Biogas. It works. In Tilburg, they have taken a big step in making circus romance more sustainable. The campfires, from the first edition the anchor of Circus Festival Circolo, have been modified. No longer fuelled by increasingly soggy firewood, beautiful yellow flames now play around glowing chunks. The wood fire became a gas fire, but designed by a pyrotechnician with circus experience.
The flames provide atmosphere and warmth without the harmful effects of burning wet wood. And wet wood, that was a bit part of Circolo, just like the mud resulting from a drainage system in Tilburg's Spoorpark that did not quite work as it should.
This edition, you won't have to walk with mud on your shoes. It is all a bit tighter, with spacious decking and thick wood chips around the tents. Circolo is also a bit more austere this year. A good chip bar and a champagne merry-go-round were left over from something that used to look all a bit more burgundy anyway, in terms of food trucks and coffee boats.
Commedia dell'arte
This slightly smaller-feeling edition does not skimp on quality, by the way. That was already evident with the opening show, Da Capo by Circus Ronaldo. The 182-year-old family-owned company performs circus romance referencing southern Europe. They are commedia dell´arte scenes that could have come straight out of Les Enfants du Paradis or Ariane Mnouchkine's Milliere biography. Such monumental heritage is in good hands with the Belgians. It touches you in your deeper layers, as good family theatre should.
That primal sense of circus also brought the big man and little woman with them from Alta Gama, in Mentir lo Minimo. They perform an act with a small white bicycle on which they perform blistering acrobatics, all the more exciting because they let their audience get closer and closer to them. You start to wonder how well insured everyone is when they spin around on a single square metre between spectators sitting on the ground. All goes well, as we should expect from professionals.
Alta Gama is street theatre livened up in the circus tent by the focus you get for free.
Dangling lonely
Of a completely different order is Alice Davies' relatively short act. Her work is called "Sustained", which means as much as "prolonged, sustained" and that is exactly what you get. Whereas other trapeze artists perform their breakneck feats in constant motion, Davies hangs mostly very still, but in poses that a normal person would not be able to sustain for so long. Upside down by preference.
Sustained is one of those performances where your mirror neurons are working overtime. It is almost torture to watch, and the slowness of the act almost hurts. This too is circus, and sometimes it's nice then that it doesn't last more than half an hour.
It also looks very lonely, that dangle, while a sizable team of helpers stands around it, in the dark. Davies brings abstraction in an extremely austere setting. No spectacle, but stillness under high tension. It stays with you for hours: small act, big effect.
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