Cirqu’ Aarau Festival, a Swiss festival of contemporary circus, has a lot going for it. Not the least that the shows, in a host of formal and informal venues, run impeccably thanks to Roman Müller, its apparently unflappable Director, and his small but efficient supporting team. Readers may know Müller from the ground-breaking Duo Tr’espace diabolo act with his performing partner Nella von Zerboni, which won a silver medal at the Cirque de Demain in 2005.
Müller, along with Peter-Jakob Kelting, founded this biannual festival in 2015. Unsurprisingly, given Müller’s history, the festival focuses on emerging work and, by design, many of the shows have only a subtle link with circus; several of the shows I saw could reasonably be described as kinetic art. There’s also plenty of more characterful work and considerable humour within. None of the shows are a sequence of different acts, but the festival programme is sufficiently diverse for everyone to find something to their taste. The quality is high, both in the ticketed shows and in the many that are free to vie – though some of the shows, particularly those with just one or two performers, are longer than their material merits.
I attended the second half of the two-week festival that takes place in Aarau, an attractive town mid-way between Zurich and Basle on the banks of the River Aare. It is spread across an assortment of fabulous venues all within comfortably walking distance from the festival hub (where a bar serves locally brewed and very quaffable Cirqu’ beer) at the Alte Reithalle, a former military riding school that the city transformed into a versatile and well-equipped performing space years ago.
Shows start in the late afternoon, so the day is free to spend sightseeing or – in my case – sunbathing and swimming at the glorious Freibad Schachen. Downsides? Expect to pay steepish prices since it’s Switzerland, and book your accommodation early, especially to get an affordable space to stay. The town lacks a campsite though there are ambitions to rectify that.
Bastien Alvarez of Cie Cabac was given Carte Blanche by the festival to create a 15-minute animation within a giant metal frame in Aarau that plants grow up and over. The space allows Alvarez to use a corde lisse, cloudswing and slanting rope within a piece about oppression and rebellion in Franco’s Spain that ends with Alvarez singing Cancion de Soldados, a notable anti-fascist song. He is an accomplished aerialist and has a good voice. Though I could not translate the introduction, I could get the gist of the narrative and found it to be a successful intervention in the space.
As well as commissioning new work and programming established productions, the festival also hosts work-in-progress showings. Boucherie Miaoux is a 45-minute work-in-progress circus-meets-gig by aerialist Noémi Devaux and drummer Julius Michaud. A triangular frame erected in a park supports an aerial hoop over a drum set and a complex array of electronic sound and mixing desks that Noémi, particularly, manipulates between her aerial performance. ‘Think punk without a guitar’ says the publicity, and that’s a fair attempt to describe some of the wilder pieces where Devaux, accomplished on the hoop, flails and gyrates with some of her moves reflected electronically in sound alongside Michaud’s frenetic drumming. Other pieces are mellower with controlled moves by Devaux to ambient psychedelic noodling. Musically interesting, visually appealing, the prospect looks good for the finished work.
Another work-in-progress is NEXUS, a 20-minute juggling performance by Isaline Hugonnet of Switzerland and Yu-yin Lin of Taiwan who met at France’s Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC). The two women, dressed in black polo shirts and blue and white striped shorts, perform half a dozen snippets towards a show planned for 2027 (as other commitments mean 2026 is not feasible). The duo have a playful rapport, swapping props, sometimes copying each other, other times embracing whilst diaboloing. There are plenty of neat tricks such as using a diabolo’s control sticks and string to slice it in half. Their gentle but intriguing interrogation of object manipulation is combined with strong interplay between the two characters. I’ll certainly keep an eye out for the resulting piece.
The works-in-progress and commissioned small pieces are complemented by established work including The Tortoise, an outdoor theatre divertissement by Pieter Post from the Netherlands. Post whiles away half an hour most beguilingly as he questions the value of a frenetic life, the need for speed, the necessity of action. Dapperly dressed in top hat and silk scarf with a black smoking jacket over a pin stripe suit, Post, is avuncular and jolly with the spieling ability of an old-time medicine man. Framed quotes by the likes of Oscar Wilde (‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world‘) hang behind a long and narrow wooden run of shelving on which Post places a series of books he entertainingly recommends on the merits of idleness and the ilk. Clearing them he lifts a hat at one end to reveal a tortoise who, oh so slowly, makes his way along the run. Just as children start to lose interest an event happens, be it the intervention of a penguin which the tortoise must overcome or the fuse being lit that requires the tortoise to slowly scurry to avoid being blown up by detonating dynamite. All remain engaged to the finalé, wherein the tortoise undertakes a wildly ambitious leap into a bed of lettuce. Superbly crafted, this is understated, imaginative, gentle and very clever street theatre. Perfect alike for those with nothing urgent to attend to and for those who believe they do.
Other shows reviewed at this year’s festival:
‘Ama’, by Jörg Müller & Bertrand Wolff
‘Ceramic Circus’, by Julian Vogel/Cie unlisted
