circus
Nick Hasted
Circuses were a regular touchstone for Fellini, and clowns, as this 1970 TV movie confirms, their troubling core. I Clowns’ first 25 minutes are a dry run for Amarcord’s raucous flashback to Fascist Rimini. Beginning with the boy Fellini woken in the night by a circus's arrival, his camera takes a ringside view of the hoarse bluster and escalating mania of a Twenties show, orchestrated by clowns who frighten Fellini. His observation that their grotesquery was in those days common in Italian small towns allows an aside into sketches of such characters: a horse-drawn carriage driver, huge like Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Once, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was all about penniless students presenting avant-garde plays to audiences of three in church halls. These people still come, but now they compete for attention with professional production companies who, it’s to be supposed, make a decent whack of money from their three weeks in Scotland’s tourist-jammed capital.Australian contemporary circus outfit Circa are in the latter camp, spending this year’s Fringe with a prime 7pm spot in the McEwan Hall, the largest venue used by successful Fringe promoters Underbelly. At £16.50 for an hour-long performance, Read more ...
Jenny Sealey
As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. We belong to ourselves, but our sense of belonging is also about people and places and our sense of who we are in the world. It became our starting point for the collaboration with Circo Crescer e Viver. Graeae's Reasons to be Cheerful was part of Unlimited Festival in Rio and I was also there to share the experience of co-directing the London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony. I had the opportunity to meet Junior Perim and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between. For this latest incendiary reinvention of the form, it makes its way back into an intimate big top where the residual DNA of circus’s regular trappings seem all to be in situ. There’s bendiness and balancing, aerobatics and good old trapezing, fire-eating (pictured below) and sword-swallowing. But before you book for the whole family, be aware that the whole shebang is underpinned by something you never used to get at Billy Smart's: lashings - and I mean lashings - of sex. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, a young man is driven to murder women who excite him sexually. Sound familiar? Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) acknowledges his debt to Hitchcock by placing the mother in a rocking chair; there’s even a shower scene, yet Santa Sangre is far from being a remake of Psycho. First released in 1989, this ravishing visual feast is far weirder and more wonderful than that.Fenix (Jodorowsky’s handsome son Axel) is confined to a mental hospital. He thinks he’s a bird and, perched naked on a tree trunk, screeches mournfully. Then, in flashback, we Read more ...
david.cheal
Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So here we go.
Latitude’s organisers are still struggling with the water thing. Although work has been Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic of love and internecine war into a very small sawdust ring, with horses, jugglers, aerialists, clowns and gymnasts. And as you park your car on the green and wander over under the quiet afternoon sky to the cute white tent where a rackety little brass band is parping and blaring from inside (and check out the “War and Pizza” trailer for the interval Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a troupe of Moroccan acrobats who learned their awesome skills on Tangier Beach. Through the wit and imagination of its Swiss theatre directors, the show manages to retain a lively street smell and yet pull off some deft theatrical effects, blurring the edges between normality and strangeness - one moment you feel you might be walking in a souk, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy angles, refashioned while decorating the tasks with acrobatic surprises. At a steep tilt a plank is both a slide and human catapult, or makes a terrific wobbling noise if slapped right; as an upright it’s perfect for a girl to shin up and then array herself in a bouffant Boucher Pompadour dress of crumpled paper, later to be elegantly torn off in Read more ...
bruce.dessau
In National Anthem, the debut play by bestselling novelist Colin Bateman, a composer lies prostrate on the floor. Half hungover, half waiting for inspiration, he has been commissioned to co-write an anthem for Northern Ireland with a poet and has a day to do it before flying back to his continental tax haven. The ad-hoc alliance soon fractures as differences emerge. One is Catholic, passionate and pretentious, one has sold his Protestant soul to MOR rock and platinum sales. Can the two sides work in harmony?
As metaphors for the divisions in modern Ireland go this is pretty Read more ...
fisun.guner
Whether you think the weird world of Walter Potter is cute or creepy, there’s little doubt that the Victorian taxidermist, and creator of humorous tableaux in which fluffy creatures enact human scenarios, has acquired some standing in the art world. When his museum collection went under the hammer at Bonham’s in 2003, Damien Hirst, David Bailey, Harry Hill and Peter Blake each bid for valuable items. Now each has contributed to an exhibition that not only recreates part of Potter’s original museum, but invites us to celebrate the quirky art of the outsider artist.Baby rabbits that pore Read more ...