Cie Modo Grosso: Tout/ Rien at Lowry

Belgian circus artist Alexis Rouvre has spent three years touring a show built from wool, chains, volcanic stones and a theory of time.

Most circus asks what the human body can do. Rouvre – trained at Brussels’s ESAC as a juggler, acrobat and dancer – is asking something else entirely, taking his cue from the astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli: “Bodies move naturally where time passes more slowly.” He calls it a ‘circus of objects’: a single performer, a table, and a set of objects – knitting wool and needles, bead chains, volcanic stone, sand, magnets, pendulums – behaving in very strange ways.

The show draws on the tradition of the vanitas: those still life paintings in which simple objects – a candle burning down, an hourglass, a skull – were used to mark the passing of time. Rouvre is doing something similar, though in motion rather than paint. He describes it as “a choreographic ballet of hanging objects, tumbling with humour”. Reviewers talk about a bead chain being sucked into a table, knitting needles taking flight, a strand of yarn becoming a spider web the span of a person.

Tout/Rien has been working its way across France, Belgium and the Netherlands since 2022 with Modo Grosso, the company Rouvre co-founded with dancer and visual artist Tiziano Lavoratornovi. The Lowry is its first stop in the UK.

Though it’s inspired by theory, the show is sensory rather than cerebral, and all the more impressive for it. Metal appears to escape its own weight, pendulums vanish and return, and none of it’s ever explained. One Dutch critic described coming out of it feeling as though they’d climbed out of a hole in time. For a show about exactly that, it’s a good trick to pull off.