A couple of weeks ago, this photo on Instagram caught my eye while I was scrolling. The Observer magazine was sharing a feature about journalist John Simpson, who had just left the paper after fifteen years as a serious crime reporter to become a full-time clown.
This is brilliant, I thought. How did he come across clowning? What inspired the move? I did some digging, partly wondering whether I’d missed my own vocation as a journalist. Though with my love of puns, headline editor for the Sun might have been a better bet. John’s Instagram bio said he could be found over on Substack, a platform I’d been toying with the idea of moving to myself. So I followed a clown onto Substack, and we connected there.
Having left teaching after six years, I was curious about the journey of someone else who’d made the leap. Not a little jealous, too, that not only does he have a way with words, he also has somewhere to leap to. I’m still figuring that part out.
For me, leaving the school where I’d been teaching for years, after investing so much time and energy in the job, doesn’t come without a wobble. That’s why I’ve thrown myself back into writing and looking ahead. To try and find my purpose, my path, my voice, and my use.
Part of me has been questioning that choice lately, if I’m honest. It's taking too much time to write each post, second-guessing every word and, in the process, missing the moment while the stories are racking up. As every clown knows, timing is everything.
But then I look back over what I've written since the last day of term, and I see twenty posts and over twenty thousand reads, which keeps me going. Some days you simply need to show up for people.
And reading the stories of other people fighting the good fight is inspiring. A video of his act, showing John in a pseudo-martial-arts get-up, reminded me of a colleague at school who offered to teach me some self-defence moves alongside how to do a cartwheel, a childhood dream of mine. It didn’t quite go to plan - much as I love learning a new trick, not quite there yet for turning head over heels. But it did bring home to me that I was looking for a teacher, and a safe space to be me. Maybe all I needed was to watch a zen master in idiocy in action, I reflected.
Which is how I ended up on Friday night at Lost the Sauce comedy cabaret, @wearelostsauce on Instagram, watching him do just that.
It was a brilliant night. Another story.
John has also set up Clown Lab London with Gabriela Chojnacki, a community-driven project providing space for training, games and play, where they teach and which has hosted workshops with the likes of slapstick maestro Enrico Touché, coming to Jacksons Lane later this month, and multi-faceted dark clown and guru Peta Lily, who I first met through her shows Chastity Belt, and Topless.
In the meantime, loving to bring people together as I do, I couldn’t resist getting John along to Jacksons Lane for the last sharing of the season at Circus Hub. John has come to clowning through the theatrical improv route rather than a circus space, and I wanted him to meet a couple of clowns from that world. There’s overlap for sure. Sean Kempton and Michaela O’Connor, the genius double act who founded Kook Ensemble (Sand getting rave five star reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe), were directing Zirkus Morsa. I was sure that physical comedy would find its way into the show, and it did, along with the chance to introduce everyone afterwards.
And just when he was laughing at me, “Lu, is there anyone here you don’t know?!”, there was a “Hello, John!” Ha! It’s not just me. Perfect timing.
So check out John’s Substack "The Shiny Things". Great title to attract a magpie reader like me. He writes beautifully. Funny too. There was one moment reading one of his pieces when he made me spurt out my coffee, and live at the cabaret he has since made me choke down my wine.
I’m not yet convinced about my presence on Substack too, but I'm beginning to think I may have followed the right clown...
A hollering off-stage and the screech of a train coming to a halt. What's going on? A face peeps out from behind the curtain, then another above it, and another above that. There's something delightfully Godot-esque about the squabbling questions as they emerge, one by one, hauling boxes. "We could be here for some time…" Welcome to the world of Circus Parade, a new musical in development by Jack Horner, who has written, directed and composed it. It's the first production from his newly formed company, Jack Horner & Company.
Given what I know of Jack's career, the fact that he was bringing a circus musical to Jacksons Lane wasn't a surprise. But the fact that he composed all the music too really bowled me over. Before I actually met him at National Circus, I first saw Jack, without knowing it, in Barnum at Chichester Festival Theatre over a decade ago, along with Kook Ensemble Director Michaela O'Connor, when Upswing's Vicki Amedume was circus consultant. There was a moment where they were spinning in umbrellas. I have never forgotten the delight and creativity of it. Latterly, I know Jack went on to do artistic work for Cirque du Soleil on global tours like Totem and Luzia, before heading to the West End as aerial director for Moulin Rouge!.
Circus Parade is based on the memoirs of Jim Tully, who ran away with a travelling circus in the Deep South in the 1900s, and all the colourful characters he met along the way, all set beautifully to the blues. Barnum meets Hadestown, I thought, and I was not to be disappointed. This sharing, about half an hour long, was part of a season of sharings at Jacksons Lane's Circus Hub, where artists open their work and their world to the public for the princely sum of £1. Even so, in August many people are away, especially on Bank Holiday weekends, and it speaks volumes that the place was packed out.
Talk about the blues. I turned up feeling a bit tender myself. After six years teaching in the state sector, I’ve stepped away from the classroom for now, with full-time the only option on the table, to take stock and make some space for my writing. This is my 20th post since the summer holidays began, so that space is clearly being put to use. I miss my students more than words, but I’m also taking a financial leap of faith, choosing freelance work over the security of a monthly pay cheque. So the precarious life of a bunch of misfits on the road, in the shadow of the Great Depression, their skills consistently undervalued and exploited, carried more resonance than it might otherwise have done. I’m not here to play the violin, just to explain why it hit home.
I settled into my seat. What a treat. A band of musicians on stage alongside actors and circus artists who also rotated in roles. What’s the performance equivalent of ambidextrous? “Multi-talented” works, but even that feels inadequate. Anway, the last time I was here, Clamber Collective were also on stage with musicians and physical performers, working in completely improvised territory, a different discipline entirely from the scripted precision on show here, each demanding its own kind of skill and nerve. I am struck again by the sheer diversity of technique and style that has been on offer at Circus Hub throughout the summer.
The action on stage freezes and on comes a wandering troubadour with a guitar, taking the spotlight. Jim Tully, played by Maxwell Darnell, is about to take us back to where this whole journey started, introducing the characters we’ll meet along the way. There are echoes of Barnum in his nostalgia and fondness for those sawdust-and-dream days. A drumbeat comes in, duh-dum, and soon the melody carries the feel of a train on the tracks, and we are rattling along. We are transported to the fare-dodging hobo world of the young Jim Tully, dodging the “dicks”, the private detectives employed by the train companies. Here, the world of the picaresque meets Keystone Cops comedy as an escape runs riot round, and through, the audience.
With the vagrancy laws “hanging over me like a noose,” Jim Tully joins forces with the cleanest of hobos, Damien James’ Rosebud, heading south to join a travelling circus in Baton Rouge. So when Rosebud asks, “Are you sure you wanna be seen walking with me?”, the racial undercurrent is clear. He is navigating Birth of a Nation territory, but Jim gladly accepts his company, not to mention the soap and food. Rosebud carries all the weight of someone whose life is tough, but doesn’t let it grind him down, and keeps going with a humorous, gentle resilience. Maybe that explains the name. I loved this pairing of characters, the young lad with a flash of dreams and a history of giving people the slip, and the gentle giant of a pragmatic friend. And when the same actor later plays Jim’s circus mentor, the lion tamer Denna, there is a balance there too. But Denna’s friendship has to be earned, and if Jim wants this strange little community to trust him, he has to share his story with them too. Jim, who has just fallen for aerialist Alice, jumps right in when she tells him, “no fairytales, mind!” Isn’t that what I’ve been doing these past twelve years with this blog, I wonder?
So Jim takes to his soapbox, the lion’s travel crate, and his guitar solo shows how versatile this cast is. His song of Hard Times has all the punch of a Frank Turner punk rock ballad, with a touch of the Irish about it, and it’s here that we finally meet the circus in terms of skills and acrobatic performance, as the physicality of the company really comes into its own. First up Simeon Montague springs into action, with a spontaneous joy that draws Alice in, while another acrobat, Bella Diosa, does graceful backbend spins in rotation, and Georgie Hutchinson and Will Meager bring the hand-to-hand. For me, that moment captures the joy and camaraderie of the circus community, and it’s crucial to why Jim is so drawn to Circus Moonshine and his growing friendship there. His opening up leads Denna to respond in kind.
Denna’s guitar playing and voice in “Ain’t No Use”, singing of acceptance, are mesmerising. It is a powerhouse of a gospel number, with Jim on bass this time, Jessica Daley on sax solo, and the cast in chorus. Oh lordy, it is just glorious. “When you play, them lions, they listen.” I love how the music is woven into the narrative, his guitar becoming the secret to lull(aby)ing the lions into submission. It took me back to sailing for a moment, to the French Polynesian islander who would serenade a couple of nurse sharks on guitar without fail each evening. Lions are also a metaphor for worries, as Denna makes clear when asked how to control them: “Look ’em in the eye. Turn your back and they’ll bite you in the arse.”
Unfortunately for Lila, the Strong Woman (Jessica Daley), she makes the mistake of looking Trouble in the eye, approaching the new acrobat Anton (Will), the very picture of the romantic hero from the novels we’re told she has devoured over the years. But we already know better. Out of earshot, we’ve heard him mock her as “the fat heifer”, and we can see the snake oil beneath his charm.
Fast forward to Act Two, with the scenes linked together by Jack coming on stage with narrative updates, so that we really do experience the whole arc of the musical. Here we learn that Anton has proposed to Lila, who has given all her money to him to buy the plot of land where they will build a new life together. Of course he disappears without a trace. There is no surprise there, but there is in the number Lila sings, a scene in its own right. What a voice. Her soulful yearning for the presence of this vanished man made me well up for her. What was really brilliant about the choreography was the way a circus artist becomes her mirror at the dressing table, then reaches out to comfort her in her vulnerability. It was so touching. I’ve never known such betrayal, but in that moment I really felt her pain. That’s the power of art. “Gets me every time,” said Jack afterwards.
The profit made from the misfortune of others takes me back to sailing through Martinique, where, in the ruins of the prison at Saint-Pierre, the Paris of the Caribbean, I learned about Ludger Sylbaris, born Louis-Auguste Cyparis, one of only three survivors of the eruption of Mount Pelée, which killed more than 30,000 people within ten minutes. He survived because he was being held in solitary confinement in a prison basement. Rescued from his cell, pardoned and eventually taken on tour with Barnum & Bailey Circus, he displayed his scars and recounted his survival alongside a replica of his prison cell. He became “the man who lived through doomsday”, forced to tell his tale of horror again and again and again. In both cases, the suffering of a Black man became part of the spectacle, an exotic frisson that could be packaged and sold. The parallel is uncomfortable and makes the tragedy in Circus Parade so poignant. These are real lives, shaped by poverty, racism, exploitation and extraordinary resilience.
And now we hear Alice’s own story of hardship, what it cost her and how the Moss-Haired Lady was born.
Here Alice splits in two, body and soul, as Georgia sings with a voice that is crystal clear, sweet and rousingly defiant, while Bella takes to the air in a real showstopper. I loved the use of a hair-hanging act to convey the pain, betrayal and fierce fire that has fuelled Alice’s life on the road. She spins and spins, and the length and endurance of the act become part of the storytelling. It is phenomenal. The spinning is insane, but what gets you is that she keeps going.
By now, the music, the story and the circus have become inseparable. Jack’s achievement is not simply that he has written, directed and composed a musical. It is that he has created a world where the music carries the story, the story gives meaning to the circus, and the physical skills become another language entirely.
And perhaps that is why Circus Parade caught me where it did. As Alice says about the travelling life, it eats you. I get that. And while I’m sitting at something of a Miller’s Crossing in my career, there is something very familiar and cathartic in watching these folk navigate the obstacles. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. But they keep going.
Circus is, after all, about falling, catching, balancing, trusting. You miss the trick. You get back up. Someone catches you. You learn to trust again.
Not because it tells us everything will be all right.
But because it shows us what people do when it isn’t.
I want to see the whole thing now.
Lead photo credit: Mark Morreaux. Cast from left to right back row: Simeon, Bella, Will, Georgia, Damien Front row: Georgie, Maxwell
Musical direction: Tamara Saringer Musician: Tony Bowen Choreography: Vanessa Vince-Pang Lighting Design: Zoe Spurr Rigging: Tim Lenkiewicz Production Management: Acrobatic Arts
What a great concept! Could I convince my own kids to come along? Not a chance.
To be fair, two are now fully fledged adults and the third is a teenager on the cusp. Gone are the whimsical Barnum days. National Circus graduation pieces are more their vibe these days. But perhaps I am a regular circus Wendy, still inclined to follow the circus off to Neverland, and I was curious to see what Leap Circus had cooked up, particularly as this was billed as the first kids’ cabaret of its kind.
There were other reasons to make the trek to Woolwich Works, somewhere I’d never actually been before. Ade Berry is the new Programmer there, with years of circus programming behind him (and ahead!) and it is always good to catch up. I had also clocked that Acosta Danza’s creative hub is in the building next door, where they run classes. And then there was Lydia Harper, creator of Leap Circus, putting it all together. Lydia has such a director’s eye and vision, on top of all her experience as a performer herself. I first saw her way back at Jacksons Lane, before she joined Cirque du Soleil.
In the pre-kids days I knew the Docklands well, having lived there for a couple of years. Since then I’ve been over on the other side of London and it has been a right old trek. So hallelujah for the Elizabeth Line. A mere ten minutes or so after changing from the Northern Line and I was there.
Well, nearly.
As ever, I was running late, after a long, extended brunch with my Parkrun community after a morning volunteering, so I put on Revel Puck’s playlist on Spotify to get me legging it up the escalators at Woolwich and take the stress out. It certainly did the trick. I was laughing as I approached the building listening to 99 Luftballoons, only to look up and see the Punchdrunk building opposite, complete with a sinister character holding a red balloon. Very It.
Punchdrunk was my first immersive theatre experience. I went to Battersea Arts Centre for The Masque of the Red Death when I was pregnant and nearly fainted with fright as I donned the mask and cloak. I had gone because my niece was working on the set; ironically, she was over in the US at the time with Punchdrunk director Felix Barrett, taking The Drowned Man to Broadway. I could feel the goosebumps. Thank goodness it was broad daylight. The contrast with what I was about to see made me smile.
I had time to run to the bar and grab a drink. Was it appropriate to order wine at a kids’ cabaret? I opted for an alcohol-free beer, then spotted the line-up of circus mocktails. Brilliant touch.
And then came the first surprise: the cabaret was outside.
There was a tug of nostalgia seeing all those parents with young children. I do and I don’t miss that. Mostly, I was rather glad I could hover at the back and watch. And what I watched was a show that understood its audience brilliantly.
Lydia was our compere and she ruled the roost, setting the tone from the outset. The show knew its key audience was under ten, but never patronised them, while making sure the adults had plenty to enjoy too.
What better way to begin than with a Minion diving into aerial silks? Constanza Ruff, in full Minion mode, brought the slapstick immediately, accompanied by that upbeat, banana-crazy anthem. There were splits, bananas and plenty of visual silliness. The energy was up before we had barely begun.
Then Donald Craig appeared with Be Our Guest. What a voice. I’d started following him on Instagram when the cast list was announced, so I knew a little of his background as a musical theatre actor and singer, “the voice of Hong Kong Disneyland”. Live, though, it was something else. A resonating voice, charisma and a real ability to engage the audience. Before long everyone was singing along, and later dancing too. It was a fantastic way to welcome the kids into the world of cabaret.
And then came the cabaret twist - contortion with a tennis spin. I’d last seen something like this at La Clique, with a performer worming his way through a racket. Here Jo Foley came on like a pro, in sun visor, whites and neon pink socks and wristbands. She was blimming bendy and hilarious. A cheeky flash of skort that would delight a child’s sense of humour, but with just enough of a flirtatious nod to the adult world of cabaret to make the grown-ups laugh too.
How to turn spectacle into chaos? Hundreds of plastic balls. They were distributed through the crowd and the children were invited to lob them into the basket of their favourite performer. Brutal. Hilarious. Chaos ensued. I deliberately paid no attention to who won.
Ed Stephen then came out with some neat lassoing tricks, making it all look ridiculously easy. I know from experience that it isn’t. Years ago, when our engine broke down in St Lucia, I had to lasso our boat to a post on a pier in front of a crowd. It took me three goes. Back at Woolwich Works, Ed nailed it and I imagined that over the holidays a few skipping ropes would now end up knotted.
Lydia kept things moving with a trick she hadn’t done for over a decade, she told us. Should she do it? Roars of encouragement. Of course she did, and up in the air she spun in a dizzying neck spin.
Then, after warming up by threading through the crowd, Physical Fool Sophia Knox-Miller tumbled onto the stage at speed in an orange boiler suit. She persuaded the adults to make fools of themselves to the children’s enormous delight before carrying them off through the crowd, a banner billowing out behind her.
Finally came a seaside turn from Ania Giannattasio, wandering on in mask and flippers, complete with a neat beach towel trick, aerialist chalk deployed as suncream and some wonderful clowning before she took to the hoop. I will never forget that heel hang of joy, performed with a towelling turban on her head.
In neat continuity, Donald returned for Under the Sea, and suddenly a whole load of bubbles were released across the stage. The children chased them, danced around them and tried to catch them, and for a few minutes the entire space became a whirl of movement and delight. His presence with the children was a real joy; they just gravitated to him.
Then Ed returned for a showstopping juggling finale, complete with confetti cannon. He knows how to work a crowd, and by this point it was entirely his.
And just when you thought it was over, up popped an inflatable banana that seemed to dance its way along. An inspired final addition from producer Anna.
This is where the show really got me. It wasn’t simply that the acts were fantastic. It was the sheer variety, and the pleasure of having no idea what was coming next.
A singer. An airborne Minion (also on stilts). A contortionist. A juggler. A clown. An aerialist on hoop.
There is something refreshing about seeing cabaret stripped back to its most basic ingredients: a dynamic performer, a fantastic act, music, surprise, audience participation and the sheer pleasure of watching somebody do something extraordinary with their body.
And here, those ingredients were handed straight to the children. They weren’t simply spectators watching a show made for them. They were part of the cabaret. They shouted, sang, danced, threw balls, chased bubbles and decided who they liked best. The adults got to be silly too. Sometimes we all need to reconnect with our inner child.
Afterwards, one child summed the whole thing up in the vox pop rather better than I could:
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
I left, albeit sober, but not a little Punchdrunk.
P.S. My back went the next day. It was pointed out to me that at least I had climaxed at Woolwich Works. Possibly not one for the kids’ programme!
A collective noun. A clamber of circus artists? There is a certain onomatopoeia about the word. It brings to mind a climbing human tower, like the Catalan castellers, and a hint of anarchy too. The roots of the contemporary circus scene that stretch back to the early days of Archaos. The promise of stomp, a riot.
I very nearly missed them.
Life had been busy, and, queen of the power nap that I am, I had grabbed a siesta. I came to and, daydreaming, made myself a cup of tea and started doodling in bed. A whisper came first. I have somewhere to be, what day is it...? Then the sledgehammer hit.
Crap. It's Friday. Jacksons Lane. 5pm.
Still groggy, I jumped out of bed and grabbed the most colourful clothes I could find. Tangerine orange, paired with a float of patterns threaded through with royal blue. It just felt right, and I had no time to second guess myself, making it to the theatre with minutes to spare.
This is my first summer back at Jacksons Lane for a good decade, at their new Circus Hub, where you can see a sharing of work in development each Friday for a quid, so I am a bit out of the loop. Familiar faces for sure, but so many new companies on the scene. Like this one. Clamber Collective is the brainchild of Bendy, Freddie and Ellie, and this was their first performance in a venue of this size. I didn't know quite what to expect. As it turned out, neither did the performers as what followed was a gem of pure improv, as I was later to find out, between circus artists and musicians on stage.
I slid into a seat without registering anyone around me. A first, really! That's good, I thought. I like seeing new crowds mixing things up. But for a moment it did make me think: if this is the next generation of circus artists, where is the next gen of chroniclers?
I recognised a couple of faces on stage though, albeit from things I've seen just this year. Aerialist Leah, from seeing her graduation piece at the National Centre for Circus Arts, and acrobat Toffy, one half of Brainfools Duo, whom I caught at Ensemble Festival. Both operate at such a precise level of brilliance, that I was glad to be seeing more of them.
What followed was an innovative dialogue between musicians, circus artists and a dancer. They listened to each other and responded wherever the mood took them, riffing off each other like a piece of physical jazz.
There was Bendy as the swing in a human cradle, Freddie's fluid acro, Leah exploring the possibilities offered by the dance trapeze with a kind of graceful curiosity. The inclusion of Shulah as a dancer reminded me of the collaboration between Gandini Juggling with ballet dancers in Ephemeral Architectures. And the musicians didn't just accompany the movement, they goaded it, teased it, sometimes challenged someone on stage to find the answering shape.
Sometimes there was comedy. Toffy bringing the rigging centre stage, turning it into a character to play with. Alex's superb juggling slipping playfully into the music, with a downward whistle informing the drop from a high throw, or following it. There was an understated humour to that, a quality that reminded me of Onni Toivonen, who performed in Shhhh!, a cabaret I curated. Then Leah became the Pied Piper in turn, her recorder orchestrating an increasing number of performers into a relaxed, loose, swinging skip across the stage.
Sometimes more pensive reflection. Leah and Toffy in a hand-to-hand duo, acting out Bendy's spoken-word narrative of a couple navigating the highs and lows of life.
Afterwards, I discovered that every element of the performance was improvised, so no two rehearsals during the week were the same. It reminded me of those warm-up exercises at National Circus where you have to move around at speed without bumping into anyone else. Only here they were throwing circus skills and dance moves into the mix, picking up a clue or a cue from each other, throwing it back and trusting that someone else would catch it, musically or physically.
It was clear what a gift the week of research together at Jacksons Lane had been, giving them the space to really listen to each other, and so build the confidence to take these risks and learn from each other. Impressive too, quite how many people were on stage.
There is danger in this, because the uncertainty of what comes next brings the possibility that they could simply fall flat on their feet. In the audience, I appreciated that same mixture of apprehension and wonder in the same way I would watch a tightrope walker manage the balancing act. That was part of the reward of watching the show. And it was a huge success.
Clamber Collective is a self-funded company, so I was delighted to see afterwards that they'd brought some merch with them. It was creatively done in their inimitable style, with the same doodling energy running through the design of their handmade prints and hand-printed T-shirts. I picked up a piece of art that I am going to frame from a Valentine's piece, so hearts all over it. Perfect for LucyLovesCircus! And I also picked up a t-shirt for my daughter about to go to uni, who saw the grad show with me at National Circus and has been talking about picking up aerial skills there. Bendy and Freddie showed me the notebook they have kept through the creative process. I was fascinated. Each page was an artwork of mind maps, ideas and connections blended with art.
You could see the collective brain at work on the page, as on the stage, where the musicians were reading bodies as closely as the performers were reading sound
And suddenly the performance made even more sense. The state of mind behind it all, flexible and hypermobile. There was a kind of jazz dissonance to it, without a jarring note.
Which brings me back to the name.
A clamber can be messy, a little unruly. It suggests bodies piling in, potentially getting in each other's way but somehow making space for one another.
And that is the essence of Clamber.
Not simply a group of circus artists and musicians sharing a stage, but different bodies, brains, disciplines and instincts, listening closely enough to make something together without knowing exactly what it will be.
There are so many beautiful, and some funny, stories for this blog this summer still to catch up here: the most creative sharings of circus shows in development at Jacksons Lane, a surprise outing to Barnum in Richmond, a secret date with Take That’s Circus Tour concert, a cabaret at a new (for me) circus venue opposite the home to immersive theatre Punchdrunk and Acosta Danza (click here)... There has been a flow of adventures, and then, out of the blue, my back went into spasms a couple of weeks ago. I'd been overdoing it. Looking for sympathy, I was met with the teasing response, “Well, I’m glad to hear you climaxed at Woolwich Works!” That dark humour, entirely inappropriate, kept me going. That, and a series of funny coincidences.
“Lucy, there are no such things as coincidences,” Adrian said as he removed the last pin, working his acupuncture magic as ever.
A couple of days later I was on my second walk on the Common, taking it gingerly. I was a bit fed up because I’d had to miss a few circus events (Hikapee at Jacksons Lane, Daughters of the Wire at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, and the Circus Boat over in Daubeney Fields), as well as catching up with a friend over from Spain. But the sunshine was glorious and I stopped halfway round to bask in it on a bench, rest up and watch the world go by. A couple of women in my line of sight were having a good old chinwag. They had a light about them. It made me smile. As they continued their walk they passed by, paused, and came over to me.
“Excuse me,” said one, “I don’t know why, but I think you need to know there is Hope.”
She drew out of her cream crocheted bag with leather strap, which I had clocked, a small Gospel booklet, with Hope set against a background of blue sky and birds in flight. The photo reminded me of our sailing trip, anchoring off a motu of Raroia, an atoll in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia. It was a small islet of pink coral sand where, in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and his five Norwegian companions had run aground on the Kon-Tiki, just over 100 days after setting off from Peru. As we set foot on land, a flock of white doves, which I later discovered were called angel terns, took to the skies. A few weeks later, accessing Wi-Fi on the steps of Papeete Town Hall, we uploaded our photos. What are the odds that our bridesmaid, looking round Beatrix Potter’s house in the Lake District, should cross paths with a group of Norwegian tourists, one of whom, Øystein Kock Johansen, was a close friend and biographer of Thor Heyerdahl? She showed him the pictures.
“Ah yes,” he replied. “Raroia. Very boring place!”
The next question brought me back to the present:
“Do you mind if we talk to you a moment about God?”
I felt my hackles go up immediately, but I was also curious, because they had asked with a gentle hesitancy rather than an evangelical insistence. So I played the Catholic card, open to conversation but already covered on the conversion front, thanks. It’s a tactic my postman uses too, we swapped notes later. I asked them about their own journey, found out about their lives, their families, their faith. They could tell that my back was causing discomfort and asked if they could pray over me. Sure, I replied. Would they mind if they placed their hands on me? I thought back to the moment in the crowd of audience participation in Domte (click here) where I had tickled the chin of the stranger in the wheelchair next to me. No, I had no problem with that either. It did occur to me that the probability of someone passing by who knew me was very high. Dear Lord, that would be embarrassing. So I just shut my eyes.
They prayed, in English at first, but then underneath one of them began to murmur in tongues. I’ve never heard that before. My linguist brain went into overdrive, but I only caught one sound, repeatedly, “sam-sah-rah-sam-sah-rah”. It finished. They thanked me for being open. They weren’t sure what reaction they would get, understandably. And then they were on their way.
It was softly done. I was really touched by their act of witnessing what they believe in and the reaching out to move someone in response. Isn’t that what performers do again and again, especially clowns and street performers in terms of audience interaction? Maybe it was all these years in circus and feeling for those putting themselves out there, being inspired by them, which had prompted me to hear them out. And in the process, I received a real blessing.
Later, after recounting the episode to a friend, I googled the word I thought I’d heard chanted and found saṃsāra was Sanskrit for wandering, or flowing through, and refers to the continuous cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth. That’s curious, I thought, not something I’d have associated with Pentecostal lingo. Maybe I misheard, but I liked the idea and this sense of energy flowing through from these two strangers, as they laid hands on my shoulders in a very maternal gesture. Then, editing my post on Songs of the Bulbul (click here) and just doing a little more research into Odedra’s catalogue of shows, I found that he had done a show called Samsara, and that connection helped me explore further thoughts and connections to Garbh (click here) in the previous post.
Is my back healed? Well, a week on I am pain free. Over the past week, I have been able to take on freelance work teaching and, this morning, have my first swim in the Lido in a fortnight. I even managed to get to Jacksons Lane on Friday, if not GDIF or Notting Hill Carnival this weekend. And, managing a balancing act aside, I guess that is the message. The wheel of life keeps turning, people cross our paths, experiences are shared and we pass things between us, picking up connections and meanings along the way. And sometimes, when we least expect it, there is hope.
At a friend's 50th recently, I
fell into conversation with a Gujarati friend of theirs about the power of the
arts. I was still reeling from Songs of the Bulbul (see previous post),
singing its praises, and mentioned Garbh, one of the performances at
Ensemble Festival, organised by Certain Blacks, which I was hoping to catch the
following day.
“Oh, you'll enjoy that,” he said,
and explained how Garba dancing is an expression of the soul of Gujarat, a
homage to the Divine Mother, the goddess Durga. Even the costume has something
in common with the whirling dervish, he told me. The skirt flares out on the
turn too. And as it turns out, Odedra’s family is also from Gujarat.
From there, the conversation kept spinning outwards. We talked about hand gestures, including the ones a student at school had been teaching me when we ran out of salsa moves in an impromptu outdoor workshop, riffing to Bad Bunny. We talked about how the Romani people migrated out of north-west India, and the gestures that seem to have travelled with them into flamenco. Conversation with me, it turns out, has a habit of finding its way back to Spanish, if not circus. There are artists out there already pioneering that Indo-Spanish fusion, like Kunal Om and bands such as Indialucia. And writing this now reminds me that the friend I went with to see Aakash Odedra perform is also a hispanophile. We had both agreed afterwards that Odedra had duende, that elusive, impulsive genius at the heart of flamenco. I’d forgotten that.
The performance of Garbh at
Ensemble Festival took place in the round, a large terracotta circle that accumulated mounds of sand. It began with a solemn procession, a body
carried in and laid down. There was a clay pot carried to the centre. I knew it
represented the womb, garbh being Sanskrit for womb, but it also
reminded me of a pot of ashes, and so somehow held both the beginning and the
end of life. The dancers dropped down into the sand and began to stir the heaps
in and around them, one dancer pouring sand over another as though anointing
them.
As the only male dancer walked
slowly around the circle, sand sieving through his hands, I was reminded of
Myles Macdonald in Kook Ensemble's Sand (Chapter 225 - click here). Gradually the others got to
their feet and began to circulate. As their skirts spun out, they revealed
seams of colour that matched their tops, each in soft earth hues of burnt red,
orange and olive green.
We are born of sand and clay,
they seemed to say.
A stray thought surfaced, of a K-drama I've dipped into recently, in which a genie refers to human beings as lumps of clay. It made me smile, then dissolved almost as soon as it arrived, because here, those "lumps" were sheer grace incarnate, propelled by their own version of duende as they spun freely, arms reaching up towards the sky. As they gained momentum, I had this sense that their bodies were literally becoming the music, their increasing intensity generating the energy of Shakti, the divine feminine energy.
It was joyful, celebratory and
powerful. Life-giving.
I find echoes here of another
performance from the festival, Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx's Water Silhouettes (see Chapter252 - click here),and their incantations calling upon Yemayá,
patron of the oceans, and Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of the fresh waters. Here, Garbh was an invocation of Mother Earth. I loved that contrast in
the festival programming.
The dancers’ flick of the skirts
and the percussive palm-clapping reminded me of flamenco, for sure, with its
own deep-rooted sacredness. But there was something different here. In Garbh,
the sacred feminine seemed to be what the dance itself was invoking, as they
held us within it, mesmerised. In the circular rhythm there was also a timelessness. I think now of a Sanskrit
word I didn't know at the time, having learned it only yesterday, samsara,
the wheel of life. That was where the performance was taking us.
The sun was blistering down and,
having stood at an angle to protect one side, I moved to the other side of the
ring to even out the burn, and sat on the floor. From behind me, moments later,
a grandmother figure processed slowly out.
Durga, perhaps, so central to Garba dance that she felt present throughout. Or simply the spirit of an ancestor being mourned, a grandmother figure. I couldn't say which, and perhaps it wasn't for me to know. She was certainly the embodiment of wisdom passed through generations and carried that weight in her tremendous dignity.
The four dancers were then in a
line, holding hands, the young girl at the front reaching out to her,
repeatedly swaying backwards onto those behind her, in surrender. Watching the
dynamic, I felt the loss in my own maternal line. I longed for my mother, my
grandmother. The stoicism of her posture reminded me of the strong women in my
own lineage, stretching all the way back to the Highlands.
As she left the scene, she passed
so close that I could have reached out and touched her. Of course I didn't. But
I wanted to, as though a touch of her hem could somehow connect me directly to
some deep maternal comfort. I realise how strange that may sound, unless you
share my childhood of Bible stories, and remember the woman in the crowd who
reaches out to touch Jesus's garment and feels that healing energy pass through
her. Different faiths, but the same human impulse, perhaps, to seek the sacred through touch.
Somehow the performance offered a
harmonious way of reconciling ourselves to that. By the end, those who were not
already on their feet to applaud quickly joined the standing ovation. Since
then, I've kept finding echoes of Garbh. I've been sharing some footage,
and a beautician at my local salon told me all about the three-day Sagar Patel
Pre-Navratri Festival she attends every year ahead of the nine-day Navratri celebrations
in October. I saw her photos of the outfits, videos from previous years, the
colour, the sheer joy of the celebration, and found myself picturing her there
with her family, dancing in all that colour.
Perhaps that is what I loved about Ensemble Festival. It kept throwing these unexpected connections into my path, bringing us all together, ensemble, celebrating the rich diversity all around us. Finding moments of connection in cultures other than our own and celebrating them.
Who is your community? Where do you belong?
Neti, neti. Not that, not that.
We are all. We are other. We are one.
As a languages teacher, it’s my day job to encourage students to explore other cultures and find points of connection, empathy and understanding. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to Garbh. It reminded me that those connections don't always come through words.
Garbhis coming to Greenwich and Docklands International Festival
on Saturday, 5th September.
https://festival.org/gdif/whats-on/garbh/
Dancers: Marta Beccatini, Meera Patel, Anaya Vasudha, Shahnal Shah, Mira Salat,
Shyam Dattani, Sundhiya Dattani, Anjali Tanna (R&D)
Choreography: Shyam Dattani and Mira Salat in collaboration with the dancers.
Choreographic Mentor: Urja Desai Thakore
Dramaturgy: Parbati Chaudhuri
Set Design: Simon Daw
Producer: Giulia Coti Zelati
Before I write my fourth and final post on Ensemble Festival, about Garbh, a Gujarati dance performance, I need to take a step back for a moment to provide some context and continuity. That means rewinding to earlier this summer, when I went to Sadler's Wells East in Stratford to see Songs of the Bulbul by Aakash Odedra Dance Company. It was a contemporary dance piece based on a Sufi tale of a songbird that evokes the fleetingness of life. It had cropped up on Instagram, and I was curious.
Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, has a habit of turning up in my life without my ever going looking for it. I first came across the term at sixth form when the progressive nuns at school brought the work of Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello into class, a writer heavily criticised by the Catholic Church and something of an outlier. His books on breathing and Awareness were threaded with Sufi stories, including the world of Nasrudin in One Minute Nonsense. I loved the humour, that sudden “bouf” of the bouffon, the preserve of clowning, whether the Master gives the pupil a metaphorical or literal comedy slap in the face to jolt them out of their assumptions, from illusion to reality.
So a few years later, when a flatmate asked me what I pictured a Sufi looked like, I answered with utter confidence: “An Indian monk sitting on a hillside somewhere deep in meditation.” She fell about laughing. I had been living with one for months and had no idea. As de Mello would say, neti, neti, not that, not that.
And then Sufism came to me through music. A university friend spent time in Turkey studying the Whirling Dervishes for his dissertation as part of a Music degree, and made tapes for me, while a Spanish mentor gave me a cassette of the ney and a book of poems by the Sufi poet Ansari, Gritos del Corazón, that I still dip into. Like his poem Mi Deseo / My Desire below:
Cries of the heart indeed. This year, with the death of my mother and a body struggling to keep up, it feels as though my heart really is crying out: what now? Where to go from here?
A wise friend recommended The Conference of the Birds, Attar’s parable of enlightenment about a flock of birds on a quest to find the fabled Simorgh. Birds are very much part of my life. I now have the small cushion on which I cross-stitched a pair of blue tits chirruping to their young, which Mum kept beside her to the end. There is the owl in my study that my father carved, the robin on the Common I talk to, thinking “hello Dad”, and the solitary magpie I salute. They each have their own character. I seem to have been collecting bird metaphors for years.
An old post of mine, Bird with a Broken Wing, suddenly came to mind, so I went back and reread it. The themes of fragility, vulnerability and still finding a way to fly seem to resonate here (Chapter 16 - click here).
Another recommendation was Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love, the story of an unfulfilled housewife inspired by the deep love between the poet Rumi and the mystic Shams, which I listened to on Audible as a bedtime story to dream on. I don’t feel remotely unfulfilled; life has been so rich with experience. But I am seeking clarity. Maybe it’s the brain fog, the sense that I can’t quite wake up. By the time I walked into Sadler’s Wells East with my friend, I had a whole private mythology built up around what this evening was going to be and what impact it was going to have.
The stage was set with a bed of rose petals and, to the left, a semicircle of candles. The simplicity of the design and other-worldly lighting created a place for the soul to breathe and rest. I knew nothing about the actual story and when Aakash Odedra introduced it, my heart dropped like a stone.
The story was about the fabled Bulbul, a songbird whose longing for the divine comes through in its song. Over three acts we watch the bird go from freedom to capture, and then into an increasingly claustrophobic darkness. The cage gets smaller, the light fades, the circles tighten, until eventually the bird is left with nothing but itself and its song.
I am writing now, having seen the production well over a month ago, and the impression of the performance is still vivid. The fact that Rushil Ranjan’s music, the album Songs of the Bulbul, is on Spotify certainly keeps that connection alive. Like the dance, the music creates a sacred space for the meeting between cultures, bringing together the sounds of Western classical orchestra with Sufi devotional chanting. It really does sing to the aching joy of the whole experience.
What I remember from the first act is the magic of what appears to be a rag bundle on the floor suddenly coming to life, unfurling into a bird, stretching out to explore the space around it and celebrate sheer physical freedom, its feet stamping out an explosive rhythm like a racing heartbeat. Odedra doesn’t mime a bird, he becomes it. His body adopts the mannerisms effortlessly, instinctively. The turn of his hands, the pecking movement. There is an extraordinary precision to it, but never a sense of effort. He can be delicate one moment and astonishingly powerful the next, and somehow the technique disappears into the character.
His physical range matches the epic sweep of the music, and it is exhilarating to watch. The wild bird is captured and caged, yet because it can still see the world beyond its bars, it continues to sing with pure joy at the beauty of life, and his movement sweeps and soars like the music. As he turns, the lift of his skirt sends the rose petals flying so the air seems itself to be singing. It is intoxicating, and he captures a sense of limitless horizons through the sheer expansive physicality of grace and movement.
And yet we know what is coming.
The second act portrays the world contracting, and it feels like ours does too. Heavy branch-like cylinders drop from above, like the bars of the cage crashing down. A few moments earlier the space had seemed limitless. Now it feels like a prison. Even the light has been reduced to a single shaft, like the window of a cell.
The movement is still beautiful, but the shadows have grown. The bird reaches towards what is no longer there, towards a world it can remember but not see. A single shaft of light becomes almost a character in itself, something to lean towards, to yearn for, and the music shifts from grandeur into something more searching and exposed.
Then comes the blinding. I winced. There was a collective intake of breath at this unbearable cruelty, and suddenly I was transported back to the early 90s, watching King Lear at the Royal Court on a school trip, to the moment Gloucester has his eyes put out and sees, finally, the extent of his betrayal. The cruelty leading to insight.
With his eyes now bandaged, Odedra’s extraordinary physical control seems to dissolve into surrender to that reality, his body no longer responding to what it can see but to something deeper, feeling its way through the space. He moves carefully among the scattered rose petals, cradling little lights in his hands. The world has become darkness, but the light begins to return behind him, as though the wheel has come full circle.
And here comes the sublime moment as the bird’s song becomes movement. Odedra spins faster and faster, synchronising with the zikr, the repetition of “Allah Hoo”. The Hoo, as I understand it, is the breath of the prayer, the exhalation itself. The chant becomes the breath of life. Somehow breath, movement and prayer have become the same thing. Then, with the bird’s last breath, a plume of smoke escapes from his mouth, as though the soul itself were being released.
Remember to breathe.
In that moment I was back at the threshold, the door at the end of the corridor I had walked through in January to say a final goodbye to my mother. She had breathed her last the night before, barely an hour after I had got back to London to get ready for work the next day.
I returned. My chest constricted as I approached the door, struck by an immense solitude, and I still carry that weight between my breastbone.
And now the tears were rolling, as I sat there in the stalls, in the dark, feeling the pressure ebb and flow. This grief for the mother I am missing, alongside the beauty of the spectacle. I couldn’t breathe properly for a moment, but the pressure then eased, and I did find release watching Odedra. The songbird who doesn’t hold back his breath.
Through it all, the ineffable beauty of Odedra’s dance and the power of the emotions it evoked were such that by the end we as an audience had moved beyond the sadness of the ending into the elation of having witnessed the beauty of the songs.
Afterwards, my friend and I slipped down to the front row and scooped up the rose petals from the floor (not the stage!), throwing them in the air with sheer joy and the security guard’s blessing. He watched us with such paternal amusement that it was clear we weren’t the first to have had the idea.
Then, writing this today, I have done some more homework and discovered that Aakash Odedra is not, as I had assumed that evening, from the Whirling Dervish tradition. He is a Kathak dancer, working in an Indian classical tradition whose chakkars, those rapid spinning turns, have an obvious resonance with Sufi whirling. The two traditions are distinct, but they have crossed paths over centuries, particularly as Kathak developed in Muslim courts and absorbed influences from Sufi culture.
Suddenly, what I had experienced as two worlds, storytelling and meditation, meeting on stage made rather more sense. And I love that Odedra himself embodies that meeting, in both his heritage and his artistic vision.
But it was digging into the genesis of the piece that stopped me in my tracks altogether today. Songs of the Bulbul was born out of Odedra’s own devastating loss of his mother, Kay, and he dedicates it “to my smiling bulbul, who left her cage.”
Learning his mother’s name took me back to a moment at the funeral of my maternal grandmother, Granny Kay. I was in my late teens. For some reason my mother and I had arrived separately, and I saw her holding it together until she caught sight of me and our eyes met. There was a moment of mutual recognition and premonition I will lose you too one day and we both dissolved.
That was one of the few times I ever saw my mother cry. She was incredibly stoic in life.
Suddenly the grief I’d felt during the performance made sense in another way. I had been watching a man dance his own grief for his mother, without knowing it, yet feeling it with every bone in my body.
Perhaps that is what theatre can do at its most powerful. Somehow, the boundaries between his story and mine dissolved. Before I knew his story, some part of me had already recognised his grief.
There had been something devotional about Odedra’s dance, as though he were reaching for something beyond himself. I had experienced it as a kind of living prayer; now I also saw it as a ritual of remembrance.
And it’s a funny old world, but a few weeks later, on a family outing, as a treat we each chose a book to read in the park for the afternoon. My youngest chose Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
After an evening watching Songs of the Bulbul, I reckon I have a better understanding of that now.
