Look up and keep looking up. The Generating Company's Storm at the Galway Arts Festival will take place in mid-air. Multiple aerialists, rope-climbers, gymnasts and acrobats swing and swoop to the sound of a live music soundtrack as they relate a day in the life of a city - as told through a series of strange encounters between its inhabitants.
This atypical airborne show is a mix of the circus arts and dynamic physical theatre - words like "spectacular", "sensational" and "arresting" have cropped up in reviews. While the audience stands in the middle of the venue, the performers hang sideways from the walls on gravity-defying armchairs and scaffolding blocks. A whole metropolitan day is played out in aerial suspension. The show is the brainchild of Mark Fisher, an architect turned designer of large-scale spectacle; Pierrot Bidon of Archaos, and some of the players from the Dome shows in London, and is created by the circus training organisation Circus Space.
"We hope the make the show a physically exciting, intimate spectacle," says Fisher. "The whole story unfolds all around and above the audience. Each of the performers plays a character and the relationships which develop between them create the Storm. I thought one of the previous reviews of the show captured it well, when it said that Storm isn't a play, it doesn't create characters, but it provides a dynamic, wraparound experience of city terrors.
"I'm delighted to be bringing it to the Galway festival because it's our first overseas adventure, although we have done a series of cabaret appearances at the Manumission nightclub in Ibiza."
Fisher obviously has a thing about airborne performances. While training as an architect, he says he was "actively interested in designing and building lightweight structures - inflatables and tents". One of his first gigs was to build some inflatable pigs for Pink Floyd's Animals tour, and since then he's spent a lot of time working in the rock 'n' roll business.
"I've designed touring shows for the Rolling Stones - the Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon and No Security tours. I also worked with REM on the Monster arena tour and I've just done the Elevation tour with U2".
One of his biggest jobs to date was working at the Millennium Dome, where he was responsible for the daily aerial shows by acrobats (one of the few aspects of the Dome that received positive reviews). The show featured a small army of acrobats who began by running around the Dome's central area before throwing themselves at ropes which they used to lever themselves skywards. Once high up in the air they performed in synch to the specially-commissioned music.
"Working on the Dome shows was interesting, exciting and rewarding," he says. "The creative environment surrounding the show was difficult because there was a lot of political interest in the content of the show. But in the end Peter Gabriel [who composed the music for the Dome show] and myself were left very much on our own to shape the show in the way that we wanted."
In Storm 24 people - trapeze artists, dancers, singers, rope-climbers, acrobats - create the drama above the audience's heads, with original music from salsa to hard core club music by Akintayo Akinbode. "Obviously the show doesn't really have to take place in mid-air," he says. "To that extent the story for the show is a vehicle for the performers to display their talents. The concept for Storm started with the idea that we were a physical theatre company intent on creating a story, and it grew from that. The challenges of working in the air are mostly to do with integrating physical things, like the way performers fit into a narrative structure, so that the mechanics of aerial performance do not get in the way. In the end, none of it is very complicated - we just work it out as a team." Due to the success of Storm, Fisher is now trying to build a permanent company to produce shows that are "thoughtful, spectacular adventurous and entertaining. The arts environment in the UK is a difficult world in which to realise such an ambition".
The 24th Galway Arts Festival runs from July 17th to 29th (for information and booking, call 091-566577 or check the www.galwayartsfestival.ie website). See also Weekend 16. Storm is at Black Box Theatre, Galway, at 8p.m. from Wednesday, July 25th to Sunday 29th.