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Carousel and Clothesline is a piece of New Circus by Quebec-based company Vague de Cirque. Although the New Circus form pioneered in Quebec, France and Australia replaced animal acts with more character-based work, often with a political or queer edge, increasingly New Circus has been going back to its origins in old skool circus.

Carousel then is not a simple skills or act based piece. Every feat of acrobatics, juggling or aerial work is inflected by character or a particular scenario/take, making each section a small theatrical (and typically comical) sketch. Nevertheless, the piece is not that far from a traditional, pre-1970s circus, the opening even featuring all of the performers in early twentieth century acrobat outfits in a fetching, functional brown!

Performed in this instance within the high-ceiling venue of King and Queens schools’ theatre, the acts focus on acrobatics of some kind or other. Though a trapeze bar is lowered into the space at one point, it is used for an aerial acrobatic and contortionist act, rather than true flying trapeze. The only other aerial act is an impressive slack rope piece from the long limbed and super-flexible contortionist Emmaline Piatt. Some juggling is also thrown in to add some variety, notably a very simply and gently performed three-man act, with clubs crossing high over-head, along a plane in front of the middle juggler, and other simply arranged but attractive configurations.

In short, there is nothing especially out of the ordinary about the particular skills on display here. Anyone who goes to circus with a fair degree of regularity should be broadly familiar with the repertoire of material. 

What really distinguishes Vague de Cirque, apart from an extremely high level of proficiency, is the enormous good nature with which all the material is presented. Whilst not always going for laughs per se, the performers always seem to be beaming. This also gives great scope for more overt comic interjections, provided liberally by our hopelessly inept but ever confident, lanky M.C. Philippe Thibaudeau. The almost dangerous level of concentration and intensity which can accompany some circus and New Circus (some of the works of Australian company Acrobat spring to mind) is avoided, as is the tasteless kitsch styling and faux-artiness of the hugely over-rated Cirque de Soleil—let alone the cheap eroticism which this famous company repeatedly trades off.

Which is not to say that the performers in Carousel are not a bit of all right, but—as one perhaps might expect of a company coming out of French-speaking Canada—the women are suitably gamin, and the men’s sexiness usually so understated (or self-consciously parodied, as with our M.C.) that they are hardly macho either.

The exception though has to be one of the great highlights of Carousel, a wonderfully homoerotic disco-themed acrobat act performed by Coen Clarke—all John Travolta polyester and suggestive hip waggle—with his hapless, uncomfortable straight-man lifter Jason Fergusson. Even for a male heterosexual like myself, I must conclude that Clarke easily comes off as the most arousing of all the performers on stage 

Special mention should also be made of Thibaudeau as the MC. Channelling a combination of completely un-self-aware lounge lizard, Serge de Gainsborough at his most egotistical, and other French male chanson artists, the character could easily come across as the clown you love to hate, his rampant flirting with women on and off stage (appropriately signalled by his lame attempts to mimic a tiger), and his tendency to interrupt acts or generally get in the way, potentially alienating us from him.

Yet he always does so with a grin and an exaggerated, floppy shrug, such that the character’s lack of a proper self-perspective seems more endearing than repellent. He is also a man of unusual talents. At one point, with nothing to lead into this, he starts miming Sergio-Leone-style Westerns using tennis rackets and his own vocalisations of sound effects for spurs clinking and gunshots. The idea seems to come from nowhere, but is done so well and with such conviction it immediately transforms an already playful space into one of limitless possibilities and dreams 

In short, the real mastery of this piece is in how it does so much with so little, taking very slight inflections of fairly standard (albeit extremely difficult) material and really making it shine in a way which I, as a great fan of Australian and European New Circus, have rarely seen: a real highlight of the Fringe.

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