Chapter 225: Sand by Kook Ensemble

 

I have been turning over memories of Sand by Kook Ensemble, the creation of Sean Kempton and Michaela O’Connor, ever since I saw it with my daughter back in June at Jacksons Lane. Devon, where the show is set, has always been a mythic county for me. My parents lived there by the sea when they were first married, after they met in the Navy. As the youngest of six, born almost two decades after my eldest sibling, I grew up hearing Devon stories and always felt a kind of yearning to know the parents of those days too.

I finally got to Devon back in 2019, the summer we returned from sailing. I was staying with friends in the National Park and nipped over to Barnstaple with the kids to see Sean and Michaela’s A Simple Story. A family piece with their daughter Chloe at its heart, carrying the teasing subtitle you’d expect from a couple of clowns: Two Idiots Raising a Genius, which delighted my own kids too. It was lovely to meet Sean’s parents afterwards, and I remember him talking about Devon beaches near home with such affection, but ran out of time to make my way to the coast. So back in June this year at Jacksons Lane, when Sand opened with gulls, breaker posts and sandbanks, I really was transported.

The power of memory is central to Sand, only ironically I can’t remember where I’ve put the notebook where I jotted down all my impressions that night on the tube journey home. Now, months on, I find myself travelling by train again, notebook in hand (on the cover of which reads "Creative Ramblings of a Restless Mind"!) reconstructing the evening, this time on my way to see my mum. At ninety-four she still has a prodigious reach into the past yet is increasingly both frustrated by and resigned to what she calls her “glitches” of short-term memory. We watched my father fade gently just past one hundred, ebbing and flowing like the tide.

The show begins at breakfast. A clock ticks. Dylan juggles with a boyish persistence, trying to coax a smile from Heather, who sits staring blankly at her newspaper. The effort is comic at first, his tricks bumbling and bright, but something hovers just beyond reach. The clock keeps watch over them, its steady hands a reminder that time itself is part of the story and later those hands will be shifted back and forward, as if memory could be rewound or hurried on.

From there, the story unspools across two timelines. The young lovers meet by chance in a supermarket, a tin of beans passed between them like fate disguised in groceries. What follows is a rush of play, flirtation and trust and mirroring of past and future selves: a grace of bodies tumbling in turn in acrobatic rolls down a dune (my favourite part), juggling that becomes courtship, a hand caught mid-fall that steadies into intimacy. At one point they build a precarious human pyramid, the kind of trick that depends utterly on balance and trust, before collapsing back into laughter. A clowning streak runs through their encounters, never undermining the tenderness but grounding it.

Between the older couple there is both tenderness and the shadow of dissonance. A breakfast ritual slips into confusion when incongruous objects are placed into the bowl. The older Heather steadies the older Dylan as though her whole frame has become scaffold and anchor. A chair becomes a barrier between them, a piece of furniture suddenly charged with all the frustration of not being able to connect. At another point the younger couple take shelter under an umbrella as the older Dylan rains down sand from above. The phrase "brain like a sieve" springs to mind, and it occurs to me here that the umbrella is a sieve is upturned and lined with memories as a barrier, but while memory gives some respite and shelter, ultimately it cannot stop the downpour. 

And then, in a moment of startling delicacy, a single feather is set adrift. Audience members in the front rows lean forward and puff it back into the air. What might have been a standard clown gag with a balloon became something else: a reminder that memory is sustained not by weight but by breath, by the lightness of being recalled and retold. Without that, it will simply drift away.

The performances are finely tuned. Myles MacDonald’s older Dylan clowns with a fumbling sweetness that makes the moments of forgetfulness hit harder. Dilly Taylor’s older Heather holds her ground with a resigned compassion, her body taut with both love and weariness. Álvaro Grande’s young Dylan brims with physical energy, throwing himself into acrobatics with a kind of reckless joy, while Ebony Gumbs’s young Heather moves with lyric grace, her aerial sequences suspending her between flight and rootedness. Together they create a dialogue across time, a sense of selves that are continuous and fractured all at once.

At one point, the younger and older pairs shadow one another so closely it feels as though memory itself has conjured them, doubling across generations. It made me think not only of my parents but of my son too. Just this weekend a cousin over supper remarked not only on how much my son resembles his father, but also how the way he and his girlfriend were interacting reminded her of us. That doubling of likeness, gestures, and intimacies felt like an echo of what unfolded on stage, where love and memory ripple forward even as they return.

The sand itself is both material and metaphor, and the most striking image comes near the end, when the older Dylan juggles balls that crumble in his hands, grains scattering in concentric circles as he whirls them round. It crystallises the whole piece in one gesture: beauty dissolving even as you try to hold it, “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.” That line, from the song The Windmills of Your Mind, came back to me on another journey to Mum’s this summer, when a cover by Jacqui Dankworth (daughter of Cleo Laine and Jonny Dankworth) played on the radio in the home stretch. Her version, with a flamenco-style improvisation that broke the song apart mid-way through, remade it into something both yearning and unsettled. The lyrics turn on a single image. That was Sand... lingering in the way love and memory ripple forward, keeping us connected as the seasons turn, and reminding us that, like a feather on a breath, what we share keeps us uplifted.

Footage of show and audience feedback:  click here
Photography: Roy Riley www.kookensemble.com

Chapter 224: On Cloud Swings in Life and Sturgeon Moons

Under the Sturgeon Moon

“Lucy, if I gave you the sun and the moon, you’d ask for the stars as well,” Mum used to say.

This weekend, under the Sturgeon full moon, her words have been looping in my head like an artist on a cloud swing, because sometimes I really do ask for it all.

This morning, I waved off an old school friend flying back to teach in China. She brought a copy of Orbital by Samantha Harvey and a box of Krispy Kreme “Saturn rings” for the family. We ate them talking, as ever, about life, love, and the universe. She recalled a moment of connection in China when she realised the same sun shining there was shining here in the UK.

I know that feeling. Three years ago to the day, I stood in moonlight on a beach in southern Spain after hearing from my sister that our father had died. Xavier and our youngest came with me to the shore. We looked out across the water to Tangiers, the same moon over us as over him, the same moon that had watched over him when he stood on that beach seventy years earlier, newly engaged.

In a recent homily, or maybe a podcast, my mind slips, came this question: When have you stepped into the unknown and it was a disaster?

The answer, if you’ve ever trusted the net, the water, the loving force beneath it all, is never. From the first time I stepped off the trapeze platform at National Circus, or published my first blog post, to setting sail from La Rochelle and somehow ending up in Sydney Harbour two years later, the pattern’s the same: fear, superseded by trust, that carries you through challenge and leads ultimately to joy, or at the very least the quiet satisfaction of survival.

Friday night’s adventure was a Full Moon swim at Shepperton Lake. Carolyn and I drove there in my “teenage Mini,” as old as my children and still full of magic. She had grown up just ten minutes away, so we crawled through rush hour revisiting her childhood haunts until the lake appeared, luminous under a setting sun.

No moon yet, but the water shimmered like glass. We slipped in and swam towards the blazing light, familiar yet unheimlich, uncanny. I could picture Dad there, ever the water-lover, saying, “This is the life,” heading towards the ultimate source of all.

The last ones out, we emerged giddy with laughter and sheer joy. Half a dozen of us, part of the “Tooting Tits,” an open-water sisterhood of sirens, shared lentil and caviar-flavoured crisps in true sturgeon spirit.

The moon finally appeared later, as I walked halfway down our street, bright, whole, and watching. I thought: You’re the same moon from Tarifa, from every thus. Like Tweedy in Giffords Circus: Moon Songs, I felt the clownish comfort of continuity.

Sunday brought an unexpected hangover from entertaining friends. I missed morning Mass, curling up instead with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a story of love, loss, and survival. It reminded me of a friend’s father, a gentle man who had survived a Japanese POW camp. I wonder if that gentleness came from having looked into the void and stepped back.

In the book, the protagonist copies to his lost love: You burn me, you burn me. It recalled the jisei, the Japanese death poems that distil life’s impermanence into beauty. I understand that yearning to have it all, the sun, the moon, the stars. But our family motto reminds me: I shine, not burn.

It’s a delicate balancing act.

Yesterday morning, before my friend arrived, I finished We Are Still Here by Lamorna Ash, luminous writing, poetry in prose. She explores her bisexual Gen Z identity, faith, and performance. A young Quaker challenges her: is she commodifying her journey?

I felt the echo. Years ago, I questioned my right to write about circus, my makeshift religion when I’d felt distant from Faith with a capital F. Circus was my devotion, my discipline, my daring. It still is, part of my ongoing pilgrimage.

We made it to evening Mass, lighting a candle for Dad in the Lady Chapel. I thought of Stella Maris, Our Lady, Star of the Sea, and of Yemayá, patron saint aboard La Cigale, our boat, her envoys the dolphins that guided us at sea.

Ritual is its own trapeze act. In morning Mass, a hymn can send me swinging back to childhood, Mum and Dad beside me. Sometimes the sensation is so vivid I have to look up to the golden dove in the cupola and blink back tears.

Dad never had Alzheimer’s, though he lost short-term memory. That meant I could tell him the same circus or sailing stories again and again, honing the rhythm until he’d beam, “Did you really? Well, I never!” The best captive audience.

That last summer, I even brought my harp to play for him, still harping on in every sense.

Now, after a year’s enforced sabbatical for back surgery, I’m preparing to return to teaching, the job I love, the job that once broke me. But a lesser-known family motto I recently discovered reminds me: Broken, I rise, Fracta surgo.

Circus performers learn that lesson early, just look up #circushurts.

The night before the full moon, I dreamed of a tunnel, a pitch-black slide that opened onto a game with red and green bowling balls. The words in my head were, Just roll with it, baby. Only later did I learn that the Sturgeon Moon is also called the Green Corn or Red Moon. Perhaps the dream was echoing that, or maybe it was the buoys at Shepperton Lake, the red and green markers guiding our way through dark water. that were surfacing again in memory.

The arrival of the moon is said to mark  abundance and gratitude, a time to give thanks for what already is and release a few wishes to the deep.

So I’m giving thanks, imagining my yearnings already realised, and letting my inner Barnum rise again.

And you, reader, what do you wonder under this same moon?

Perhaps your question drifts into the night like a jisei, catching in silver light before dissolving into dark.

This is the life, on a boat called Serendipity, with a “dark and stormy”🍸  on the side. Cheers!