An aerial work that refuses to look like aerial work.
Two performers, a single corde lisse, and a forty-minute meditation on the weight of waiting. The room was small, the silence was bigger, and the applause at the end took longer than usual to arrive — which felt right.
The piece — performed in the cellar of a former piano warehouse a short walk from the Oval — begins before either performer climbs. For the first six minutes, two figures stand on the floor and breathe. They do not speak. They do not announce. They look at the rope hanging between them as if they have just noticed it.
This is unusual. Aerial work, in my admittedly limited experience as a critic who came to circus late, tends to begin with the spectacle of suspension. A drop, a lift, a feat of holding. Here, instead, the work begins with the refusal of all three. The audience — perhaps forty of us, on cushions, in a semicircle — recalibrates. Whatever we came expecting, this is not it.
What the room asked of us
The cellar venue is run by a small collective who took the lease in 2023 and have, in the eighteen months since, built one of the more interesting rooms in south London. The space holds maybe fifty people, sells beer in cans, and starts shows when the makers say they are ready, which on the night I attended was eleven minutes late and entirely fine.
The aerial rope hangs from a single point in the centre of the room. It is, by the standards of contemporary circus, almost embarrassingly plain. No silks, no swings, no apparatus that announces itself as expensive. Just a length of cotton-wrapped rope, lit by two lamps clipped to the cellar's exposed pipes.
The work begins with the refusal of spectacle. What follows is not less spectacular — it is differently so.
When the climb does begin, around the eight-minute mark, it is slow. Not theatrically slow, not pause-for-effect slow, but the genuine slowness of two people working out, in real time, how to share a single piece of rope between them. There is no chase, no rivalry, no shared duet of synchronised dazzle. There is, instead, a series of small acts of taking turns.
On the question of difficulty
I want to be honest about something I noticed in myself during the middle section: I missed the difficulty. I missed the moment when the performer's body explained, through its own exertion, that what we were watching was hard. The piece refuses to explain itself in that way. It is full of difficult things — held positions that ought to read as tense and somehow read as restful — but it never asks for credit.
This is, I think, the work's most quietly radical decision. Most of the aerial work I have seen, even the best of it, leaves time for the audience to recognise the achievement. This work does not. It moves on. It treats the difficulty as a private matter between the performer and the rope.
By minute thirty, I had stopped trying to keep score, and the piece had become — for me at least — something almost domestic. Two people, sharing a single line, working out the etiquette of who goes next.
The closing minutes
The descent, when it comes, is the only moment of conventional virtuosity in the entire forty minutes. One performer holds the rope steady at the floor; the other comes down in a single, unhurried spiral that takes — I counted — about ninety seconds. Then both stand, look at each other, and walk out.
The applause was slow to arrive, as I said. Not because the room was unmoved, but because it took a moment to register that the work had ended without asking for permission to do so. When it did arrive, it lasted longer than the curtain call.
I have been thinking about the piece for nine days. It will run at the same venue every other Friday until late July. I would not recommend it to anyone who wants to be impressed. I would recommend it to anyone willing to wait.