ZAGREB RESIDENCY FESTIVAL NOVOG ... - Unpack the Arts

Now you see it…
now you don’t:
Character
and Circus
S U S I E W I L D
At the eighth year of Festival Novog Cirkusa in
Zagreb trickery was at work as new magic met
new circus on and off stage. From the
disappearing ink of the programme through the
surreal spectacle of Le Cirque Invisible to the
unseen trickster in L’Autre nothing was quite
what it seemed.
Beginning with a magical mystery tour, a bus
drove the audience from Zagreb to Slovenia to
enjoy Le Cirque Invisible – a two-hour play session
of magic, humour and transformations by the
enchanting Victoria Chaplin, daughter of Charlie,
and her cheery life partner Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée.
Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée met
in 1969. They cut an odd but compelling couple.
Chaplin, an elegantly elfin acrobat and beguiling
shape-shifting chameleon with long dark locks
and ever-widening eyes, and then Thiérrée, a
madcap clown-wizard with wild-white hair,
twinkling blue eyes and a big grin. Timeless
archetypes of nostalgic circus, the eccentric and
devoted pair have been performing this, their third
show, across the globe for three decades. Jean-
Baptiste Thiérrée would have loved “to have
produced just one, but work[ed] on its
improvement forever”. For him, it never seems
tiresome, and his playful joie de vivre is
contagious; we let him carry us away with Le
Cirque Invisible and away with the fairies to a land
of imaginative make believe.
“Hup!” shouts Jean-Baptiste as each trick is
revealed. He is a master of blink-and-you-miss-it
visual gags and pimptastic costumes. You’ll have
wardrobe envy at least once during the
performance as he appears in kitsch suits of
tapestry, space-age silver or zebra print, carrying
matching suitcase-tables of tricks. Predictably
unpredictable, he tells jokes, juggles, creates loud
crashes from teeny tiny objects, turns silk
handkerchiefs into doves and, at one point, saws
Victoria Chaplin in half. Victoria’s brand of
costumery is more performance high art: she
sculpts her own strange little worlds out of fabric
and furniture, creating a muddled menagerie of
surreal fantasy creatures from bulls and dragons
to underwater dwellers. Chaplin is a mistress of
reinvention. One minute a one-woman band
playing a tune with cutlery and glassware, in
another she is a flowerpot woman, a hermit crab,
or a coffee-drinking lady. A trained dancer and
acrobat, at times she moves away from oddness
to create real beauty with movement, as with her
swirling silk projection dance, of an ilk first
pioneered by Loie Fuller, and her surprisingly
sprightly grace in the art of contortion, and on
the tightrope, where she does the splits.
Between them, they have a top-hat-full of
presence (and rabbits). The characters and the
love story and the years of experience become
the glue that holds the acts together and keeps
our attention; even as the repetitive nature of acts
and gags starts to grate. We laugh and we allow
ourselves to be small children, suspending
disbelief even as we see the hands of their
assistants, or tricks that fail, because these are
masters of their trade. They wink at us and each
other, bursting with prowess, pride, selfdeprecation
and self-irony as the up-closeness of
small theatre viewings of their acts deconstructs
their circus techniques and the semantics of the
magic show whilst still showing a mixed
mainstream audience a good time.
Rarely on stage together, their cycling finale is
a double act of chrome contraptions – wheels
weird and wonderful – before a never-ending
curtain call (as if to say, ‘look what else we can
do’). A pass-the-parcel of costume changes and
bonus acts, with the go-go energy of the Duracell
bunnies they finally fill the stage with.
What was not invisible, but was meant to be,
led to the two unintended mishaps of Friday
evening’s double bill. Raphaël Navarro and
Clément Debailleul (Cie 14:20)’s career may be
SUSIE WILD 58