RAT A review of the English Circus STORM

["Adam Gertsacov" <kafclown@well.com>]

Adam G. Gertsacov
Clown Laureate of Greenbelt MD
http://www.acmeclown.com/greenbelt
greenbelt@acmeclown.com

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Giraffe minicycle, hardly used 

Roll up, roll up for the greatest show in... Hoxton 

Susannah Clapp
Sunday April 22, 2001
The Observer 

Storm  Circus Space, London N1
Love in a Wood Swan, Stratford
Suip! Tricycle, London NW6 
Another disused powerstation, another arts opportunity. After Tate Modern
and the Almeida at the Gainsborough, here is Generating Company at Circus
Space. In Hoxton, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-to-twentieth-century Electric
Light Station has been turned into a performance area and a school which
offers the only British degree course in circus. 
Its noticeboards advertise a 'club-swinging partner' and a 'seven-foot
giraffe minicycle'; another dauntingly suggests that circus skills could
come in really handy in the office. On one wall, a legend testifies to the
building's history, when electricity was made out of garbage: 'Out of
rubbish comes light.' And out of Britain's industrial past come clowns. 
And a distinct sensation on the stage. Outside Britain, the new kinds of
circus, which eschew baleful lions, glittering corselettes and pee-stained
sawdust, established their identities years ago. The French-based Archaos
have staged mock-bullfights with a driverless taxi (the beast was finally
stabbed with a sink plunger), while the Argentinian De la Guarda have hung
over the heads of audiences from rock-climbing ropes, flying to the
accompaniment of chants, drummings and rain-forest sounds. Now there's a
particularly British breed. 
Mark Fisher, the creative director of The Millennium Show in the Dome, who
has designed shows for Pink Floyd, U2 and the Rolling Stones, has joined
forces with Pierrot Bidon from Archaos and four prominent Dome performers to
produce Storm. Staged in a tent, with the audience standing, Storm features
trapeze artists, dancers, singers, rope-climbers, clarinettists,
tightrope-walkers, mimes, acrobats and jokers. They do turns, they amaze;
they are the circus, but not quite as we know it. The surprise ingredient is
a continuous narrative: Storm is an aerial portrait of a day in the city. 
Everything takes place over the audience's heads. In the opening moments,
while a speeded-up video of circus feats whirs against one wall, a high
walkway running round the building is filled with urgent figures, leaping
and leaning together in a rush-hour dance; a radio DJ, a latterday
ringmaster, raps out early-morning news. 
Things get stranger. A young woman, dressed for a day out, tightropes her
way across the tent to buy a bunch of flowers; a lollipop lady, looking like
a giant Marigold glove in her bright yellow mac, whooshes from the ceiling
on a trapeze. Huge shadows of rotating wheels sweep across the walls and the
audience. The air up there is suddenly crammed with multiple aerialists,
swinging over you and past each other. 
Individual stories develop, made more singular by being executed in everyday
clothes rather than circus costumes. A girl gets off with a postman (their
romance is enacted in a series of acrobatic leaps and holds), while a couple
pursue each other up and down a rope - sex on a flex. Most spectacularly,
though too late in the evening, is the whirling, crashing, body-flinging
storm itself. 
What does it amount to? It's spectacular, sensational and arresting. This
doesn't mean it's empty. You couldn't call Storm a play. You couldn't say
the narrative is as yet strong - or clear - enough to take command of a
series of terrific, skilful moments. You couldn't say it creates characters:
no one having seen this is going to press for a juggling Hedda Gabler or a
tightrope- walking King Lear. Nevertheless, each act and movement is full of
personality and full of interest about the way people betray themselves
through movement. Together, they provide a dynamic, wraparound experience of
city terrors. 



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