Bull in a China Shop Project is....
A research orientated circus project composed by Circomedia BA graduates Valentina Solari and Fiona Salisbury. With a practice research led approach, they use trapeze-juggling and tightwire to explore and challenge the classical circus performer approach towards; dominance over equipment and desire for success aiming to joyfully disrupt the superhuman narrative that exists within circus.
Valentina and Fiona have taken their research to various residencies and taught several circus-research workshops at Degree level. They’ve produced various community engagement events aiming to connect experimental circus work to the community it lives in, a circus 'works in progress' night part of Circus City Festival (VOLT) to give circus artist the opportunity to test work and receive feedback and their own double-bill circus shows Making Molasses and Many Hands Make Light Work.
Valentina Solari
Valentina started doing circus in Chile at the age of ten in El Circo Del Mundo. After years of exploring various movement styles and disciplines, she left her home country in 2015 to study in Bristol and has been living and working there since. Valentina has performed in small community projects in Chile, and the UK, to Glastonbury Festival, doing what she loves the most; juggling and trapeze.
Currently, her major interest is to create work that plays with the deconstruction and combination of different circus skills and performance techniques. Using circus-theatre she wishes to create an environment where we can gravitate towards each other generating a feeling of community that, hopefully, audiences can take home with them.
Fiona Salisbury
Fiona stumbled into the world of balancing as an aerialist searching for humour and wavering uncertainty in the seriousness and decisiveness of her cloud swing practice. After spending months training to balance on a swinging rope Fiona made the switch to tightwire finding as much joy in the wobble as the trick. She has been researching unpredictability and imperfection to find a meeting point between circus technique and physical comedy. Aiming to shed light on the lesser celebrated aspects of the circus trick, she finds a richness in the failed attempts, ungraceful dismounts and hopeful wobbles which come before the perfect trick.
