CityLife

Cirque de Glace: Evolution

Cirque de Glace
The Lowry
April 27, 2011

The physical limitations of the human body mean that it isn’t easy for circuses to keep pushing the boundaries with increasingly jaw-dropping feats.

Cirque de Glace gets around this by adding the speed of championship ice-skating into the mix, creating a unique hybrid show which will appeal as much to Dancing on Ice fans as those who enjoy circus.

Of course the skating here is much faster, more skilled and dangerous than anything you’ll see in the TV show. Male skaters balance their female partners on a single hand while spinning them with such dizzying speed that their forms become a blur, while other skaters are thrown through the air, missing the ice by inches causing audible gasps in the audience.

The stage of the Lowry’s Lyric Theatre has been turned into an eight-centimetre deep, solid ice-rink for the complex show, which is themed around a celebration of the earth from its big bang creation to present day and beyond.

A full cinema screen backdrop and Steve Millington’s varied score add atmosphere, taking the action deep into the rain forest where silk artists fly and somersault through the trees, back to early civilisation with acrobatics and on to the frantic streets of New York, where Cavalieri Giuseppe Arena gets to show off some impressive musical-style choreography.

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