Ensconced in the cavernous Roundhouse is a giant spider of scaffolding that resembles a big-top after an arson attack. Within, nofitstate seem intent on the destruction of traditional circus in order that, phoenix-like, it might rise reborn from the ashes. In this, Tabú is a modified success – certainly, it presents a new perspective on the medium, but it fails to truly reignite.
Pitched in promenade, there is a quality of immersive street theatre about Tabú. When performers cascade over your head, you feel the rush of air; when they spin dizzyingly just in front of you, you become caught up in the rhythm, swaying on the spot. Up close, the feats on show appear magnified and infectious. However, from distance, it lacks the scale to really dazzle. Aside from the silhouetted crowds obscuring one’s view, the acts themselves often fall short of genuine gasp-factor.
That said, the shift away from demonstration and derring-do allows nofitstate’s breed of circus to function almost as performance installation. From the very first image – a field of horizontal bodies hanging from butchers’ hooks as if a human battery farm – Tabú’s component parts demand interpretation rather than astonished applause.
Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tabú takes its aim at individual fear and isolation, but seems to speak more about the evolution of society. What begins as a communal carnival, playing in amongst us with shared smiles and private jokes, becomes increasingly distant and out of reach. Where we walk into a bustling town-square populated by toy-box oddities of clowns and action-men, the place we leave is a towering metropolis that seems look down on us with menace and suspicion.
The rural simplicity of Tabú’s first half brings with it a playful exuberance. Men tumble past on spinning wheels as young girls, perched on a tightrope above, peer down on them flirtatiously. Together they swing from municipal trapezes and leap into one another’s arms in a free-flowing dance of warmth, courtship and community. After the interval, however, no such conviviality remains.
Instead, everything seems self-contained and self-involved. During a raggedly sexual stationary trapeze routine suggestive of a couple holed up in a hotel room and entangled in each other’s bodies, there appears a high-rise population dotted around the space. As they dance, swirl and clamber in isolated pockets of space, each seems unaware of the world beyond their own personal bubble. For its inhabitants that toss in breathless sleep and drown in its plugholes, this Escher-like city is an inescapable nightmare fraught with panic.
Even when the whole company comes together to spring tumultuously on a single trampoline, community is absent. They dart haphazardly as if trapped in a wind-tunnel or lottery-machine, each a commuter concerned only with his or her own journey.
Beyond its content, though, Tabú beautifully opens the circus event to include the mechanics that operate it. Tiny moments catch the attention: an empty trapeze, a discarded hat, a pair of shoes tucked for later. Equally, the human counter-balances scuttling over the scaffold become as pleasurable as the main acts. Across the two halves they shift from playful companions in a trust game to malevolent controlling forces.
Circus, for nofitstate, can be traced in anything and anything can be found in the acts of circus. While there are problems – individual acts, for all their diligent imagery, rarely seem complete and the recorded text of fears and dreams is irksomely over-poetic yet unrevelatory – Tabú lubricates an old medium, though more through the spectacles it prescribes its audience than those it contains inherently.
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