You have heard how it takes a village to raise a child. It takes an audience to help build this astonishing, often rapturously beautiful circus show from Chicago company Aloft. Today, that means toddlers, a school party and older people are all huddled side by side in the Circus Hub’s hall-of-mirrors Beauty venue.
The show, we are told, asks for our trust and will bring us close to each other. And startlingly close to the performers, too, underneath the watchful gaze of Shayna Swanson who guides the hour.
To start, we encircle a giant white sheet, lit from within, which shimmers as the all-female cast beneath make their presence known with a foot pointing here, a nose protruding there. They emerge with poles of scaffolding to erect first a walking platform and then a pair of stilts. The soundtrack overlaps chanting and radio transmissions to create an incessant, otherworldly chatter, contrasting with the acrobats’ inner calm and steady concentration.
Step by step, we assist in creating a makeshift circus tent for the tricks that follow. The sheet becomes a canopy and, an arm’s reach from where we sit, a spellbinding Cyr wheel solo grows into a duet. The mat squeaks, the slightest breeze hits us, and after an initial flinch or two – is that coming straight for me? – an up-close four-hula-hoop act is gently intoxicating. The tricks never feel flashy and are performed with an easy humour, direct eye contact and a bond of confidence that blooms quickly between audience and performer.
Plaintive songs, including Low’s The Innocents, are perfectly matched to a show that manages to increase in intimacy even as the tent is expanded to house further tricks. We are invited to lie on our backs to watch a duet on aerial silks done with grins, the other performers resting and watching among us. The proximity of their dusty soles and bandaged joints lets you sense, however briefly, a circus company’s close-knit nature, and soon the audience is helping again, holding poles for the next act.
Brave Space is delivered with care and charisma by Zoe Sheppard, Hayley Larson, Rachel Nesnevich, Linnea Ridolfi, Heather Dart and Sarah Tapper. It’s an astonishing hour that leaves the audience as aloft as the company.
At Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows, Edinburgh, until 26 August
