I couldn’t disagree more! I hate routines where a performer spends loads of time and effort to establish a character or a mood or simply to “mesmerise” (sometimes with simple tricks, sometimes with a skill where I can’t judge the difficulty) and then doesn’t have the courage to leave it there for the audience’s enjoyment.
It seems especially common in circus school routines where there’s 4 minutes of interesting manipulation with 2 or 3 clubs followed by a really shaky qualify of 5 – but it’s surprisingly common amongst people who should know better too!
It stinks of insecurity; they show something that’s thoughtfully designed and well presented and then figuratively shout,
“Did you like that? I don’t have enough faith in it so look, I’ve got hardcore technical skills too”.
It destroys all the work that they put into crafting the routine but doesn’t convince me that they’ve got real technical chops because if they did they’d be presenting a full routine of big numbers technicality!
by Mike Armstrong, in response to this post 2015-08-27 13:55:13