Aerial company offers high drama at the LBT

Nov 21 2008 by Val Javin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

IT IS just over a year since aerial company Ockham’s Razor staged one of the most engaging events seen at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in recent years.

Now the company is back with another helping of the riveting physical theatre style which creates extraordinary drama high above the stage.

Ockham’s Razor comprises three aerial artists, Alex Harvey, Charlotte Mooney, and Tina Koch, who specialise in creating physical theatre around new pieces of aerial equipment. The company, who return to the LBT on Wednesday November 26, combine circus, dance and visual theatre to make work that is arresting and entertaining. And from what I saw of them last year, they certainly do that.

The trio met at the Circomedia Academy of Contemporary Circus and Physical Performance where they trained in aerial and physical theatre.

Now acquiring a reputation as one of the UK’s most talented and innovative performance companies, Ockham’s Razor is back at the LBT with two pieces, Memento Mori and Arc.

Memento Mori, seen at the LBT last year, is an intimate duet performed on a suspended metal frame and based on Holbein’s The Dance of Death woodcuts. When it was first seen in Paris in 2004, the piece won a prestigious Jeunes Talents Cirque award.

Their second piece, called simply Arc, takes place on an aluminium aerial raft rigged 3.5 metres off the ground.

Due to the way it is rigged the structure seems to float in the air. It also up-ends dramatically half way through the performance.

The company derives its name and philosophy from the medieval writer, Franciscan friar William of Ockham, who, in essence, declared that all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. It is called a razor because it cuts out unnecessary elements, removing ambiguities and redundancies. As an aerial company, that seems a pretty sensible policy to adopt.

To complete the programme at the LBT, the company will be joined by a special guest, Ilona Jäntti, an aerial specialist who was born in Oulu in Finland. She specialised in aerial skills while studying at Cirkus Piloterna in Sweden, has trained as a dancer and is currently studying for a Masters degree in choreography at Laban Centre in London.

At LBT she will be performing, Piiri, a solo performance that combines traditional circus skills with contemporary dance. It explores the overlap of aerial work and object manipulation and is inspired by the simple circular shape or the aerial hoop and juggling rings.

The piece was commissioned three years ago by the Finnish Arts Council and has since been seen at festivals across Europe including Great Britain, Finland, Sweden, France, Germany and Lithuania.

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