Thurs 12 Aug
★★★★★
Although they are top of their game when it comes to the trapeze, and have amongst them some of the world’s most elevated Chinese pole artists, it is not just literal heights that Cirkus Cirkör attempt to scope. As the company promise ‘a show about something as simple as life’, they pave the way for a night full of intelligent storytelling alongside the expected spectacle of acrobatics.
This concern with narrative and thematic content is immediately evident from the company’s metafictional merging of circus past and present. By making full use of video projections and pedal-powered electrics, the performers force modes of spectacle across the generations to clash. The result is the definite sense that we’ve stepped in on a ghostly transient moment, rendering Inside Out a thoroughly modern take on a rather unfashionable genre of performance.
And with a self-consciously modern theme comes viciously modern ideas. Through backdrops echoing dusty pages from Gray’s Anatomy and scenes acting out the course of blood through the body, the troupe nods towards development.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that soon the boundaries become blurred. What first seems to be superficial, shriek-inspiring entertainment transforms into something much darker and movements that were previously incomprehensible to the average homosapien start to tenderly expose a rich range of familiar emotions. As the acrobats fly through the air we cannot help but be reminded of the times where we all seek security.
So, do Cirkus Cirkör fulfil their promise? Laced with an intelligent tenderness, this is a work which weaves together head and heart, luring its audience into a trance of appreciation. Fusing unbelievable contortion with familiar emotion, the company have made a show that is at once awe-inspiring and homely. To know that such knowledge and mystery can co-exist is to know a lot more about who we are, and the lives we lead. Inside Out then becomes a tale of human mastery over the fragmentarily forces of fear, the blinkered power of science and the magic in which we all want to believe.
