The best show I’ve ever seen: Charlie Wheeller, Barely Methodical Troupe, La Clique
We are delighted to welcome Charlie Wheeller back to The Widow. A graduate of the Circus Space – now the National Centre for Circus Arts – he is one of the world’s leading Cyr wheel exponents, and was first featured on our site in 2015. Charlie formed the runaway-successful circus company Barely Methodical Troupe with fellow NCCA alumni Beren D’Amico and Louis Gift. The trio have toured their shows Bromance, Kin and Shift worldwide, astounding and thrilling audiences in equal measure with their skill and showmanship.
Now Charlie is on home turf for a while and will appear in La Clique, which runs in the Spiegeltent at Leicester Square in London from 8 November 2019 to 4 January 2020. He chats to Liz and Adrian Arratoon
The Widow Stanton: What have you been up to since we saw you in Shift during this year’s London International Mime Festival?
Charlie Wheeller: We’ve been touring; we toured Shift a little bit around the UK. The cast changed and Beren came in for Elihu Vasquez. He fitted in wonderfully and made the show even more amazing. We had a really lovely Edinburgh doing Bromance; that was great, really fun. I’ve also been teaching quite a lot and we’ve been doing little bits and bobs of other shows here and there.
I’ve just got back from Chicago. I was teaching there and judging at the US Wheel trials for the world championships. I was the ‘difficulty’ judge of wheel gymnastics. And I did a little bit in Switzerland at the École de Cirque de Lausanne as well. They’re starting up a new one-year course for the kids that are graduating beyond 18. I was helping put a little bit more artistry stuff into the course. And we’ve just finished three days, me and the boys, down at Circus Space, teaching solo and group acro stuff on the youth circus course; a half-term intensive. It was really fun, really, really good.
Are you always working on your own Cyr skills?
Yes, always. I’ve been trying to a do thing… there’s a guy, Rowan Thomas, that goes around the wheel and he calls it ‘The Champagne’ move. So he kind of spins and then like, rocks it and goes round the side of the wheel, which is amazing. I’m trying to do it while spinning.
Any there any moves named after you now?
Wow, it’s tricky with a surname like Wheeller, isn’t it. [Laughs]
Oh yes, Cyr Wheeller…
They all should be that, they all should be Wheeller tricks, you know. [Laughs] There are quite a lot of tricks that I guess I started doing and now they’ve become quite normal for everybody. So that’s quite fun. The task for me now is to try to come up with something no one else can even do, not just a new thing.
Since you started on Cyr has the level just got better and better?
Yes, it’s been amazing to see the growth of it. That’s one thing that attracted me to the art form, that I saw it was quite small and the potential was huge. Every day there’s something new, you know, that will come out online or I’ll find something new and it just shocks me. People always think: “Oh, we’ve gone to the limit,” then something will just blow those doors open and, in the age of the internet, everything just travels so fast. The best things are also like magic. Like, you know, it’s ‘I can’t even imagine how I would think about doing that without ever having seen it’.
What’s the hardest move you do now?
I really enjoy Cyr wheel so I don’t find that much that tricky. I love it so much. I guess now I’m trying to learn better how to combine tricks and sequences, and make tricks out of that. I’m just trying to use the wheel in a different way. A lot of people now… a lot of the development and research in Cyr wheel is going away from spinning and is about manipulation and how we can move around the wheel. That’s really cool, but I remember what attracted me was the spinning. It’s really hard to get better at that but it’s such a magical thing, you know, and there are so many more possibilities in Cyr wheel because of the force that we can’t even dream about doing without a wheel, which is quite special.
So we come to La Clique. Have you been in it before?
No.
Is it going to be on the usual tiny little stage?
[He nods]
Is it?! [Laughs]
I’m so excited.
Is your wheel bigger than the stage? [Laughs]
The stage is 3m in diameter and I think my wheel is maybe 1m 90.
How are you gonna stay on?
[He smiles] It’s the first time La Clique have had Cyr wheel because, you know, it is such a tiny stage.
So if we imagine a £1 coin spinning on a 2p piece, then that’s pretty much it…
Yeah, and then you put a person in there. The people all around are very close.
Can you tell us about anyone else in the show?
The cast includes Jamie Swan doing the ‘Bath Boy’ act. He’s another Circus Space graduate and taught us a little bit when we were there. I’m excited, I’ve never seen him do straps, which he does above the bath, so that’s really cool. There’s juggler Florian Brookes – I love his club helicopter – also Heather Holliday, the wonderful American sword swallower and fire artist; she’s great! I always want to see that act, and there’s a wonderful band, La Clique Palace Orkestra, with singer Kelly Wolfgramm. La Clique’s founder, David Bates, will be onstage for the first time at the piano. I’m doing my act to live music. And Bernie Dieter of Little Death Club is MC.
How does doing guest spots compare with doing full BMT shows?
This is one of my first guest spots in a long, long time and my first time for a long time working for somebody else. It’s going to be fun. There’s a nice intense challenge of the stage diameter and that’s a really exciting project as well. I think I’ll learn a lot. I’m really quite excited to spend Christmas in London, to have a structure and a schedule that’s very steady. I’ve not really done that for years. So that’s really cool.
Do you have any plans for next year?
We’re going to be touring our shows that are in rep, rework Kin a little bit. We’re very excited to meet with its director, Ben Duke, and go a bit more into detail now we understand the show. And he’s seen other circus as well since 2016 and understands maybe where he can make an impact a bit more. We were going to make a big new show next year but it’s just been moved back to 2021, so we’re going do quite lengthy R&Ds. And we’ve got a couple of other projects, more kind of outreach stuff, and leading a couple of projects in London as well. I guess now we’ve got these shows we’re quite excited to delve into what other things the company can do, while we’re enjoying gallivanting with our shows.
Now tell us, if you can pick one, about the best show you’ve ever seen?
It’s incredibly tricky.
We’ll give you some leeway…
If I have to choose one, it would have to be He Who Falls by Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois, which I saw at the Barbican in London in 2016. It had a square spinning stage. The Barbican theatre helped a lot, it’s a beautiful space. I was in a perfect place to watch it myself – there are so many details – I was at circus school watching and learning, and then it was just so magic I wanted to be on that stage, like playing around with it… the music was really lovely and I just saw things I never thought were possible done in a really beautiful way. It was funny and touching; I was really touched by it. At one point the tech come in and the lights all come up onstage and they kind of move the platform around and change it, lift it up and things like that. But if I try to think about my favourite show of all time, that probably wouldn’t be it because it doesn’t necessarily tick all of the boxes, but the experience was lovely.
Funnywise, a Trygve Wakenshaw show. He’s coming to Soho Theatre with Only Bones v1.4, a new version of Thomas Monckton’s Only Bones v1.0 in the Mime Festival in January. He’s really good at his one-man shows, he’s amazing, he’s funny. What I love is the structure of his one-man shows, he’s very creative. He draws a small circle and he only stays in it for the whole show. It’s very minimal clowning and body manipulation.
And this year I saw a show that I wasn’t expecting to think was amazing but I was very happy about it. Have you heard of Be Flat, a Belgian company? They’re like a parkour circus company. They did a show in Lithuania called Follow Us. An audience gathered outside the back of this building and we saw these two men walking on the top of the roof behind us. They gave out 200 fold-out seats, they ran around and took us around the building, scaled it, jumped across it; quite terrifying actually. They took us down the road to an estate and there was a ladder on the fifth floor just hanging out of a window, they grabbed it and brought it down. Then they found little holes in the ladder and started playing it like a flute. It was amazing. They tour around and just do this to any new parts of cities. It was really special; sweet. We’ve been inspired by that.
Charlie Wheeller appears in La Clique, at the Spiegeltent in London’s Leicester Square. It runs from 8 November 2019 to 4 January 2020.
Picture credit: Heather Holliday and Bernie Dieter, La Clique
For La Clique tickets, click here
Barely Methodical Troupe’s website
Twitter: @LA_CLIQUE; @BMTroupe
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