Paradisum

Recirquel (Hungary)

Co-presented with The Cultch

The stage as a living being: ineffable, transcendent is the atmosphere of Paradisum.

Hungary’s cirque dance company Recirquel, under the direction of the company’s artistic director and choreographer Bence Vági, brings intellectual rigour to traditional circus acts, braiding together vertiginous risk with a profound emotional core. Alive with a spiritual intelligence, Paradisum transfigures feats of strength and agility into iconographic images.

With its reference to a post-apocalyptic world, Paradisum summons archetypal figures, each engaged with the overwhelming effort of existence. Elevating aerial and groundwork, elements of stagecraft — a rippling black drape, a ladder, rings, a hoop — create otherworldly vistas. Underpinning the larger cosmological ideas with concrete manifestations, the work is both deeply grounded in the earth and yet defiant of gravity.

As the performers carve out moments of stillness and grace: the truth of the body emerges in all its primal antediluvian power. Rebirth is too limited a term: this is anima mundi (world soul).

 

Top image: Recirquel, Paradisum © Bálint Hirling.