Whole new level of success
CIRCUS REVIEW: David Zampatti
Bianco
4.5 stars
Nofit State Big Top, Ozone Reserve
It's as though a grown-ups circus - that Canadian one, for example - has left town with its set but, absentmindedly, left its tent and a pile of scaffolding behind.
A bunch of scruffy kids, one of whom, fortunately, is a dab hand at Meccano, has commandeered the space. The resulting high jinks, the ebullient, light-as-air Bianco, will be lighting up the Ozone Reserve until the start of March. It will be the runaway hit of this year's Festival.
NoFit State Circus, the company behind Bianco, is from Wales. Not a country you'd associate with aerialists, balancers and high-wire artists. Festival director Jonathan Holloway, who was clearly having the time of his life on the first night, confided that the festival wasn't plugging NoFit's origins: "Wales doesn't sell," he whispered.
He needn't worry. From the minute you enter Bianco's beautiful dome you know something's up. The performers are in the centre of the space, behind transparent scrims, limbering and geeing each other up. The band is tinkling. The music and exhortations build and, suddenly, the scrims are torn down and they're off.
At its core, Bianco is a traditional human circus; the program goes like this: trapeze; juggling; ropes; scaffold; tightrope; cirwheels; swinging ropes; trampoline; silks; balance; rope trapeze; aerial platforms; aerial ballet; hula hoops and high trapeze.
Two things you'll notice immediately: you get a lot of bang for your buck - 15 feature acts, and none of the pseudo-mystic faffing about that infects many shows of the Cirque variety. The other is that the action is nearly all above you. (That's a good thing, because you are standing through the show, and make your own sightlines.)
And it's spectacular. Anne-Fay Johnston and Lyndall Merry's eyes-a-poppin' double trapeze sets the scene for the physicality and energy of what's to come; she's back later in a coquettish balancing act, he in an exquisite pas de deux with Freya Watson. Ariele Ebacher may not be at a death- defying height on the tightrope but her skill is just as gripping, and Fred Rendell's muscular work on the swinging ropes provoked some sharp intakes of (mainly female) breath around me.
The trampoline act, featuring Nat Whittingham, has the look and feel of a bunch of kids horsing around at a skate park. A little lower down, Hugo Oliviera shows that simplicity isn't humdrum with a glorious little juggling act of musicality and wit.
Meanwhile, the performers are rouseabouts as well, manipulating the scaffold towers and endless array of ropes and clasps that keep proceedings bowling along. We're bowling along too, guided from vantage point to vantage point by firm but friendly ushers. There's a wonderful momentum and honesty about the stage business.
The music, too, is wonderful, by far the best I've heard in a circus setting. The four-piece band, Fireproof Giant - Andy Moore, Daniel Inzani, Ashley John Long and Calum McIntyre - deliver a gobsmacking array of styles, from North African beats to something akin to medieval plainsong, with fabulous skill and conviction. When they rock, sometimes like Aerosmith, sometimes Nick Cave, sometimes John Cale, they shake the tent to its foundations. Take an extra $25 with you - you'll want to buy the CD.
All these elements come together in a transcendent closer, which starts with girls suspended in gossamer cages, like go-go dancers in paradise, through Johnston and Merry's lovely dance to the flame-haired, tattooed angel Sage Cushman's celestial finale on the high trapeze in a shower of snowflakes.
At the end, the crowd stormed into the centre and erupted in applause. You'd swear Springsteen was playing tents these days.
You get a lot of bang for your buck - 15 feature acts, and none of the pseudo-mystic faffing about that infects many shows of the Cirque variety.
