Defying Perception by Reaching Great Heights in 'Anchored in Air'

Image: Anchored in Air featuring Jonathan Leitch & Tilly Lee-Kronick | Photographer: Hugo Glendinning

Featuring three performers, one a wheelchair user, Anchored in Air refuses to bend to the limitations we might expect circus art to impose on bodies that don’t match the typical image of an elite performer. A relatively new circus and aerial company that has been touring the UK and Europe with Anchored in Air, the show challenges perceptions of what can and should be done physically by individuals in one simple concept. The performers climb and find themselves twisting into difficult feats up and down a steel tower comprised of large rungs, some diagonal, others horizontal. More than just a space for spectacle, the tower marks a setting where performers play through a light-hearted but carefully choreographed movement experiment, probing the possibilities of the human body regardless of its appearance in an affirmation of identity. 

Identities are introduced right from the start with a combination of live audio self-description and kinesthetic choice. Tilly, small and thirty years old, steps and twizzles her way up to the very top of the tower with unwavering precision and good humour. Jonny reaches up to grab a metal bar and raises himself out of his wheelchair, legs crossed, rejecting gravity as he floats into balances supported only by his arms. Phoebe, accurately and proudly describing themselves as “butch”, is graceful as their legs fly when they swing around the side of the tower or arch easily into a walkover. Every solo varies so much from the other that a diverse creativity unfolds around a single architectural structure, and it reveals that how a person moves is intrinsic to their character and daily life. Friendly and promising, the group has a unique way of incorporating movement and speech to make us, the audience, feel that we are getting to know them in the most eccentrically acrobatic way.

As Anchored progresses, duets build around the tower until two become three. As the performers switch out, Phoebe and Jonny take up instruments, Phoebe on double bass and Jonny on drums, adding another mix of whimsy and talent. Tilly and Phoebe form a counterweight system, a rope stretched across the tower with a harness on either side – one for Phoebe, one for Tilly. As Tilly crouches and crawls away, her distance and grounded stance lifts Phoebe into the air where she adopts a childlike glee, gliding around steel and space. When roles change, Phoebe anchoring and Jonny flying, his wheelchair becomes an extension of the tower. Both Jonny and his wheelchair sail into the air as one, until Johnny raises himself into a handstand with one hand on the wheelchair, the other on the tower. How bodies are mobilised – inverted, turned into weights or a light sailing thing – introduces modes of normality alien to one person but familiar to another. When the trio work together with little restriction on kinaesthetic possibilities, however, they reach the tower’s peak as one unit. Leaning on or even away from one another, sometimes clinging, Anchored in Air is polished off with thrilling sprightliness and a celebration of different ways of being. Inspirational and entertaining, the show poses questions about perception concerning what circus art could be, whilst shining with pure skill.