CircusFeaturedLondonReview

Afrique en Cirque – South Bank Centre, London

Reviewer: Chris Lilly

Director: Yamoussa Bangoura

Yamoussa Bangoura founded Kalabanté Productions in his native Guinea in 2007. Their latest production, Afrique en Cirque, is being performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall until Sunday 28 July. To call it a “circus” is to misrepresent it somewhat. There is a seven-person team of acrobats, but the acrobats are dancers too. And drummers. And jugglers. And, in one particular instance, a troublingly impressive contortionist with the seeming ability to tie his spine in knots.

The show takes place in front of three risers on which four musicians hold sway. They play an impressive variety of African-flavoured jazz, on tenor sax and electric bass played as a lead instrument, and a standard drum kit. There’s also Yamoussa Bangoura playing a kora, a twenty-one-string cross between a lute and a harp built upon a gourd. It sounds lovely, and Bangoura plays it masterfully, and it generates a very effective, very evocative backdrop against which the physical theatre takes place – a riot of circus skills that appear to emerge from a Guinean marketplace.

The premise of the show is that the inhabitants of the marketplace – traders, fishermen, bakers – all have a second skill set. At the drop of a gym mat, they will explode into a sequence of flic-flacs and somersaults, build human pyramids, emerge from their street clothes into vibrant-coloured bodysuits like human butterflies. It’s dynamic and colourful and joyous, and the music behind the physical acting gives it a pulse. This gets amplified enormously when the acrobats seize all sorts of beaters and set up wonderful cross rhythms on a variety of drums. The drums get employed as the base for elevated gymnastics, but the beat of the drums, against the cascading sound of the kora, makes this show magical.

The acrobatics are impressive, but the two standout sequences are a routine with a giant hoop, in which the acrobat performs intricate gyrations and inversions as the hoop spins, and it’s very simple but extraordinarily graceful. The second standout is a display of contortionism that is very impressive and very hard to watch. A body shouldn’t be able to twist like that. The performer finishes standing upright and smiling, so he evidently doesn’t share the concern.

As an acrobatic entertainment, Afrique en Cirque is great fun. As a mixed media music-cum-dance-cum gymnastics event, it is rather more than that. It’s unique.

Runs until 28 July 2024

The Reviews Hub Score

Dramatic Dynamic Gymnastics

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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One Comment

  1. Only 4 stars? What does it take?! I watched the last night at the QE Hall. Standing ovations through the show and huge enjoyment from the full auditorium. I’m seriously thinking about seeing them again in Edinburgh.

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