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Bristol Circus City review: The Shedding, Arnolfini – ‘Bold, challenging and utterly stunning’
Yesterday evening saw Circus City – the UK’s largest international circus festival – continue with a touring show by Elise Reine.
The Shedding opens with Reine half-nude, lifeless and emerging from a heap of soil. Its central theme is the sexualisation of the female victim, and it sets out its stall early.
The show is excellent. Having read the precis, The Shedding turned out to be exactly what I was hoping it would be. It is the perfect version of itself.
is needed now More than ever
Elise Reine in The Shedding
Reine, a trapeze artist and contortionist, manipulates her now naked body into impossible shapes, silently implying and examining themes of grace, pain, beauty, violence and sex.
At times suspended, and silhouetted by a soft light, Reine again seems to blur and ripple between ideas of kink, artistry, athleticism and horror. Her performance is rounded by elements of spoken text, which is fantastically effective. At one stage she lists a series of rhetorical questions into a microphone, which probably I am unable to repeat in print, but which were deeply stirring.
A key quality of the show is its challenge to the audience. The beautiful female victim – a la Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer – is a trope pervasive in society and media. The audience is split into two sections, facing each other, separated by the performance space. By manually rolling the light to face one and then another side of the audience, we by turns get to witness the watching.
Circus City continues until October 30
In forcing the audience to confront its own – and then each other’s – gaze, The Shedding exists in an in-between space. Reine is a truly, truly talented artist.
One reflection about theatre that I frequently have is wishing a show would have the courage to go to the edge of itself. The very best work travels even briefly to the natural limit of its ideas. When, then, The Shedding ended with Reine pouring fake blood over herself and then being wrapped in plastic, posed as the victim of murder, I was both troubled and thrilled.
What Reine has created here is a bold, challenging and upsetting piece theatre. It is at once angry, beautiful, macabre and perverse. It made me think deeply about the imagistic representation of women, of violence and of sex. I thought it was stunning.
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Circus City 2025: Bodies of Care is at multiple venues on October 9-30. For information and tickets to individual shows as well as festival passes, visit www.bristolcircuscity.com.
All photos: Elise Reine
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