The Stage

32nd International Monte Carlo Circus Festival

Published Wednesday 30 January 2008 at 16:05 by Liz Arratoon

With just a couple of exceptions, this festival’s dramatic return to form proves to the circus world that there are still many sparkling performers out there who have resisted the powerful suction of Cirque du Soleil’s hoover.

Less importantly, it is noteworthy for the distinct trend among artists to wear white in the ring.

The competition for the coveted Clown awards is held over four days, with two shows being repeated on alternate days.

Programme One

After the artists’ parade and a lot of flag waving, Nathalie Harris gets the party started on cloud swing - a discipline mastered by many circus students without using a lunge. Some pirouettes and a back flip caught with one knee look nifty, but wearing a safety wire throughout means Harris’ performance is not as electric as the blue of her costume.

British clown Donimo (Jonathan Baker) has a number of touching appearances throughout the evening that include magic, juggling, sword swallowing and small comedies of errors. His clowning is probably better suited to a smaller venue, but he endears himself to the crowd, especially with his microphone tomfoolery.

Exotic and colourful, Alessio’s gorgeous parrots have been trained to rollerskate, push a miniature shopping trolley and fix an engine when a tiny car breaks down, but when four of them fly freely round the vastness of the big top, swooping over the audience and peeling off one at a time, they look really spectacular.

Get the Shoe club jugglers are one of a number of acts that have previously appeared at the Cirque de Demain festival in Paris. This is combat juggling, as they battle it out, passing, throwing - often back to back so that they are unsighted - in a cleverly choreographed and quick routine, until black finally overcomes white and steals his trainers.

Gold winners in Paris in 2005, Sam Payne and Sandra Feusi of Vertical Tango have taken the Chinese pole to another level. They are my highlight of the festival and also won the public vote for best act. Circus artists often use tango music, but few capture the sensuality of the dance so effectively. Combining strength and elegance, this is a simply beautiful performance that is so emotionally charged it leaves no-one unmoved.

Rene, Alexia and Merry-Lu Casselly appear with their four African elephants and four white horses in an adaptation of a famous equestrian number called The Post. Here, Alexia stands astride two elephants as they lumber round the ring, and, helped by Merry-Lu, collects the reins of horses that gallop between them.

Wearing red, orange, yellow and brown, China’s Shenyang acrobats - six women and four men - grip everyone’s attention with their number on tea-stained silks. Its slow pace and music provide an ethereal quality and the flyers add an extra degree of difficulty by performing all their moves - often upside-down - while executing a mouth-held sword/dagger balance.

Sending up the idea of smooth Latin hunks are Italy’s bare-chested Pellegrini Brothers, who are extreme muscle men. Though their slow-motion hand-to-hand and balancing moves are spectacular, they rely on brute force rather than aesthetics, and only include a couple of moves that involve all four of them.

One man working the Wheel of Death is never as impressive as two, but Crazy Wilson proves himself to be truly crazy by performing a forward somersault outside the wheel, at the top of its arc, while wearing a blindfold. Flinging it aside, he repeats the almost impossible move twice more just to prove his point.

Kid Bauer’s cage act, with four tigers and two lionesses, starts fairly conventionally with a few leaps, sit-ups and some lolling on a bar but the interaction between the species makes it remarkable as one of each tightwalks two poles. Meeting in the middle, nuzzling, the lioness then lies down for the tiger to walk over her. Later they jump and pirouette like horses.

Troupe Persia have devised a strange sort of flying-carpet number. Their aerial platform is raised and lowered as the nine men are thrown on and off it into various somersaults, or simply dive from it as if from a high board. But their over-elaborate costumes, of helmets and harem pants, suggest Rudolph Valentino meets Star Trek.

The three Martini clowns do not go down particularly well in either programme. Their first spot involves some shenanigans between Lorenzo and sons Serge and David, with a broken clarinet and phantom music coming from a large box.

By contrast, foot jugglers and identical twins, Marina and Svetlana, who - under Valentin Gneuchev’s direction - have modernised this ancient discipline, and are sensational. As well as looking slinky and stylish, they work at a furious pace to the Riverdance theme, spinning glittering mats on feet and hands simultaneously and flicking them between each other.

Another prodigious talent is the Chinese artist Li Wei, who can do all manner of things - including side-splits, walking on his hands, a one-arm handstand or unicycling with his hands - on a periodically raised and lowered swinging slack wire, as if he were on solid ground.

When it comes to quick-change artists, Duo Minasov must be the quickest of them all, as, in the blink of an eye, Elena repeatedly slips into something different, either behind a swiftly raised and lowered curtain or, best of all, in a hail of silver confetti.

Florian Richter won silver here in 2004 and returns with a troupe of ten men, one woman and six horses. Now much more exciting, the jockeys make running leaps on to the animals’ backs as they circle the ring, somersault dangerously between them, perform pommel-horse gymnastics on their rumps and end with seven on one horse.

Programme Two

The second night of competition opens with a repeat of Kid Bauer’s big cat act. This is followed by the first appearance of the famous American clown Grandma (Barry Lubin). Dressed in his trademark red shift, yellow stockings, grey wig and pearls, his comedy is gentle and beautifully observed. Entrees involving popcorn, a running machine and Nat ‘King’ Cole’s duet with daughter Natalie - sung with a man at ringside - are all masterpieces.

It would be hard to better Romania’s Catana Troupe - six men and three women - on teeterboard, and their thrilling somersaults - one landed on a Russian bar held two-men high -ignite the crowd. The act moves at a real lick and a lunge is only used when the end tricks - such as somersaults landed five high on one leg on top of the catcher’s head - become even more exciting and scary.

Akimov on aerial straps - another who has appeared in Paris - combines balletic strength moves and contortion, but his forte lies in some fizzing spins. For his finale, he spins from one arm with his body horizontal to the ground.

Rene Casselly’s elephants are dusted to graphic effect and sport glittering headpieces that match the horses’ saddles, making his second number extremely attractive. Their interplay is delightful and includes elephants pirouetting on pedestals while horses circle them.

Though the Martini clowns are talented musicians on guitar, clarinet, accordion, sax and trumpet, unfortunately they go on far too long and rather lower the heat. White-face Serge’s stunning red and gold sequinned suit becomes the thing most eyes are glued to.

Elayne Kramer is a contortionist in a class of her own. Slender, elegant and precise, she turns her inside out, forming U-bends and shapes that would be hard to demonstrate with a pipecleaner. She finishes in an inverted position and using her feet to hold a bow and arrow, fires and bursts a balloon dead centre.

Working on carpet-covered sand makes Duo Flash’s carefully choreographed acrobatics even harder, but this pair have a real spring in their steps. Fast, funny and accurate they perform hand-to-hand and land all sorts of inventive somersaults and flips, which are perfectly timed to the music.

The first half closes with the Flying Fuentes Gasca trapeze troupe, who strut in to Stayin’ Alive sporting white suits and dark glasses. So long is spent milking the crowd before really getting going they could open a dairy. When Gino achieves the famed quadruple somersault third time lucky, more frenzied whipping-up of the crowd follows.

China’s Guangzhou Acrobatic Troupe crosses traditional hoop-diving with trampolining, but this act is crying out for Cirque du Soleil’s finesse. Though the moves are spectacular - especially the horizontal pirouettes - overall it looks messy, with scruffy gold safety nets and padding, too much ironwork and lurid purple and silver costumes.

Brit John Burke motors into the ring in a small patrol car with his two sea-lions as passengers. He uses a Blues Brothers’ theme as the animals stand on their flippers on the open doors, balance balls on their noses, join him in singing and a hilarious ventriloquism spot and generally demonstrate their intelligence.

I’ve never been surrounded by rows of people who just don’t applaud an act but it happened to The Bikers - seven men and one woman in studded black leather - who somersault on gigantic inflated inner tubes. This act is aggressive, ugly and has nothing, other than being different, to recommend it.

Luckily Scott and Muriel’s brilliant comedy magic lifts the mood. Their clever take on sawing a woman in two sees a dummy, whose arms, legs and head keep falling off, being mysteriously replaced by the living doll, Muriel. They follow this with a collapsing sword box in which she is not only run through but seemingly flattened to nothingness.

Another outing for the Casselly family starts with Merry-Lu entering the ring on a fairy-lit Pegasus, before taking to the air on silks. She descends and joins Rene and Alexia in a Spanish-themed equestrian number, but the acts sit awkwardly together.

Wearing white flappy trousers open at the calf, Victor Minasov has a fun spot with a huge and silly white balloon. He’s either inside in or sticking one limb out of it, bouncing it on his head or releasing a little red heart balloon from it.

Equilibrissimo’s hand-to-hand duo and acrobalance trio showcase some staggering positions but the eye is distracted from the brilliance of the one male and four female Ukrainians by the over-enthusiastic and noisy electric balalaika musicians and the profusion of dancers who surround them.

Reto Parolari, as ever, leads his circus orchestra and is kept busy as many more acts than last year use live accompaniment. He has his own interlude playing cowbells like a xylophone. More music is provided by the exquisite Clowns en Folie band, and occasional gyrations come from Kiev’s Freedom Ballet. The ringmaster is once again Petit Gougou.

With such a strong line-up, the jury, made up of six artists - including the British animal trainer Susan Lacey - had a hard time allocating the awards. Eventually, they gave Gold Clowns to the Pellegrinis, Li Wei and Florian Richter, silvers to Vertical Tango, Crazy Wilson, the Catana Troupe, the Casellys and the Shenyang Troupe, and bronze to Marina and Svetlana, Elayne Kramer and Akimov.

This is the second festival under the auspices of Princess Stephanie. Last year things tilted too far towards Las Vegas glitz, but this time, apart from the shows still being far, far too long, things are almost spot-on. If this is shape of things to come, this world-renowned festival is not only in safe hands, but its future editions will be something to look forward to.

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