Tuesday 30 August 2011

Days 29 and 30: Eden Project

Slapped wrists all around - the pace of my entries for this blog has predictably slackened of late. My trip to Cornwall has been something of a double-edged sword, as while it's been wonderfully relaxing and reinvigorating, I've unfortunately not been involved in anything so exciting or amazing that regular readers would really want to hear about them.  The half-way house I'm therefore adapting is just to pick up on a couple of highlights from my trip, sparing my readership my thoughts on the advantages of a chicken pasty over a steak, or Harbour Lights' fish 'n' chips over Rick Stein's.


Early on in the holiday, once Jo and I had packed our hire car and moved base from the gorgeous sea-side town of Falmouth to the more metropolitan county town to Truro, we had tickets for the Eden Project, the famous collection of golf-ball shaped 'biomes' nestled deep within a former clay mine near St. Austell.  




Our main motivation, however, was the evening's entertainment, the mysteriously named Labyrinth presented by the enthusiastic UK-based circus company NoFit State. The prospect of a Cirque du Soleil-style show in the exotic surroundings of the Rainforest Biome certainly sounded appealing, and who couldn't be excited at the prospect of the combination of scantily-clad acrobats and tropical vegetation?


The actual Project itself is unfortunately very much an attraction worth visiting exactly once.  It's acreage may be expansive but unfortunately there's not a great deal to see.  The biomes are huge but once you have seen one giant fern and another giant banana tree, you have pretty much seen them all.  It's certainly interesting to feel you are visiting a equatorial climate (complete with stifling heat and humidity) but you cannot escape the feeling that the whole biome is stage-managed to the extent that it's halfway between reality and fantasy.  You know that somewhere out there coffee plants, mango groves and eucalyptus bushes are growing in a climate far, far away, but in the context of a golf-ball in south-west Cornwall, such exhibits might as well be in the Natural History Museum.  Add the fact that there is precious little interaction in each biome, and I ended up leaving the exhibition with little more knowledge than I came in with.  That said, children will love the wondrous variety of fauna and from the expressions of infants and toddlers around me, I could see their enjoyment etched on their faces.


I was therefore quite looking forward to the distraction of the circus, as the sun became to set and the mercury began to lower.  Once the plebs had been ushered away at closing, the privileged few with the right colour armbands gathered at an innocuous hill high above the biomes, where scaffolding had been sneakily erected in the background.  After some preamble involving a monologue from a mad accordionist and some rather disappointingly perfunctory health and safety instructions from a steward (we would see much more of him later), four acrobats began some trapeze work, with some silly banter about having to get on to the real show.  I find it difficult to appreciate trapeze.  What the clowns were doing no doubt takes years of training, and nerves of steel, but there seemed to be so little variation in their act that I felt I was applauding the same thing over and again for twenty minutes.  All well and good for me to criticise of course, but I'm sure if I spent five minutes on a trapeze, I'd have more broken bones than I'd had hot dinners.


The second phase of the evening began with the crowd cattle-herded through narrow paths to the Mediterranean biome, with the promise of a more open-ended exhibition, where we could wander around and view various acts hidden amongst the olive and fir trees. The acts ranged from an incredibly boring monologue punctuated by a woman gyrating on a metal hoop suspended from the ceiling (with the joke being that she had to constantly cover herself with every spin and fall to protect her modesty, which was of course already adequately protected anyway) to a genuinely impressive man in a linen suit performing gravity-defying acts of athleticism on a Chinese pole. The concept sounds liberating in theory, giving the audience the freedom to experience the acts they want, but in practice the whole thing was shambolic.  The ever-present stewards marched the crowd from place to place, there was little or no signal that an act had finished and where another one had started, and the uneven nature of the structure of the biomes meant that it was far too easy to end up viewing the back of someone's head rather than the gymnastics.


The final act was a finale within a specially constructed big-top, complete with live music and what we thought would be a story.  The story, unsurprisingly, turned out to be nonsensical semi-poetic musings that functioned as little more than a frame for the continuing acrobats, and the live music crashed between post-rock riffing and Arcade Fire-style heavy pop that, whilst occasionally jarring, did contribute to the atmosphere.  But that atmosphere was constantly broken by those infuriating stewards, who insisted every five minutes on pushing, pulling, splitting, joining, fragmenting and uniting the crowds, to make way for the various acts.  I saw two poor wheelchair users who looked exhausted by the constant haranguing.  I could see the potential, but if a circus insists on a reverse-round style where the actions takes place around and above the audience, it must construct the show to make use of the space and not constantly change its mind about where it wants to take place.  


We left twenty minutes early feeling exhausted. It wasn't the inventive circus action that had taken our breath away - we'd seen pretty much everything before bar the linen-suited Chinese pole artist - but the constant shifting and craning our necks.  The Eden Project should be praised for championing UK-based shows, and for reviving a frankly dying art, but any kind of outdoor event will struggle with the Eden layout. A shame, really - this had so much potential.