30.05.1996

Precipice of disaster

Helen Ellis reviews Archaos' Game over (Brixton Academy, £17.50 and £20.00)

Despite its long absence and the ticket prices, Archaos’ new show attracted its loyal ’80s punk and anarchist following and plenty more besides.

Archaos dragged the circus into the 20th century and began a movement of experimental circus without animals. But its act, like those of many other new circus groups, both big and small, is more like performance art using circus skills. Postmodernists would like it too: it is after all the ‘spectacle of spectacles’ of our time.

But Archaos began its life not simply to provide entertainment, but as a reaction against modern society itself - and particularly the mystified power of technology. It has dragged circus not simply into the 20th century, but also into the political and artistic arena. Game Over takes what is now the cliché of a media-dominated world which enslaves us all, literally in this case. The cast of ‘Infinite TV’ are dragged from the street by the ringmaster and bundled into the back of a people-gobbling truck. This is the nightmare world of Bladerunner, Robocop, or Judge Dredd that we are now all so familiar with.

There is something unique however about the way Archaos presents its vision of contemporary and post-contemporary life. The action is set to the beat of techno but with a soundtrack that will transport even the most ardent techno-phobes into the world of Archaos.

The backcloth is a screen projection of ‘Infinite TV’ interspersed with images real and imagined. The show starts and ends with a picture of a modern, cold and empty metropolis built on the ruins of an ancient ‘civilisation’ - a past hidden and a present impenetrable. Manic kids playing pinball - a popular French metaphor for jettisoned lives - divide the action, as does the presenter of ‘Infinite TV’ who announces the end of unemployment and homelessness and that the time is (always) 15.38 - who’s counting? Later a huge corkscrew fills the screen?

Video screens either side of the stage show computer graphics of mutating bodies which, though fascinating to watch, have nothing on the real thing on stage.

There is a compulsion in the performance of the circus acts, both real and theatrical, that is in both senses disturbing. The audience enjoys both the action enforced by the ringmaster and the performers’ desire to push themselves to the limits. But there is nothing quite like the skill and hunger for danger in Archaos for portraying a contorted world which is persistently motivated to the precipice of disaster.

Who else could show the wonder and perils of medical science with six people dangling loosely from six pieces of long silk hanging from the ceiling? The people obviously control the silks but as they wrap themselves up in them, hang and then fall one by one to a few inches above the floor, we see the thin line between control and plummeting ourselves into oblivion. Or seduction carried out on a trapeze. Trampolining basketball players, BMX bikes cavorting through the air and tightrope walkers without a net take the perils of everyday life to new heights.

The highlight of the evening was definitely the motorbikes. However, knowing that Archaos is not afraid to fall and in fact makes a virtue of the possibility, there is something akin to voyeurism going on here. Under the theme of war a spherical cage holds two motorbikes which buzz around inside in a frenzy, with very little room to miss each other. Faster and faster, closer and closer towards a hit. Accompanied by techno, there seems very little possibility of them stopping, and anyway where would they go?

The projection here of the tortured face of a child slowly disappearing jarred quite badly.

Throughout the show there was a danger that the ‘message’ of the piece would be too ‘in your face’ and so destroy the text of the actual physical performances themselves. Most of the time it worked. The tension in the human experience which is heightened to extremes by Archaos creates an exhilaration which it is hard for even the most sophisticated technology of cinema to replicate. Archaos has with this show begun to develop a much richer narrative than previous shows were able to do.

Helen Ellis