If there was any doubt that this is an extraordinary year for our city, the sight of 30 performers shimmying down the spokes of the London Eye at 11pm last night dispelled it. They looked like flies caught in a web, except that they skittered and swung and posed around the big wheel’s architecture as if personal peril didn’t exist.
This was the breathtaking finale to a day of radical artistic responses to iconic London settings from American choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s “extreme action” troupe, as part of the London 2012 Festival.
The event’s title, One Extraordinary Day, was apt, not least because the weather stayed unusually nice.
Streb’s work is a mixture of dance, acrobatics, stunts and apparent reckless thrill-seeking. The time and location of these London performances were a close secret, eventually revealed online. But those who were hangover-free and quick off the mark on Sunday saw her troupe bungee-jump off the Millennium Bridge at 7.30am.
After that, 62-year-old Streb and some trusted acolytes walked nonchalantly down the carapace of City Hall. The troupe performed in Paternoster Square by St Paul’s.
Then, in Trafalgar Square, they started a show called Human Fountain around Nelson’s column – a cascade of bodies swan-diving from a scaffold onto crash mats – before rejigging their schedule after concerns about rain.
The segment Ascension saw bodies weaving in and out of the rungs of a rotating ladder, like bobbins in a loom, in front of the National Gallery. A Streb spokesman with the manner of an evangelist exhorted us to seek out the next episode. This was Speed Angels, a brilliant and beautiful series of co-ordinated tableaux, executed by three performers yo-yoing on harnesses on a high frame, without a safety net, outside the National Theatre.
All remarkable, but the stand-out was the finale. Streb dramatically imposed human scale on the London Eye with trademark gestures: lots of bodies running in thin air, throwing star shapes, or just hanging like ripe fruit. To help matters, giant close-ups of the tiny figures were projected onto the Shell Building on the South Bank. It couldn’t work anywhere else. It will probably never happen here again.
Seriously, was there ever a better time to live in London? The brio of the Olympics and the accompanying cultural programme, both somewhat cobbled-together in the teeth of recession, should sway even the most dedicated sceptic.
This weekend, an unprecedented 1000 people took part in the Big Dance in Trafalgar Square, ahead of Streb’s unique response to our city’s architecture. And there’s more to come. As well as being part of London 2012 and the Cultural Olympiad, Streb’s performances are part of a programme of events promoted by the Mayor.
It is called A Summer Like No Other. Let’s hope this refers to the content, rather than the weather.