In the beginning was the circle - circus: latin for circle. This circle in this circus is the essence of “roundness”. The audience sits in a circle and there are no tent poles to obstruct our view. They usually do in the circus in order to keep the ring clear. No, this tent pole is right in the centre of this circus - the column, the monkey‘s palm tree, the dream trapeze. From its apex the canvas flows to the low edges - soft, white sky. And the earth is - just for today - a round, black, aristotlian disk.

“Here comes the circus!” - and what a circus it is! -Que-Cir-Que-. A french circus, which instead of the teutonic “Notausgang”(Emergency Exit) signs brings us the more gentle “Sorties de secours”. Its roots are to be found in Ueli Hirzel‘s erotic-poetic “Cirque O”. Ueli also co-founded the Bar jeder Vernunft, who together with the Hebbel Theater and Tacheles have given Berlin yet another radient, memorable cultural highlight which shines, but doesn‘t need to glare. Que-Cir-Que is playing on the same pitch as last year‘s chilean circus production: Popol Vuh, which was also made possible only be the co-operation of committed producers.

The show begins at eight precisely, and continues for ninety wonderful minutes. Three artists (or big children) play at circus. They don‘t need much more than a couple of ropes, bicycle tubes, a bicycle wheel, a broom, and a tin of shoe polish, not forgetting a cubist bicycle, a strange see-saw, and a heavy gyro-wheel. They play with these objects, and the objects play with them. Jean-Paul Lefeuvre, the athletic, inexhaustible and untroubled Charlie Chaplin, bald and wearing nothing but a gym slip; Hyacinthe Reisch, the melancholic, wirey coco clown with long flowing hair; Emmanuelle Jacqueline, the statuesque earth mother with the face of an angel; their game is a triangle within a circle - a game of enemies and rulers and lovers and friends and servants.

Sometimes the spectators are so spellbound that they forget to applaud - they are, after all, not accustomed to such a visual feast. There are no acrobatic machines here, nobody who spends his life perfecting a single stunt, neither are there any urban cynics, whose only desire is to drag artistry down to the level of ridicule. The only flic-flacs here are part of the warm up and there is no crescendo and no razzmatazz either. Instead we are served finely cut ecstasy. -Que-Cir-Que- slowly turn up the levels of perception, and upon reaching a high qualitative platform, allow them to oscilate. Every change of set or scene is a beautifully choreographed routine in itself.

The music also has a role in this play, it acts as a discrete foundation for the images and the action. The rumbling Tom Waits rhythms are interwoven with recurring aural memories of coffee houses. Just once, a vain piano solo pulls our wheel-magician by the lead, calling him back into the game and taking us to a new serenity. But hold on, for once you start recounting the stories of -Que-Cir-Que-, there´s no stopping. And suddenly it‘s all over, and while the applause rings in our ears a bar is rolled on stage and installed in its centre - obscuring our view of the column. The audience spills on stage, and the exhausted faces of the actors disappear from our view. The circus is over - for our eyes just a little too early.