Amid the soaring temperature of Cape Town’s recent heat wave, there’ve been few better places to be at night than inside the Royal Countess Zingara spiegeltent, currently stationed in Century City, playing host to Africa’s most celebrated cirque show.
It’s there that if you’re lucky to have seats at a ringside table, you’re probably going to get wet. The potential baptism by bathwater happens during a new act that landed in the Mother City this month, with a resounding splash — it’s one that has Zingara patrons more than a little fired up.
Apart from the water being sloshed around, there’s also plenty of steam being generated by the toned and talented couple performing in, on and above the rather compact tub that takes centerstage during the exhilarating and at times hair-raising act.
The pair in question — Englishman Jonny Grundy and his partner Manuel Artino, who is Sicilian — mix playful physical humour with grace, precision, physical strength and unavoidable sexiness and charm. As Grundy told me after their first rehearsal in Cape Town, if there’s a bathtub full of water on stage, you have to expect a certain level of eroticism.
When they perform at night, with lights, sultry music and a braying crowd, they do it in nothing but a pair of drenched jeans. Their intricate — and raunchy — choreography plays on the natural energy generated by having two hunks using each other’s bodies to achieve a variety of tricks and feats.
During their act, the tub is used a bit like a pommel horse, so they dive and roll, twist and turn, contort and tuck themselves into a fabulous array of positions. Their bodies — muscular, graceful, sinuous, poised and extremely nimble — dance together like they’re yin and yang, as though they’re interconnected by some invisible force.
Grundy says the bathtub routine is a riff on a long-established burlesque act; what sets them apart is that they’re two guys performing it. They’re also among few male couples working together in the industry.
While their bathtub shenanigans are an understandably huge hit, the duo do a great portion of their work while suspended in the air. At a certain point in their routine, the act transforms into an aerial straps act, showcasing a range of skills and setting their physiques and strength in a different light.
Whether they’re in the water or in the air, though, it’s neither merely clever gymnastics nor inventive displays of muscular dexterity. Instead, it’s a kind of dance designed to take the audience on a journey: there’s great heart and plenty of levity to go with the awe and splashes. All done with a sense of effortlessness and ease and a bit of a tease. One moment it’s Grundy in a handstand, the next instant Artino has his legs stretched across the top of the tub in the splits.
The splits are a recurring motif.
“For circus artists it’s a running joke that you can do your hardest trick and audiences barely respond,” Artino says. “But if you do the splits, they go wild.”
He gives audiences what they want. He does the splits in an array of locations — at one point, it’s up in the air where he’s stretched out along Grundy’s flat, horizontal body, the two of them spinning from the straps.
They were both dancers with diverse experience, including ballet, before they transitioned into the world of circus. Grundy says he’d been transfixed by Cirque du Soleil as a teenager but never imagined it was something he’d end up doing. “As a boy, I didn’t even know circus schools existed.”
Much of what they do they’ve learnt through a combination of determination and a willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve a goal, picking up skills and techniques wherever they can.
They met while working on a show on a cruise ship and were a couple for a while before collaborating on their own intimate two-man show, which they launched in the aftermath of Covid-19. After accruing considerable attention with a touring circus in the UK in 2022 they entered Newcomershow, The International Variety Festival, held annually in Leipzig, Germany, where they took both the top prize and the audience choice award.
While plenty of what they do looks effortless, there’s barely a moment that does not demand incredible muscularity, core strength and pinpoint body awareness, plus an imperviousness to fear, since their aerial acts are pretty risky.
Another sequence, performed in even fewer shreds of clothing during another part of the show, is their aerial hoop act. Suspended in the air, the hoop is a large metal ring through which they manoeuvre, twirl and hang. As with the straps, they perform without a net, albeit a whole lot drier.
Performing in the air straight out of the bathtub can be tricky with wet hands, particularly when flesh-on-flesh gripping is required, though having water on the straps helps because it increases the friction and makes holding on a bit easier, says Artino.
Towards the end of the act, Artino’s not even hanging on with hands, fingers or the back of his knee. Instead, in a dramatic flourish, he’s suspended from his neck, cradled in a loop as he spins at exhilarating speed.
Is he dizzy when he finally gets his feet back on the edges of the bathtub? “Weirdly, no,” Artino shrugs, as though it’s barely crossed his mind. “A lot of people get sick. But I don’t.”
While all that spinning makes every moment appear more difficult, Grundy says there’s a slight upward thrust that makes the airborne routines more effortless. “While the spinning is a beautiful visual effect, centrifugal force makes us feel lighter because our weight is being pulled up.”
That force is also helpful when they’re spinning together. “Because it’s pulling us away from one another, it creates extra space so you can see the other person and more easily work against their body.”
Grundy says that while rehearsals can be a slog, once they’re performing, they’re in another zone. “During the show there is something that happens to your body, your brain releases adrenaline, so you don’t feel the effort, you don’t feel pain, you don’t feel anything, you just enjoy it, effortlessly.”
He says that while it’s not exactly an out-of-body experience, “there’s something like short-term memory loss … you know something took place, you know it was wonderful but you’re not entirely sure what happened”.
Getting to that point, though, where every moment becomes second nature requires incredible discipline, body awareness and constant focus.
“We gym, we work out, do resistance training with weights and have specific aerial training and there’s yoga and Pilates as part of our mobility and core strengthening,” Grundy says. “We eat well and we move every day.”
They both agree that being two strong guys together has great advantages, while also adding a surfeit of difficulty, too.
“Manuel is 15 kilos heavier than everyone else I’ve worked with because previously I worked with a very small lady,” Grundy says.
“What makes Jonny a great partner to work with is that he is so strong,” Artino says. “So he can lift me and I can be the flyer and know that he’s not going to drop me.”
Which is why they’re able to fearlessly and effectively dance in the sky. Being able to rely completely on one another adds tremendously to their creativity because it enables them to more easily swap the tasks of holding and being held, supporting one another in all manner of complicated positions.
Not that they do anything simply because it’s a “cool trick”. “We want people to experience awe but hopefully in the context of coming on a journey with us,” Grundy says. “Making people feel things beyond merely looking at something that looks cool is more interesting for us.”
Admittedly, seeing Artino grasp one foot high above his head while balancing on the other leg and pulling himself into a human banana is pretty incredible.
It’s not simply the ease with which he does it but the calm energy he exudes as he does so.
For those of us watching, it’s a display of seemingly superhuman flexibility. What sets these down-to-earth humans apart is something beyond their strength, skill and daring. What makes their performance remarkable is some unspoken magic that sizzles between them, a spark that cannot be faked.
“Because it’s not acting,” Grundy says. “We have an honest connection, something absolutely authentic, so the audience experiences something very real rather than something we’re playing at.”
Jonny Grundy and Manuel Artino are part of the Royal Countess Zingara’s line-up of cirque acts until the conclusion of its run in Cape Town in May.
A daring duo turn a humble bathtub into a stage for sensual acrobatics, aerial feats and playful humour in the latest show at Zingara’s Cape Town spiegeltent
