Living Room Circus – Lab:time and Lab:time² at the Broadway, Barking - The Penguin and I
Living Room Circus is an experimental circus company, creating and performing intimate and immersive shows. They devise and develop their own blend of circus, dance, live music and physical theatre - always with the emphasis on audience interaction and involvement. This is achieved by transforming any given space into ‘the circus’.
The collaborators of Living Room Circus are Laura Overton, Elinor Harvey, Josh Frazer, Tessa Blackman, Charlee Rico DeBolla and Jason Dupree; all of whom are circus performers and graduates from the National Centre For Circus Arts. The performers bring a mix of skills to the company, including trapeze, rope, straps, acrobatics, gymnastics, hand balancing, juggling, ballet, contemporary dance and theatre.
After receiving some initial funding from the Deutsche Bank award for Creative Enterprise, their first shows were unconventional in setting:
The initial performances were set in a yurt which had been transformed into an enchanting living room into which the audience was invited. We then had a four day run of ‘work in progress’ performances for the public which was received with much enthusiasm. We have since used the audience feedback to adapt and improve the show and were then able to take the Living Room Circus to a community in rural Wales, performing in a transformed woodland roundhouse.
Living Room Circus applied for Lab:time – funding and space at the National Centre for Circus Arts – to rig their new ‘circus sofa’. This is a custom-made, specially reinforced and durable sofa which can be used for tumbling, flipping and handbalancing. It also has the ability to be rigged high in the air, which means that aerial equipment such as a trapeze can be attached. This was successfully carried out and Living Room Circus were excited to be able to realise their ambition of an aerial sofa, a feature they hope to incorporate into performances going forward.
The group completed their Lab:time² – a funded residency at a collaborating venue – at the Broadway, Barking. Lab:time² funds projects which have already undergone early stage research and development, so this enabled them to more fully explore themes for their upcoming show, The Penguin and I.
At the end of the week we had explored 10 scenes, of which we had finalised 3. We also managed to explore lighting for the first time. This bought a different element to our show and also created a final scene from the exploration at the Broadway theatre. … We co-produced a circus day as part of the Barking Folk Festival at the end of our week where we ran workshops and performed a work in progress. We also managed to explore our bespoke sofa, giving us time to play and create, finding out what it has to offer.
Living Room Circus took The Penguin and I on a short tour this summer to a working dairy farm in East Sussex, Redbridge Drama Centre in Essex and Jackson's Lane in London. They will shortly be announcing their next tour.
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Lab:time² applications are currently open and will close on 13 November 2017.