All The Fun
Underbelly Circus Hub
4pm 5 – 26 August 2017
Set to be a cult classic, Belgium circus company Cie Ea Eo present All The Fun, a hypnotic, tongue-in-cheek antidote to the glittering circus world.
Maybe more than a little ironic, the show brings the audience right into the tricks of the circus with an insane level of focus and the odd bead of sweat. An all ages show, All The Fun will make you wonder what is staged and what is play, all from the edge of your seat.
What was the inspiration for this performance?
We’ve all been practicing juggling for years, and we wanted to invite the audience to discover why this discipline means so much to us. So, we decided to create a very intimate space, a small circle, with the audience nearly sitting on stage. As if we were around a fire, everyone very close to everyone else.
With this intimacy, we can share with people some of the mystical aspects of juggling that is not usually seen in juggling shows. How juggling actually transforms
us: how we can one minute be very intensely concentrated, and the next, we are children rolling around the playground.
us: how we can one minute be very intensely concentrated, and the next, we are children rolling around the playground.
Juggling can be so intense and require so much physical involvement that we have the feeling we are deep into some kind of rave or spiritual ritual, where we throw weird plastic objects into the air for no reason.
Juggling is a useless thing, and we wanted to pay homage to this beautiful uselessness. Uselessness is the most precious thing these days.
Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?
The time after the performance actually is. We tried to make a show that leaves the audience a lot of space to interpret what they see. By the end of the show, although everyone saw the same show, everyone saw a different “thing”. Different people feel different emotions. They project different interpretations depending on who they are and where they come from. Then they can talk with each other and share their feelings, and try to understand each other. The show then becomes some kind of tool that makes people try to understand each other’s way of experiencing the world.
How did you go about gathering the team for
It’s very organic. There was no audition whatsoever. We all met through the juggling community, and at one point one of us stated the obvious: we have to make a show together. The real starting point of the show is in fact the team.
How did you become interested in making performance?
We all started juggling just for the sake of it, and not at all with the intention of creating shows. But as you evolve in the juggling world, you get to see juggling acts, circus acts, you get interested in movement, in dance, you get to see dance shows, in which there is also a bit of theatre, so you become interested in theatre as well, and then you’re just simply interested in performance in general, and how juggling can be strong medium to perform with.
Is there any particular approach to the making of the show? Does the show fit with your usual productions?
It’s like making a bridge. On one side we work on a small scale, we have juggling techniques, ideas for scenes. On the other side, we have some blurry idea of the show as a whole. The game is to get these two sides to meet. But what is amazing is that they feed one another, so it makes the building easier. The overarching theme of the show, when examined, can inspire a specific scene. The ideas behind the scenes we create are not random, but naturally share some similarities. When you try to understand what it is that makes them consistent with one another, it helps you understand what the show will look like as a whole.
What do you hope that the audience will experience?
We hope they experience some joyful feeling of weirdness.
What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
We actually don’t try to « shape » the audience experience. The game is more about shaping things that we think are fun/ beautiful/weird as well as we can, and then showing them, taking the bet that if we found them fun/beautiful/weird and liked to feel this way, the audience, made of human beings like us, will probably feel something similar.
Ea Eo is an internationally touring juggling company founded in 2009 by Jordaan De Cuyper, Sander De Cuyper, Bram Dobbelaere and Eric Longequel. Neta Oren joined them in 2015 to create All the Fun. Juggling and silly jokes are the two languages that are central to the work of the company.
An original score has been composed for the show by David Maillard (Notoy). Notoy works by recording everyday sounds and turning them into hypnotising electronic soundtracks – which in the case of All The Fun, builds throughout the show and works intuitively with the performance on stage.
The team of five balance objects and play with Newton’s theory of gravity in this new show from the makers of international touring success m2.
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