Circolombia was set up to provide professional opportunities for graduates of Colombia’s national circus school, Circa Para Todos, the world’s first one dedicated to supporting and training young people at risk. I guess it’s a case of swapping one kind of risk for another – the sort the performer can assess and control. Here, you watch breathless as a young man leaps from a swing and twists through the air to land upright on his feet, confident that his colleagues will catch him. There is a sense of trust in every leap into the unknown, including a final heart-stopping dive into darkness.
Every trick here is a metaphor for having the courage to take risks, so we don’t really need the monologues, often inaudible, to tell us so. The tricks are quite good enough, although the whole thing would benefit from being more tightly choreographed, and even at an hour the show feels slightly padded with some perfectly pleasant but unmemorable musical interludes.
The company is clearly more than capable because there’s some terrific stuff, such as a fabulous aerial duet on straps that has a sinuous, muscular sexiness and which includes a sequence, definitely not recommended by dentists, in which a young woman is suspended above the stage and kept airborne only by a strap held between her partner’s teeth.
Not every turn is as seamless as this, but there is pleasure in the fact that not every stunt works and that sometimes the performers have to go back and do it again. It only makes the audience more appreciative of the risks involved. It’s just a pity though that, as in previous Circolombia shows, it’s mostly the men who get to show off their acrobatic prowess, while the women are sidelined. The two female circus performers in the troupe are skilled, too – they just need to be better represented in this crowd-pleasing show.
• At Roundhouse, London, until 3 May. Box office: 0300 678 9222.
