Dance Consortium presents Cirque Éloize with Cirkopolis

A world-class leader and champion of contemporary circus, Cirque Éloize has been creating magical, innovative and moving productions since 1993 and their spellbinding shows combine circus arts with music, dance and theatre.

Following the success of their last show iD in 2013, the internationally acclaimed Canadian company return with Cirkopolis, a new fantasy inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Directed by artistic director Jeannot Painchaud and co-directed and choreographed by Dave St-Pierre, Cirkopolis lifts audiences out of the everyday, to escape in a stream of acrobatics, music, images and drawings into a space between dream and reality.

Painchaud said: “Cirkopolis was imagined as a crossroads – between individuality and community, between limits and possibilities.

“The show is driven by the poetic impulse of life, the physical prowess of the circus and the humour, at once serious and light-hearted.

“Entering Cirkopolis is all about letting go and allowing yourself to be borne aloft by hope.” See it in Scotland’s capital from Wednesday 1 – Saturday 4 April.

In Cirkopolis 12 multi-disciplinary artists including acrobats, jugglers, contortionists and aerial artists rebel against convention and conformity.

In a setting of an oppressive, dystopian near-future city, a lowly office worker (British Circus space alumnus Ashley Carr) leaves behind his teetering piles of paperwork – as we all dream of doing – to embark on a creative transformation and a bearing witness to the magical metamorphoses of his fellow workers as they embrace their inner artists.

Performing with exceptional skill and grace, Cirque Éloize provide a master class in contemporary circus, demonstrating the fine artistry of trapeze, Chinese pole, contortion, banquine, teeterboard and the terrifying German wheel (an 80kg hamster wheel holding up to six dancers).