A first look at IMA, Hungarian 'cirque danse' company Recirquel's unique new Edinburgh Fringe show

The Hungarian company behind 2018 smash hit My Land are back with the most audacious solo show at this year’s Fringe.

It’s May 2023, and I’m about to enter an ‘infinite space’ in Budapest. It doesn’t look very infinite at first, just a black entrance to a plain white circus tent in a car park. Above the door, in white capital letters, it says ‘IMA’. Inside there is a sombre, mausoleum-like room, grey walls, grey benches. You are invited to pin a tiny white ribbon to a giant wall sculpture resembling an angel’s wing in close-up, through which a breeze gently blows.

And then, at the other end of a tunnel, there is a 40-minute show about faith, mortality, the sublime, and our tiny, fragile place in the Universe that has apparently left many audience members in tears, some so overwhelmed that they come back four or five times.

IMA, as you may have heard, is the first new Fringe show in five years by Recirquel, the Hungarian ‘cirque danse’ (circus and dance) company who were a big hit in 2017 and 2018 with Paris de Nuit and My Land, two equally dazzling but radically different shows, the first a slice of decadent 1930s Paris life, the second an exploration of land, freedom and mythology performed by a Ukrainian cast. My Land is an especially hard act to follow, having won more five star reviews at that year’s Fringe than any other show; it also has a new resonance since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Zita Horvath is one of six performers taking turns to appear in Recirquel's new show, IMA.

IMA is very different again, and despite its success in Hungary the company is apprehensive enough about its UK debut to fly two Scottish writers all the way to their home at Mupa, a lavish contemporary arts centre that is also home to a concert hall, a museum and, as of 2022, a big top venue built solely for IMA.

The first thing to say about IMA (‘Pray’ in Hungarian) is that there is only one performer on stage, a bold move which could deter circus audiences hoping for troupes of acrobats each with different skills, but which makes sense once you see it. As artistic director Bence Vagi puts it: “Circus brings you the astonishment, and dance always creates the possibility for self-expression or for narrative. That’s the kind of magic. All our performers are hybrid performers.” IMA, in fact, has six hybrid performers taking turns to do the show, all of whom bring different combinations of circus and dance skills to the same choreography.

The second thing to say is that, after a slow start, IMA delivers on providing that astonishment, narrative and magic, in a way you may not have seen before. To say more would spoil it, but the lighting and sound design, the orchestral score (by composer Edina Mókus Szirtes who also worked on My Land) and the venue itself are as vital a part of the experience as the extraordinary physical skill, strength, and discipline of the person on stage. It’s a formidable team effort, requiring a big technical team and the transportation of an entire building from Hungary to Scotland.

“Twelve trucks,” notes Vagi, a perfectionist who thinks big and, thanks to the support of Mupa and the global success of his previous shows, has the resources to do so. (After My Land, he confesses, he spent three years developing another new show before abandoning the idea completely, a privilege alien to most artists.)

The idea for IMA began in lockdown. “Like everyone I was in a very different state of mind or mood,” recalls Vagi, “and the only thing I could visualise was to create a piece that was recharging people.” At first it was a duet, he says, but “every time there was another human involved, it wasn’t about what it wanted to be about. It was kind of a daring step to make to say ‘this must be your solution’. I was a bit scared of that – 40 minutes, just a solo show? – but it was definitely the right choice.”

Another reference point was the night sky as seen from deserts, places Vagi visits whenever he has an opportunity, from Mongolia to Chile. “This whole installation was brought to life while in the desert. When you go to the Atacama Desert in Chile the sky really feels like it’s something surrounding you.”

At its heart, IMA is about the search for meaning. Vagi jokes that he has been “cheating” by creating emotional experiences for other people as a distraction from his own search for the same thing. He talks, with equal levels of frustration, of how churches have become “tourist attractions, with flashing cameras and plastic candles”, and of the restrictive commercial demands of circus. He could have made a show that was much easier to stage and tour, he points out, but wanted to try and create a “sacred connection”.

What British audiences may not know is that IMA follows a series of Recirquel shows, Non Solus, My Land and Solus Amor (which Vagi regards as a trilogy), all of which address different aspects of human existence: isolation, connection, and love (Paris de Nuit, evidently a show from an earlier phase of Vagi’s creative life, isn’t mentioned once during our conversation). IMA is the latest step on this journey and perhaps the most introspective.

“The real challenge with my team was, how can we create a kind of sacred space?” says Vagi. Hence the mausoleum-like entrance and the white ribbons, a multi-purpose symbol that has historically been used to represent peace, purity, remembrance and, more recently, a campaign against domestic violence. Vagi has also made a point of restricting audience numbers for each performance of IMA, placing chairs and cushions some distance apart and then fixing them to the floor to stop people moving them in order to sit closer together. “It’s ok to be alone for 40 minutes,” he says.

If this makes Vagi sound a bit preachy, that’s on me. He clearly takes his work very seriously – he once said that being an artist requires an “almost Sisyphean thoroughness”, perhaps while rolling his other show idea up a hill for three years only to let it roll down again - but he is also humble, funny and generous. He tells a funny story about a TV crew who wanted to film him directing one of his performers, the problem being that the two men had known each other so long that they now communicate via a series of minimal nods and hand movements which are almost imperceptible on camera. And he spends much of our conversation talking up the talents of his team and the wider work of the organisation. When we meet, Recirquel is staging the last ever performances of My Land, which has clearly been hugely emotional for all involved. Recirquel’s work, he tells me, now includes circus and dance training for 20 young Ukrainians separated from their families by the war.

One question I’m left with, though, is whether it’s actually possible to create a “sacred space” in the noise of the Fringe, even at Murrayfield Ice Rink away from the main festival hubbub. This will be IMA’s biggest test. It’s certainly bold to promise, as the marketing blurb puts it, “the place where human beings realise that we are merely tiny points in the infinite vastness of the universe”. Still, you won’t see any other solo show like it this Fringe.

IMA, Assembly Murrayfield Ice Rink, various times until 27 August. https://recirquel.com/edinburghfringe2023