Circus arts see a raw and dreamlike new twist in O'DD and Lontano + Instante at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
Finland’s Race Horse Company conjures an eerie sci-fi universe, while La Compagnie 7Bis spins the Cyr wheel in metaphorical new ways
O’DD takes trampoline work out of this world. Photo by Minja Kaukoniemi
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents Lontano + Instante January 26 to 28 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre and January 26 to 29 online; and O’DD at the Vancouver Playhouse February 4 and 5
AT THE PUSH INTERNATIONAL Performing Arts Festival this year, two far-flung productions thrust circus arts into surreal and exciting new realms.
O’DD conjures a surreal sci-fi universe through gravity-defying trampoline work, while Lontano + Instante’s innovations with the classic Cyr Wheel become grand metaphors for the struggle of life.
Finland’s Rauli Dahlberg, of the Espoo-based Race Horse Company, says his eerily mesmerizing solo O’DD was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s masterwork Space Odyssey 2001. Set to composer-musician Miro Mantere’s live-looping, futuristic electronic score, the performer is born bursting out from a wall of plastic wrap, and later bounces high off billowing, cloudlike sheets, often appearing to be caught in some cosmic, enigmatic void. Each innovative yet low-tech scene evokes a phase of human existence.
“The whole goal of the show was to try to tell a story, but using circus skills—how to tell a story just by moving,” Dahlberg begins, speaking to Stir over Zoom from his garage in the Helsinki suburb. “That was the challenge, because in many shows you have the circus skills and then you add the story. But I wanted to tell the story first.
“I’m a fan of sci fi, and to play with gravity suits circus arts,” he adds. “There are tiny moments where you are floating in space.”
The visual effects he creates in O’DD illustrate everything the rough-and-ready Race Horse loves to explore in its shows: chaos, the element of surprise, and that wonderfully dry and existential humour the Finns are known for.
“Circus is all around in Finland,” says Dahlberg, who got his own start in gymnastics before training extensively in trampoline and ball acrobatics at France’s CNAC circus school. Together with friends, he launched Race Horse in 2008. “We really wanted it to be on the edge, to really push style, and to keep it quite raw.”
Carefully crafting the dreamlike O’DD took eight years to make, he reveals—much of it experimenting directly with materials like cellophane and exercise balls.
“I kept testing and testing; there was so much experimenting and deciding what is working and what is not working,” Dahlberg explains. “What stayed was the visual imagery that makes you feel like you’re not in the theatre—to take you out of your comfy chair, a bit like old-school cinema.”
Juan Ignacio Tula in Instante. Photo by Les Soeurs Chevalme
HYPNOTIC, LOW-TECH wonder is also in generous supply in the physically pummelling Lontano + Instante, which is coming to the Scotiabank Dance Centre as part of PuSh. In the production by Lyon-based la Compagnie 7Bis, dancer-acrobats Juan Ignacio Tula and Marica Marinoni take turns in two consecutive solos, whirring around the stage with the large aluminum ring called the Cyr wheel.
Marinoni’s piece is an epic struggle with the device: she wears boxing gloves as she attempts to tame it, roll around in it, jump through it, and. fight it. Ignacio Tula uses the wheel in more of a mesmerizing hula-hoop-on-steroids style, creating artful imagery with paper cards and a sheet of foil as he spins.
“In these two pieces there is one thing in common: the physical commitment as a form of sacrifice,” he Buenos Aires-born Ignacio Tula tells Stir in French. “In a way, these two shows question our presence in the world through the body.”
Through their endless experimentation, he and his costar have found infinite possibilities in the shiny Cyr wheel.
“I have always liked the living side of the Cyr Wheel: when I give it an impulse, it remains in motion independently of me,” Ignacio Tula says. “The centrifugal force is also a fascinating part of it. But above all I like the simplicity of the object, which makes it abstract.”
The artist reveals that he started teaching himself the Cyr wheel as a young man, drawing on his dance training. From there, he studied at France’s CNAC, always pushing to find radical new ways to use the device. Today, his work is uncategorizable, Lontano + Instante finding places at dance, theatre, and multidisciplinary festivals like PuSh.
As he puts it: “My work is circus, but it is nourished by different artistic fields.”
For Instante, the artist says he enters an almost trancelike state as he spins the wheel through his body’s gyrations. He drew inspiration from Turkey’s Whirling Dervishes. “I was inspired by memories of life, travels, and in particular soundtrack recordings that I made in Turkey,” he explains. “The show is constructed through images that appear and disappear in the whirlwind of centrifugal force. It is an invitation to cross landscapes and cultures.”
That meditative feeling contrasts the confrontation of Marinoni’s hand-to-hand battle with the 15-kilogram wheel. Ignacio Tula describes his colleague’s relationship with the device as intuitive and animal.
“It has in it a need to destroy, to strike, with the boxing glove becoming an important part of the spectacle,” he says. “I think the thing that Marica shares in Lontano is this strong woman facing the world.”
In other words, like O’DD, these are circus skills that go far beyond the Big Top and push rawly into the human condition—turning tricks into fluid poetry and metaphorical storytelling. And not a sequin or shiny spandex bodysuit in sight.
Related Articles
