But this isn't a clowning show per se, though I imagined there would elements, as the show is directed by Kook Ensemble's Sean Kempton and Michaela O'Connor. It is a touching exploration of love and connection, set in a kind of no-man's-land outside ordinary time. Welcome to the world of Zirkus Morsa, the vision of Rosa Wilm and Johannes Siven.
Their half-hour of Amber Hour, a 70-minute show in development and the last sharing in Jacksons Lane's Summer of Circus Hub, blew me away. It was physical poetry, but of a very different kind from the lyricism of the spoken and sung word in Circus Parade the week before. Where that show used language to tell its stories, Amber Hour seemed to tell its stories through bodies, objects, projections and the strange physical logic of circus.
I knew technology was going to play a part when I walked into the auditorium and saw a back row of tables crowded with electronics and switches, already being manned. The cinematic quality of the show was there from the beginning.
The backdrop was a projection of images that transitioned the scenes between street and home. On either side of the stage were two enormous perspex boxes, transparent but somehow mysterious, each carrying with it the promise of illusion. They became little worlds of their own, or perhaps portals into one.
In one, a phone rings. Eventually it is answered, but the man has the wrong phone box. He wants to get to another phone box, only to discover a huge queue, with a bouncer at the front acting as guardian to the underground scene, or the underworld, whatever lies beyond.
The whole scene has the slapstick manoeuvring of Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, as the man tries to get to the front, but there is something much darker underneath it. I later discovered that there is potentially an Orpheus narrative running through Amber Hour, and suddenly the queue begins to feel almost purgatorial. Though Hadestown this ain't.
The boxes change function.
In another scene, a woman strips off her top and enters the box with her partner. There is a voyeuristic element, for sure, but not in the Amsterdam sense, nor The Box. The top underneath is a sports bra, and what follows is instead something intimate and strange. She uses her body to wedge herself upside down from the ceiling, while her partner moves in for a kiss. At the last moment she ducks her head away, twisting the physical mechanics of the duet into a tiny comic tragedy of desire.
Elsewhere the box becomes a nightclub. All the performers squish inside, faces pressed against the glass, one particularly caught in a ridiculous grimace, while the music pumps and the party rages. It is New Year's Eve. A couple leave. She says goodbye and he goes back in.
Relationships in Amber Hour are constantly forming, dissolving and reforming, often with a lovely casualness. I particularly loved a series of two-high sequences in which partners were swapped almost en passant, the acrobatic equivalent of changing seats at a dinner party, or a crowd at rush hour navigating the spaces in between.
There is also a beautiful moment in which a performer plays with her own shadow self, apparently a pre-recorded projection. It is one of those images that feels almost magical precisely because the technology is so seamlessly incorporated into the physical world.
And then there are the recurring lovers.
A pair sit together on a chair and it is only when they stand that we register the extraordinary physical discrepancy between them. A good fifteen inches, as it turns out, which I believe is the name of their act outside of this. The comedy comes not from a punchline but from the simple fact of two bodies that don't quite seem to belong together, finding a way, through acro duo, to do so anyway.
Later, there is a duet on rola-bola, with a couple of glasses placed on it for good measure. Because apparently balancing two human beings on a rolling board isn't quite enough.
And perhaps that is what stayed with me. The circus skills are extraordinary, but everything is in service of this strange, funny, fragile world in which people keep trying to find each other. Bodies don't quite match but they do fit. Phones don't connect. People end up in the wrong places. Shadows acquire lives of their own. Lovers swap partners, disappear into boxes and emerge somewhere else.
The world loops back on itself, just as memory does.
There is something wonderfully Beckettian about that, but Amber Hour is much warmer than Beckett. Its absurdity is shot through with affection. Its characters are ridiculous at times, vulnerable at others, and circus gives them a language for all the things they can't quite say.
I came out on a high, in part because I'd just been able to share with a complete stranger the reason why Lucy Loves Circus, without needing to say a word.
This was such a good advert for where contemporary circus can go when it stops thinking of itself as a succession of tricks and starts borrowing freely from cinema, theatre, dance, magic and visual art. Amber Hour felt less like watching a circus show than being briefly admitted into somebody else's strange dream.
And perhaps that is the amber of it: moments, memories and relationships caught and held in suspension, like an insect preserved in amber. The world of Amber Hour loops back on itself, outside ordinary time, and I wanted to remain suspended there too.
Photo credits: Zirkus Morsa
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