14/09/2007 Circus Front at the Roundhouse
No wonder old school circuses are in decline: deformed freaks, ordinary people willing to humiliate themselves for a little attention… yeah, you see where we’re going with this. So how can the circus shake us from our BB-induced coma? With talent, intelligence, astonishing physical feats, an artistic sensibility and disturbing tricks involving penises. Presenting: Circus Front.
Circus Front grabbed our attention for several reasons. First: spectacle. Really, really big, mad, eye-raping nonsense is fantastic. We were all kids once – what is the elegant, ever-slipping remembrance of sensual minutiae in Proust, for example, when compared with the ‘WOOOOOOOO-YEEEEEAH!!!! KILL DEM GUYS!!!!!!’ thrill of seeing a man with a massive jaw blow up half of the Middle East (as children we’re all a bit more like American presidents than we really want to admit).
 Traditionally, we’d recourse to cinema to fulfil that particular, testosterone-charged urge (fact: after watching action films men have better sex – let’s hope it’s a biological thing, rather than a latently homosexual one), but the release schedule for this summer has contributed to the rising insanity of the style media. Threequels! Mundane, tired continuations of franchises, donkeys whose backs are slowly breaking as they tread the paths to the multiplex overloaded with back-story, pomposity and flaccid love stories designed for the purposes of… bathos? Seemingly. The point is: we want ballsy-ness and the blockbusters are eunuchs. Fortunately, Circus Front is so ballsy it enters a room preceded by a wheel-barrow to carry them.
Cinema has always been concerned with showing the best of life: the danger of death, glamour, breasts, sensual overload, animals and deformed people. Added together, such ingredients attain the quintessence of spectacle. However, now that they’re all daily occurrences in the life of a two year old, what with ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and everything, the power of all circuses (except for Disneyfied vomitopia Cirque du Soleil) seemed to be waning. Happily, though, Circus Front exemplifies everything resurgent, vibrant and disturbing about the circus nouveau movement collated into a handy six week programme.
Why has Circus Front shocked us out of our midsummer madness? What spectacle can it offer to compete with a mass brawl of pink-belt-wearing Lifestyle editors in a gallery four foot wide? Well, we’ve seen many an editorial shanking and – brutal though they are – never have we seen a man pull a tennis ball from his foreskin. Never. Honestly. That is something we have never, EVER seen in our life – and we’re not sure we ever wanted to, either. But, thanks to Australia’s Acrobat, it’s a sight we can take to the grave, our likely dying words something along the lines of: “BUT HE PULLED A BALL FROM HIS DICK!!! A FUCKING TENNIS BALL!!!!” It wasn’t what we had in mind when we said we wanted a spectacle with balls, y’know?
Nonetheless, that is merely one of life-changing experiences the programme offers. Media as we are, cock-shocks aren’t  quite revolutionary enough to dispel the malaise that has set in; even astonishing spectacle alone might not have been enough. The four collectives who comprise the bulk of Circus Front, however, combine spectacle with art, play the grand circus tradition against avant garde experimentation and confront spectators with death, beauty and, well, the aforementioned cocks. There’s also the extra bonus of Jacques Tati-esque slapstick – nothing makes us laugh like guys falling over repeatedly for an hour. Shit never gets old, like kicking someone in the ass.
Collectif AOC choreograph feats of physical wonder within what is an almost painfully cynical attempt to be hip, with roller-skating, break-dancing and DJs. It is only when one realises that they are French, and therefore A) honestly believe they’re being cool, not trite; and B) the French support circus as an art-form seriously and are so actually really damn good at it. The brashness of AOC is contrasted by a sublime, understated turn from Collectif Acrobatique du Tangiers: director Aurélien Bory has brought out of these former Moroccan beach performers a medley of mercurial slapstick and elegant cultural commentary (a combination which had until then seemed impossible). NoFitState prove British circus is in recovery, and Acrobat – yes, there’s a lot of cock, but the nudity only intensifies your all-too-real fear that the man falling fifty feet down a rope is about to die.
While Circus Front itself, in what Programme Co-Ordinator Verity McArthur calls their “Big Top made of Bricks” (the Roundhouse), ends on August 5th, McArthur’s brave programming has given us hope that the nonsensical PC campaigns objecting to the abhorrent treatment of animals and the worse treatment of disabled people haven’t ruined this classical form of entertainment with its roots in Ancient Greece. The circus speaks to everyone: it appeals to that part of us which revels in stuffing our faces with junk and braying like apes as real human  beings put their lives in great danger for our own amusement. Spectacle has history – grand dramas, bold statements, massive balls, all of them shock us out of the mundane. It’s what we want from all our art and entertainment. The reason Hirst’s stupid skull was so good was that it was fucking EPIC. So, with the clear-headedness of those who’ve escaped midsummer madness, we cry: more spectacle! More showmanship! More balls! |
