Performance
Liquid Sky
Platform, The Bridge, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
three stars
Whether you view it as an artform or an entertainment, circus is a survivor - harking back, in the UK, to 1768 when equestrian Philip Astley drew a circle on some London wasteland, stepped inside, and went into his act. Circus has, however, survived because it is a chameleon. Modern dictats have outlawed animal acts - instead human bodies push physical (and mental) strengths to extremes and new technologies perform breathtaking feats of their own. These disparate elements interact to striking effect in Bassline’s ambitious Liquid Sky, part of the Braw Circus festival staged across the weekend at Platform.
The acrobatic prowess comes courtesy of aerialist Aedin Walsh, the laser light matrix that frames and redefines her is created by Jack Wrigley. Already visually intriguing, the piece acquires an otherworldly feel through Sue Zuki’s live music and incantatory vocalising, her Gothick robes further suggesting a high priestess from some mystic- alien realm akin to those in Doris Lessing’s feminist sci-fi novels. Walsh’s empowering quest is one of fiercely won ascension from a woman constrained - by a rope that binds her to an emblematic rock - into a wonderfully limber figure spooling around that now dangling rope amid moody cloudscapes and shifting colour-planes. Walsh is, in fact blind-folded: trained instinct rather than the acquired ‘bush-baby’ glowing eyes guide her manouevres to a point where she transcends our field of vision... and vanishes into freedom.
Zinnia Oberski’s brief Scratch performance proved an appropriate curtain-raiser for Liquid Sky. Bare-torso’d, in only a pair of trunks - her gender/identity frequently veiled by her long hair - Oberski took to a trapeze in a ritual of sinuous moves that called down a beautifully realised bull’s head-cum-mask. Zeus, Europa, the Minotaur, the bull-leaping acrobats of Crete - her final descent hinted, tantalisingly, at ancient myths and culture. And, perhaps, at the origins of circus itself.
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