Dance Community | Southbank Centre

Film critic and official and Charlie Chaplin’s official biographer David Robinson on Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin’s Le Cirque Invisible which after a critically acclaimed sell out run returns to the Queen Elizabeth Hall this August.

First it was Le Cirque Bonjour, and then in turn, with the passing of four decades, “Imaginaire” and now “Invisible” (which it is not). Four decades? Or have those years themselves been imaginary and invisible, since the show still sparkles every night as new and fresh and untarnished?

Conversely, how in so brief a time – only four decades – can it have left such an indelible impression on successive generations, an impression not of any ordinary theatrical experience, but the deeper-digging and enduring memory of myth and fairy-tale? The fairy-tale magic that stays with us mostly comes from Victoria’s endless transformations. She either battles with or makes love to floating silks or umbrellas or furniture or ropes – and in the process is changed into mythical beasts, sea creatures, geometrical compositions, prancing horses, unearthly machines. She can vanish into a tiny box or grow till she seems to fill the stage. Enwrapped in wine glasses and Cinderella kitchen objects, she metamorphoses into a self-performing musical instrument.

Jean-Baptiste too from time to time undergoes transformation, but if the tiny, exquisite Victoria has a quality of fairy, he is the substantial embodiment of mischievous elf or goblin. While Victoria’s creations are generally ethereal, elusive as rainbows, Jean-Baptiste, with his sweetly demoniac grin, is always eager to confide, to share with us his own delight in his jests; his mild surprise when his conjuring tricks go right; his resignation when, as usual, they go wrong; his child-like naughtiness when it is not the expected dog that materializes but only its droppings. A gag he did 30 years ago is just as funny now, because it is not a gag, but Jean-Baptiste himself. Victoria’s transformations are mystical; Baptiste’s very human – a man in a wind-storm, another carried on the back of a wilting porter. He has his moments of crazed surreality too, merrily cycling with a skeleton; or joining forces with his own knees to form a vocal trio (at one brief moment maybe a quartet?) to perform The Pearl Fishers.

When I first saw the circus, 32 years ago, on its first big-city outing, in a tent on the wasteland of the Paris Halles, Baptiste boasted two suitcases which, placed on the ground, sprouted tiny legs and scuttled, merrily and uncontrolled, about the circus ring. The legs belonged to the Thierrées’ children, Aurelia and James. They long ago left the Cirque to establish their own shows, dazzling extensions of the same inspiration, with their own variations on that same singular vision which can perceive improbable kinship between disparate inanimate objects, and give those objects their own life: Aurelia makes stage curtains perform like trained animals; James is constantly beset by a none too friendly inanimate world.

Say what you will, these things do run in families, linger in the genes. The heightened vision of the physical world that marks this family’s creation, the sense of unexpected visual connections, is something unquestionably shared with father and grandfather Charles Chaplin – even though, in another century, the view of the world and the creative outcome may be very different. Significantly too Baptiste shares the progenitor Chaplin’s fascination with earlier visual clowns of the British stage, like Grimaldi, Dan Leno and Little Tich. The Cirque Invisible is unique, certainly, but it is not isolated in time. It occupies a clear place and a rare durability in the world tradition of spectacle and clowning and magic. In the long view of history, four decades is nothing and everything.

Le Cirque Invisible returns to Southbank Centre this August, find out more and book tickets.

Filed under: Circus