Based on Kimberly: Yes Person at Lowry
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
Based on Kimberly: Yes Person
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
“Kill your darlings” is one of the oldest pieces of advice handed to artists. It’s the discipline of cutting a good idea because it doesn’t serve the piece you’re actually making. Good advice, yes, but it can also be absolutely maddening in practice. That’s why, for one show only, Imogen Huzel and Inka Pehkonen decided to stop doing it. Their method: say yes to every idea in the room, cut nothing, and see what comes out the other end.
As co-founders of the Berlin-based collective Based on Kimberly, circus artists Huzel and Pehkonen have spent the last five years making work from within what they describe as “a punk, playful, and politically left playground.” Fuelled by love and approached with a clown mentality, themes of feminism, freedom of speech, friendship, community, sexuality and gender roles recur throughout their work.
Yes Person is their most freewheeling statement yet, built entirely from the sketches that never found a home in earlier shows – or, in their words, “the sediment of ideas left behind, too mismatched, ambitious, or nonsensical to fit elsewhere.”
The show features an anarchic blend of circus and acrobatics, clowning and performance art self-billed, only half-jokingly, as “new wave, new wonk circus”. Underscored by a soundscape that shifts from trickling water and birdsong to a blast of the circus classic ‘Entry of the Gladiators’, Huzel and Pehkonen move between genuine skill and absurdity: a sketch involving miniature hands escalates into a walking handstand held for an unreasonable amount of time, before handbrake turning into a satirical rap. Yes. Freewheeling.
It premiered at Cirko in Helsinki in January, then spent eight months touring six countries – Stockholm, Berlin and Edinburgh among the stops – picking up strong reviews along the way: five stars at Edinburgh, four in Berlin. The night after Salford, it’s on to London.
In town for one night only, the show runs 60 minutes with no interval. It comes with 16+ age guidance, so just note this is satirical circus pitched at adults, not family fare.
