I went to Sadler's Wells on Thursday to see the super talented The 7 Fingers perform their contemporary circus show, Sequence 8.
I went to see the show with fellow circus performers Charlie Bicknell, the Singing Aerialist, and Tink of The Dream Performance. Circus performers are hard to impress, but everyone I spoke to in the industry loved this show. The eight performers were incredibly skilled and worked and moved together effortlessly. The ensemble were inspiring to watch in such a tight show, where the acts seamlessly conveyed the different emotions and relationships which the company explored.
As freelance performers, my friends and I were jealous of the possibilities which become available when you work with an ensemble. The trapeze piece really highlighted this for me, with the trapeze artist performing lots of really technical tricks with the rest of the cast becoming a human staircase, or lifting him up to a toe hang before sucking him head first into their cluster of bodies.
This was a show which made me feel excited about the ways in which circus can convey emotions, relationships and stories. It didn't try to tell "a story", it didn't feel like a succession of acts, it challenged me to look at relationships and impressed me with technical skills and beautiful movement. The magic of circus is the way that you can play, break rules, explore endless possibilies with your body and you could see that out of the process of exploration and play, the show had been created. This felt much more exciting than shows I've seen where circus and theatre struggle to work together to tell a narrative. There have been some highly successful examples of this working, but the way that the 7 Fingers show felt so natural, made me feel that this is the style of circus that really works at the moment. Circus performers, teachers at the NCCA, directors and circus students all left feeling inspired...to work harder, do things differently, change their approach to circus...this must be the sign of a great show.
