Number one: don't expect to sit down if you go to see NoFit State Circus this month. Number two: do expect to be entertained. Number three: play your cards right and you might get to join in, as Louise East discovers
3pm in Barry, on the outskirts of Cardiff, and in a very unlovely car park a UFO has landed. On the outside it's silver and candy pink and looks like a squashed skittle. Step inside and it's as if the kids from Fame have been set loose in Mad Max's Thunderdome. In a corner, a Woody Allen lookalike shouts over the jangly chords of a wired-up accordion. High in the air a bottle blonde flips absent-mindedly in and out of a hula hoop. Down on the floor, a tall man with multiple piercings and a black bondage kilt checks the tent's rigging, then flops into a series of graceful ballet stretches. This is the big top of NoFit State Circus, and rehearsals are in progress for ImMortal, the show the company brings to Ireland this month.
The sound of heavy breathing fills the tent as a miked-up Adonis balances, one handed, on what looks like a giant hatstand. When he comes to a stop a small Italian woman shouts: "No, no. At the end I want you just to stand there, perfectly still, like Michelangelo's David with a handbag."
As an art form, circus offers an anarchic magic that is hard to define but easy to love. I'd rather lop my legs off than sign up as an actress, but ask me to run away with the circus and I'd pack a spotted handkerchief pronto. I'm in good company. Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Angela Carter and Federico Fellini all nursed obsessions with the circus.
Of course, there's circus and there's circus. Fed up with moth- eaten camels, baggy-kneed elephants and half- hearted clowns, 1970s audiences started to stay away from traditional circus. Thankfully, life was soon breathed back into the form when companies such as Canada's Cirque du Soleil and Australia's Circus Oz combined human skill with mind-boggling spectacle. In the United Kingdom, it's NoFit State that is leading the charge.
Founded in 1986 by five students-cum-jugglers from Cardiff University, it has since scooped numerous awards with shows of ever-increasing scale and cheekiness. ImMortal is its biggest and most ambitious project, two hours of pandemonium during which the audience skitters around beneath the performers like mice let loose in an extravagant clockwork toy. Wherever you look something startling is happening: a boxing match kicks off in mid-air, a man in a silk nightgown walks up a tightrope in high heels, a 1950s pin-up girl keeps 30 hula hoops spinning."It's a 360-degree spectacle," says Firenza Guidi, the show's Italian director, during a break in rehearsals. "It's up to the spectators to be curious, to be greedy. Everyone in the audience sees a different performance. You might choose to look at someone high up on the trapeze; I might want to follow the stilt walker."
While Guidi dives back into rehearsals I ask Lyn Routledge, a trapeze artist, why she ran away to join the circus. "It's never quite worn off, the buzz when people ask me what I do and I tell them I'm a trapeze artist," she says with a grin. "Mind you, their next question is always 'Have you been doing it since the age of three?', and when I say no they're disappointed." In fact, Routledge's story is much more exciting for those of us who secretly harbour circus ambitions, as she didn't take to the air until she was a politics graduate of 28, with several years' work with Oxfam under her belt. After having a go on a trapeze at Glastonbury Festival, she was so hooked she ended up abandoning her study plans.
"I remember the MA prospectus had a grey wrapper on it, and I left it sitting on the mat until, one day, I thought, Lyn, if you can't even open the brochure you probably shouldn't be doing the MA." Since then Routledge has swung through the air everywhere from northern nightclubs to the Royal Opera House.
"I've never stopped feeling scared, but it just makes you feel really, really good. The one thing that the audience don't see is the pain. If I'm hanging upside down all my body weight is on one bone in my foot, and it hurts like hell."
At 36 she has already been doing trapeze longer than she once imagined possible, but she's realistic about the future. "I can't do what I'm doing and be pregnant," she says with a grin. "But I reckon I've got a couple more years in me yet." At 12 and 13, respectively, Valentine Reynolds and Leah Carroll have plenty of circus years ahead of them. Valentine's father is the Woody Allen-alike who composes and performs ImMortal's beautiful music; Leah's mum is the circus coach. That means the girls have been involved in NoFit State since they were two and four.
"We do get some people at school who call us gypsies," says Valentine, who has been educated at home for the past couple of years. Leah, who goes to school half the year and does the rest by correspondence, joins in. "But then, after they get to know us, they say" - she adopts a tone of amazement - " 'But, Leah, you don't nick stuff.' "
Dressed in mini-kilts and stripy socks, which makes them look like Vivienne Westwood put through a Japanese manga blender, the pair catapult round the ring during the show, moving props, spinning off ladders and generally adding to the mayhem. "Basically," Leah says solemnly, "we can do anything that won't endanger the audience. For insurance reasons."
Although they both already have a battery of skills, including juggling, flying on the trapeze and spinning hula hoops, neither is sure whether she'll stick with the circus. "I'd like to be an actress," says Leah. "Although I doubt I could live without the festival life. I haven't missed a single Glastonbury Festival since the year I was born."
Another dyed-in-the-wool circus performer is Simon Darling, the tightrope walker, who is the only member of the troupe to have been born to the circus life. "My granny was half-circus, half-Romany," he says. "She was the one who taught me tightwire, after I pestered her from the age of 10. My mother and her uncle did whips, knife-throwing and lasso. I do tightwire, and my brother is a juggler in another circus."
Most of NoFit State's performers started off with a bit of juggling or by playing around with fire at summer festivals. Many have degrees. One, a Finnish hand balancer called Jaakko Tenhunen, even has a BA in circus. "Actually," he says, "most performers have been to circus school now." What all the performers reiterate is that circus is not a job but a way of life - and not always a glamorous one. At NoFit everyone from the stilt walker to the fire eater helps to clean toilets, fix showers and haul canvas. They also make sacrifices- Routledge missed her twin sister's wedding; Tenhunen doesn't see his girlfriend in Ukraine - and, as Gustav Lundstrom, a world-class performer on the gravity-defying Chinese pole, puts it: "It's a short-burning career. You can only do it as long as your body holds out."
For Firenza Guidi it's exactly that mixture of vulnerability, skill and rough edges that makes ImMortal so special. "I like that they're not spring chickens, they're not wired up, and they're not 12-year-old Chinese acrobats. Everybody here could be your neighbour, and yet they're doing these extraordinary things. I find that thrilling."
What I find thrilling is that, after I have been loitering like a lovesick teenager for hours, Routledge finally takes pity on me and says: "Do you want a go?" Five minutes later I'm hanging by my knees from a hoop suspended in mid-air. Lights twirl, the hoop spins and the big top is filled with the sound of the band warming up. Routledge is right: what you don't see is the pain. My arms will feel like overcooked spaghetti for days, but, just for five minutes, the dream comes true, and I am part of the circus. Now that's what I call magic.
NoFit State Circus is at Cork Midsummer Festival (1890-200555, www.corkfestival.com), June 20th-25th; Clonmel Junction Festival, Co Tipperary (052-28521, www.junctionfestival.com), July 4th-8th; Earagail Arts Festival, Co Donegal (074-9120777, www.eaf.ie), July 13th-16th; and Draíocht, Dublin (01-8852622, www.draiocht.ie), July 24th-29th