On the border between theatre and dance, between tradition and invention, we find something new – contemporary circus – a borderless, hybrid artform.

The contemporary circus has everything old: flying, falling, grace, risk, sweat, injury, beauty and moments of absolute fear. It has the realness of life meeting death, the seconds when time runs slow, and it still has, often, if not always, the devil’s virtuosity. Most of all, it has the quality of what you least expect.

Evoking the unique characteristics of an artform that combines elements of theatre and dance in the crucible of its own intensive training, this short film opens the Circus Post project by tracing an abstract map for the road ahead. What is contemporary circus? How can an artist speak without words? Where did this artform – experimental, open to collaboration, changing constantly – even come from?

They’d already created work inspired by Merce Cunningham, Mozart, Steve Reich and Jean-Paul Sartre when, a year after the death of the great choreographer Pina Bausch, Gandini Juggling made Smashed.

Weaving the gestural choreography of Bausch’s Kontakthof with the intricate patterns and cascades of solo and ensemble juggling, Smashed simultaneously evokes great pleasure and small disquiet as it lightly disrupts the rigid conventions of etiquette, dress and body language.

In this film we see it in 2010, playing outside the National Theatre in one of its first ever performances, the core Gandini company supplemented by an international cast that includes the Finnish deadpan Sakari Männistö (seen determinedly upsetting his fellow performers with a rolled-up newspaper), the airily wry Kim Huynh (seen manipulated by many hands as though a life-size puppet), and the extremely tall and lugubrious Malte Steinmetz).

In other works, Gandini Juggling have moved their language further toward a darker understanding of the mechanics of human relations. In Smashed, they teeter on the edge, balanced between the pleasingly subversive and the faintly unacceptable in an extended moment of comic poise. Service and power, culture and chaos, the throw and the drop, and, of course, apples and china…

Featuring hyper-aggressive Chinese pole, rough and tumble fights on the ground and in the air, an exercise ball as trampoline, resplendent golden trousers, improvised teeterboard, and even a small but gratifying amount of nudity, this short film releases an invigorating blast of the wild energies contained in Race Horse Company’s Petit Mal.

A twist on the 1930’s wrings out the darker passions and tensions that lie within that era’s entertainment. Australian production Cantina takes the gaily enjoyable 1930s aesthetic familiar to cabaret and repeatedly twists it, exposing the darker passions and tensions that lie within the era’s decadent entertainments.

A woman delicately tiptoes on the open mouths of champagne bottles, then walks with less care (as well as stiletto heels) over the body of a naked man. We see a re-enactment of an old ‘toss the girl’ routine, partner dances turned sour, and sudden fights between lovers – the jolly ragtime mood bleeding out into a low, heavy atmosphere of threat.

The film ends with one of the standout solos from the show – blind corde lisse performed high on a black rope by the extraordinary Mozes.

Combining the skills of a breakdancer, a cage fighter, and an ex-gymnast (and chef), Race Horse Company attack circus with a sullen punk-rock attitude.

Their show Petit Mal, set amid the wreckage of a tyre-yard / junk-pile / ended world, cuts their bruised, all-in physical style with a surreal edge: as the walls of reality come down, multiple Elvises propagate through the stage-world and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police meet Joy Division.

Sat here among the giant tyres of their set, Petri Tuominen, Rauli Kosonen and Kalle Lehto talk about finding a sense of hope within a world of ruin, the impulse to laugh in the face of disaster, and the moments when gravity falls away – only to return with a crash.

In the Ockham’s Razor trilogy Arc, Memento Mori and Every Action… each episode builds an aerial choreography, and a narrative, around a different piece of custom equipment – in Arc a suspended raft made from a grid of scaffolding, inhabited by the survivors of a wreck; in Memento Mori a rigid metal portrait frame through which Death dances a young woman to her grave; in Every Action… a length of rope run over two pulleys to create a game of counterbalance and tenuous trust.

Here the company talk about their approach in making the trilogy, about the sweat and the work of circus, about the stories they find in exploring newly created pieces of aerial equipment, and about the debt they owe to the historic insight of a fourteenth century logician.

Artist and juggler Phia Ménard talks about the meaning of transformation and erosion in her work, about piecing together the puzzle of each performance, about putting herself in danger, and about the power of the circus artist to bring their audience in to a closer relationship with death.

Everyone in the Medina knows the Hammich family. From the oldest grandfather to the youngest granddaughter, the Hammichs are famous acrobats, trained from an early age in skills that have been preserved through seven generations.

Members of the family used to tour the world, performing acts in the great traditional circuses, but in 2003 their lives took an unexpected turn when they met the French circus director Aurélien Bory and resolved to collaborate on a new work. Combining their vernacular style of acrobatics with Bory’s exact vision for space, scale and transformation they made their first full-length show, Taoub.

Here we visit them at their home in Tangier, a shrine to the family’s wide-ranging achievements, and hear how Taoub was made, as well as how later work Chouf Ouchouf was inspired by the bustle, the colour, the rooftops and markets, the dangerous alleys, the swarming cats, and the incredible everyday stories of the Medina – the city’s bustling old quarter.

Epicycle, a vast, dirty ring of steel studded with valve wheels and junk controls along its edge, is the work of the French group CirkVOST. Ludovic des Cognets’ photographs follow the piece from rehearsal to performance in London’s Waterloo Place where men and women appear to climb the rungs of the circle before lowering ropes and trapezes to make their flights.

Epicycle at London’s Waterloo Place was part of Piccadilly Circus Circus and our video below has had over 20 million views.

On 02 September 2012, French company Les Studios de Cirque invaded Piccadilly Circus to perform an extraordinary aerial spectacle after sunset.

La Place des Anges closed Piccadilly Circus Circus – a unique and unforgettable experience brought to the public by Crying Out Loud on behalf of the Mayor of London and the London 2012 Festival.

Photographer Bertil Nilsson talks about his book Undisclosed, a collection of black and white stills of circus artists pictured naked as they work on their skills.

Nilsson spent five years travelling Europe and North America to photograph his subjects in their natural element, capturing them at work in training spaces and studios and affording us a glimpse of the sheer physicality that lies behind each circus performance.

Yet while much is revealed, more is hidden: for all that they lay the circus artist bare, Nilsson’s photographs retain an enigmatic energy, the compositions expressive and empty, the actions of each subject frozen within a flowing silence

A stark and simple production drawing on memories of the Khmer Rouge regime, Rouge is the creation of Phare Ponleu Selpak, an art school operating in Battambang but originally formed on the Thai border in 1986 as a refugee camp.

Working through an escalating tension between the actions of the group and the individual, Rouge takes a measured approach in asking its audience to reflect on the conflict between personal and collective will, the militarisation of teenage youth, and the unvoiced expression of physical coercion.

To create the show the school collaborated for three years with the French group Compagnie UBI, and here UBI’s artistic director (Sarosti Nay) and producer (Sophie Jadin) illuminate the process of working with eight of PPS’ young acrobats – members of a generation for whom Pol Pot’s regime is only half-known or half-believed. Sometimes abstract, sometimes brutally direct, Phare Ponleu Selpak’s work remembers the Khmer Rouge regime.

Going by the numbers, Bristol is our circus city: you’ll find more circus artists there, relative to population, than in any other UK town. Much of the activity revolves around Circomedia, a professional circus school, but spend some time looking and you’ll also uncover the Invisible Circus, a collective of creative squatters staging immense, interactive shows across the building and grounds of an abandoned fire and police station.

Monica Connell’s vivid photos open up this half-hidden world, drawing us into scenes of performance and pageantry; of Gothic darkness and Victorian decay; of fire and chaos and long, full, memorable nights.

Appearing unannounced in the centre of London on 02 September 2012, Piccadilly Circus Circus was a one-day event that saw more than two hundred circus artists perform among the pendant flags and grand, stone buildings of Piccadilly.

Piccadilly Circus Circus – a unique and unforgettable experience brought to the public by Crying Out Loud on behalf of the Mayor of London and the London 2012 Festival.