A woman passes through a tiny hoop, no bigger than her head. Another manages to keep fifteen hoops aloft around her waist as she gyrates. Two men vault over one another, balancing precariously from a taut rubber pole. Throughout the hour long show at Underbelly the performers at Circa (Wunderkammer) push the human body to its limits, performing death-defying stunts that, despite the almost supernatural agility of the performers, never feel anything less than fully human. The very few onstage stumbles, rather than looking like mistakes, are dramatically effective, as we come to empathize with, as well as admire, the performers.
At its best, Circa simultaneously stuns the audience and tells us a story, combining visual spectacle with compelling characterization: the stunts of one acrobatic trio hint at good-natured male competition; the rope-dance duo, perhaps the show's most memorable sequence, hints at the passion of a queer love affair. Better still, the female performers - rather than being treated as mere sexual objects (as is all too common in these sorts of performances) - are given just as much to do as their male counterparts. They are allowed to show strength as well as skin, and indeed, it is a male trapeze artist who has the closest thing we get to a bona fide striptease.
Less successful, perhaps, are Circa's attempts at comedy. A burlesque-style bubble-wrap-popping-sequence feels out of place among such a (literally) high-flying spectacle, and a post-rope-dance striptease feels like an unnecessary thematic explication of the homoeroticism already plenty implicit in the rope-dance itself. Yet such quibbles are minor, overall Circa (Wunderkammer) proved among the best of the shows I've seen at this or any Fringe.
