Guest Blog: Firenza Guidi On NoFit State Circus's BIANCO

London, Southbank Centre. I look at the people sitting in front of me in the tent and realise only two were in the original Bianco at the Eden Project, four years ago: Lyndall and August. All the other faces have appeared along the way. That initial creative process is lost in the collective imagery. This is the history of Bianco, a chapter in the history of NoFit State. A chunk of my life too unfolds, unravels, one idea after another with underground and overground connections.

Going back to the beginning is going back to the origins of performers as living creatures, a bunch of creative humans with a great hunger and capacity for growth and continual change. In my work, the desire is to rekindle the innocence that makes the audience marvel, just like in the old days of cinema and circus when people marvelled at the clown fumbling, the elephant rearing and the moving image of a train charging at them. Art and its making coming full circle.

NoFit State, as a company, is about teamwork, communal living and common goals, and my shows reflect that ethos in an orchestrated ensemble feel, apparently improvised but indeed highly choreographed chaos: I call it 'raw energy'. In the creative process, performers learn a language that's a particular alchemy of vulnerability, naughtiness and seduction. The focus is on finding the originality of each performer, and our world is populated by human beings: real, honest and with a good deal of cheekiness and self-irony - ordinary people performing extraordinary things.

Bianco ('white' in Italian) tells a story of a great journey inside and outside ourselves. In Saramago's The Elephant's Journey, the mahout (elephant keeper) is called Subhro, which means white. He's poor, dirty and covered in rags but wise, cultured and with a beautiful soul. His real beauty is internal. He's washed and dressed, transformed into a magnificent figure on top of the elephant, and sent as a wedding gift by the King and Queen of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The elephant journeys on foot across the whole of Europe, from Lisbon to Vienna, and everywhere it brings joy, awe, bewilderment - transforming people's lives.

A moving village, a community thrown together, with towns and villages and cities made of wires, creating its own rules and embracing the unknown. "In the end," we learn, "we always arrive where we are expected" - for there is nowhere that is not somewhere. Our pre-show represents that pitched camp, and the elephant is the unexpected - the event that shakes up beliefs, convictions and prejudice.

Our 360-degree creative process involves theatre, dance, circus, live music and more, with skills ranging from aerial exploits, like swinging trapeze and cloud, to ground-based disciplines like cyr wheel, juggling and hula-hoops. The performance explodes the traditional proscenium arch audience-performer relationship; the immersive space has a constantly shifting point of view, actively framed by the spectator.

The subtitle of the show is 'Here be dragons' - the phrase used by mapmakers to highlight wild and potentially treacherous territories (one of these being Wales, our company's homeland). Reflecting that idea, the performers are encouraged to be real and passionate, wild and unpredictable.

The journey of Bianco spans multiple cities and cultures and reflects new influences and discoveries. It's undergone many transformations, with new places and faces appearing before our eyes. August was in the original production at the Eden Project in 2012, and was then out for nearly two years for an operation. When I saw him back in the piece in New York, I decided he would close the show in the snow - inspired by Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World.

The end of the world, the end of a show and the end of an era - but the beginning of a new life. August and Jess, his counterweighter, would act as a man and his shadow, parting with one last hug and accompanied by David Murray's hopeful and incredibly haunting song "I've Got To Get Out Of This Place".

It's a perfect marriage of image, circus, body and music, and the new scene takes on new meaning: a celebration of life and death, a longing for change and transformation, the dream of flight becoming possible through human endeavour, free of motors and machines, and man and woman together defying time and gravity.

Bianco is at Southbank Centre until 22 January, 2017

Picture credit: Tristram Kenton

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