Chapter 231: Sequins, Panache and Rabbits out of the Hat

I'm sitting here at my computer, the morning after the night before of Eurovision and it feels like the perfect moment to reflect on seeing Norvil & Josephine: Rabbits Out of the Hat at Jacksons Lane, in Highgate. A family show that serves up sequins and secrets, the politics of identity, and a good old-fashioned flourish of panache: who could ask for anything more?!

The show is set up as a Edwardian magic act. Brother and sister, Norvil and Josephine, are auditioning for the chance to upgrade their act to the Egyptian Hall. Norvil is the top-hat-and-handlebar-moustache magician of the old school, all Atlantic vowels and masterly self-importance. Josephine is his mischievous sister, officially the assistant, unofficially the far more interesting one: fed up with standing to the side, fired up by the suffragette moment, and increasingly unwilling to remain straightjacketed by family expectations that "assistants assist" and nothing more.

But very quickly, as you might hope from a magic show, it becomes clear that all is not quite what it seems. Norvil keeps sneaking little moments with a pair of pink sequinned dancing shoes (vive la vie en rose, douze points!) and the show begins to slip deliciously from period pastiche into something more tender: a story about transformation, mischief, self-revelation, and the long, glittery business of becoming who you actually are.

I know Christopher Howell from two clowning workshops years ago led by Ira Seidenstein, veteran actor, director, master clown and founder of ISAAC, with over fifty years and more than 140 productions behind him, including Cirque du Soleil and Slava's Snowshow. A PhD in Education and a lifetime on stage: as eloquent as he is funny, Ira is the Woody Allen of clowning. He lives in Brisbane now, and the last time I had seen him was on our sailing trip, so it was a particular joy to learn he had been working with Chris and Desireé as clowning and movement director on this production. The full creative team is listed in the programme (click here).

Desireé Kongerød I had come to know mostly through social media, through her pairing up with Chris and an Instagram account that captures her expertise and warmth in equal measure, her disciplines spanning comedy, contortion, stilt-walking and more. I had long wanted to see her 1920s-style butterfly dance, and in this show it was simply beautiful: delicate, playful, precise, full of that unique stage quality that feels both technically controlled and completely free, Josephine to a T. 

What I had forgotten was what a fantastic singer Chris is. There is something particularly lovely about being surprised by someone you know. His Norvil is comic, pompous, vulnerable and increasingly undone by the thing he is trying hardest to hide. The singing adds another layer entirely, as it did with Michael Twaits in Cupid's Cabaret (see previous post): suddenly the moustache and the patter give way to something more exposed, and the old-school magician becomes a person with a secret dream.

There is a politics to the piece, but not the sort that thumps you over the head with its own virtue. It is there in the structure of the act: who gets to stand centre stage, who is expected to smile and disappear, who is allowed ambition, who is allowed flamboyance, who gets billed first, who gets the applause. Josephine wants the power and agency of the magician, not just the spangled peril of the assistant. Norvil, meanwhile, is trapped by a different but related expectation: masculinity as top hat, control, command voice and stiff upper lip, when what he really longs for is pink shoes and a tap routine. The show understands that liberation is not a tidy business. It often looks ridiculous before it looks brave. It may involve a wig, a reveal, a wrong-footed sibling and a lot of sequins.

One of my favourite moments was the levitating table, which drifted so alarmingly out of control into the audience that you genuinely forgot to wonder how it was being done, which is of course precisely the point. And then there was the Sword of Glorious Repute, deployed against the Klimt cabinet with magnificent ceremony. I love that kind of theatrical double-cross. It plays so neatly with the contract between magician and audience: we know we are being tricked, we want to be tricked, and yet we are still delighted when the trick turns out to have been hiding somewhere else entirely. It also speaks to the deeper rhythm of the show. The thing you think is being revealed is not always the thing that matters. The real transformation is happening elsewhere, just out of sight, until suddenly it isn't.

And then there was Jacksons Lane itself.

"Oh, Jacksons Lane, Mum. It just makes me so nostalgic. It was my childhood really."

My youngest daughter is now fourteen, the worldly age my mother was when she realised she knew everything about life. That strange transition year into adulthood, when childhood is still close enough to touch but already slightly embarrassing. As we got out at Highgate tube, we both sighed. The tree tunnel was still there, and we raced each other up the steep steps to the main road. Catherine hadn't been to Jacksons Lane since we got back from our sailing trip, and she was reassured to discover that despite the external changes from the millions of pounds revamp, the new entrance, the enlarged café, the auditorium still felt like itself, new seats aside. There is something very powerful about returning to a place where your children were once small. You sit there with the teenager beside you, both of you pretending to be composed, while the walls quietly remember everything.

I had explained to Catherine that the show was a family show, but it was only when we entered the foyer and she saw the demographic of much younger children that she fully took it in. I could see her bristle. She was too old for this. So I reframed it quickly: she loves drama and we were here to see two wonderful performers who could teach her a trick or two, and - the big reveal for us both - I had somehow secured the very last seats in the house, right at the back. Had we been more conspicuous at the front, Rin really would have killed me. As it was, she relaxed. And I trusted Norvil and Josephine to do the rest.

On stage was a classic magician's set: props, velvet and gilt edges, the promise of danger yet all shall be well, with a splendidly decorated cabinet waiting for the inevitable woman-in-a-box business - a beautiful object waiting to be cut, contained, transformed and escaped from. Very Klimt-matic indeed.

The show has the generous, handmade quality of the best family theatre: the sense that adults have been taken seriously as audience members too, and that children are being trusted with more than noise and bright colours. There is comedy, magic, music, audience participation, and a lovely line in vaudevillian silliness. But underneath it all is something real about performance and permission. Who are we allowed to be? Who decided? How long do we have to keep assisting in someone else's act before we build our own?

By the end, Catherine was totally immersed. We both were. Magic, like clowning, has the potential to be embarrassing until it works on you. Then you remember that delight is not actually childish. It is just something teenagers have to pretend not to recognise for a while.

For me, the joy of Norvil & Josephine lay in its mixture of craft and heart: Desireé's luminous physicality, Chris's comic precision and vocal richness, the affection between the characters, the theatrical cleverness of the reveals, and the sheer visual pleasure of it all. It is a show with all that glitters, yes, but also with a quietly radical little pulse beating under the waistcoat.

Sequins and panache. Norvil's secret dream, whispered at first, then claimed out loud, centre stage, unapologetically. We could all do with a little more of that in life.

Not tonight, Josephine?

Oh, I think very much tonight.

Norvil & Josephine are on tour throughout the summer, from King's Lynn to Exeter, Bath, Farnham, Stratford-upon-Avon, Twickenham and culminating at the Ventnor Festival on the Isle of Wight at the end of July. Click here for their website and full tour dates as they have a packed summer ahead and well worth catching.

Encore!

There was another magic moment afterwards in the foyer of Jacksons Lane, this one unrehearsed. As we made our way out, I found Chris chatting with Sonia Benito, a magician with edge, and a face from another chapter entirely. I had last seen Sonia when she performed in the Shhh! cabaret I curated for Jacksons Lane. We had met originally training together at Freedom2Fly at the Hive in Hackney Wick, part of a family of aerialists brought together by Jair and Jess, who have since taken their magic to New Zealand, leaving a gap that neither of us has quite known how to fill, though a birthday milestone session at Flying Fantastic (see recent post) has reminded me that another such family space exists, and that the circus girl is still very much in residence. Finding Sonia there with Chris felt like the world folding in on itself, exactly the kind of serendipity Jacksons Lane specialises in.

Now in May, I'm reminded that used to be the month of the F2F pull-up challenge. Six was my maximum. I couldn't do even one now.

But I'm always up for an encore.

Chapter 230: Cupid's Cabaret

 

Life is a cabaret, old chum…

At Christmas, I had told Mum, aged 94, how much I was looking forward to spending my birthday with her on my day off, as luck would have it. Having overheard one of my sisters on the phone getting sympathy at the prospect of turning 60, "Oh, that's terrible, darling, terrible," I threw my own hat into the ring.

"Mum, I'm turning 50 soon. What do you think about that?"

"Well," she said archly, queen of the one-liner, "I suspect you're as smug as a bug in a rug."

As the youngest of six, with a 19-year age gap between my eldest sibling and I, she may have had a point.

In the last conversation I had with Mum, I told her how much I loved her, how enormously thankful I was for her, and how often I wished my three could have known the joy of my childhood, waltzing the car along country lanes to Hooked on Classics, accelerating over bridges so my stomach would flip, magically materialising a koala fresco out of watermarks on the kitchen ceiling (caused by overflowing bedroom basin, possibly mine!) ... 

"You know, Mum, you really are a tough act to follow."

"Well," she quipped, "good luck!"

She knew exactly. And so, somewhere deeper than I could reach, did I.

So when my birthday arrived I wasn't so smug. It turned out to be the day before Mum's funeral, and never had I felt such a sense of time waiting in the wings. When Valentine's Day came round a couple of days later... well, what good is sitting alone in your room? A sudden flash of to hell with it, life's too short had me searching for circus shows: something to celebrate and live up to my nom de plumage.

The recent brush with circus silks at Flying Fantastic (see previous post) seemed to call for a sparkle of sequins, and the Instagram algorithm gods duly flagged up Cupid's Cabaret at the Phoenix Arts Club. Something about rising from the ashes felt rather apt.

I wondered if I would recognise anyone. The last time I had been there was at the behest of Ade Berry, then Artistic Director of Jacksons Lane, who had introduced me to Alex Walton, the actor in Ade's tour-de-force "From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads" (see Chapter 161 - click here). Ghosts of the past, and Bowie himself not so very far away in spirit. The Phoenix is tucked down the same little Soho side street used in the opening sequence of Harry Potter, secreted in the original haunted dressing rooms where Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence and Laurence Olivier rehearsed Private Lives in 1930. The art deco interior worn to a comfortable gleam, walls lined with signed posters, the parquet floor humming with decades of creative electricity. You feel it the moment you walk in.

I needed that more than I knew.

Pulling out all the stops, I booked a corner table for two near the front for the 5.30pm show, with an aphrodisiac on the side of bubbles and truffle arancini. I donned a red dress and my trademark golden circus heels decorated with vintage trapeze performers, hopped on the back of my husband's Vespa, and we zoomed into Soho ready for a night of burlesque: to put the burla, the laughter, back into life.

This would be a real drag, and God knows I needed one.

The lights dimmed. The MC sparkled. Michael Twaits scanned the room, appraising the predominantly heterosexual couples, the Russians at the front, the girls primping on selfie mode, the alpha males with bulging biceps, and a burlesque protocol ensued to manage expectations.

"...And we'll have none of that judgey-judgey," he said, eyeballing my husband directly.

That made me laugh. Xav wouldn't. And anyway, I'd already given him the pep talk...

What followed was Wickedly musical mayhem: Jo Foley's seductive aerial, scorching fire, cutting edge comedy from Bunny Boiler's knife throwing act, Andromeda's impossible contortion, and that reminder of everything I love about circus and cabaret: the glitter, the ridiculousness, the danger, the skill, the permission to feel too much and laugh anyway. And as for Michael Twaits, beyond the repartee (Queen of the One Liners, encore!) the range of vocals and emotions, soaring, defiant, heart-wrenching, defying gravity, was the sucker punch I hadn't seen coming. In a week when my heart had been ripped out, belting out show tunes somehow flipped the energy round. 

After the show, I had the joy of meeting Andromeda, the elven phoenix, el duende, of the evening, and even got to speak a little Spanish, another passion of mine. We were moving our Vespa and he was reparking his bright red shiny Mini ahead of the second show. My own convertible Mini had died a death after nearly 20 years on the last day of the Autumn term, en route to the pub giving a lift to colleagues from school, quite literally smoking. There was something both nostalgic and so vibrant about that fire-engine red mini. Vibes of pure elation. As there were in the speed of riding pillion all the way home through the London night. I simply felt the rush of life.

All I had wanted at Christmas was to spend my milestone birthday with Mum. In the end, she ensured I did, as I gave the eulogy in church, standing next to her. I will be forever grateful to my five siblings for entrusting me with that.

"Lucy always has to have the last word!" Mum would always say.

Et voilà. The show must go on.

Chapter 229: Flying Fantastic, encore!

“Lucy, I’m really enjoying your English girl alter-ego of a Spanish seductress moonlighting as a circus performer.”

That DM popped up and made me laugh out loud. I love Instagram at its finest, when there are people who get it. Spain is my passion and my knee-jerk reaction to the thought of turning fifty was to google flights to Valencia and throw myself back into her arms. Every time I’m there I feel more myself. My Spanish friends notice it too.

But I am also a magpie. I love bling. I love sequins. I love stomach flips and swinging upside down.

In recent years circus has taken a back seat. Retraining as a teacher, family life, surgery in April and ongoing recovery has taking its toll. Training, cabaret nights, aerial classes all quietly fell away. And somewhere in the background a question was forming: what happened to that circus girl?

Then my friend Sam handed me an early birthday survival kit. Tiger balm. Lip balm. Paracetamol. A Nero’s coffee voucher. And a card that read: “Running away to the circus is always an option.”

With fifty on the horizon, I’d also been set a challenge to do 50 things I’d never done before. So when Flying Fantastic’s founder Edel announced a full-day aerial yoga workshop finishing with a gong bath, it felt like something new, and also the gentlest possible way back in.

I’ve known Edel for years. I knew the inspiration for her aerial gym came from time she and Chris spent living in Buenos Aires, discovering silks in a gym over there. What I hadn't appreciated until the workshop was that the Flying Fantastic logo is based on the Argentine flag. That made me smile. El mundo hispano and the world of circus overlapping again. ¡Dale!

Edel is so inspiring. Creative, funny, encouraging, inclusive and quietly brilliant at making everyone in the room feel capable. The space they have built over the years is more than a studio. It is a family home for aerial novices, pros and magpies alike. I am so grateful for her friendship and the worlds she keeps opening. The studio in Peckham is warm and welcoming, and so damn pretty with its chromatherapy ceiling. There were eight of us in the group, all so supportive of each other and lots of laughts. Instructors, amateurs, and my uni friend Jane in mermaid leggings that shimmered like an aerial siren. Despite being a complete novice, Jane had said yes immediately when I floated the idea and that meant so much. Turning up, trying something new, laughing through it together. She is a superstar.

First came the warm up stretches, then we played rock-paper-scissors suspended in silks. I lost every time! There were trust falls and gentle inversions, life really is better upside down. Then Edel switched it up in spangled leggings led us through a stealth core workout under disco lights. We had a good laugh swinging on our bellies in a birthday game of Hungry Hippos to grab juggling balls and scarves and chuck them in our hoops. I might have missed the memo about one item at a time, so guess who won that round... Muscle memory counts and it was reassuring to feel that I haven’t lost my touch. More than that, it reminded me how much joy lives in movement, in play, in shared ridiculousness. Jane bought me a Flying Fantastic sweater that reads “Circus Every Damn Day.” I am living in it over half term now.

In the afternoon things softened. Yin holds. Stillness. At one point the silks cradled my scalp and something in me unclenched. A quiet well of emotion rose and passed. Then cocooning to Grazia’s sun bath. Vibrations from crown to toe. Rainbow ceiling above. Grounded and floating all at once.

Afterwards came the surprise of cupcakes and candles, with everyone gathered round singing Happy Birthday. I blushed. I curtsied. I revelled in my invisible crown. When Jane and I stepped back out into Peckham Rye, we were both on a complete high. Centred. Steady. But also ready to swing from chandeliers.

There’s a line in Oliverio Girondo’s poem Espantapájaros, which I was first introduced to by my Chilean flatmate in Valencia when a student there, and it is also recited in full in Argentine Eliseo Subiela’s brilliant magical realism film El Lado Oscuro del Corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart).

After declaring, with typical irreverence, that he couldn't give a fig whether a woman's breasts bloom like magnolias or shrivel like dried fruit, the narrator draws a line in the sand, and on this he is irreducible:

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

He will not forgive a woman who does not know how to fly.

Well. Hello, my love.

Lucy está de vuelta.

Revuelta.

Revuela.

Winging it.
Encore. 

Chapter 228: The Last Word and the Golden Ball

 

An advert for Cirque de Soleil’s Corteo popped up on my Instagram feed earlier (Click here for trailer ):

“Meet Mauro, the Dreamer Clown, watching his own funeral. He suits up to perform one last time, to dive into his memories, before ascending to the afterlife in a bittersweet farewell.” 

A clown performing at his own funeral.

It took me straight back to a beautifully illustrated book by Tomie dePaola that my mother gave me as a child, called The Clown of God .

Set in medieval Italy, it tells the story of a young juggling clown whose special trick is to cascade a myriad of colours until they whirl into a rainbow, then, with a flourish, “And now, for the Sun in heaven,” a single golden ball tossed high into the air. 

His fame grows. Then, as the years pass, it begins to wane along with his skill. He drops the catch. No longer able to entertain, he grows old and poor and is chased from town to town, cold and hungry. Until one Christmas Eve he takes shelter in a Franciscan church. Watching the beauty of the procession and the candlelit singing, he notices a statue of Mary and the Christ child looking far too solemn for his liking.

So he performs. One last time.

“And now, for the Sun in heaven.”

The following morning the friars find him dead at the foot of the statue. The Christ child is smiling. In his outstretched hand is the golden ball.

I found that book again on Boxing Day when Mum asked me to look in the bookcase for a guide to Scottish birds she wanted passed on.

“Do you remember getting this for me, Mum? Shall I read it to you for old times’ sake?”

I had forgotten what a tear-jerker it was. Thank goodness my eldest sister Jenny was there. I made it as far as the arrival at the church before becoming overwhelmed. My voice gave way and she quietly took over and finished it. We sat in companionable silence for a bit and then conversation moved on. My birthday was approaching, falling on my day off, and I was planning to spend it with Mum.

Instead, I received a call at lunch-time from my sister, the first week back at school. Mum was going downhill rapidly. I had one lesson left that afternoon and that was all I had to give. The following day was my day off and I was able to spend it with Mum. She came to in the afternoon. I reminisced about the good times and thanked her for all the fun of the fair.

“You know Mum, you’re a tough act to follow.”

“Well, good luck!" she replied, "God bless!” and fell back to sleep.

I am blessed to be one of six, so alongside the carers and the angels from the Rosemary Foundation, we were able to play tag team at home. When I next went down at the weekend there were no more conversations. Just quiet time by her bed, or moments by the open window, taking a deep breath and looking out over the garden and across the Downs.

Mum loved hills and mountains, maybe those Highland genes. At the bottom of the garden she had built a small Swiss-style chalet, inspired by Alpine walking holidays and the refugio of St Francis in the woods outside Assisi. She named it Ystrad Fflur, The Valley of the Flowers, after the ruins of a monastery in Wales we once stumbled across on an impromptu road trip. Dad had taken up woodcarving in retirement and carved a sign which Mum painted. The same double act created the plaque of mountain flowers that hangs by the front door. There were hiccups too though. I still smile remembering the time Dad mowed down the wild meadow Mum had been carefully cultivating around the hut. He never made that mistake again. Mum could work wonders with mistakes anyway. When an overflowing basin (possibly mine) leaked through to the kitchen ceiling once, out came the stepladder and Mum used chalks and charcoal to transform the watermarks into the fresco of a koala sitting in a eucalyptus tree. 

Mum had taught me the art of butterfly kisses from a young age, eyelash fluttering to cheek. It is a tradition I passed on to my own children and I was reminded of that the Saturday after she died, when a bouquet of wild flowers labelled “The Butterfly Kiss” appeared anonymously on my doorstep. Since then turquoise butterflies have surfaced in small places. On a supermarket bag. In the delight of a bike ride. On a card from my department covered also in messages of support. I am told butterflies are common after loss. I had never heard that before. When Dad died, for me the messenger was, and still is, the garden robin.

I miss Mum. It hits in waves. And yet I am at peace too, for Mum had a complete life, leaving behind six children, sixteen grandchildren and a further sixteen great-grandchildren. When we all gathered to say goodbye, the tone was one of gentle presence, quiet dignity and stoicism, so entirely in keeping with her spirit, one of the heroines of planet earth, as a friend observed.

Being the youngest of six, it was a real privilege that my siblings entrusted the eulogy to me. This time my voice did not give way. When I stood to speak, the tightness in my chest and the jelly legs from the minutes before dissolved into something steadier. The liminal space where balance lives. A place of flow. Mum used to say, “Lucy always has to have the last word.” And this time, I spoke for us all.

Since time immemorial, stories have prepared us for the hardest moments of life. In her own gentle way, Mum had been preparing me too. Circus knows how to bow out. To release light into darkness. To send colour upward one final time. That is the power of the arts. A rehearsal for life, and sometimes for death.

“And should this sunlit world grow dark one day, the colours of her life will shine a quiet light to lead the way...” Barnum

Katharine Ann Margaret
Dearest Mum

8 July 1931 – 11 January 2026

Chapter 227: Stranger Things are happening...

 

This is a wandering piece, written at a threshold moment. I'm not sure where it is all going, but following a thread (Ariadne's?!) and a couple of loops back in time...

Opening Are the Double Doors of the Horizon

Some mornings feel electrically charged, as though the air itself is waiting for something to happen. New Year’s Eve has that quality, a thinning of the veil, a sense that stories are about to cross over.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2025. At 1 a.m. tomorrow, the final episode of Stranger Things will be released, suspended between one year and the next, a threshold moment if ever there was one.

At the weekend, an Instagram post from LA Opera popped up and quietly detonated my sense of narrative closure. Does Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten reveal how Stranger Things will end? it asked. The caption explained that Glass’ music threads through the series, including excerpts from Akhnaten, The Window of Appearances and Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Happily, I missed most of the explanations and watched the second half of the season in one fell swoop that evening, searching for clues of my own.

I have returned to Stranger Things after skipping a few seasons through my youngest, through school, through cultural osmosis, more than anything else. As a languages teacher, speaking the lingo matters. So in the run-up to Christmas, in lesson-time I had flashing technicoloured bulbs that could increase in intensity (¡ojo! se acercan los demogorgons…), and in the final class we decoded the Stranger Things secret message illuminating the street in Madrid’s festive Postigo de San Martín.

Timing is everything. Like the lights themselves, it’s clever the way the episodes have been strung out, tension stretched, held, then released, like any circus act worth its sawdust and stars. I hadn’t realised one final door would be left unopened, waiting for the wee hours after midnight.

The music draws me in too. Those soundtracks open a familiar door, the 1980s humming just beneath the surface. But it was the Akhnaten connection that split the frame entirely, widening the field.

Years earlier, as a student in Spain, I spent time living with a Sufi and hung out with her friends. I learned to listen for what sits beneath the story, the messages folded inside other messages, the seriousness that plays at being light. It’s a way of seeing that lingers, leaving you Rumi-nating on meaning, truth, and whatever waits quietly at the heart of antimatter.

Serendipity did the rest. I hadn’t twigged that the LA Opera post was a cover image followed by explanations, so I spent the evening tracing patterns without a map. Instagram became a gameboard, tagging, replying, playful call and response. A friend shared a skit about Vecna’s beauty routine and suddenly it clicked. The costume. A dead ringer for Gandini Jugglers in Akhnaten. I laughed out loud.

Then came the moment.

In an alternate reality, as Heart and Soul drifted over the sound of children playing, I was taken back to learning on the piano, duetting with my sister. Had I unwittingly been playing Philip Glass all along?! I’d assumed it was Gandini Juggling who introduced me to his music. 

And yes, it all comes back to circus. Stranger things have happened.

My introduction to Glass came on Mother’s Day, when juggler José Triguero announced a Glass homage performance with Gandini Juggling at the British Museum, part of a community initiative ahead of Akhnaten opening at the English National Opera the following month.

After clowning around in a red nose with a daffodil, to the delight of my littlest, I legged it with her elder sister to Russell Square to watch.  Click here: Chapter 133 - Mother's Day at the British Museum.Blown away by the music as much as by the notes and spheres released, suspended and whirling through the air, there was a sense of inevitability.  

One of my dearest friends, Carolyn, partner in crime on so many adventures, is obsessed with Glass. He is her circus. Still, we couldn’t quite justify a night at the opera. As the final performance approached, the sense of something slipping away grew unbearable. So we went for it.

The last two tickets in the house. Right up in the gods, known in French as Les Enfants du Paradis. The phrase also names the classic film I was first introduced to by circus performer Hamish Tjeong, and which later resurfaced, beautifully reimagined by Giffords Circus.

[Shhh! cabaret 2016 on Youtube  / Click here: The making of Giffords Circus "Les Enfants Du Paradis"]

We were rows apart until a sweet student visiting from China noticed our predicament and graciously moved so we could sit together.

Exhausted, mother of three, moonlighting in circus, necking back bubbles like water, I nodded off at points and surfaced again in the most surreal dreamscape. Akhnaten is trippy like that. At the curtain call, I snapped a photo of the cast and inadvertently captured Glass himself, standing quietly at the centre. One for posterity.Click here: Chapter 136 - Akhnaten and Gandini Juggling

Later came lockdown. We signed up to the Met Opera app and Akhnaten went on repeat. The children drifted in and out. It became part of their sonic landscape, up there with Bowie, Dylan and Queen.

The opera was directed by Phelim McDermott. His wife, Matilda Leyser, later directed an exhibition on circus and motherhood at the Roundhouse.Click here: Chapter 142 Me Mother.

A year or two later, McDermott and Glass worked in New York with my niece, set designer Fly Davis (see www.flydavisdesign.com), on a piece for that premiered at the Manchester International Festival about reaching into people in comas through music, rather than bringing them out. Sounds familiar?

I chatted to her about it yesterday morning, after having taken my Qi Gong practice outdoors for once, by our Common pond. Akhnaten is, after all, a work of sun worship, and standing there at sunrise, before a conference of birds, time seemed to slow itself right down. The piece, The Tao of Glass, turns out to be returning to the UK this July, landing in the West End. One to watch out for. ¡Ojo! Encore. As is her current show 

One of the goosebump moments in Akhnaten for me comes when Zachary James’ baritone booms out, “Open are the double doors of the horizon”. The line lodges itself in the body. It has become a family refrain, spoken half in jest, half in reverence. So when he returned to the West End as Hades in Hadestown (meet him as Hades by clicking here), I had to get there.

Watching it, I realised the pull was the same. Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Hades and Persephone. And only last night, thought of Ram and Sita too, whose homecoming is marked by Diwali, the festival of light. The wooden carving we brought back from Ubud many moons ago has sat quietly in our bedroom for years, though I am only just beginning to understand the the twist in the story it carries, including its complications. Different cosmologies, same geometry. A descent, an exile, a return. Light leaving, light restored. Death not as an ending, but as a doorway.

The release of LUX last month by Rosalía has further stoked the fire. An album of sex, desire and violence, rooted in twelve female mystics, it moves between booming orchestral passages and flamenco flame. It feels less like a collection of songs than a sustained act of illumination. Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi, she sings. I am nothing. I am the light of the world.

That line lands somewhere I recognise. Luceo non uro, I shine, I do not burn, my Scottish mother’s clan motto. Different herstories, arriving at the same understanding. This is where Celt meets duende.

Once you start listening that way, the same refrain surfaces everywhere. In Madeleine Peyroux' song Anthem, or ,Leonard Cohen lyrics. Further back still, in Hemingway. The idea that we are cracked, broken open, and that this is precisely how the light finds its way in. Different voices, different centuries, tuning into the same frequency, using art to amplify the signal.

I began For Whom the Bell Tolls in Spain while my father was dying. We visited Ronda, both the novel’s setting and the place where my father proposed to my mother, third time lucky. Akhnaten opens with a funeral. Death stalks Stranger Things. But so does light.

That, I think, is the point. Perhaps the universe has only a handful of messages at its core, and artists simply learn how to listen. They catch the signal, surf the (radio)wave, and amplify.

As we step cautiously into a new year, gently and slowly, aware that while there is much to be thankful for, many friends are weathering difficult chapters, and I have a couple of my own, I return to that feeling from this morning. The air charged. The veil thinned.

Whatever you are juggling, may the music and the light be with you.

It wouldn't exist without the shadows.

Happy New Year. Here’s to a opening the next chapter...

Chapter 226: The Odd Ones

 

The Odd Ones – Finding Flow

“The Odd Ones is a show about the differences of people. A social and physical dance about finding your place in a group, being authentically you, and about the adaptations we all have to manage when being with others.”

 Simon Granit Ossoinak, director and co-creator with Stasy Terehhova and Cristian Boscheri<
co-produced with Circusstad, and Perplx, a circus production hub and workspace for contemporary cirucs in Flanders.

https://www.simongranit.com/creations   For The Odd Ones video trailer on Vimeo click here..

It was a school night, and I was exhausted. My Year 10s have been practising dialogues about turning down invitations, and I had every excuse lined up myself: recovering from back surgery, lessons to prep, books to mark, supper to cook. Only curiosity won. 

The title The Odd Ones had me from the start. Circus is full of odd ones, my tribe of free spirits exploring the edges of what’s possible. And there was more: a long-overdue catch-up with Ade Berry, Artistic Director of Jackson’s Lane, and another dear friend, Lucy, a fellow teacher and circus lover who had never yet seen a show there. The promise of a large glass of wine, good company, and something strange and beautiful tipped the scales.

Lucy and I sank into our seats, two weary teachers on a school night, and of course a family of four children settled right in front of us. I nudged Lucy, and she winked as if to say, “So much for our night off!” The glimmer of a grinch was short-lived; the kids were immaculately behaved, eyes wide with curiosity. When their mother turned round to ask what was happening after the show and I mentioned the Q&A, her son’s face lit up. “That’s like behind the scenes?” he whispered, as if I’d handed him the universe’s best secret.

The lights dimmed.

Simon moved first, gliding diagonally across the floor, hands and feet crossing in counterpoint as if rewriting gravity. Perhaps it was knowing his Finnish heritage, my mind leapt northward to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, to the mulefa, those strange wheeled creatures whose movement is both awkward and sublime. Then came Stasy, spinning serenely, a whirling dervish lost in her own orbit. Cristian followed, hesitant and angular, all elbows and knees, looping a strap round himself until he tangled in a gangly knot. If Mr Bean had studied under Alexander Vantournhout  (see post Chapter 129 on Aneckxanderr) this would be his act. Deadpan, elastic, and utterly captivating. The audience chuckled, drawn in.

The opening unfolded through solos and duets, one performer always slightly the odd one out. Cristian’s awkwardness marked him first, but what struck me wasn’t his oddness so much as his awareness of it. Stasy’s otherworldliness offered counterbalance, coaxing him out through quiet grace and warmth. Simon, by contrast, was a storm of cartwheels, flips, and lightning energy.

As the show evolved, their quirks began to echo, overlap, and finally blend. They mimicked, borrowed, and absorbed one another’s movements until difference became dialogue. Cristian’s journey wasn’t about changing who he was but recognising his own power. Stasy grounded the chaos; Simon fractured and reformed the rhythm with impulsive energy that drove the dynamic forward.

I really enjoyed how the show carried the imprint of street theatre and that direct, unguarded dialogue between movement and emotion. Cristian’s breakdancing brought a raw, syncopated energy that made his awkwardness even more expressive, speaking in its own rhythm, a physical language that slipped between vulnerability and humour. He’s an extraordinary physical actor, disjointed yet fluid, comic yet tender, folding the rhythm of the street into the discipline of the stage.

Beneath it all pulsed a score of loops, synths, and heartbeat rhythm. In the Q&A later, we learned the composer Stijn van Strien (see soundcloud - click here) had spent two decades as a DJ, and you could feel it. The music didn’t accompany the piece; it shaped it. The performers moved with and against its current, sometimes gliding in sync, sometimes breaking away into silence. That conversation between beat and body, pulse and pause, became its own choreography.

Cristian and Simon wove through one another, arms and legs interlaced in a human puzzle, pausing in mirrored curiosity as if to ask, “Where do I begin and you end?” Stasy crouched low, testing her balance, then Simon lifted her, placing her lightly on Cristian’s curved back where she hovered in improbable stillness.

Later, the trio sat in a row, legs scissoring like a living Newton’s cradle, momentum rippling down the line. Another sequence had them leaning back, spine to spine, a bendy domino chain. When Cristian, the tallest and least flexible by circus standards, couldn’t find the angle, they simply switched places, adapting and supporting, making space for one another’s limits.

Then came the collision. Simon launched himself full force into Cristian’s arms. It looked aggressive but wasn’t; it was an explosion of energy seeking containment. Cristian caught him with quiet steadiness, and the gesture became a metaphor for community, for how we hold each other’s wildness and create soft landings.

As their bodies found unison, something otherworldly emerged. Their limbs intertwined until they resembled a multi-limbed creature, part Geek Love freak, part Malik Ibheis dreamscape, grotesque yet tender, absurd yet beautiful. It was a choreography of difference refusing categorisation.

Each performer spoke a different language - parkour, ballet, breakdance, clowning, mime - but over time those dialects merged. Mimicry became empathy. By the end, there was no longer an odd one out. The friction and laughter had given way to flow. What began as three distinct bodies became one evolving rhythm. The Odd Ones turned out not to be about strangeness, but connection.

---

Creation and Conversation

In the Q&A, the company spoke with Artistic Director Ade Berry about how The Odd Ones came to life. It began as a development of Simon’s graduation solo, sparked when he mimicked a fellow performer’s clowning moves and then developed from there the thought of how “oddness” exists in contrast with others, hence the desire to expand from solo to collective. The dramaturgy sketched out as an arc that and detail developed as through the dynamic between the performers as they responded to the kind of open-ended questions that fuel creative process: What happens if I push here? If I mirror
you? If I try that again? Slowly, a pattern began to breathe.

The piece evolved over eight weeks between September and May, shaped by three “outside eyes.” One explored teamwork and trust, another, coming from a street theatre background, focused on emotion and how it’s carried through movement, while the third refined choreography and light. The use of lighting praised by audience members in the Q&A.

Stasy, clearly an introvert, admitted she was more comfortable moving than talking, yet she spoke with the same quiet eloquence she brings to her body. She described how they built sequences that showcased each performer’s strengths while transforming their weaknesses into points of connection. Cristian spoke of trust, of how exaggerating real interactions onstage revealed truth through play. Ade picked up on that thought, noting that adulting consists in (re)connect to that the inner child.

Simon agreed. “The choreography might not change,” he said, “but we do.” Each night they inhabit the same structure yet find new selves within it. That evolution, he added, came in part from asking their parents about childhood quirks and folding those memories back into their characters. 

This morning, reading Philippa Perry’s latest on Substack, I found her reflection on annata, the Buddhist idea of “no fixed self”, echoes that same philosophy.

“The self isn’t a solid, unchanging thing you can pin down once and for all. Instead, you are a flow of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories that come together in this moment. You don’t have to uncover one perfect, authentic self and defend it forever. You can allow yourself to change and to keep discovering yourself.”

That is precisely what The Odd Ones celebrates: belonging without erasing difference, and identity not as a fixed point but as something found in motion.

Afterwards we all decamped to the pub. It was a joy to meet Simon, Cri and Stasy, exhausted yet energised. It was great as well to meet Charlie Holland in person, former juggler and one-time programme director at Circus Space, now circus historian, writer, and reviewer of London shows for Kate Kavanagh’s The Circus Diaries. He is also the biographer of The Marvellous Craggs, soon to be published.

Together we raised our glasses, kippis, to the odd ones everywhere.

A Teacher’s Eye

With both parent and teacher hat on, I recognised the personalities on stage instantly. Stasy’s gentle introspection, Simon’s impulsive curiosity, Cristian’s shy clown.. I see that spectrum every day: daydreamers adrift in thought, ADHD whirlwinds unable to sit still because the world moves too slowly, anxious thinkers threading their way through the noise, my classroom in motion.

Circus understands that world. It gives permission to be fully human, to fidget, to fail, to connect.

Simon mentioned that in Sweden, the state shares half the cost with schools to bring performances like this to students. How I wish that were possible here. The Odd Ones would speak to my students, not just those with identified needs, but every teenager caught between Who am I? and Where do I belong?

The next morning, still glowing from the night before, I brought trailer and discussion of The Odd Ones into my Year 10 Spanish lesson. I wrote them a short dialogue for translation inspired by the evening that dovetailed neatly into their current topic; we laughed and talked about what it means to take risks and be seen.

With our World Languages Day coming up, celebrating over a hundred heritages, I’ll remind them of this piece, how Italian, Swedish-Finnish, Estonian, and Dutch performers can move together seamlessly, switching between languages of body and speech. My own Swedish and Italian students in year 7 were glowing that morning too when I showed them the clip, proud to see their cultures, as well as natures, reflected. They stayed behind at break for an encore! 

Coda:

I came to Jackson’s Lane for the play, but also because I knew Ade is leaving after eighteen years as Artistic Director, and that is a fact he mentioned in the Q&A. Ade has been instrumental in forging international circus links, travelling the world and building bridges, especially with the Finnish Institute. Those connections have shaped my own life: from seeing Ilona Jäntti dancing in the woods, to learning “kippis!” from Sakari Männistö and marvelling at the whole Gandini juggling; to Onni Toivonen bringing the house down in the first Shhh!  cabaret ( see post: click here - thanks to Hamish Tjeong for the introduction) that I curated for Jacksons Lane two years running; to the warmth of acro-duo Sasu Peistola & Jenni Lethinen and the sublime Hanna Moisala, from shibari to tightwire. And of course, the Moomins, I will get to Jacksons Lane for that Christmas show! Through it all runs a thread of oddness, maybe the very thing that drew me, Little My. While really I was too caught up in its flow with Ade and Lucy, pictured below, to feel maudlin at the time, there was a certain poignancy. A wondering. Will that connection remain? Watch this space...

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