#5 Tesseract

Circus Theatre, Jacksons Lane

A creative balancing act on stacks of wooden cubes from highwire circus talent Nacho Flores. Touches of clownery, puppetry and video effects.

Flores is a lovable circus acrobat. We meet him on top of some shaky stockpiles of blocks, in the midst of an absurd climbing challenge. We then se him taking on some block men and finally scaling a set of peculiar stairs that have a life of their own.

It's all rather charming. Flores is a natural performer, puffing and heaving his way through tricky acrobatic feats made look easy and vice versa. He is very much at play here, all the while being a circus pro. A confident, relaxed performance. Momentarily impressive.

Tesseract, the four-dimensional hypercube, is a neat mathematical construct that is both vaguely comprehensible and impossible to really imagine. A meaty subject for some philosophical thought and abstract ideas. Flores is for the most part too busy with his blocks to give much thought to depth. There's no time for deeper emotion, beyond a brief connection with the block men.

In Flores' Tesseract, we see three standalone numbers, that could nicely pace a more traditional variety show in a big circus top. There's not much of an arc here, though the theme of climbing naturally resolves.

It's all a big mess of blocks in the end. But in the grand game of entropy, there's not that much more you can expect to achieve. So why not make a few stacks of wooden cubes and have a little fun before you go?