"Mum, why are you dressed head to toe in black?"
The answer was simple. It had been a full-on day and I was going to see a show about the fear of death. Somehow shaking off the day, and the clothes, and dressing for the evening ahead, brings its own energy. I was off to see Lithuanian performing arts company Teatronas at Jacksons Lane with ITCH, a performance directed by Gildas Aleksa. Described by its creators as a theatre essay on the fear of death, it draws inspiration from psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom's book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death.
The premise intrigued me. What if our everyday anxieties, our isolation, our busyness, our relentless pressure to achieve, were really manifestations of a deeper fear of mortality? As a compulsive overachiever in a perpetual boom-and-bust cycle of energy, there are patterns that need breaking and questions that need answering.
I've never considered myself particularly afraid of death - educated by Irish Catholic nuns for 13 years, it's really the thought of an afterlife that scares the bejesus out of me! In the past few years I've accompanied both my parents at the end of their lives. The night before my mother died in January, I felt her energy flood the house and wrap me in a warm blanket. The morning after she died, as I approached the bedroom where she lay, my chest constricted, but still I crossed the threshold. The experience struck me with the thought that when we go, no one can do it for us or come through with us. We cross alone. I can't describe why, but that thought gave me some consolation and made me feel stronger.
But there is a fear that remains. A sense of accountability for this life. An exhaustion, even. The feeling that time is slipping away and there is still so much to do, or strip away. Increasingly I feel the pull to pull away. To just be still. But not that evening. I was looking for another perspective.
I arrived minutes before the performance and grabbed a ticket and took a seat. On stage, two guys were warming up in a twilight of muted lighting. Minimal, metropolitan, dressed in suits but bare-chested, with slits of fabric, purple perhaps, at the knees of one and the elbows of the other. I liked that. It was a strange world, somewhere between the familiar and the surreal.
A young woman, the flyer, performer Milda Jonaitytė, swinging on a rope, held a balloon. She spoke of the landmark moment when a child first recognises their own mortality as a helium balloon slips from their grasp and floats away, beyond reach. A first experience of irrevocable loss. It struck a chord, especially if, like me, you were haunted by the beautiful film The Red Balloon as a child. But in a neat inversion, her balloon didn't float away. As she turned upside down, it thudded to the floor. Suddenly we were in an upside-down world. Clever.
Then another balloon, apparently with a life of its own, followed an acrobat across the stage. However often he kicked it away, back it came. Later, a juggler appeared to throw a ball which, through a genius bit of sleight of hand, went nowhere at all. There was something wonderfully playful about these tricks, and something unsettling too. Death is like that balloon, or that ball. However hard we try to chuck it away, or ignore it, it keeps coming back into play.
The circus skills were a joy to watch. Kasparas Bujanauskas performed an extraordinary juggling solo lasting over half an hour. It sounds impossibly long, but the repetition took on an almost meditative, playful quality. There was something deeply soothing about the rhythm, the different patterns, the seemingly effortless control, the endless movement. But baked into that serenity was a certain anxiety about the inevitable drop. There were several. Yet each was recovered so smoothly, with a flick of a toe or a leisurely scoop from the floor, that it was difficult to distinguish the mistakes from the choreography. Nor, perhaps, should we. The carrying on is the point.
There were moments of wonderful comedy too, with acrobat Džiugas Kunsmanas weaving in and out of the juggler's movements, interrupting his carefully constructed patterns. The interventions were at once a distraction and a source of delight, and I didn't see a drop. There was the pleasure here of watching extraordinary physical skill responding to another human being intervening, Loki-style.
Then there were surreal moments. At one point, the acrobat folded himself over, feet above his head, until his back seemed to take on a life of its own. It twitched and writhed in strange, almost St Vitus' dance-like movements, the itch of the title, an uncontrollable agitation. It took me back to seeing Punchdrunk's immersive The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre, years ago. But to me the back also resembled a faceless puppet, the hands on either side like ears, a body onto which we could project the features of someone we'd known, or unknown.
The spoken word was harder for me to grasp. The words tumbled out quickly, one over another, and I struggled to hold on to them. I wanted the flyer to slow down, to leave more space between her thoughts, to give me time to reflect. But maybe that was the point, and I just needed to go with the flow rather than try to anchor myself to a pebble in the riverbed of words. A thought had drifted in early on: They're so young. So full of energy. What do they know of death? Of that paralysing exhaustion? And yet I know death doesn't respect age, and neither does grief, as I was reminded when she spoke of her own experiences.
One striking image I carried away was of the flyer standing blindfolded in a two-high, directing the base beneath her through shifts in her weight towards the rope in the centre. It was funny, clever, but also took me back to Songs of the Bulbul, a dance performance I saw earlier this summer, based on a Sufi tale of a caged songbird. When the bird is blinded, it can no longer see the world beyond its cage, but in that darkness its song becomes something deeper, almost a prayer. Its physical world contracts, yet something within it is released.
The creators of ITCH suggest that our relentless rush to achieve might itself be an expression of our fear of death. Watching the endless juggling, the frenetic itch, the distractions, the anxious torrent of words, I could see what they meant. We keep ourselves busy, perhaps because stopping would mean confronting the limits of our time.
In the face of death, perhaps our only response is to create. Not necessarily something grand or lasting. Not a monument to ourselves, or another achievement to add to the list. But something that taps into what lies beyond ourselves, something we can share with others.
Ironically, I almost didn't write this up. I'd jotted these notes down on the tube home. Everyday life intervened the moment I walked back through my front door. Traitors. Ironing. Lesson prep. I dropped the ball and was loath to pick it up. I could just give myself a break for once. But I'm learning. And maybe the trip down to the shell of my parents' house this week for a final clearance, and the raw grief that surged back up, brought that home.
And perhaps the measure of a life isn't how many balls we managed to keep in the air, but how we pick them up after the drop, before the ultimate performance comes to an end.
And if you are London-based this weekend, check out London Juggling Festival at throwntogether.org which is being covered over at thecircusdiaries.com/
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