Postcards Festival: Tumble Circus

Postcards Festival

This Is What We Do For a Living by Tumble Circus

Jacksons Lane

Ireland based Tumble Circus, aka Tina Machina and Ken Evil, in their first London performance in a theatre, perform an entertaining, playful and insightful show about the life of a couple of circus performers on the move.

It’s a simple loose narrative frame that feels natural to the duo and gives each act, be it flying hoola hoops or high-impact aerial, a different meaning and a strong context. Tina and Ken are not the best of actors, but they’re confident, skilled, natural performers, so watching their quarrels turn into playful acrobatic routines is surprisingly theatrical and engaging.

Ken and Tina have a background as street performers, and this brings a fresh, engaging quality to their performance. They perform with energy and skill, but carry an interesting relationship to the techniques they employ, and to failure. This is a very theatrical yet underexplored element of circus at this scale, and the duo create a narrative framework that embraces failure unapologetically. This play with the audience’s expectation of what a circus show should be, and what it can be, makes This Is What We Do.. ,an intriguing and risk-taking performance. The tension behind this play with the idea of failure and the relationship between circus, performance and technique is grounded and balanced by the skill of the two performers.

The nineties soundtrack is sometimes distracting, and not always woven into the fabric of the show; the same can be said for the imposed drama that the two attempt to pack onto their narrative- this is an aspect of the show that isn’t completely developed and doesn’t always play to the duo’s strengths.

This Is What We Do… is a show about the life of two circus performers that finds a strong balance between technique and storytelling. It’s a show that punches above its weight and is never superficial or trite despite its subject matter. It’s just daring enough to be surprising and humorous, but also to place circus and performance at a potent juncture.