Determined not to let one bad circus experience discourage us, we went to see Cirkus Cirkör today, at the Subtopia festival. Cirkör is a Swedish contemporary circus company (which means no clowns and no animals, and about as much theatre as circus).

The title of the show was “Wear it like a crown”, after a song with the same title by Rebekka Karijord, who’s written the music for this show. It was a small and almost intimate performance, with just 5 people on the scene (the 6th artist was absent due to an earlier accident), a simple set, melancholy music and muted lighting. There was juggling (of everything from ping-pong balls to chainsaws and chairs), acrobatics, knife-throwing and trapeze, and more. It is apparently possible to make a circus show out of shoes, plastic bags and plungers.

This is not a children’s show in any way, but it was weird and whimsical enough, and not too loud or scary, so Ingrid enjoyed it. At over two hours (including the interval) it was a bit too long for her, but not so that we’d need to leave early.

I’ve looked for photos of the show but found none that made it justice. There is a trailer but unfortunately it shows nothing of the show itself.

A nice performance, fun, unpredictable, and personal – well worth seeing.

Yesterday Ingrid and I went to the circus. (Eric was away in Italy, carousing with colleagues.) We’d been looking forward to it for a week, especially with all the posters everywhere.

And what a disappointment the show was. A dull performance with unimaginative numbers, not exactly badly performed but totally uninspiring. Two of the numbers seemed to be pure fillers, to make the time pass: musicians in shiny circus attire playing ordinary musical instruments in the middle of the scene. If I wanted to listen to a guy play the trumpet, I’d go to a concert, not the circus. During the break children were offered pony and camel rides (for a fee), or to go backstage and see the animals (for a fee, again) – and that’s on top of the steep ticket price.

Note to self: stay away from Circus Maximum, and probably from all such travelling circuses.

On Sunday we had our first evening out since April. We went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai. We’ve seen, I believe, all their shows that have come to London, and generally buy tickets for each one as soon as as they become available (about a year in advance).

The show wasn’t bad, but I felt it was not up to their usual standard. It was not as innovative as I had expected. Are they running out of ideas, getting stale? Or is it just me, getting used to their thing? In any case it wasn’t quite worth the money I thought (given how horrendously expensive the tickets are, plus the expense of 5 hours of babysitting).

Nevertheless a good show. As usual, a Cirque du Soleil show has to be seen as a whole rather than separate parts. The costumes, music, the acts themselves, etc all have an overarching theme and a coherent feeling. The costumes in particular were fabulous, impressive enough on their own and then even more impressive when you stop to think that the artists can move freely in them without destroying the costumes.

You can’t go wrong with skilled acrobats and tumblers, and two of the strongest acts of this show were acrobatic. One was a tumbling act: two men reclining on their back, spinning their partners with their feet. (Youtube video – you can skip the first 2:30 of the clip which is just general prancing around.) The other one was a Russian swings act – acrobats launched from swings high into the air where they turn and tumble, and then impossibly land on each others’ shoulders, or gracefully “land” high up on a large canvas nets stretched out behind them. (Youtube video.) In both acts the feats that the acrobats perform become gradually more and more impressive until I sat there with my mouth open and could hardly believe the things I was seeing.

At the other extreme of the scale were some totally boring swirlers (marketed as a Georgian dance) and an almost-as-boring hand-balancing contortionist doing nothing new. The swirling dancers were so boring I don’t understand why they were even included in the show. If someone turns up at a circus with swirling as their only skill, you wouldn’t generally expect them to be hired!

My favourite act was an aerial one – two men hanging from wrist straps, swinging high and wide across the scene, sometimes together, sometimes apart. When they first appeared, in tight low-cut black leather, my first thought was, “how much did they pay them to wear those costumes?”. But the act itself was beautiful, well-coreographed and very expressive. Refreshingly, they were not aiming for a pretty result (which is where most aerial acrobatics end up sooner or later) – it was angular and sharp, full of heels and elbows. Very fittingly the performers are two brothers (Andrew and Kevin Atherton). (Youtube video.)

Circus Ronaldo consists of David Ronaldo and Danny Ronaldo, Belgian mimes and comedians. In La Cucina dell’Arte, David & Danny are head chef and assistant at a pizzeria, and they present an evening’s power struggle between the polished and bossy David, and the simple, good-hearted yet sneaky Danny.

A man and a woman from the audience are invited to the pizzeria and the two attempt to make a pizza for them. This involves numerous of broken plates, juggling roundels of pizza dough, plate-spinning, and lots of gags. The show reached its peak when Danny tried to set eight plates spinning on long rods sticking up from the pizzeria table, while David expected him to take down orders for pizza that he was getting from the audience, all backed up by frantic acordion music. Danny tried to get the man from the audience to help him with the plates, but the man had obviously seen enough crashing plates for one evening and preferred taking down the pizza orders instead. He was a natural for the role, getting magnificently confused when he couldn’t hear what David was shouting, jumping away when plates crashed behind him, and eyeing plates spinning above him with great nervousness.

The stage after the show

It was a simple story with simple jokes, but so well presented that the audience was roaring with laughter, with tears in our eyes. They were good mimes/comedians/actors, very expressive, ridiculous without going too far. They also had a very relaxed attitude about audience contact – not just the people who were invited on stage but also others they “conversed” with. Mistakes in tomato juggling meant tomatoes flying towards the audience (luckily not too ripe tomatoes); likewise torn pizza dough that Danny wants to hide from David. When the show was over, the stage was a royal mess of flour, crashed plates, lumps of pizza dough and used matches.

Lots of great pictures are available via the agents of Circus Ronaldo.

Cirque du Soleil is the most spectacular circus company I know of. Each act is more difficult than anything that normal circuses attempt, and performed to perfection. Individual acts are joined into a seamless performance with not a moment of silence or empty scenes. Costumes and decor are artful and resplendent. Music is written especially for each show and performed live, also faultlessly.

Indeed CdS are so far above normal circus that it would be unfair to even compare them. So I won’t. I’ll talk about Alegria, the latest of their shows to visit London, only in the context of other CdS shows.

Had this been my first experience of CdS I would have been utterly dazzled and charmed. But having seen four of them over five years, I have to say that it left me slightly disappointed. Somehow there seemed to be less life in this performance than the previous ones – the decorations are taking over and leaving less space for actual circus. Too much time was spent looking at pretty girls posing in pretty costumes. It was all a bit too courtly, where I would have liked to see more passion and energy. More action, please!

Russian bars	Trampolines

The music is a case in point: it was pretty enough, but almost indistinguishable from last year’s, and from the year before that, and therefore not very memorable.

The first CdS performance we saw was also the best: Quidam. It was a bit more adult and less sugary-sweetly pretty.

The two best acrobatic acts: tumbling on two long trampolines, and Russian bars (which is a wide bar in some sort of semi-flexible material, held on the shoulders of two men, on which a third performer performs somersaults).

But for the first time ever, my favourite part of the show were the clowns, especially one scene that was more mime than traditional circus clowning. The clown walked on stage, opened a large suitcase, took out a coat and hat, and hung them on a rope ladder. Another rope ladder laid on the floor, plus sounds of an old steam engine, hinted at a railway station. With that as his only props, he acted out a tender scene of taking farewell: his left arm animating the left sleeve of the coat, he was playing both voices of the conversation. He did it so well that the performance was vividly tragic and simultaneously absurd.

The next scene showed the same clown alone in a snowy emptiness. Then it started to snow little bits of silk paper. The snowfall grew until it swelled into a magnificent snowstorm, with howling winds and swinging lights, and “snow” falling over half the audience. It was so unexpected and over-the-top immersive that I laughed aloud out of joy.