Review: BIANCO, Southbank Centre, 29 November 2016

It's 25 years since I saw circus as I had never seen it before - the chainsaws and motorbikes of Archaos hurtling through the air inside the decrepit Battersea Power Station: ears, eyes and nose assaulted in an industrial wasteland. It was unforgettable stuff.

NoFit State Circus's Bianco is more post-industrial than industrial: like the gig economy of today, stage sets rise and fall swiftly, performers take on multiple roles and the only way to survive is to keep moving, whether in the company or the audience. Performed in a big top on the banks of the Thames, it's a show in which gravity picks and pulls at mere mortals, but they fight back, twisting and turning on ropes, balancing on wires or levitating the hoops spinning around their bodies.

It's all underpinned by an aesthetic sensibility grounded more in performance art than in theatre (you can read more about that in director Firenza Guidi's Broadwayworld guest blog) and it's not shy of making demands on the audience. There's no narrative to anchor the scenes; the music, played in a variety of styles, accompanies rather than explains the work (lyrics are irritatingly indecipherable); and the one time a performer uses a body mic, he seems to be speaking French - though it's hard to tell. Sure it's all part of ensuring that each individual's reaction to Bianco is as individual as they are, but it's hard to get a grip on what's going on at times. The show is given the subtitle, Here Be Dragons, but it's hard to discern the phrase's relevance, literally or metaphorically, with no references to maps nor journeys.

If the cables and scaffolding used throughout the show owes something to Archaos, the movements in the vertical plane owe something to Cirque du Soleil. As in their Vegas show Love (a tribute to The Beatles), I found myself looking up and down far more than across the performing area, though the opportunity to move around the space makes the slight nausea I always get at a Cirque show less likely with NoFit State.

Bianco is probably a show for aficionados of circus as it has developed in the last 25 years, for those who enjoy spectacular parkour videos on youtube, Danny MacAskill's cycling films or even James Kingston's daredevilry on high buildings. It's not Billy Smart's, nor would it be a comfortable home for Norman Barrett's budgies. I'm lucky enough to appreciate all kinds of circus, but I'd rather not have to work quite as hard for my kicks as I did in Bianco.

Bianco continues at the Southbank Centre until 22 January.

Photo by Tristram Kenton.

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