Fidget Feet versus Cirque Beserk

This is a very interesting photograph. It is from Fidget Feet's The Second Coming. It could possibly be a rehearsal shot. It does bear a resemblance to the version of the show that I saw at Tramway (as part of Celtic Connections), but it also poses some intriguing questions about the evolution of the show.

The version that I saw did not have a tough looking guy shouting into a microphone, but a man dressed up in old fashioned clothes playing the part of WB Yeats. He turned up after a couple of dance numbers, expressed surprise at being back from the dead and would perform doggerel between the dance episodes. He flannelled about some mystical oneness that replaced God in a spiritual cosmogony. The Second Coming alternated between aerial routines based on Irish dancing and these poetic interludes of Celtic mist.

A week later, I went to see Cirque Berserk, another circus theatre piece. This had no story, just manic tricks and stunts, culminating in four motorbikes racing around inside a big metal ball.

Both Cirque Berserk and The Second Coming share a foundation in the tradition of circus acrobatics. But where Fidget Feet add the theatricality of Irish dance and a heavy dose of 'serious content' (the Yeats character is trying to make some kind of point about spirituality), The Cirque simply lives up to its name, shoving three hours of entertainment into two, and getting dangerous with knives, swinging from silks and leaping from tall scenery.

Although I have a vague memory that Yeat's poem about the second company was pessimistic (it seems to describe the anti-christ rather than any cheery baby Jesus), The Second Coming is a happy celebration: the most thoughtful moments are towards the end, when the aerialists slowly climb the spiral (see photo). That is a beautiful moment, hinting at evolutionary growth and the DNA spiral's innate elegance. However, much of the choreography is a generic blend of Irish dance energy and clumsily used aerial swoops - combined with the poet's interludes, the atmosphere becomes cloying and sentimental.

This brings me back to the image at the head of the page. That version of the show looks tougher, more rough hewn - the poet is more punk prophet than tweedy dead revolutionary. It has the vibrancy that is missing in The Second Coming as I saw it. 

Cirque Berserk has no time for fripperies. Stripped of animal acts, plunged into a theatre venue, with no ringmaster and the barest hint of a narrative (one scene had a gypsy village theme, sort of), it races through routines. Now and again Tweedy the clown strolls on to slow down the pace (although I am sure his music was Taraf de Haïdouks), hiding his acrobatic skills under the pretence of idiocy. Throughout the show, the displays of human excellence were astonishing... and they hid any scene changes by having three dancing women come to the front of the stage (which can lead off on a debate about how to judge sexy women being deliberately sexy).

The rise of 'circus' as a serious art form prefers work like The

Second Coming to the Cirque, and suffers. The latter sins by entertaining, the former leeches circus' energy away by framing the spectacle in a format that demands meaning and concessions to high art. Never mind that Cirque's performers are more daring, more skilled.