Roll up! Graeae to take to the skies at CircusFest

Circus skills: a performer rehearses for Belonging. Photograph: Juliana Chalita

A visual feast is to be plated up by Hackney theatre company Graeae in an acrobatic spectacle as part of the UK’s biggest contemporary circus festival, CircusFest, next month.

The world premiere of Belonging, an international collaboration between Graeae and Brazilian performance group Circo Crescer e Viver, will explore the idea of what connects and divides us as people and will feature deaf and disabled performers from the UK and Brazil.

Consisting of displays of hoops, trapezes and silks, the plays bids to further Graeae’s pursuit of challenging preconceptions and engaging both disabled and non-disabled audiences.

Jenny Sealey MBE, Graeae’s artistic director and co-director of Belonging says: “It always amazes me how quickly the common experience of being deaf or disabled gels a group and we felt we belonged to each other.”

Sealey has been deaf from a young age and a Hackney resident for almost 20 years. She describes the area as a “glorious hub for artists and mavericks” and a perfect home for Graeae at Bradbury Studios on Kingsland Road.

“Being deaf and seeing the world through my eyes is a huge asset to being a director” Sealey explains. “Every production forces me to explore how I am going to access my own deafness and way of working with casts.”

As the original disabled-led theatre company, Graeae is a pioneer in dynamic accessible performances engaging audiences from all walks of life.

It was founded in 1980 by two friends in Coventry, Richard Tomlinson and Nabil Shaban, who shared experiences with the prejudices and myths concerning disabled people.

The impact that Sealey has had on disabled-led performance art has been global as she was selected to be co-artistic director of the London 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony.

With the Games moving to Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Belonging acts as a symbolic cultural exchange and despite there being no literal translation for the word ‘belonging’ in Portuguese, Sealey insists that “across thousands of miles and across cultures, we quickly belonged to each other as a group”.

Sealey’s co-director is Vinicius Damaus from Brazil who says this is “a huge opportunity to show the world how much it has to change its perception and see what are the true human values”.

This production is the first of an ongoing cultural exchange between the two companies who are both at the vanguard of reinterpreting contemporary circus for deaf and disabled artists.

Belonging is at Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8EH from 15 – 19 April. www.graeae.org