After a raucous summer season at London Wonderground at Southbank Centre, Canadian Circus Company Cirque Alfonse will bid au revoir to the Spiegeltent on 25 September. The spectacularly sexy and hairy cabaret, BARBU, will end its headline run at the recently expanded London Wonderground having delighted and astounded audiences for 14 weeks.
Hot on the heels of a storming run at Underbelly’s new Circus Hub venue last year, the first major venue dedicated solely to circus at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, BARBU opened at London Wonderground on Wednesday 15 June.
Wowing audiences in 2013 with their London debut of the madcap lumberjack circus Timber!, Cirque Alfonse’s BARBU takes this form of edge-of-your-seat, off-the-wall entertainment to a whole other level with breath-taking performances from a group of the world’s most extraordinary dare-devil acrobats, all set to a heart thumping score by a frenetic electro-trad band.
BARBU delves into the origins of the circus in Montreal at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Imagine a fairground, where spectators are left spellbound by astonishing performances and outrageous feats, simple curiosities and unexpected eccentricities. Political correctness has no place in the madness and mayhem of this show.
Since it began, Cirque Alfonse has been exploring traditional iconic Quebec images and integrating them into a truly innovative form of contemporary acrobatics. In the Lanaudière region of Quebec, the Carabinier-Lépine family and their close friends joined forces in 2005, and the following year they created La Brunante which became the foundation for Timber! which premiered in 2010. This highly original production became an undeniable success with more than 300 performances in 13 countries to date.
London’s finest circus party and the Cirque Alfonse clan’s third show, BARBU, is an exuberant, bizarre and once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza.
www.londonwonderground.co.uk
Photo: David Jensen
