Beautiful, mesmerising and tender – Richard Davies witnesses an aerial trapeze show unlike anything he has seen before. Still time to book your place for the last two shows at the Rose today, Sat April 16.
You’ve heard of pre theatre dinner. At slightly over an hour in length, Tipping Point by award winning UK aerial theatre company, Ockham’s Razor is more like a pre-dinner show. That said, you will scarcely spend a more beautiful and mesmerising hour.
Gone are the days when circus acts meant sad clown faces and even sadder caged animals whipped around a ring. This is a new style of circus that draws on the world of theatre, dance and performance art. The show is staged in the round with a simple industrial design of crossed girders and there's not a leotard in sight.
With a nod to ancient traditions, the show begins with the drawing of a chalk circle. The powder pours from the end of a Chinese pole balanced on a shoulder, as the performers stand in quiet veneration.
Then the magic begins. And no other word describes it better. Within the circle, a parallel universe opens up, a world between worlds where the performers appear to play with the laws of physics.
Their props are five long poles, sometimes suspended from above, but always free at the bottom to create uncertainty and danger. The poles provide endless permutations for the five performers to experiment with shape and movement.
The performers appear wide-eyed with wonder at every move they complete, like children given superhuman powers to defy gravity. There is a breathless joy about it all, as if they are performing for the very first time. It is this quality that makes it poles apart from conventional pole dancing. Instead of eroticism, it is about playfulness, creativity and softness.
The performers climb up and down the poles as if this was a natural thing to do. They swing the poles like pendulums in all directions and dance between them, sometimes with their eyes covered. They find footholds in the crooks of each others’ arms and other concavities, they form springboards with locked arms and ladder rungs with fists.
At one point a trapeze is used as a pivot to transform a pole into a seesaw with full rotation, for two male performers to swing each other through space, as in the tipping point of the title. This was one of the moments that my wife confessed ‘gave her the willies’, the other being when the tallest of the performers, Alex Harvey, suspends the smallest, Emily Nicholl, high over the stage, firstly by a wrist, then by an ankle. It is a moment of beautiful tenderness that brings a lump to the throat, love and trust perfectly combined.
Based on the opening night, there are lots of tickets still available for the remaining performances on Saturday and Sunday. Do go, this is a beautiful show that will stay with you for a long time to come.
For tickets to Tipping Point see Rose Theatre
