Preview > Theatre throws its hat into the ring
Theatre throws its hat into the ring
By Roger Cox
Published: 20/8/2009
Controlled Falling Project show off their skills with a little help from Greyfriars Bobby
The traditional circus format is changing, as stories get in on the act, says Roger Cox
CIRCUS performers are a common enough sight on the Fringe – indeed, many visitors to the city get their first taste of the Festival watching someone swallowing swords or juggling fire half-way up a ladder on the Royal Mile. But this year there’s been a huge spike in the number of acts in the Fringe programme claiming circus credentials, and increasingly these performers are opting to produce shows that fuse circus with theatre, rather than simply relying on the wow factor of the traditional circus format.
That’s not to say that old-school circuses don’t still have the power to pull in the crowds. The acrobats and strongmen of the Moscow State Circus are back in town again this year, and they’ll be packing them in until the end of the month at their big top in the Meadows. Elsewhere on the Fringe, however, the distinction between theatre and circus is well and truly blurred. At the Underbelly’s Hullabaloo, Flick Ferdinando is using her circus skills to tell the story of her obsession with horses. At the Gilded Balloon, Noir by Airealism is a story about gangsters told through physical theatre. And riding the crest of the theatrical-circus fusion wave, all the way from Australia, are ThisSideUp Acrobatics company, with Controlled Falling Project.
Staged as if it were some sort of eccentric laboratory experiment, the show features acrobats Casey Douglas, Christian Schooneveldt-Reid and James Brown performing a series of mind-bending physical feats to music written and performed by David Joseph. Dressed as a nutty scientist, Joseph sets impossible challenges for his trio of crash-test dummies and they have to do their best to meet them.
“We really wanted to emphasise the idea of scientific exploration,” says Joseph, “so the whole look of the show is how you might find a bunch of mad people in a garage at the back of a house doing crazy experiments on each other.”
It may have been given a theatrical context, but the stunts involved in Controlled Falling Project are still as extreme as anything you’d expect to find in a traditional circus.
“It gets dangerously extreme,” says Joseph, “stupidly extreme.”
“One scene involves one of us jumping seven metres into the air and landing on a 15cm-wide bar,” says Brown, “so there needs to be a lot of preparation, a lot of focus and a lot of trust.”
The explosion of theatre-circus fusion shows on the Fringe has been brewing for a few years now. In 2007 the hot Fringe ticket was Fuerzabruta, which aspired to be a theatre show, although it was really just a series of spectacular acrobatic set-pieces staged in a tent that looked like a flying saucer. In 2006 and 2007, innovative Welsh company NoFitState Circus brought two beautiful crossover shows to town, in a temporary venue that looked as if it might just have arrived from another planet.
And now, all of a sudden, productions of this ilk seem to be cropping up everywhere – although the jury is still out on how successfully they’ve done it. The Scotsman’s dance critic, Kelly Apter, for example, was unconvinced by both the eco-circus extravaganza Tales of the Apocalypse at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, and the circus/disco show RAW at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall. Zemblanity at the Bedlam Theatre, meanwhile, can’t seem to decide if it’s a theatre show with elements of clowning or an hour of clowning held together by a rather flimsy narrative framework.
As with many of the other theatre-circus experiments on the Fringe this year, it’s debatable whether Controlled Falling succeeds in blending the two art forms together into a satisfying whole. Joseph himself admits that the theatrical element was bolted on to a pre-existing acrobatics routine to give the production more substance.
“I guess the original concept just needed to be supported a little bit more,” he says. “These three guys were already working on the show and then I came in as a muso and developed the professor character. It’s really a theatrical construct to hold the show together.”
Whether it works as theatre or not, though, one thing’s for certain: the ThisSideUp boys can do pretty much anything upside down, as we discovered when we filmed them in action this week – to watch, visit www.scotsman.com/festivalblog.
Controlled Falling Project is at Udderbelly’s Pasture, 3:50pm, until 31 August.
