Chapter 74: Circolombia at The Roundhouse

No se me importa un pito que las mujeres

tengan los senos como magnolias o como pasas de higo;

un cutis de durazno o de papel de lija.

Le doy una importancia igual a cero,

al hecho de que amanezcan con un aliento afrodisíaco

o con un aliento insecticida.

Soy perfectamente capaz de soportarles

una nariz que sacaría el primer premio

en una exposición de zanahorias;

¡pero eso sí! -y en esto soy irreductible

- no les perdono, bajo ningún pretexto, que no sepan volar.

from Espantapájaros (Scarecrow) by Oliverio Girondo 

for poem in full, and translation, click here

or see my interpretation at the end

 Espantapúblico: Circolombia's Julia Sanchez Aja 

Lianna - check out her website: www.liannamusic.com

When I was about 12 I fell in love with Spanish. Or maybe it was the Spanish teacher at our little convent school. The formidably fierce, elegant, young Mercedes held us in thrall decked out in her modern Mediterranean colours (all taupes, olive greens, russet browns) in contrast to the old-fashioned black and starched white habits of our Irish sisters. And more exotic still, Mercedes had a boyfriend. Suffice to say the spark that she ignited has since become an all-consuming blazing fire. I love speaking Spanish. It gives me a freedom to communicate a passion, warmth, joy and enthusiasm that in English may get  written off as "excitable". For me, Spanish is more than a language, it is a state of mind, just like circus. A space that challenges constraints and crosses boundaries.  So what a treat when the two worlds collide, when they fuse and I short-circuit, as with  Circolombia and their show Aceleré, which gets the heart of circus pumping, and the audience pulsating, to an urban latino beat. And on Friday night I went along with over a dozen friends for the ride. The friends were all from different areas of my life (sounds familiar? See Chapter 1: A Circus Experience), and while some may have crossed paths before, in the main they didn't know each other. Still, they all share that curiosity and openness to otherness and new experiences that makes them great company. 

I felt a bit like the Pied Piper actually. As I travelled up with a girlfriend on the Northern Line, one friend got into our carriage, then her partner at the next stop, and so on. By the time we got out at Chalk Farm most of us had been united, and introductions were made over heads in the lift on the way up to the general a(be)musement of the rest of the occupants. We hit The Roundhouse buzzing, connected, and ready for more.

Soledad Gomez Acevedo & Oscar MauricioRojas Guasca on straps

The performance that followed was one of extraordinary strength, agility, courage, playfulness, power and poetry. All the world-class performers in Circolombia are graduates of the National School "Circo Para Todos" which provides support through professional circus training to young people at risk, founded by Brit, Felicity Simpson, building bridges. Watching the Circolombia guys backflip from a hand-to-hand handstand onto a pair of hands behind or somersault from swings onto a platform of hands, left me not speechless, but rather drained of expletives. I don't normally swear in English but the words jerked out of me at every climax. Each time there was a sense that the performers were continually responding and assessing whether they could go that little bit further today. And then go for it, or on occasion maybe not. Absolute trust and breath-taking risk. Fundamental cornerstones to each trick. And that gave the show its raw edge that made it both terrifying and exhilarating to watch.  As well as astonishing acrobatics from teeterboard, swing and from each other, there was an extraordinarily sensual duet on straps, a cloud swinger whose aerial state defines her identity and a sequence where butanes of gas, with lights on the base became suspended aerial supports round which four performers whirled with a graceful luminosity. Ironic really, as the energy the evening generated was so high-octane it lit up the Roundhouse and spilled onto the streets.

John Rodriguez

Afterwards some of the performers stayed behind to sell CDs of Ryan Willmott's superb musical score, have pictures taken with their adoring (excitable!) fans - what's the Spanish for groupie anyone? not acosadora, por Dios! - and generally chat. Talk about stamina. They revealed themselves to be utter sweethearts whose gentle, easygoing nature explained the relaxed insouciance that was part of their on-stage charm. The English me still cringes at the thought of introducing myself to these young guys and handing over my cards, but in Spanish I'm a shameless sinvergüenza which overrided any embarrassment,  and afterwards we decamped to the bar where the caipirinhas did the rest. So here's to old souls and new memories. 

Cheers Circolombia! Salud! Aché!

CAST:
Juan Eugenio Bonilla Landazuri, Gustavo Adolfo Quinones Castro, Jhon Edward Angulo Ibarguen, Jhon Gerlin Rodriguez Riascos, Daniel Muñoz, Juan Manuel Navarro Rubiano, Juan Camilo Gaitan López, Soledad Gomez Acevedo, Oscar Mauricio Rojas Guasca, Julia Sánchez Aja, Lianna, Diana Vargas.

Standing ovation all round

My Interpretation of Oliverio Girondo's Scarecrow:

I don't give a toss whether women have breasts soft as magnolias or wrinkled as prunes;

a skin soft as peaches or scratchy as a filing board.

I am completely indifferent 

as to whether their morning breath is an aphrodisiac

or tastes  of insecticide,

I am can perfectly well put up with 

a nose that would win first prize in

a carrot competition

but know one thing, and on this point I am resolute:

- I don't excuse, under any pretext, that they not know how to fly. 

Chapter 70: Airealism: Circus That Takes Us Down the Rabbit Hole...

It's a funny old world, I think sometimes, curiouser and curiouser. Chance conversations and meetings converge, and give life its own quirky rhythm. I had been admiring Fiona's ariel boots in class, and it turns out that another Circus Space student, Isabella Mars, had made them. I remember going on Isabella's website - see www.isabellamars.com - and falling in love with the colours, designs, and the glamour. There was something otherworldly about the leather and the laces, maybe all that reading of Lucy Ribchester's "The Hourglass Factory" (see Chapter 68) had encouraged the fantasy of being a suffragette trapeze artiste, the archetypal circus strongwoman. So I met up with Isabella in the foyer of Circus Space, where she brought swatches of leathers and suede and measured me up (my feet, rather than skillset!).  A couple of weeks later they were ready, and they are a work of sheer beauty. Soft black leather with suede where grip is needed, and dark silver tongues. I am in awe and, determined to live up to them, they are my talisman. I managed my first ankle hang in them only last week. As we were chatting it turned out that Isabella was part of Airealism. This is the circus collective comprising some 20-strong (make that super-strong) amateurs, in the most fundamental sense. That is to say they hold down day jobs and train on the side for the love of it. And, 150 years on from Lewis Carroll, they were bringing Alice in Wonderland circus-style to the Vault Festival, taking the audience Down the Rabbit Hole.

As I descended down the stairs into this warren under Waterloo, hand-in-hand with my six year old daughter for the Saturday matinée, there was a frisson of excitement. I love the space in the Vault tunnels, the dank underworld of adventure it promises. As we lined up outside "The Pit", it was a joy to bump into Malcolm from my static class and Edel and Chris from Flying Fantastic. Name badges were handed out  - familiar, yet different, we were all Alice! - and then ushered into a departure lounge of an airport. Announcements were made over the tannoy and the stewardesses gave safety instructions as we prepared to take off into Wonderland.  As the lights went out my daughter tugged at my hand for security. The black curtain that had sectioned off half the space fell away to reveal a stage set for tea-time, where it is always six o' clock, and a central runway - less for airplanes, more a space to lead the characters up the garden path.  

It was brilliantly executed. The Mad Hatter, Dormouse and March Hare provided the entertainment (and the Foxes Glacier Mints!) to cover the transitions between acts, charismatic raconteurs engaging the audience, while the skill of the circus acts themselves was creatively captivating. The caterpillar - well, more of a silks worm! - morphing into the bread-and-butterfly and swooping down in the drops left us goggled eyed, the sultry flamingo on silks smouldered, the Cheshire Cat was a fluroescence of feline grace on the lyra, the frog courtier had echoes of Frederick Ashton's Jeremy Fisher on trapeze, the imperiously silent Duchess span round at dizzying speed, the pages to the Queen of Heart's stunned as a duo on static trapeze, and the Queen of Hearts made her regal entrance and hopped on the hoop. I left thinking how Circus complements Wonderland. Both connote a transformative space where the impossible is possible. If only you believe. And with practice, I now myself believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, while these guys show where you get to by tea ...

Chapter 69: Company New World's "Globally Wanted"

“A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world, because that's where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they'd like to be if they dared to and what they really are.” 

 - Tove Jansson

Billed as "sex, love and violence in black, pink and turquoise" Finnish Company New World (Circus Uusi Mailma) brought their astonishing show Globally Wanted to Jacksons Lane recently. Five fragile creatures in an iron acro-cube exploring boundaries of emotional and physical resilience.  "A black burlesque belch" one Finnish critic observed, picking up on the elements of dark and grotesque comedy. Think Clockwork Orange meets (Visi)Goth Vamp and you get the gist.

As I wandered into the intimate space of the Jacksons Lane auditorium, eyes adjusting to the lighting, I registered the cube structure first, and only after a few moments noticed the performers on top, and gazing fixedly out from the shadows. It caught me unawares. Destabilising. And that's the show - an off-kilter balancing act. I loved the use of the acro-cube, a mass of edges that functioned as Chinese poles and monkey bars that the performers fly around. Delineating space but not limiting it, a construction of borders repeatedly crossed.  There was, for instance, an ingenious use of parkour movements to scale the walls and access doors and fire exits beyond. 

One of the performers, pictured above in pink, moves in bi-mechanical fashion (the only way I can think to describe a cross-dressing manbot) and then turns into a wicked drummer, raising the energy levels through the roof.  Pairings and triangles criss-cross with a look, a longing, a tease of a kiss and then are ripped apart with a slap, limbs becoming bandaged, bodies wrapped around poles or strapped into wheelchairs. It's not pretty. And that's the point. As if to say what doesn't kill you really does make you stronger, the injuries and their supports become a springboard for new tricks. A crutch is unscrewed and fixed into the base of a trapeze swing, the wheel chair swings round the pole, gaining momentum and becomes a fundamental spoke in the circus apparatus.  There are breath-taking moments of physical brilliance, the whole raison d'être of any circus performance, combined with an absurd take on representing the dynamics of relationships in all their cruelty that was very funny. We laughed, we whooped, we shifted in our seats uncomfortably. Globally Wanted now translates into Globally Appreciated. And I'm sure they'll be back ... in some shape or form.

Love hurts. Circus hurts. Embrace it. 

Chapter 68: The "F" word.

"What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives"

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (author and aviator)

So true. Life is an act of juggling compromises. I had to miss the last unicycle class this week as I was working through a science experiment examining sound and vibrations with my son. The one where you make walkie-talkies with paper cups linked by a piece of string, and use juggling balls to explain molecular action. Obviously. And I really missed the class. Circus Space is such a familiar part of my landscape now, it's hard to believe I have been going there barely a year. Tomorrow, 8th March is, in fact, our anniversary.

A year to the day since I rolled up with a dozen girlfriends in tow, for a "circus experience" afternoon. It also happened to be International Women's Day, which hadn't registered initially but was so apt as we were a complete hotchpotch of nationalities, just the ticket for the BBC crew that turned up there filming and interviewing for a travel programme.

Lucy Ribchester at the Brixton Book Jam

As we march towards that date again, I have found this week to be a celebration of sisterhood and friendship. And I swear by the "F" word.  Feminisim. That marmite word you either love or hate. Feminism may signify to some dungarees and DMs, the man-eating Miss Guided. For me it signifies a reclamation of space and redressing the balance. A positive celebration of female empowerment does not connote a castration of manhood. Because I am more, does not make you any the less. And this circus adventure over the past year has brought it home.


Recently, reading Lucy Ribchester's "The Hourglass Factory" a page-turner of a conspiracy set amidst the suffragette movement  (click here for post: Circus Strongwoman) has brought home how far we have come since the days when women were either stuffed into corsets or stuffed into Holloway. Funnily enough I met Lucy this week at the Brixton Book Jam at Hootananny's, after watching her on stage read aloud from the prologue, where the suffragette trapeze artist, Ebony Diamond, is preparing for a leap of faith in more ways than one. It struck me that a circus woman historically has been regarded as a figure of emancipation. Independent and strong.

Superheroines - the artists

But while we have the vote, sexism pervades all areas of life. That was brought home this week on a trip to the South Bank where I was meeting up with the founder of Boylexe (click here for post: Boylexe - Man, I feel like a Woman) for coffee at the BFI and talk turned to recording and witnessing personal stories verbatim - as in the Burlexe show he had also produced to great acclaim. Afterwards, joined by my circus buddy/partner-in-crime Anne, we bumped into the founder of Femme Fierce (click here to access the Facebook page) being interviewed in the Vault tunnel by Waterloo. As a mother with a teenage daughter Ayaan was struck by the male dominance in the street art scene, where cartoonish figures of nipped waists and blossoming boobs prevail,  and has instituted this festival that reclaims space for women. Last year, in aid of Breast Cancer Care, they painted the tunnel bubblegum pink and then sprayed graffiti over it. This year the charity being supported is the children's charity Plan, and so their signature blue will be used as the base. Ayaan was joined by Austrian chinatilegirl.com, whose ceramic street artwork - a hyena encrusted with dollar signs - Anne recognised from a recent trip to Berlin (you can also find it in Tokyo!). We also met Mariana, an artist over from Greece, and a couple of students recording for posterity. It was quite simply a moment, a meeting, an inspiration.

Anne and I left them and walked all the way home, some 7 miles. The journey became a sort of cultural pilgrimage as we dipped into a friend's art gallery en route, bumped into one of my static trapeze teachers from Circus Space,  and generally set the world to rights.




As Jude Kelly (Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre) said in her talk at Battersea Arts Centre last week: "We all have a chance, all of us, to do something to make the world a bit more positive". So if you are free tomorrow, Sunday 8th March,  join the women and girls for some or all of the painting, which begins at 8am in the morning at the Vault tunnel. Make your mark.

8 March 2014

NOTE: Kaveh Rahnama (pictured) was our course instructor that afternoon. Fitting then that a year on, to the day, we will be going to see his directorial debut of Genius Sweatshop's Lab Rat and mind-altering puppetry in the Firsts Festival  at the Little Angel Theatre, Islington, tomorrow (and on Monday too) click here for more information:  www.littleangeltheatre.com 

*Post Up-date*

Sunday at the Vault Tunnel with Femme Fierce was a truly incredible community experience. Took my girls and we met women, and men, who had travelled from all over the world for this inspirational event.

Read more about it here in my circus partner-in-crime Anne's superb blog post and sign up for next year!
On Femme Fierce, International Women's Day, Leake Street and more Gorgeous Graffiti

Chapter 67: Cirque Eloize's "Cirkopolis"

"It's fantastic! It makes you happy, surprised, amazed and makes your life full of colour!" 

(Kids' verdict)

Last weekend I also went to see Cirque Eloize's Cirkopolis at the Peacock Theatre, Sadlers Wells,  as a family birthday treat. We had seen their show I.D. there a couple of years ago, a high-octane meditation on urban living, exploring the different tribes we live in with sensational street-style, circus tricks with skipping ropes and BMX bikes and we came out bouncing.

Cirkopolis the people's circus, da?, starts off in a colourless state. A human factory of grey brick and grey trench coats, as though we had stepped into Brazil, the film, not the country. A place of anonymous functionaries and functionality. A man sits at a desk in the Aegean stables of admin, attempting to rubber-stamp an ever-growing pile of forms. Bit by bit, he, along with a dozen or so other mysterious characters rebel against the monochromatic tedium of their existence with spectacular circus skills in flashes of glorious technicolour (so it's not just me then -  see previous post click here) - the red dress in a Cyr wheel,  the mustard-yellow kicking Chinese pole duo, a purple dress splitting her steps atop supporting hands, to name but a few. It is darkly comic, both in terms of humour and the graphic set design (think Metropolis meets shades of Gotham City), while the cast really are multidisciplinary Marvels in the feats they perform.

Without an interval the show propels you forward relentlessly with tricks of contortion, trapeze, juggling and flying off teeter boards until the characters finally succeed in breaking out of their factory settings and into the circus space of a Big Top. The hard-core adrenaline-fuelled moments are counter-balanced with suave instances poetry in motion, such a cliché I know. But had you seen the tour de force on the German wheel, the spinning sighs on the Cyr wheel, the torso on straps or clown Ashley Carr's (former Circus Space student) poignant romance with a coy dress on a coat hanger, you would understand why words fail me.

"Poetry in motion": Léa Toran Jenner on Cyr Wheel

We loved Stéfan Boucher's musical score as well (see the behind-the-scenes video below). "Something chimes in me" indeed, and I highly recommend buying the CD. Having bought the soundtrack to I.D. last time round, we found it really does reinforce the memory of each individual act, and trust me, if you see this show you'll want to prolong the experience. Enjoy!

Note: Cirque Eloize's Cirkopolis has finished its run in London  but is still on tour in the UK until 11 April.

For the tour schedule click here.

Chapter 66: Sad Clown, Fun afFair

It could be said that theatre gold-dust is discovered when it mines the richness of humanity, in all its flaws and wonder, right to the depths, to its very core, and this is what happened in Parrot {in the} Tank's play Black Dog Gold Fish that was on at the Vault Festival last week.

Parrot {in the} Tank team: Big Claps Huge Smiles

Photo: Facebook 

Through the play, writer Sam Bailey explores the subject of depression, examining the absurd and the wonderfully funny in the situation as much as the negative. I had heard about the production from a friend, Gemma, who had been there at university for me with a listening ear, when I was studying the language of Almódovar and a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown myself. Finding my voice was what made the difference - having a listener, and finding a creative way to express it.  Through oil pastels, and juggling balls when I couldn't give a toss. The blacker the mood, the brighter the colours. 20 years on, it seems circus skills and colourful expression are still my default coping mechanism! And here is this play, a work in progress they announce, just 12 days old when I saw it on Sunday, finding its voice, and a sell-out audience to boot. It is a play that can pack a poignant punch in the guts, while also being laugh-out-loud funny.

Black Dog Gold Fish was part of the Vault Festival, by Waterloo, a space where water drips down the walls, judders with the rumble of trains overhead. It's a veritable dank tank and the perfect stage for a play set in a run-down aquarium. Enter Italian Remy, a Mediterranean stranded in a dilapidated English seaside town in winter, the proverbial fish out of water, and he's dropped his trousers. Eccola il bufo, I thought, cue clown. And here I define clown as a figure putting pain on show, whether from a mental or physical knock, which gives rise to laughter. We laugh at an absurd scenario, but we also squirm in empathy, for that is the cathartic function of the actor, isn't it? The actor represents the audience. We follow him on a journey into the unknown from a safe distance, although with the transverse seating and the characters often addressing the audience, the illusion of the safety net of a fourth wall quickly dissolves in this production.

The gentle and sensitive Remy (Andrea Foa) is working for the forthright, frankly nitwit of a boss, Mr Kyriacou (Joe Connor), and while caring for the fish becomes increasingly despondent, as though their incarceration in the tanks mirrors his own entrapment in his mental state. So he releases them one by one, but accidentally kills one. This is played out in a fantasy sequence at a funfair, where a symbolic rescue of a goldfish goes helter-skelter when the winning dart he is throwing accidentally spears the fish. The fish then comes back to life as a surreal manifestation of his guilt (for his depression as much as its death), a head on the body of a black dog, exacting revenge by causing Remy to push away all human contact, and ultimately his only friend, Kyle, played by the gracefully gangly Kyle Shepherd.

If that sounds at all bleak, it's not.  There is a lot of warmth and humour throughout the play. Kyle at one point, as he sees it emulating his friend Remy on a zen journey to become one with the jelly fish, breaks into the aquarium at night,  threading his way comically through the alarm sensors (red wool held in zigzag by the audience), to jump into the tank and mimic their moves. Joe Boylan's black body-suited Goldfish is hilarious, and has all the dry wit of a cabaret act, never a drag, in the way he inveigles himself into Remy's good books to the exclusion of all others. Remy holds onto him as company, but that only serves to underline to the audience his increasing isolation in the real world. Ultimately, as Remy lets go, the goldfish gets flushed down the loo, which made me both laugh and wince. There is a bar I once went to in Paris, in the Quartier du Marais, you see, where the loo had a fake cistern-cum-fishtank. It takes some nerve to pull the chain.

One of the questions asked by Parrot {in the} Tank on Facebook is where would you like to see the show go next? Well, depression, particularly among men, has been very much in the press this week. Matt Haig, an author I came across on Twitter, has been writing in the Guardian about his own experience (click here), in Times 2 there was a feature on the vulnerability of sensitive boys in pressurised environments (click here), even Grazia was featuring the story of an attempted suicide, one of the saddest parts being it was such a surprise to his wife. And that's another thing in terms of indicators - the sad clown is a misnomer when it comes to depression, often it ticks by unnoticed under the surface, just out of view, a point made in the promo video for Kickstarter:

So, I would say target the teenagers who do not always have the tools in place to open up. Show them a voice, a way, and that they are not alone. They can cope with the colourful language. And it'll beat the grey days.

Post-script: 
The musical version of Almódovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown starring Tamsin Greig is on at the moment at The Playhouse.

Chapter 62: NOODLES

Photo: Sean Purser (www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk)

And now for something completely different. NoFit State's Flying Noodles Circus. An evening of pure, unadulterated, gratuitous FUN. Noodles is a bonkers riot of laughter and colour to blast away the January blues, stuffed with slapstick tricks and circus treats.  We walked out on a high and my heart is still grinning like a Cheshire Cat. 

A stage-hand, *Miguel, walks on in a blue boiler-suit, adjusting the lights, tripping over, comically apologetic. Visions of canary yellow and loud pink descend the stairs at either side babbling, or babeling?, away in their native Spanish and Italian. Rays of linguistic sunshine, such intrinsically happy languages, they chivvy the audience along and clown around. *Zenaida and *Cristina then are the self-styled Mediterranean "Brownies" to the pair of Scandinavian "Blondies", *Lisa and *Klara, dressed in emerald green and royal blue. Seeing them all lined up at the beginning swapping round colour-coordinating handbags, well, it's like a Kate Spade shop meets Pedro Almódovar.

And then we come to the noodles. Noodles that are are chewed like gum, slurped like spaghetti and pulled out from underwear like wayward knicker elastic. They are made into bow-ties and animals, wigs and beards, used to fashion Madonnas and Monroes - the skies the limit ... and then it rains more  noodles! In a surreal cookery programme pots and pans, and bras, catch fire, water is squirted, flour is farted, nothing is sacred and everything is liberated. It was physical clowning par excellence, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed since Jorge Costa and Julia Muzio from Argentina at the CASA festival last year (see Clowning around and The School of Hard Knocks).

The aerial apparatus are noodle-like ropes, multiple cloud swings on pulleys so that the weight of the performers counter-balanced each other, and silks made of hundreds of fine strands. On occasion they have a life of their own, slipping just out of reach of the caretaker as he attempts to put them away, while obeying a masterful click of a girl's fingers. The aerial sequences themselves were an uplifting array of swirling colours and sheer beauty. I could have watched them for hours. Twisting and turning bodies that speak of strength and fearless grace. And funny with it, no mean feat. The friend I went with, who has herself done a fair few turns as a stand-up comedian, brave lady, totally agreed. 

There were wonderful turns on the tight-wire, which struck a chord after our four classes on it at Circus Space this term, although in my case the comedy wasn't exactly intentional. The flexibility, speed and the jumps executed with razor-sharp precision were exciting to watch, and Marilyn flapping around trying to make her skirt behave seemed like a parody of the sexy siren in red heels I had so loved in NoFit State's "Bianco" show a few years back. The signature hand-balancing act from the posters was another class act, maintaining her balance under a barrage of noodles.

The show is given magic touch from Miguel whose sleight-of-hand tricks involve multiplying raw eggs like amoeba, puffing smoke rings from a noodle-cum-hookah in an armchair of a wheelbarrow and apparating a bottle of red wine out of nowhere (please, teach me that one!) - he just made us laugh. At the end of the day, for us Noodles was warming comfort food, pure and simple, that slipped down easily and left us utterly satisfied. As we walked outside the snow was tipping down. Noodle-dust. Surreal.

*CAST:

Aerial Ropes and Clown: Cristina Geninazzi       

Aerial Ropes and Tightwire: Klara Mosseberg 

Aerial Ropes and Hand-Balance: Lisa Engberg

Magic and Noodles Manipulation: Miguel Muñoz Segura

Aerial Ropes and Clown: Zenaida Alcalde