The power of circus arts proven
Nik Waldram in De Piste May 2025
Monday, May 5. One day after the Circus City Festival. At the end of the morning I walk into Café Floor, the café of Theater Rotterdam. This is where I will type up my festival report. The adjacent hall of the theater is now empty. Outside on the Schouwburgplein people are working on the dismantling of the festival grounds. After a sunny week, the weather is gray and chilly. Inside, Stole the show by Kygo sounds through the speakers. That, too, must be a coincidence.
(…)
1. Jugglers and lots of balls
Lots of juggling performances this year, especially with lots of white balls. Roxana Küwen Arsalan manipulates teacups and balls with her body and feet. Meanwhile, she tells a personal story about her German and Iranian grandmothers. In Irroottaa, lots of ceramic balls roll onto the stage, which two performers obsessively juggle and perform acrobatics with. Harvey Cobb juggles the familiar pink boots in Late Night at the Opticum.
And Stijn Grupping reaps open mouths with his bouncing balls. He and Ine van Baelen form the artistic core of the Flemish company Post uit Hessdalen. In Man Strikes Back, Grupping creates bizarrely complex juggling patterns. Through six slanted boxes, the balls bounce five or six times before returning to him. Drummer Frederik Meulyzer mirrors the bouncing rhythms. When the cubes begin to take on a life of their own, it complicates the juggling and creates an anti-utopian tension between humans and robots.
2. Illusions and KA-IN magic
More fascinating balls fly around in Ballroom, another Post uit Hessdalen production. For this solo performance, we climb into a converted truck. Inside, a chilly room with gray floor and concrete walls awaits. In this abstract setting, Stijn Grupping tackles boredom by bouncing little balls around via increasingly complex detours to a gray bin. Three-dimensionally, the bouncing balls fly through space. Never seen such astonishing bouncing-ball juggling. Until one ball suddenly stops bouncing. We end up in a magical-realist universe where the balls appear, disappear and float. The distinct concept and narrative magic made Ballroom a favorite of many experienced festival-goers.
Throughout the festival we saw more illusions: the robot cubes in Man Strikes Back, self-moving ceramic balls in Irroottaa, and an acrobatic-floating artist in director Camille Boitel’s street act La Lévitation Réelle. But no magic worked as smashing as the light show in KA-IN by director Raphaëlle Boitel (indeed, sister of Camille) and her regular lighting designer colleague Tristan Baudoin. In this performance with the renowned Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger, the designers take maximum advantage of the spacious stage house to create a surreal universe. With large beams of light and deep shadows, they create optical illusions and distinct images. In this context, thirteen artists tell their own stories. The dance (hip-hop, modern and theatrical) and acrobatics (on the ground and on each other’s shoulders, on the solo trapeze and in handstands) convincingly convey these stories to the audience. The countless cartwheels and flicks are delightfully graceful and snappy at the same time. Some scenes are lit so surreally that you can hardly believe that what you are seeing is real-life theater. Driving music and the phenomenal sound design suck you further into the illusion. A gigantic sense of euphoria then briefly takes hold of the audience. With KA-IN, Circusstad once again had a prestigious production for the main hall of Theater Rotterdam.
