ‘it is really The first challenge for the artist is to important for a healthy creative culture to create a piece of work to take place in a have many different strands’. small room under the gaze of an audience. trace’s own role in this network has The second challenge comes from Stitt mainly been defined through Stitt’s own himself, who encourages a durational artist practice. Time spent squatting in London to produce a performance that lasts one during the 1980s, for example, provoked an hour, for example. This approach, along interest in the distinction between the with the mix of artists who have performed private and public, the domestic and in trace, has resulted in a diverse use of a artistic. ‘Because of how I’ve always lived,’ very ordinary white room. Fore Mien he tells me, ‘art has taken place in a transformed the space into a golfing range, domestic situation.’ The decision to with John G. Boehme driving 600 golf balls establish an artspace in his home was into an aluminium-clad wall. James Cobb therefore a natural progression of this & Bob Dog Catlin’s Our Children created a interest: the front room, intended as a live sonic backdrop for a series of studio, became a temporary, then manipulated prints depicting images of permanent exhibition space. tattooed children. More recently, the room Similarly, Stitt’s practice as a was split in two to create a tarpaulin performance artist and his involvement in a swimming pool by the High Heel Sisters‚ number of peripheral art activities has led Art Holes. The final challenge comes from to a distancing from the traditional art the requirement that each performance market. Along with other artist-led produces an exhibition by leaving behind a initiatives, trace feeds into notions of residue, or trace. promoting artists‚ autonomy and networks, These notions all feed into the debate allowing artists to develop away from the surrounding performance and live art, pressures of a more consumer-led market. engaging with issues such as how to ‘Performance art is ephemeral – it is approach or document the work: ‘trace is a constantly changing and shifting, and that’s way of making exchanges and keeping that why dominant culture has a lot of problems dialogue going, that idea of art as meeting, with performance art, because it can’t be that the meetings continue,’ says Stitt. In defined and in a sense, whoever is making trace, this can be as practical as a meeting the piece defines what it is they’re making between artist and curator in order to in the time they are making it. That can secure a show and discuss the performance often be confusing to people who want an space, or between the artist and audience, outcome or end product,’ Stitt says. with the relaxed atmosphere of the pre- and In trace, the work produced focuses post-performance gathering in the kitchen partly on how it will contribute to a wider facilitating conversations. The biggest dialogue. In general, as performances tend meeting, of course, takes place between the to occur as part of an event or festival, it can artist/audience and the work. The open and be difficult to focus on one particular work, experimental air of trace enables a head-on 83 or view it in relation to itself rather than the interaction with ideas and concepts, both work by which it is framed. trace, however, on the night and as the exhibition of trace highlights the work of one artist, and materials develop over time. challenges that artist to experiment with his The final stage of meeting takes place on or her practice. In other words, Stitt asks: an international level. This has taken the ‘How would it be if you took this artist and form of projects and exchanges such as the placed them in another context?’ and ‘How 2003/2004 RHWNT with Le Lieu, High Heel Sisters, Art Holes, 2005 (photograph by Phil Babot, courtesy trace gallery)

Centre en Art Actuel in Québec, 2004’s in developing a performance dialogue Dadao Live Art Festival in China and the within Wales and on the international presentation of a season of Chinese live art circuit, a dialogue which is being written later this year, as well as more local into the very fabric of the house. According collaborations with events such as Chapter to Stitt, ‘there are layers of traces behind the Arts Centre’s Experimentica festivals and paint, there’s drawings and text on the wall, 2002’s ‘Something for the Weekend’ at the floors have been painted and painted so Gregynog, Newtown. This is taken further you get a scabby floor with all this residue by research, publications and trace: annex, underneath it.’ In other words, trace will an occasional series of events that takes continue to be a living space and document place outside of trace’s usual programme. As of all the transitions that have occurred James Tyson says, this hive of activity has within its walls. earned trace the reputation of being ‘a sharp 84 reflection on the international world of performance art’ and is ‘unique and to be trace will be ending its fifth season with much valued in both gallery and an installation evening featuring Cosey performance situations’. Fanni Tutti on 28th May. For more Over the next five years, trace will no information visit www.tracegallery.org doubt change and develop. The directions it will take are unclear, but it will maintain its sense of experimentation and play a part Debra Savage is a freelance journalist based in Cardiff. was The Motorcycle Diaries). She has Latino America travelled widely, and has studied and danced in varying idioms such as hip hop Aparna Sharma and tango. Though contemporary dance is her preferred artistic vocabulary, she also incorporates various textual influences – literature, poetry, music and theatre – in order to extend the boundaries of her work. Aparna Sharma reflects on her participation Aside from the dynamics of movement, she in a three-week workshop earlier this year is deeply engaged with improvisation and run by Argentinean choreographer, Andrea composition. Commanding a sinuous ease Servera, at Chapter Arts Centre as part of with the body, Andrea seeks any interaction their Latino America season. that involves what she calls the ‘play of difference’. So her workshop invited a varied group of artists who work in dance, On a hazy winter morning, amidst the performance, music and, in my case, film. clutter of a cosy café, Andrea and I sit to talk. Influenced as I am by the secular ancient Far away from the textures and smells of Indian discourses of spiritualism and yoga, habitats familiar to us, we grapple with the the medium of film has been for me the weather. And also, in a sense, with the most intense source for meditative environment we are in. Andrea can barely introversion, which I have translated into speak English. I cannot speak any Spanish. A experimental films and video work. It was translator sits between us, and we soon my current academic focus on cross- realise words are failing us (and the translator cultural encounters and the dynamics of too). But our conversation is resilient: this is movement within the moving image that how it has evolved during the course of the initally took me to Andrea’s workshop, three weeks that we spent working together. though I have to confess that, besides some Dance and movement were the vocabulary occasional and simple lessons in classical for me and the dozen other artists who Indian dance while at school in India, I attended a residency led by Argentinian have never really felt equipped or sought dancer and choreographer, Andrea Servera, expression in this medium. At the at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre, which is workshop my participation was expressed one of those unusual spaces where cultural through my use of a video camera. interface is not prefixed with the often It was the difference itself between the celebratory and somewhat callous term different media in which we work that ‘multi-’ or ‘cross-’. Instead it is the ‘inter-’ sparked a dialogue between Andrea and me, marking cultural contact that is sought here. an engagement that demanded of us an The three-week-long residency was part of alertness towards our aesthetic inclinations, Chapter’s Latino America season of art and and that also resulted in an interaction performance from Latin America, featuring marked by constant interrogation. It programmes such as our workshops with involved negotiating the specificities of our Andrea, which explored the dynamics and media to explore the possibilities arising in possibilities of cross-cultural interaction. our contact. Andrea tells me now she was 85 My work with Andrea led me through aware of our differences and so she did not moments of appreciation, tension and compel me to participate in any of her extension. We work with different media exercises. But I couldn’t help being drawn in. which are crucial to our artistic expression. Besides contemporary dance, Andrea Camera: corporeal and beyond… choreographs for fashion and film in Bodywork with Andrea is as intense as it is Argentina (her most recent film assignment engaging. With her, dance is not so much movements evolved along with the dance work, emulating its pace and poise. The camera started to assume a kind of corporeal dimension: it became more than an eye simply looking at an object. Its corporeality was, however, complex: it was no mere extension of my body, nor a response to movements between dancers. The camera was intimate with the body, yet distinct from it. Together, Andrea and I discovered how much we liked the moments when the camera All photographs by Diego Vidart felt increasingly hypnotized in the play of (courtesy Chapter Arts Centre) movements. In such instances the image was disturbing: it no longer offered a smooth, about learning a style or method. It flows accessible or sustained perspective. It would from and is the culmination of honing one’s get close, then distant; rotate along its axis, awareness of the body, the emotions, and of move erratically and then steadily – as if with one’s relationship with one’s environment and a will of its own. It became fluid, uncontained fellow dancers. The breath is central to the as it was in any fixed role or function. whole process, and becomes analogous with While I was dancing, there were occasions when I had to hand the camera to a fellow body movement. Being and meditating with dancer. What was remarkable was that there the breath lent refinement to our movements; was no jarring of the image as the camera when breath and movement were combined, changed hands: its rhythm and sense of they created a distinct dance vocabulary. composition were maintained. This was The work was rigorous and not easy to crucial, given that some of my dance understand in the first instance, and I was partners had never held a video camera immediately confronted with the problem before (and were a bit perplexed and hesitant of how I would translate my body work for about confronting it). The implication of the camera. At first I played as an observer, our bodies in a common vocabulary of studying formations and movements. But movement seemed to make the camera in some measure I was uneasy about being transcend the differences between us. an outsider: I wasn’t just content to look on. However, the imagery generated did not In the second week of the workshop, lend itself to a smooth integration into the seduced by the ease and rhythms of the performance Andrea was developing. This environment, which were enhanced by the piece was a medley of movements, each variety of music that Andrea had brought distinct in its texture and underlying with her, I started to dance among the emotion. It traversed assorted arcs, and group with the camera in my hands. quite indiscernibly raised the notion of the Like most independent filmmakers, I woman as a subject in a variegated manner. have appreciated the hand-held camera for Without any singular narrative, it served as 86 its closeness to the body. At the same time, a space where the artists shared and I have repeatedly pondered over whether combined the material developed amongst aesthetic possibilities can be extended them. The camera work contrasted sharply beyond the hand-held camera being in feeling from the performance, and nothing more than ‘shaky’, contrasting though derived from the movements diametrically with camera movements incorporated within the piece, it was not realized with sophisticated gear such as the offering a complement to it. It was decided track or the crane. But my camera that I would present clips from my work at the end of the performance, which would she adds with her characteristic shrug. It provide the audience with a sense of the seems that the pleasure for Andrea is in workshop and the possibilities I had engaging without naming: the performance encountered. The two, the performance is like a gust of wind, and the dust caught and the video work, would stand apart and up and dispersed on the breeze scatters itself yet be implicated in each other. over artist and audience alike. Some sequences in the performance The woman subject accessed in echoed familiar and on occasions clichéd movement encounters and sensations, while others For Andrea, it is the exploration of a spilled over with a freshness and crispness ‘within’ that is inspirational and the source akin to abstraction, making the entire piece of creativity for her. This exploration serves gripping, yet understated and poetic in as the means for converting the nuance and execution. Andrea exploited commonplace into a unique form of dance moments of cultural specificity and in which gesture and poise are key. difference through the performance – when In her compositions, Andrea does not the performers spoke in their native turn to words or text out of habit or languages (including Spanish, Polish, practice. In fact, words, according to her, Italian), for example, or through costume, can sometimes be an impediment to the which was most obvious in my brief semantic construction of a piece, ‘limiting’ appearance, when, wearing the saree, I the work into a fixed matrix of meaning danced among the group with the camera. and context, she says as her hands break However, the insertion of the local, here crusty bread while we sip coffee together. the Argentinean setting, was expanded so Andrea is subtle in her suggestions. For her that the ironies and humour of cultural the performance is not a presentation; it is disparity that dotted the performance more a conversation with the audience in became submerged. Andrea could have which neither party has any fixed role or limited herself to particular instances of the responsibility. ‘The process of art is more local, like the card game of Chancho, or complex than any identification can allow,’ particular musical scores that pulsated with

87 characteristic Latin American rhythms. These of history and pursuing political struggle. instances would have served on their own Indeed, the urgency that underpins this to lend the necessary flavour less elaborately. occupation cannot be emphasized. Yet Given Andrea’s preference for form radicalism, as Andrea’s work indicates both and experience over immediacy and in its content and form, is not the hallmark identification, this was an aspect that did not or sole definition of the Third World artist. make the performance any the poorer, but it The complexity of the Third World subject, did collide with it. which comprises the rich and multiple The opening of the performance remained textures of socio-economic and cultural perhaps the most powerful enactment of the reality are more intriguing and informative Third World female subject’s complex identity, than a vision that isolates struggle and when the protagonist rose from an innocuous glorifies instances of militancy. As Andrea heap of earth at the corner of the performance says to me: ‘There’s lots more than Che space and moved among the other performers Guevara and poverty in Latin America. The in the space seeking water. The closing of the picture there is a far more complex, multi- piece was calculatedly yet poetically tied to this layered and sophisticated than that image.’ opening, when the dancers dropped glass cups In retrospect, working with Andrea that smashed on the floor. Emerging from seems to be less about dance or moments of action on a grand scale, this action choreography and more about accessing a came across as small yet attentive. Its impact space of difference and distinction – the was also heightened by the accompanying ‘inter’ between subjectivities and cultures. music, which indicated a colossal scale and Andrea’s work uses markers of culture – sense. Evocatively, the woman subject we language, dress and modes of performance encountered at the beginning of the piece was – but situates them in the context of the re-inscribed here, paralleling in a sense the themes and thoughts the work evokes, and fierceness of the transgressive Hindu goddess equally in terms of the engagements that Kali. arise between artists. As a result, cultural At times the woman subject was specificity is not restricted to an confrontational, addressing the audience unquestioning employment of quantifiable directly. Her voice and expression were markers held in a tight template devoid of interrogatory. Then she sang aloud in a primal re-appropriation, critique or contradiction. tone that was at once demanding and Peppered as Andrea’s work is with humour seductive. The performance was also smattered and pleasure as well as frustration and with occasions when men and women slipped melancholy, it offers the artists and performers into bodily attraction, enacting flirtations, an understanding of culture as a multi- equations and seeking romances. And then faceted, living and breathing notion. Andrea there were rare moments when the woman herself asserts that the ‘involvement of the with an air of conscious carelessness turned her self’ is principal in the making of meaning. back to the audience, unrelenting and To me, the benefit of our interaction is articulate. She emerged as determined but manifested more in my video compositions undefined, unassumingly weaving newer than in the performance. I shall wait to narratives. The multiple modes of dance the dance again wearing my Kanjivaram silk 88 performance was composed of – the saree, with my camera near to my body. communal and merry, the acrobatic and the Pointing outwards, yet looking inwards... abstract – testified to this development.

The making of meaning The Third World artist has been appreciated Aparna Sharma, an independent filmmaker from New in the First World, and on occasion literally Delhi, is studying for a PhD at the Film Academy, reified, for articulating the displaced subject University of Glamorgan. ‘Circus with Heart’: New Circus and NoFit State

Jeni Williams

Theatre is . . . like bread . . . like a necessity. Heathcote Williams’s anti-car poem, the Theatre is a form of religion. It is fun. show featured car-based sculpture and – Peter Schumann, founder of Bread and percussion played on car parts. It closed with Puppet Theatre, 19681 fireworks erupting over two cars as they burst into flames in a head-to-head crash. Far, far Last summer I went with a friend and her closer to Brith Gof than Billy Smart! A son to Pembroke Dock to see NoFit State’s further measure of the links between NoFit latest show, ImMortal. It had been touring State and the rest of the performance Britain to the kind of ecstatic reviews that community in Wales is that one of their script every company’s fantasies, and we founder members, Richie Turner, moved on were excited. The silver big top couldn’t be to work with the Welsh College of Music and missed: erected just outside the town, it Drama, became a Director of CADMAD ( glittered like a fantastic spaceship in the Cardiff multicultural arts organisation), and late August sun. But inside was a circus is now the Wales Development Officer for show that was as extraordinary as that NESTA (the National Endowment for exterior: a promenade show with acrobats Science, Technology and the Arts). and fools performing around and amongst I spoke to Ali Williams, a founder us, with live music, with hula-hoop member of NoFit State in 1987 and now dancers, trapeze artists, with aerialists on Chair of their board. She prefers to describe rope and tissue tumbling above our heads. All three of us were entranced. It was no surprise when ImMortal was awarded the (increasingly prestigious) Theatre-in-Wales Award for the Best English-Language Production of 2004.

Circus as Theatre NoFit State is not a theatre company of course, but the categories of theatre and circus are hardly clear-cut, with physical theatre and dance performance as the most obvious cross-overs. The company doesn’t see such categories as relevant, and the fact that ImMortal was directed by ELAN’s Firenza Guidi and choreographed by dance artist and choreographer Jem Treays is indicative of its performance base. Indeed, 89 NoFit State have always worked with other kinds of performers. In 1995 they worked with Music Theatre Wales, Splott State Circus, Rubicon Dance and Circus Space to produce Autogeddon, a multi-level, multi-stage show in a warehouse on Cardiff’s Dumballs Road. Based on All images courtesy NoFit State NoFit State as an ‘ensemble-based collective’ that produces ‘mixed-media circus theatre spectaculars’, and she relates their practice to the similarly multidisciplinary experimental companies that exploded into Wales in the 1980s: Brith Gof (1981), the Magdelena project (1986), Volcano and Green Ginger (1987), Music Theatre Wales (1988), Earthfall and ELAN (1989). In the midst of this ferment the Aberystwyth Centre for Performance Research was established in 1988. Seeing the lack of a Welsh circus tradition as providing freedom to experiment, Williams says that it’s no accident that no English and no Scottish companies are doing their kind of work. The 1980s were not just a time of radical formal experiment but also of shifting relations between theatre and audience. Welsh companies like Spectacle (community theatre) or Small World (Theatre for Development) were set up as early as 1979, and Theatr Powys even earlier. It’s between these two poles of radical and community-based theatre that NoFit State’s theatrical work is best seen. Williams points out that where traditional circus was seen as autonomous commercial enterprises which required no public funding, NoFit State is a registered It is this interrelation of experimental charity with extensive outreach educational and community theatre that I find and community learning schemes that fascinating in NoFit State’s work. They enable those with no circus connections to describe themselves as ‘circus with heart’, enter one of the two main circus training and they succeed in combining cutting schools in Britain: Bristol’s Circomedia and edge theatre, video, dance, music and London’s Circus Space. Eight of the interactive technologies with community ImMortal performers have come through group involvement. Ali Weaver, the poised their community workshop; one individual Hula dancer and aerialist from Australia who started with NoFit State at the age of who was one of the stars of the show, has fourteen is now professional. The company done circus work with companies all over receives Local Authority support from the world – including iconoclastic Spanish Rhondda Cynon Taff and funding towards company La Fura del Baus – and she said 90 touring from the Arts Council of Wales and that she had never worked in a company the Arts Council of England. The lion’s like this. For NoFit State is no ‘ordinary’ share of their support comes from ACW, New Circus either… who helped them acquire the silver spaceship, and who have funded training New Circus and apprenticeship schemes. Their first New Circus is popularly thought of as Welsh-language circus tour takes place this ‘circus’ without animals – a homogenising autumn. simplification which obscures the huge range of different activities. Rather than a rhetoric of Guy Dubord and the practical utilitarian response to growing concerns for example of Peter Shumann’s Bread and animal welfare, the absence of animals is Puppet Theatre, which had electrified best seen as marking a shift in the meaning Paris at the height of the 1968 student of the circus. There have always been rebellions. Shumann claimed theatre is ‘a tumblers and clowns, but the classical necessity’ like bread – or religion – and he circus as a distinct form was the creation of has kept to a ritualistic ‘poor’ theatre. But, an eighteenth-century British cavalryman, like the former ‘pro-Situationists’ who are Philip Astley, who supplemented his now advertising executives, or the equestrian displays with acrobats and industrialists who exploit the techniques Elizabethan fools. Classical circus of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the dramatises an Enlightenment desire to Oppressed to increase market domination, control the physical world, the human body Cirque du Soleil seem to have become the and the animal world, a control reinforced very kind of circus to which they were through the autocratic ringmaster and the once opposed. As their shows become ever parodic antics of the irrational clown. In larger and their sets ever more extravagant, New Circus the clown is more of a the company becomes ever more character and less of an archetype, and the corporate. It has even – with ‘spectacular’ master has disappeared, along with the irony – established a base in Las Vegas. trained horses and ‘wild beasts’. With the Pierrot Bidon, who founded Soleil’s best- loss of that stabilising masculine centre, known rivals, the post-punk French New Circus reflects the dislocated vision of troupe, Archaos, cuttingly dismissed the contemporary world, its attention Cirque du Soleil as ‘the McDonald’s of shifting away from control over the natural circuses’.2 Archaos thrilled their audiences world to questions about the limits and with danger and repressed violence: in possibilities of the human. their most infamous act, performers Developments in circus clearly reflect juggled with moving chainsaws (it did end what has happened and is happening in in tears.) Despite their differences, the theatre. The bourgeois text-based drama companies share an emphasis on control, and the proscenium arch theatre associated spectacle and skill; neither aims at with it are as much eighteenth-century intimacy. Other strands of New Circus do, constructions as is the classical circus. This however: the smaller-scale French Cirque kind of theatre is squeezed on two sides: on Plume (set up by puppeteering jazz the one hand by the mass attractions of the musicians in 1984) emphasises humour long-running spectacular musical which and connection, as does Cirque Éloize, the dazzles its admiring spectators, and, on the Canadian company (established 1994) other, the desire for engagement that which played the opening season at the produces the unique moments of site- Wales Millennium Centre to general specific work or the intense intimacies of acclaim. These shows seem closer to the small-scale physical performance. As the idealistic roots of 1980s radicalism. In a brief overview that follows will show, new recent interview, Cirque Plume’s founder, forms of circus seem to fall into one or the Bernard Kudluk, testifies to the ongoing other of these categories: disengaged influence of Dubord and Bread and 91 spectacle or intimate experience. Puppets. He sees New Circus as reaching For a long time the company that out to new audiences, providing ‘a bridge seemed to define New Circus was between live shows and the people who Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, started never go to them’.3 by Guy Laliberét in 1984. Like much of What, if any, is NoFit State’s place in the radical performance of the time they the New Circus frame? As they themselves were influenced by the Situationist point out, there may be other British New Circuses (Bristol’s Dark Horse, London’s as the archetypal figures of the bride, the Mamaloucas), but no one is doing the mother, the lovers, or the archetypal same kind of work. They seem more community expressed in choral singing. grounded than Cirque Plume, more Guidi always draws on a substantial key intimate than Cirque Éloize. Their text: for the National Youth Theatre, for speciality, as in ImMortal, is the example, it was Goethe’s Faust; for this promenade show in which the audience is show it was José Saramago’s allegorical The brushed by performers swarming up ropes, Cave, which won the 1998 Nobel Prize for where the trapeze artist’s breathing is Literature. The fact that The Cave is deeply audible as she skims over their heads. influenced by Plato’s ‘noble lie’ goes some Their shows require not only performance way towards explaining ImMortal’s skills but intricate choreography to work subtitle: Coming Out Alive. It would be with and through the crowds: there can be difficult to get much further from no safety nets when an aerial dance takes mechanical bodies. place over their heads. When Toby This emphasis on sensuous pleasure is as Philpott wrote about the 1995 suspect in radical theatre as it is in circus. Autogeddon show in the circus magazine Many of the better known radical groups Kaskade, he highlighted the evolution of and performers challenge audience this particular strength and related it to a identification and/or pleasure as part of passionate involvement with the issues: their attack on the traditional forms of ‘The show expanded the [poem’s] themes, theatre or dance they seek to subvert, employing video, slides, circus skills, fragmenting the narrative line to disrupt rapping, dance and humour, while links between audience and performers. keeping the audience alertly scanning the But NoFit State bring a narrative line into a space, editing their own experience, a traditionally spectacular and fragmented bewildering sensation like being at a form... and they unashamedly seek festival. Attention might be drawn to audience pleasure. specific areas by sound and light, but there In ImMortal the total engagement of was always a feeling that you might be each individual created a sense of growing, missing something elsewhere.’4 infectious delight. It was a show of extraordinary and surprising beauty: as a ImMortal: the show bride progressively unravelled her twenty- When I spoke to Firenza Guidi about foot skirt, her vulnerable legs were exposed, directing ImMortal, she was very clear hanging within skeletal hoops; a kilted about what she was attempting to do. She man somersaulted with pantomime believes that New Circus is no different embarrassment above our heads, repeatedly from classical circus in its view of the body tucking his skirts up; demonic black-coated as a machine: ‘Lots of the performers had angels twisted and coiled on swathes of fantastic skills [but there was] a tendency tissue; and two clothed lovers slid over each to focus on a single skill. That was what we other’s bodies, making love on a swing. But started working on.’ She wanted to bring the success of the show rested on the out an emotional aspect to the rhythm and integration of those moments: 92 performance with everyone doing balancing individual act against ensemble everything, seeking ‘moments of total work, spiralling figures suspended high up involvement, transgressing all categories. on ropes were set against a detached Men climbing ropes in high heels for moment when (for example) three example…’ insouciant women stood on a small stage, Such transgression is familiar to anyone drenched in purple light, casually drinking who knows Guidi’s work, which frequently glasses of water while spinning fluorescent returns to and reworks earlier motifs, such hula hoops. This was very much an ensemble piece Notes that gained its overall impact through the 1www.sagecraft.com/puppetry/papers/Schuma interrelation of its various elements. nn.html (18/3/05); Saramago’s narrative seemed valuable for 2Brian D. Johnson: ‘Cirque Du Success: the performers, who needed a sense of how The Montreal circus has reached the top the varied elements could be integrated into with a mix of ethereal athletics and business a whole. For the audience, however, the savvy,’ Maclean’s, 07-27-1998; narrative was less essential and the www.cc.utah.edu/~gem16460 performance was like a haunting, /cirquedusoleil/success.html (19/3/05); inexplicable dream. We recognised the 3Stéphane Besson, Interview with Bernard archetypes, we saw love, joy, anger, sexual Kudluk, Revue Théâtre Universitaire (Jan delight – all this drew us emotionally to the 1999); kaleidoscopic performance before us. This www.cirqueplume.com/plic_ploc/indexb.htm emotional bond was what mattered, not the (18/3/05); narrative in its detail. Coming out alive – as 4‘Autogeddon: The Final Reckoning’, Kaskade necessary as bread. This is where NoFit 16: 1 (Oct-Nov 1995); State’s circus theatre excels, leaving its http://homepage.ntlworld.com/toby.p/Auto spectators with a sense of elation and geddon.htm (17/3/05). beauty at the end: for a show that espoused a philosophy of carpe diem there could not NoFit State are touring Wales in May be any better. and June: see www.nofitstate.com for full details. Jeni Williams lectures at Trinity College, .

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