Archaos: Circus From Hell, Bargehouse

Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at the Bargehouse in the Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank for just three days ending on Sunday. It’s also a tribute to the genial genius behind the troupe, Pierre Bidon, who died earlier this year, at the age of 56.

The exhibition features all sorts of memorabilia (and press cuts, including some by me from the not-very-lamented Blitz magazine - I went on a couple of memorable tours with them). As Bidon told me at the time, in Berlin “our project was to make circus more like life – violent and cruel, but with love and tendresse as well. Circus has the most possibilities of any performance because you can use everything – theatre, pyrotechnics, music, lights, special effects. You can put it all together to create something new, something full of emotion”.

That's all very well, but it does present a problem when deciding which section of your website to run it in. He was, as I described him at the time, “a woolly rogue, with an amiable, if slightly sinister grin”. He claimed to be “mad - and I like stupidity”.

The stunts were genuinely dangerous; when I met them they had at least five performers with assorted breakages. Their ability to keep you guessing about what was accidental and what was scripted was one of the things that gave the show its power. Their performers, 38 members and a pig called Aurora and assorted dogs, chickens and sheep, put together a Mad Max/ Clockwork Orange version of a form that had become stale.

The performance I saw included assorted “grebos with motorbike helmets with corrugated iron sheets attached to their back”, a Brazilian girl who “accidentally” went topless in mid-air, another girl who put a cockatoo’s head in her mouth, and assorted tableaux including ones from Ancient Rome. Not to mention assorted alarming stunts with fire and motorbikes to a soundtrack that mixed cheesy cabaret tunes and punk.

The music was an essential part of the show which they preposterously called The Last Show on Earth and purported to be describing “the story of the world, from beginning to end”, although it would be fair to say that any narrative sequence was haphazard to say the least. They claimed to be “the Circus from Hell” but were actually based in Montpellier in the South of France. The audience of post-punkers, alternative types and Berlin deviants adored it, as did a gang of Hell's Angels, whose bikes were parked Germanically very neatly and methodically outside.

If Archaos, whose name was art mixed with chaos, were making a claim to turn circus into art, so arguably another often derided form that became art was their PR. Mark Borkowski, their publicity man, gave a talk at the opening. Borkowski now runs a successful agency that does a lot of corporate work, is a PR pundit all over the place, and has written a book called The Fame Formula (a swashbuckling history of PR stuntmen since Barnum).

Archaos were Borkowski’s first “über-client” and they managed to cajole thousands of column inches by assorted ruses like staging some motorbike jumps over traffic queues in Edinburgh. There was the tabloid front pages due to an Iraqi member of the troupe being on the run from Saddam Hussein. The agency won a Fringe prize for “creating a new branch of theatre – the Theatre of Publicity”. The cavalier, buccaneering spirit may have had to be “moderated” over the years, said Borkowski rather wistfully, and it’s harder to crash the front pages by such stunts. As for Archaos, the Health and Safety types wouldn’t allow them these days anyway. The Archaos exhibition brings back a moment of lost post-punk mayhem.

• Archaos: The Sensations of the Theatre World is at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London SE1 (11am-7pm) until Sunday
  
• FInd The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry on Amazon. Link to The Fame Formula website.

Watch video of Archaos's show Bouinax from 1991, with musical accompaniment from Chihuahua (YouTube):