I saw NoFit State Circus once before, at the London International Mime Festival in the South Bank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. An auditorium of this style does no justice to the magic that can be worked in a Big Top. This time round, as before, I found myself yearning for story to connect the spectacular circus acts. Bianco, however, has shown me how powerful an art form circus can be, full of visual splendour and spectacularly skilled performances.

Bianco’s audience enters the Big Top stationed on Hove Lawns into a lively atmosphere. Performers clamber over a scaffold made of an interconnected aerial rig – which the show reveals to be a genius piece of design – covered in gauze. We encircle the excitedly shouting performers and, as the lights go down, the gauze drops and we are invited into this extraordinary circus show.

A live band accompanies Bianco adding to the electric atmosphere that fills the space with every act of aerial, juggling, tightrope (in heels!) … I could go on and on. This show is highly charged, immensely skilled and powerful but it’s just too long. At two hours and 20 minutes, including an interval, I found myself leaving with neck ache and a significant lapse in concentration. There’s only so much ‘ooh-ing’ and ‘aah-ing’ a person can do, a limit to the level of unconnected, equally spectacular and skilled circus acts you can take before your focus starts to wane.

I headed into the interval after a stunningly beautiful and emotionally charged straps performance feeling elated and inspired. This act demonstrated how circus can take its audience somewhere, tell a story and really make them feel. To stick with having no over-arching story the show may have benefitted from ending here, with a tribute to the beauty and power of circus art. However, I think to add some sense of narrative would elevate a show such as this to something phenomenal.

To its credit, NoFit State does toy with an element of story. Narration at the opening mentions the setting as a travellers’ camp at night, and something about this being the night the elephant came. At least I think that’s what they said. Such narration happens sporadically throughout and performers occasionally speak during acts, they are wearing microphones but it’s challenging to make out anything that is said.

Despite its lack of coherent story, however, Bianco is spectacular in every regard. Go and you will find yourself marvelling at the skill and sheer strength of every act, whilst enjoying the immersive environment created by the fantastically designed and engineered set, sound and lighting. This is a well put together, if lengthy, show and a great night out – I just think with more presence allowed to story it could be something even more dazzling. This is a Brighton Fringe experience not to be missed.

Bianco is playing Brighton Fringe until 1 June. For more information and tickets, see the Brighton Fringe website. Photography by David Levene.

The heats are on! Swing by Udderbelly at the Southbank Centre if you like a little circus in your summer – whenever summer decides to arrive – because Circus Maximus, the UK’s first circus competition, has landed.

Some of the country’s finest circus talents compete in the iconic purple Udderbelly for the votes of the audience and judges. Over the course of the next month, 20 acts will compete in Circus Maximus for the grand prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to develop a new show with Underbelly Productions and Circus Space – on of the UK’s foremost centres for circus arts. I attended the second part of the first heat which featured four rounds, one for each act, the heat lasting for an hour in total. The acts were delightful and diverse. Firstly there was juggling and unicycling followed by hula hoops, then strength handstands and dance, then trapeze, and finally aerial hoop.

Tweed-suited Sam Goldburn’s act set the sweet charm of a Chaplin-esque, face-pulling juggler and unicycle trickster to a contemporary bass line, and it worked a treat. This is a man who can juggle balls with his feet and unicycle with one leg. The second act featured Sylvia Pavone with several sparkly hula hoops, with which she managed to create a swirling light show and perform tricks that made the hoops appear stationary, even as they rotated around her arms. It was a good few seconds before I realised they were spinning.

The third act was my favourite: this was Jonathan Finch’s Danse Macabre. With a set of balancing poles at waist height he performed a movement piece of tremendous strength where the focus was on the body alone; the emotion he got across in the act was what I found particularly stunning and moving to behold. I won’t lie, Finch got my vote. Alcina Mendes approached her trapeze act from an interesting angle. She played a character, Maria the Cleaner, and created her own little scene in which she came blundering through the audience onto the stage, ranting about everything being a mess, her goal being to clean the trapeze with her spray and wash gloves. A lot of her movements and tricks on the trapeze were pulled off as if by accident. You know a person excels at their skill when they play the casual card.

And finally there was graceful Gemma Creasey on the aerial hoop, which ended with a terrifying (and deliberate) face-first drop to the floor that had the people next to me clutching their hair.

Sylvia Pavone won the heat, but all the acts were so watchable and so different that I almost felt mean by voting. Circus Maximus is definitely worth checking out: the talents and spectacles are surely only going to get more impressive as the heats go on.

The remaining heats of Circus Maximus run from May 14-19, and the finals run from May 28-June 1. For more information and tickets, visit the Underbelly website.

West Yorkshire Playhouse’s season of new work, Transform, is back this year to question what makes great theatre. Subtitled ‘My City, My Leeds’ the project is getting personal to celebrate its roots with performances popping up in unusual spaces across the city, from shopping centres to high rise towers.

I spoke to three of the many artists involved about what they’re bringing to this year’s festival. Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland of RashDash Theatre were first involved with Transform in 2012 and this year return as an associate company hosting a scratch night for local artists; Alan Lane from Slung Low tells us how his company has been part of Transform as it’s developed over the years; and first-time Transformer Ellie Harrison reveals more about her collaborative, site-based performances, which have taken place in domestic gardens, pubs, clothes shops, derelict churches and roads as well as more conventional theatre spaces…

What kind of work are you creating for the festival?

RashDash: There’ll be some kind of performance element to us hosting the scratch – we’re not sure what yet but it will involve music, song and some weird and wonderful costumes… maybe. We’ll be meeting up with various local artists throughout the week and getting to know them and their work a bit better.

Alan Lane: We are making a show, The Johnny Eck and Dave Toole Show, about Dave Toole, a dancer, and Johnny Eck, the legless Hollywood star of the 1930s. It’s outside in the tilt yard of the Royal Armouries, where they do the jousting. Audiences will sit outside and hear the show through headphones. It’s going to be quite circus-y. Hopefully quite fun. Certainly epic. It, alongside the talents of Dave Toole, features the Oldest Woman in the World and a performance by Ballerina and the Tiny Tiger. Who is a Tiny Tiger.

Ellie Harrison: The Rage Receptacle is an installation for public spaces. For the past three years I’ve been making a sequence of seven projects called The Grief Series. Each part of the series corresponds to a phase of a seven stage grief model. The Rage Receptacle is Part 4 and deals with Anger. Whilst all the projects combine to make the series, each piece very much works on its own. For each part of the series I collaborate with a different artist working in different disciplines. The Rage Receptacle is made in collaboration with sculptor Paula Chambers and architectural designer Bethany Wells. It’s a question of thinking about how an audience move around the space. What they might like to discover and what they might find challenging. It’s also been a process of mining the complex meanings of everyday items. Can the objects we interact with everyday be transformed into sculptures and take on new meanings?

Are there artists or companies who have inspired your practice?

RD: Physically – companies like dot504, rootless root, Gecko and Do Theatre. Music wise – cabaret artists like Meow Meow, Amanda Palmer, and world music with eastern scales, epic harmonies and lots of big drumming.

AL: Dave Toole has inspired my practice, really, Google him now – he’s extraordinary. I was very inspired by the opening of last year’s Paralympics and the work of the directors Jenny Sealey and Bradley Hemmings. And beyond that Robert Le Page, Robbie Williams and Amy Letman [curator of Transform].

EH: Bobby Baker’s playful approach to difficult topics has had a huge impact on my work. Whilst The Grief Series talks about difficult things, it does so in an accessible and playful way. Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Dellers’s work has been a huge inspiration for this project, combining contemporary art with an openness and warmth.

What does theatre mean to you?

RD: An experience that’s live, transient and unrepeatable. When it’s at its best it moves you deeply and lingers in your head. Something that speaks to your body as well as your brain – your whole being. Something that speaks about the world we live in now.

AL: Coming together with your fellow man to try and further understand the relentless joy and misery of being alive in this moment right now. Also blowing stuff up and playing music at the right moment so that people feel proper sad.

EH: Oddly enough it’s not a word I use all that often. There is such a wealth of different performance practices, some of which can be housed within a theatre building and some of which can’t and shouldn’t be because it would rob the work of what makes it wonderful. I think the key is to see a greater level of communication between people making different kinds of performance, from plays to performance art. I hope that Transform Festival is helping to bring these different people together and that audiences will see something they might not have tried before.

What’s it like taking inspiration from a city when creating new work?

RD: Because Leeds is the city we’re based in and have lived in for years, she is always part of process in some way. It’s not as explicit as thinking about Leeds and then making a show. We feel like our identity as a company is wrapped up in the experience, sights and smells of Leeds.

The scratch will take place in the front of house space, or – The Playground – as it’s being known for Transform. There’s no captive audience and hopefully the bar will be busy and buzzing. Its not an an usual space for performance, but a different kind of audience and atmosphere to tackle.

AL: Every city is different so we spend a lot of time working out the best type of show for that particular city. We are lucky that Leeds is our home city, we’ve wanted to make this type of show here for a while. Leeds is going through a real boost at the moment – Trinity Shopping Centre opened recently to much national applause, the City Council is much more robust and confident than similar city councils – but it still has issues reconciling this bright future with its past. That’s very interesting to explore.

EH: I think it’s something I always do and as I live in Leeds, it is often this city
that informs the work I make. Bethany [Wells] remarked that what we have made draws on Leeds as a landscape in quite a nuanced way and actually, perhaps the fact that I live here makes me less sensitive to that. I have a huge amount of civic pride for Leeds given that I grew up down south and now I can’t imagine moving anywhere else. Without clinging to the cliché that people are friendlier up north, there is an honesty and pragmatism here, whether people are being nice or not and I really value that.

What can audiences expect from your performance?

RD: A trio of weird women playing some fun tunes… But we’re making it all this week so it’s as much a mystery to us as yet…

AL: A Freak Show gone wrong. A tribute gone wrong. And hopefully by the end they’ll know who Dave Toole and Johnny Eck are and why they are important.

EH: That sense of the live, of sharing space and time with the performer and the rest of the crowd is something film and television just can’t compete with. For this reason I’m interested in how theatre can make ‘liveness’ central to the experience in the way that football and live music does.

A moment of quiet self reflection as a break from the bustle of the city. But different audiences will have different expectations. There will be people who have seen the work in the brochure or are familiar with The Grief Series and they will have a completely different set of expectations to an accidental audience who just happen across it on the street. I hope it will be some people’s first experience of installation, whether they are young children, people who might not experience arts activity, or seasoned theatre goers who are feeling adventurous and want to try something new.

For details of all three performances and the rest of the Transform programme – and to buy tickets – visit http://www.wyp.org.uk/what’s-on/2013/transform-my-leeds-my-city/.

Image 1: RashDash

Image 2: Ellie Harrison’s Ettiquette of Grief

Image 3: Alan Lane

If, with its greasy foodstores and eccentric costumes, Camden is the circus of London, then for the next few weeks the Roundhouse is, without a doubt, our capital’s big top. Throughout April, NoFit State circus company is bringing the full thrill of its anachronistically anarchic artform to the venue. Yes, this may be a more permanent structure than the traditional striped tent, but these graceful thrill-seekers from Cardiff bring the outside in with a show bursting with seedy vintage charm.

While international rival Cirque du Soleil offers a pastiche of circus’s gritty romance, NoFit State brings a fresh authenticity, while remaining loyal to a performance style in a way that almost feels classical. All the nostalgia we come to expect from circus is here – it’s in the monochrome stripe details on swimsuits and in the occasionally-flashed stocking suspender – but Bianco simultaneously embraces the grace of a bygone era and asserts a sharp sense of progression.

Certainly, the traditional references are present, but the communicated anxieties and energies are decidedly electric and modern. Music plays a big part in this mood; while acrobats, gymnasts and clowns exhibit a kind of magnetic activity that transforms the seatless, wandering audience into little more than iron filings, the spirited live band powers the production from the only static space. Swinging from sultry, unkempt blues to crisp tango with a worldly nonchalance, this skilled musical ensemble draws together what might otherwise become a haphazard patchwork narrative.

Where voice is concerned, the audio balance is a little out here, meaning any pre-recorded monologues or sentences shouted by the performers disappear. Shards of dialogue are occasionally heard, but if there was an overarching storyline throughout Bianco, it was lost. What’s important, though, is not what is said, but how the performers say it, and nothing quite manages to drown out the cast’s energised, death-defying shrieks as they swing high above the heads of roaming audience members.

Watching their trajectory with eyes turned to dizzying heights, we wonder if our immaculate performers will ever lose their balance; little do we know that we’re the ones being tripped up. The creatives behind this piece are wise to the fact that audiences tire easily when faced with strength and talent, and so have generously laced this production with little vulnerabilities that allow us to see familiarity in these superhuman performers.

In this remarkably visual performance, we learn that there’s more to these characters than physical appearances. An aerialist launches himself into the air in a flurry of rope and muscle, but as his fellow performers form a vigil made from burning flowers, there’s an eerie emotive power here that orientates Bianco in on solid emotional ground. Similarly, while we’re concerned with working out what kind of specialist equipment enables our tightrope walker to navigate the wire in high-heeled shoes, she strips off her blonde wig, sunglasses and tight dress. In this transformation from unapproachable Hollywood star to relatable woman, the episode questions which illusions really matter.

Throughout Bianco, insightful episodes and tender exchanges combine to form raw identities that are ‘suspended’ in every sense of the word. There are no traditional characters here and few lasting interactions between performers, but as a company NoFit State truly gel. As the acrobats take their bows, somersaulting off a makeshift stage before running to seize every last beat from their band, the joy emitted by these convention-breaking storytellers is contagious. Forget the big tops and ringmasters, NoFit State’s biggest nod to traditional circus is in its successfully conjured fantasy of running away…

Bianco is playing at the Camden Roundhouse until 27 April. For more information and tickets, see the Roundhouse website. Photo by David Levene.