Fringe Theatre

FRINGE THEATRE Excentricus, Cirque Eloize Meadows Theatre Big TopEnds today

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IF you think "animal-free" circus has become a bit passe, then go to Cirque Eloize and be amazed. Their combination of dance, music and acrobatics is the most thrilling thing I've seen for years. They come from Quebec, of course, home of modern circus, but their show, Excentricus, is both more intimate than the famous Cirque du Soleil and to my mind, more original.

A 17-strong troupe performed linked and overlapping routines on trapeze, high wire, unicycle, ladders, rings and just about anything else around, accompanied by a rock ensemble. And there wasn't a chainsaw in sight.

This was a production that did not need to shock. Yet it was more arresting than the freak-show circus that has become so fashionable in recent years. It was not only breathtaking in its technical skill, it was beautiful to watch. The choreography was as striking as the stunts and lent an elegance and grace to the proceedings I've never seen before in a circus ring.

Each of the performers had their own distinctive personality, as well as their own personal routines, and wove in and out of each other's performances in a dazzling display which was more modern dance than sawdust and clowns. Yet there was humour too.

An hour and a half of pure magic. And the kids loved it as well. What more could you want?

Iain Macwhirter

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

EISLERMATERIAL Festival Theatre Run ended

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MUSIC, believed Hanns Eisler, should be about more than what you hear. It should be about more than expressing an emotion, it should encapsulate that emotion, be it pleasure or pain, hope or fear. To Eisler, music was all - love, hatred, nationality, politics the very elements of life itself.

Fittingly, Heiner Goebbels' Eislermaterial is more than just a performance, it is an attempt to educate the audience about just what drove this most ambitious of artists. Eisler died in the early 1960s, leaving a legacy that included the East German national anthem, but his life and work remain a mystery to most.

An Austrian by birth, he fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for the USA, but his left-wing views saw him hounded by the McCarthy witch- hunts and he was deported to East Germany.

Composer Goebbels has assembled an hour of Eisler's music ranging from heartstring-tugging beauty to uncompro- mising musique concrte. Performed with aplomb by the Ensemble Moderne, Eislermaterial begins with the mournful sound of a lone organ and swells through jazz, noise and orchestral pomp, eventually dying away almost as peacefully as it began.

Occasional mournful vocals, provided not with gusto but rather with a sense of almost weary resignation, serve to heighten the unsettling feeling of exile which haunts much of the work. Interspersed throughout the performance, meanwhile, are fragments of Eisler's speech (subtitled on a screen above the stage) in which he talks about his wish for a new kind of music. A music where feeling is all and where technical excellence matters not a jot.

The players themselves sit around three sides of the stage, in the centre of which sits a tiny statuette of the composer. At the height of the performance, a single spotlight projects its shadow on to the wall and the image of Eisler dominates the stage. But such imagery is unnecessary, the music says it all.

Simon Stuart

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

HERSES (UNE LENTE INTRODUCTION) EDNA Run ended H The review of Boris Charmatz's choreographic output has indeed been a slow introduction, to translate part of the title of this 1997 effort. If ever there was a case of early promise as yet unfulfilled, Charmatz is it. Four years earlier, his collaboration with Dimitri Chamblas, A bras le corps, showed signs of energetic originality, almost entirely lacking in this 65 minute work.

Charmatz's bold exposing of bodies too often has the feel of a freak show. He may have a strong statement to make about the human condition, but it is a despairing one, composed of lost, stripped bodies recalling the harrowing asylum scenes of Ceascescu's Romania. It's not moving, just bleak, and it's a relief when the dancers leave to the sound of the cellist quietly murdering his instruments.

Don Morris

Copyright 1999
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