Tower Hamlets Cemetery, London

By Sarah Kirkup

I don’t make a habit of wandering around disused cemeteries late at night. But it so happens that, at 9pm on the last Saturday in June, I enter the dusky realm of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, east London. Why am I here? To see Circa, of course – the marvellous Australian ensemble known for pushing to the limit the boundaries of the circus art form. Having witnessed their recent, jaw-dropping show The Return at the Barbican, I am keen to see them again, this time as part of the Spitalfields Music Summer Festival and LIFT, a biennial, London-based festival. The event is Depart – dubbed ‘a journey through the dark space between life and death’ and involving a promenade show ‘to be experienced in silence’. What will I discover lurking among the graves of this muddy, overgrown Victorian cemetery?

We are led by guides, dressed in black and carrying blazing flares, down winding, unkempt paths flanked by toppling tombstones, into a clearing. Aerialists hang from the trees, bathed in an eerie light. Haunting, electronic music by sound designer Lapalux fills the air. The dancer-acrobats twist and turn, seemingly plummeting to the earth before clawing their way back up again. As we’re ushered onwards, ghostly figures reach out to us, silently beseeching, beckoning us to the unknown.

We move on to another clearing, where the Depart singers have gathered to sing unaccompanied music composed by Sam Glazer to text taken from nearby gravestone inscriptions. Clad in black from head to toe, every face covered with a veil, the singers become almost invisible as twilight turns to night. Our eyes are instead drawn to a lone figure, motionless and dressed in white, who begins slowly to contort as the music dies away.

We’re led along another labyrinthine pathway, the overcrowded tombstones on either side jostling with each other for space. Rising up from behind them, apparitions in white dresses appear frozen in balletic poses until, provoked by the hypnotic beat of Lapalux’s music which has broken the silence, they writhe, as if in pain, as one. It’s strangely beautiful – mesmeric even.

But there’s no time to linger. We encounter another clearing, a lone wooden platform, and a single male figure, lying perfectly still except for one foot, which rotates a giant Cyr wheel round and round his corpse-like body. The speed increases, the urgency builds, and he’s soon upright, miraculously spinning inside the hoop, faster and faster until he’s a blur.

The strains of Fauré’s Requiem lure us away to a copse where two aerialists, one male, one female, undulate among the trees. The choir sing beneath them – the perfect fusion of two very different art forms which we haven’t really witnessed until now. As the voices fade, the female plummets headfirst towards the ground.

It’s an immersive experience, but it feels more like a fragmented, hallucinatory journey than a performance. What is real and what isn’t? At what point does life morph into death? If the ‘wow’ factor of previous Circa shows is missing, perhaps that’s no bad thing: this is no place for superficial entertainment.

And yet, as we’re brought into a huge, wide-open space for the finale and confronted with a proper stage, complete with spotlights, there’s an expectation that we’ll finally see what these artists can do. And we’re not disappointed. As choir and electronica unite, the myriad performers from earlier – not just from Circa, but from the National Centre for Circus Arts and the Central School of Ballet – join forces, incorporating elements of mime, dance and circus. But the standout performances come from Circa. Nathan Boyle provides the solid foundation for those breathtaking human towers we’ve come to expect, Brittanny Portelli walks atop men’s heads as if they were stepping stones, and Bridie Hooper is tossed carelessly through the air. The audience has finally broken its vow of silence – we whoop, cheer and clap as though we mean it. It feels good to be alive.

Depart tours to Brighton, Hull and Blackpool in 2017.

spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk

liftfestival.com

circa.org.au