Coffee-Table Notes

Paris, a wet November bank holiday Monday morning. On the outskirts of the city, Universite Paris Nanterre is deserted. This is a far cry from fifty years ago, when the 1960s-built campus once nicknamed Mad Nanterre helped ignite the student revolt that sired the seismic events of May 1968, when a revolutionary circus took to the streets. Today, however, other than the seven Edinburgh-based street theatre makers walking purposefully down the boulevard, there’s not a soul in sight. They take their bank holidays seriously in France. Look a little harder, however, and as the performers from the tellingly named PyroCeltica and Circus Alba companies are about to discover, circus is an even more serious proposition. This is something the compound of big top tents just off the main drag inside Les arenes des Nanterre, home of Les Noctambules circus school, makes arrestingly clear. In one of the big tops, a trapeze and ropes hang down from on high like some makeshift gym. Next to the

Amsterdam is a long way from Vietnam, where the Oslo-based Verdensteatret cross-artform ensemble revisited after ten years to create HANNAH, their playfully elliptical fusion of watery-looking visuals, kinetic sculptures and 1950s cartoon-style soundscapes they bring to Glasgow next week. The two performances of HANNAH will form part of the fifth edition of Sonica, the Cryptic company’s annual showcase of international visual/sonic artworks. Back in February, however, the morning after the first performances of the show at the Sonic Acts festival that tales place mainly at the Stedelijk Museum of contemporary design, the company is feeling the effects of what appears to have been a pre-Scotland research trip into a Dutch whisky bar. This hasn’t stopped four of them meeting for coffee outside the museum’s twenty-first century Benthem Crouwel Wing, a vast building in Museum Square which opened in 2010. The cross-generation ensemble who make up the membership of Verdensteatret –

There’s something happening this weekend at Jupiter Artland, the 120-acre sculpture park based in the grounds of Bonnington House, a few miles west of Edinburgh. Under the curatorship of Head of Exhibitions Claire Feeley, the centre run by Nicky and Robert Wilson has already opened its latest permanent commission, Gateway, a psychedelically inclined outdoor swimming pool by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos. The Trisha Brown Dance Company, meanwhile, has performed outdoors as part of Edinburgh International Festival in tandem with Time, Space, Gravity, an exhibition of the radical American choreographer’s work captured on film. Both works have already hailed on these pages, with the Trisha Brown Dance Company winning a Herald Little Devil Award for braving the elements. Now comes Jupiter Rising, this weekend’s festival of live music, performance and live art commissions. While the two-day event will be headlined by familiar but leftfield names such as the Mercury Music Prize nom