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Summit Steel for Roundhouse Circus Front
Summit Steel was brought in to co-ordinate and provide specialist rigging services for the Roundhouse’s acclaimed and popular Circus Front - the first ever season of international contemporary circus in London.
Circus Front staged four main shows - Collectif AOC from France with their ‘Question de Directions’; the Moroccan Collectif Acrobatique de Tangier and their ‘TAOUB’ show, Acrobat from Australia with their raw and intense ‘Smaller, Poorer, Cheaper’, and the run concludes with Nofit State Circus from Wales with their latest show, ‘Immortal’. Running concurrently to all these were a series of pre and post main show circus events and performances, mostly one-offs, many of which also needed rigging.
Summit’s Jay Call project managed from their end, working closely with the Roundhouse’s Circus Front Season production manager, Jacqui Leigh and the venue’s technical manager, John MacKinnon. “The big challenge has been trying to get so many shows working together,” says Jay Call. “The timescale and turnarounds have been extremely tight and many companies are used to working in their own big tops that are completely customised to fit their performance. We have been trying to re-create those very environments as closely as possible for them in the Roundhouse.”
This show brought street culture, breakdance and traditional circus skills to the venue, and Summit built a 12 metre long by 3 metre wide figure-of-eight mother grid to facilitate the performance. This consisted of two ends and a central spine, all constructed from 52cm SuperTruss and designed specifically to fit a trapeze into the centre. The grid was picked up on 10 points and tensioned off to the building’s outer ring beams so it didn’t move. Various elements of the company’s flying kit were then attached to the grid.
Four 1 metre trusses were installed for the surround sound PA system (supplied by the house) and four 4 metre trusses were each suspended on two points for lighting. The Summit team then liaised with Collectif AOC and provided additional of rigging to assist with diverting their own lines through the Roundhouse’s roof space.
The Taoub show was based around and endless and very magical sheet of fabric (the Taoub) that doubled as a backdrop, prop, costume and stunt equipment. Summit de-rigged AOC’s mother grid and built a new one – this time rectangular – with the upstage/downstage runs made up from 72cm Thomas SuperTruss. The stage right and stage left house trusses were initially attached beneath this to suspend a tracking system for the Taoub but were repositioned with the truss ends placed through the 76cm Supertruss - as this increased stability and made rigging the tracking system simpler. The grid was again tensioned off to stop any movement.
The house PA was rigged on a single central point. This is normally utilized for a 360 degree array for in-the-round performances, but Summit had to apply some bridling to accommodate the 270 degree audio coverage required for the end-on TAOUB show.
During Collectif Acrobatique’s run, Summit also rigged elements for the Ochams Razor company’s post-show performance – in the form of a 5 metre 30cm trussing section hung off 2 points that sat just upstage of the downstage 72 cm truss. This also had to be static, and so was dropped in during the day and strapped off to the TAOUB rig.
Presenting the antithesis of opulent, decadent circus, Acrobat’s show was the simplest of the four to rig in many ways as the company was virtually self contained and “very organised” according to Call. What they needed Summit to provide was a series of precisely positioned ballast weights and tensioned wires to counterbalance their large goal post rig. This took the form of four 500kg and four 1 tonne steel weights, placed on rubber mats on the floor. The 1 tonne points provided the main guy wires anchoring Actobat’s rig, and the four half tonne ones were utilized as fixing points for safeties and for the show’s fly lines.
For Nofit State Circus ‘Immortal’ the performance takes place above, below and around the audience, and is another self-contained rig for which Summit supplied ballast and tensioned steel wire ropes. There are six 1.5 tonnes of ballast points anchored off at the top level of the Roundhouse’s superstructure, and two sets of floor-level ballast at both ends of a tightrope. This constitutes a further 5 tonnes of ballast each side of stage on two SmarTmast bases – which proved an ideal solution to spread the load over this area. Four king poles are fixed to the decking floor - lifted into place by four hoists and deaded off. They are joined together by steel wire ropes at the top and tensioned back to the top-level ballast positions. The ‘cupola’ (a large trussing circle) sits on the outside around the four king poles, and was rigged into position using the same four hoists that lifted the king poles.
For Pain Proof Circus’s one-off performance a single hoist was rigged near the centre of the auditorium to lift aerial performer Luci Fur into the stratosphere, and for ‘Momento Mori’ a short run of truss was suspended by two points through Nofit State’s rigging.
In picture: Collectif Acrobatique de Tangier’s ‘TAOUB’ show.
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