Landscape with Monsters

This is circus, but not how you expect it. No sparkly leotards or traditional trapeze acts here. Muted colours of grey, faded forest green, and denim blue complement the bare stage and projected art conveying a landscape in distress.

It starts with haunting music, crackles and crashes clanging across the bare, post-industrial decaying landscape. A pas de deux confronts the audience – clinging, falling and barely holding on. This moves into exploration of the props, principally large wooden boxes of various sizes. On, in, around the boxes, the performers show a terrified version of “floor is lava”. With the stage still mainly darkened, the atmosphere is heightened. The mood changes with a new box coming on stage, and the first light touch of humour is shown.  

The mood of different acts is supported by the accompanying music. Electronic music drills into the nerves, then familiar tunes are presented. An adaptation of David Bowie’s “Heroes” takes on a different cast and nightmares are projected onto the boxes. Then “My Funny Valentine” shows a new way to demonstrate one’s passion for the unobtainable. Then “Quizas Quizas Quizas” (also known as “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps) is used in different formats.

Props are an integral part of the choreography. Boxes can turn into baths, be a trunk to contain a naughty, recalcitrant puppet, or be used as an integral part of a perpetual motion machine involved in a game of Sardines. Rather than the more traditional corde lisse or silks, a giant aluminium ladder is used as scaffolding for heart-in-mouth acrobatic and balancing tricks.

This is, simply, a stunning piece of physical theatre. The exemplary skills of the performers, the imaginative narrative schemas, and the created landscape form a showcase of the best of circus arts and modern performance.

Rachel McGrath-Kerr

Images: Seppe Van Looveren and Timothy Fyffe, & Kathryn OKeeffe and Conor Neall in Landscape With Monsters. Photographer.  Vishal Pandey.