Image courtesy of Mark Robson
The first time I met the NoFit State Circus Company I was a Postgraduate Journalism student at Cardiff University. They hadn’t been around for many years and everything felt new and promising. I remember walking in the old church, where they rehearsed, with a mixture of fear (do I have enough questions? Is my dictaphone going to abandon me? I hope no one realises I don’t know what I’m doing) and excitement because I was instantly hooked.
Hooked on the strange performers doing tricks and practising while answering to my, I am sure, ridiculous questions. Hooked on how different from one another they seemed-everyone a complete artist with their own world-yet still a community of creatives who completed each other. Hooked because they were unbelievably talented. And yet again hooked because I felt I had been invited to see a whole new world; a world which only danced after sunset.
Six years later I found that world again…
Image courtesy of Mark Robson
After moving into new premises, the NoFit State Circus company looked somewhat different from the colourful characters I had met years before. Their dance was now a perfect combination of precision, talent and soul and I found myself laughing, crying and gasping at the most breath-taking tricks.
Bianco, the show they’re taking to Fringe this July, was so emotionally charged to make you forget most of yourself for about two hours and concentrate on them, the artists, the pirates of the galleon that the NoFit State pavilion was yesterday night.
Bianco was a promenade show; this means that, in a way, you move with the show, you move with the artists and fit yourself around their performance. It was different yet more engaging and tiring than any other show I had ever seen before.
Bianco was a promenade experience, narrative and music. It was a live band with a soundtrack I have been searching for the past 24 hours with no luck. It was men on tightropes being cheeky and graceful and women on trapezes being scary and risky. It was ropes, hula hoops and trampolines. And then it was fire eating and juggling. It was about artists expressing life, love, pain and soul through their muscles and strength.
It was the amazing finale when a woman on a trapeze almost touches the roof as snowflakes fall delicately upon us, the audience, making us once again part of the show…part of the white…part of Bianco.
Miss Squiggles loved how NoFit State managed to modernise any archaic Circus concept or pre concept captivating the audience with their perfect, slightly esoteric mood.
To say that the night was a success would be highly limitative. If you haven’t seen Bianco you will kick yourself for hours and throw your head against the wall repetitively on Sunday morning when the pirates leave Cardiff for their next city, their next port..
So why would you put yourself through that?
Make sure you don’t miss Bianco only in Cardiff tonight and tomorrow.
And then it was Bianco…
Miss Squiggles
