Chapter 244: On vulnerabilty

"OK, what are you sad about, Lucy?"

Taken aback, I searched for an answer. Life doesn't get much better than this. Here I was in a cafe in Walthamstow with a very dear friend, thoroughly enjoying her company and conversation after seeing the most fabulous Palestinian circus show, Step and a Half (I'll get to that in the next post). The window of Ganashe had caught our eye with its trompe l'oeil of fruit that was actually pure patisserie. An edible pair of ballet shoes called to mind the ticket I have next weekend to see Carlos Acosta at the Royal Ballet. We were drawn in, and a statue of Laurel and Hardy on the counter confirmed that this really was the place to clown around with our food. The woman behind the counter wore a hijab, serving up Cordon Bleu délices, Arabic floating in the background, French pâtisserie and another language and culture layered together. 

I chose a passion fruit, in honour of passion fruit drink I'd snapped up and necked down that morning post parkrun, called Guilty Passion. What's yours? I had wondered on Instagram. I have a fair few, circus obviously, but I don't feel remotely guilty about that. My friend, also Lucy, opted for a nice pear.

So what was the matter? I feel vulnerable, I began. In the past 24 hours I have set my profile on Instagram to public, for circus companies to share on stories I post to spread the word, especially with many off to Edinburgh Fringe in the offing. But that doesn't come naturally to me. I've been a teacher for six years with all social media locked down. Private lives should absolutely not be shared with students, though I like to think now that if any were to come across my account it would simply inspire them to get up and out of their comfort zone. I practice what I preach.

I make mistakes though. My friend Lucy had been to see the Tao of Glass as well, and as we discussed it in the cafe, along with Step and a Half, I realised how incomplete my post was, and how it could do with a good edit. I'd left the house legging it to Soho Theatre but had clocked that in the past 24 hours since posting it had over 500 hits, and dear lord, I haven't got it right yet. It was clunky, this piece that means so much to me on a personal level. And then I'd shared on Instagram a friend's photo of the final bow. I was not worried about the theatre injunction on taking footage during performance, as it was taken of the curtain call, but chatting to Lucy with her outside eye, I realised that the photos did not do justice to the beauty of the show, and would do nothing to entice and encourage people to check it out. A quick edit later removed them, but again, I felt uncomfortable that they had been up overnight.

I was also still reeling from a blunder I had made post show at the Palestinian Circus, when I had mistaken one female performer for another afterwards and launched into a well-meaning supportive accolade before she gently had to correct me on my mistake. I was mortified. As a teacher, I pride myself on names and noticing every individual student. As a blogger, the care and craft I put into my writing is dependent on my skills of observation. But recently I have felt myself slipping. Is it overwhelm, too many shows, too many ideas, lost in words? Is it something darker? I had just seen Kook Ensemble's SAND at Jacksons Lane again the day before pre Edinburgh Fringe (see chapter 234 - click here and response to show chapter 225 - click here), where the wife is slowly losing herself to dementia, and the spinning spirals of disintegrating sand balls represent so powerfully the sense of loss of self to the windmill of her memories. Or is it simply menopausal brain fog? I wondered about that to friends at the Lido this morning after introducing myself to a friend, who lifted her glasses up and looked at me: "It's me, Lucy!" To be fair, it had been a while. I then went on to ask about her twins, too quick to name them, using the name of another set of twins, same age, another friend. Someone pass me the shovel. "It's not fair," I said to my friends later, "I used to be good at this, how does Coach Mel do it?" Mel being the legend behind Open Air Fit, who never forgets a face, a name, an instant. It is staggering. They laughed, and impressively in unison they both said, "Men don't get brain fog, Lucy!" Still, Mel is in a league of his own.

Still, there is that. I am religious about creatine in my coffee to help my brain function. Maybe if I stopped worrying so much that would free up brain power to actually engage.

But consciousness, coma, potential loss of memory, the true death for me, is very much at the forefront of my mind with the shows I have seen this week, and what they have triggered. And the news of death, like Glen Hansard's (chapter 242 - click here). And then seeing this Palestinian show, such a celebration, a resistance in the face of tragedy, and the thought of all the suffering in the world, beyond borders, well, that got to me too.

So I am circling back to images and events that made an impression. The trompe l'oeil and the trompe langue, my own tongue slips, caught gently, yet still caught out. The continuation of an Arabic atmosphere in a French patisserie post Levantine show, and from there, thinking about levadura, yeast, that raising agent, uplifting, the yearning for hope, ¡ojalá! inshallah, may it be so. A Pizza Pilgrims box at press night for Tao with its caption "This is how we dough it" reminding me of Riss Oblensky's Stinky Little Pilgrim (see chapter 238 - click here), milestones and the journey of the second half of life. Sand spinning through a juggler's fingers as a woman loses her grip on reality. 

None of these pieces match. That's rather the point. I wrote about Glass on Friday, re-edited it Saturday, and here I am again on Sunday, still circling. Tao of Glass brings the practice of kintsugi into play as metaphor, the gold that holds a broken thing together without pretending it was never broken. I don't think I understood, writing that, how quickly I'd need the same idea turned on myself, not on a show I'd watched, but on a week of grieving the death of a musician who felt so familiar, oversharing and undersharing, getting names wrong, and wondering if any of it meant something worse than tiredness, like a radio tower picking up all sorts of frequencies and trying to make sense of them before transmitting the programme.

Maybe that's the real call here. To be present, rather than three steps ahead, already drafting the next post, the next caption, before I've finished living this one.

Still time to catch Palestinian Circus "Step and a half" at Soho Theatre Walthamstow today, Sunday 2 August at 2.30pm, and then at Edinburgh Fringe. 

Chapter 243: The Tao of Glass

A paper hat becomes a boat on a river. Conical light is framed by three rings, each smaller than the last: three levels of consciousness. Tao of Glass is Phelim McDermott's decades-long love letter to Philip Glass, part memoir, part meditation, tracing his creative life as a director and performer alongside Glass's music and, underneath it all, the spirit of the Tao Te Ching: the questions that circle rather than resolve, the idea that the way forward is often the way back, that beauty can be found in the liminal spaces and golden stitching between imperfect fragments.

It was the circularity of it all that stayed with me longest. The revolving stage. A quiet nod to the first Glass album purchased, and to vinyl itself: round and round, the needle finding the groove. Causality and connection drawn as a spiral rather than a line. Mortality, too, not as an ending but as a helix, memories overlapping and doubling back on themselves, the same phrase returning in a different octave.

While the narrative arc centres on an elemental hero worship and father and son dynamic, I felt something else moving underneath it. I thought of the women whose vision had shaped this world without necessarily taking centre stage: director Kirsty Housley, who helped shape Phelim's fragments of memory, dream and story into a coherent whole, not an easy task I imagine, to direct a director; costume and set designer Fly Davis, who gives physical form to the show's circular logic, allowing objects, performers and ideas to return transformed; and puppet-maker Lyndie Wright, who created the wondrous boy puppet that her daughter Sarah, the puppetry director, and her team brought so vividly to life. A theatre made, in no small part, by women working quietly at its centre.

If you love Glass, or have ever asked a real question about the creative process, or about the meaning of life itself, this is the show, the signpost, the Way. Glass's son Ridley is quoted as describing the music of Glass as "calm and dangerous", and that is exactly the undertow of the piece itself. It drags you under quietly, before depositing you back on the shore of your own consciousness.

"Find out what the rules are, and then break them," says Sean Kempton, which is funny, as I'll be seeing him later today at Jacksons Lane in Kook Ensemble's SAND. So I'm breaking a few rules of my own here, jumping out of the chronology of this circus journey, with half a dozen posts still unwritten about recent circus shenanigans, to talk about last night instead.

I went on opening night, then went back for the press-night encore. Because Once is never enough.

Theatres are often haunted. I have felt that first-hand over the years. But what about the ghosts the audience brings with them? That was the question I found myself turning over as Phelim McDermott began reminiscing about his own theatrical ghosts, from Albert Finney to Laurence Olivier to the spectres of unfinished business, of the show that never got made.

I brought my own ghost with me: the memory of Akhnaten, the opera through which I first discovered Philip Glass's music, thanks to this very circus journey and Gandini Juggling's involvement (working back from this post on the link between Akhnaten and Stranger Things, Chapter 227, click here). During lockdown, I watched it obsessively, several times at least, on the LA Opera app, alongside Satyagraha, the other opera Glass and Phelim made together, about the life of Gandhi. Jugglers annotating the music with balls of varying sizes in one; puppets weaving a different kind of magic in the other. The same collaboration finding new shapes each time. And I think my take on the evening was informed not a little by the hero worship of this double act across both operas.

I thought, too, of Matilda Leyser, Phelim's wife, who trained as a trapeze artist. The work she directed, "Me, Mother" at the Roundhouse, Chapter 142, click here (again, the round!), gathered testimonies from circus artists who had had, or were about to have, children. With three young children of my own at the time, hearing the description of a performer's first post-natal experience on the aerial rope after giving birth left a deep impression of the resilience, tenacity, sheer expertise of circus strongwomen.

And then there is my niece, the set designer Fly Davis. Her mother Jenny, my sister, came to live with us when I was ten, so Fly and I grew up under the same roof, more like sisters than aunt and niece, closer in age to each other than I am to Jenny. I remember when Fly flew to New York seven years ago to workshop this piece with Philip and Phelim (I'm not on first-name terms with either of them, it is just easier!). She talked me through the idea of reaching into the world of someone in a coma through music: the reverse of Awakenings. When my own mother was later placed in a medically induced coma and we were told to say our goodbyes, that thought gave me real comfort. Afterwards, Mum spoke of a tunnel, of voices welcoming her, and of her insistence that she needed to go back to look after my father. What about us, Mum? We need you too. But it was Dad she came back for. He lived to a hundred. That concept about music reaching in, well it inspired me that last summer with Dad, to put the roof down on the Mini, load my harp into the back and drive down to play to him by his bedside in the sitting room. He drifted in and out of consciousness, but I like to think that somewhere in him, ever the April Fool, the idea of his most wayward daughter of six, la fille mal gardée, strumming him towards St Peter's gates, would have appealed to his sense of humour. 

I used my iPhone too, playing his old favourites on Spotify: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Sinatra. We went from "When the Saints" to "My Way", but when Sinatra began, "And now, the end is near", I flinched. Too close to the bone.Some Piaf instead, Dad? He surfaced, opened his eyes."Pardon?" he quipped, rolling a Gallic rrr, without missing a beat. And so we moved on to "Je ne regrette rien". Earlier this year, with Mum, it was another sister who played to her Scottish roots with St Andrew's tunes and Highland reels and in the process, I am sure, conjuring the ghost of a smile. So you see, even before I sat down at Soho Place, this helix of a show had already embedded itself in the DNA of our family psyche.

I also carried into the theatre the weight of having just said goodbye to a job I loved, teaching languages in a secondary school. After six years in the state sector, I had taken my final bow. It had not been an easy decision. I have never been happier in a job: the diversity and energy of my students, the camaraderie of my colleagues. But it had taken its toll on my health, coming on the back of spinal surgery last year and my mother's death earlier this year. Her funeral took place the day before a milestone birthday I had always imagined spending with her. And so I did, in a way, rehearsing her eulogy instead. I mention this not for sympathy, but as context for what came next.

I had planned to see the play with my sister, my niece and my Glass-loving best friend Carolyn, with whom I had seen Akhnaten all those years ago. But over the following fortnight, momentum built. I mentioned it at a colleague's retirement party, as she prepared to move into her own next chapter. Then there was another friend from the science department, with whom I had bonded further over a book called The Physics of Jazz. A teacher from the music department. My harp teacher and her daughter. A career-changing friend I had met while speaking at a Now Teach conference. My qi gong partner and her husband, Park Run volunteer friends, and those made through my children. In short, the creative and the curious. Finally, I persuaded my husband too.

In no time, we were a party of sixteen, meeting in the downstairs bar before processing together to the front row of the first balcony on opening night. I had history with this world, and still had no idea what to expect. The first surprise was how much I laughed.

I had never seen Phelim in person. He was a bomb of warmth and energy, immediately responsive to the audience, who felt instantly at ease calling things out. My husband offered a supportive heckle within the first five minutes. I'm glad he thought better of "Show us your pee-pee", although you need to see the show to understand that it was not entirely gratuitous.

Phelim took it all in his stride, entirely in his element, carrying us through the ebb and flow of his creative life: the serendipity of Glass and, poignantly, Maurice Sendak and the show that never was.

But this was never simply a double act between two giants of their respective creative worlds.

The puppeteers, introduced as Sarah, Janet and Vic, conjured up a spell of shadow play, animating sheets of music and transforming an inverted kettle into a genie. Then there was the wonder of a puppet of a young boy, representing in turn a fictional storybook child, Phelim as a child and Phelim's son Ridley. Fresh from an afternoon with Fly's two young boys, juggling ping-pong balls in a Soho Airbnb, as a great-aunt does, I found that puppet took on another resonance and I wondered what my niece saw as she watched him come to life. I wondered too what it must be like for Matilda, watching her own son represented on stage.

The puppeteers were invisible behind their craft and utterly present within it, each carrying a thread of Phelim's life story, while the musicians riffed and responded alongside them, the Glass river and source feeding all. And then there was the set, the foil. As a friend put it afterwards, "It really sucks you into the story, to the point that you don't notice it's doing it. Then you think about it and realise the story would not have worked in the same way without it."

What I had not fully appreciated until talking afterwards with Kasia, who played violin, was quite how stressful it must have been for the musicians. There was so much to hold in mind at once, weaving around a revolving stage, never missing a cue. Yet it looked entirely effortless, fluid, as though the music were carrying the performers rather than the other way around. The lighting did the same work quietly. Colin Grenfell's design never announced itself, and together the different elements kept circling back to the question beneath everything.

Where does the vision come from?

Where does the music?

Spoiler alert: the river runs through it. A stream of consciousness in which all things connect through deep democracy. The rings again, layer upon layer. A circus of light between consensual reality, dreamland and essence: at once the source and the flow, the genus and the genius of the whole thing. We were swept away.

Afterwards, in the foyer, a friend who had come alone found me, and we simply held on to each other. It was the longest hug I think I have ever given in a theatre. Later, on press night, I watched a critic rise to his feet for the standing ovation. "Write that down in your notebook," Phelim had told him earlier, with a mischievous smile.

And so we all did, in our own way: making a mental note, taking a picture with the mind's camera.

This post, like the evening itself, hasn't quite settled into a single clean line. It's my broken vase, and I'm just in the process of sticking it together with glue, kintsugi style. In circus, I reckon that golden lacquer is what's known as an outside eye. I wish I had one.

Chapter 242: Once, Encore.

Once, there was a love song. Glen Hansard wrote the musical, performed in the film, and has died in a motorbike accident this week. My heart froze. His music, what a gift he gave, he was. The covers now pouring out of Falling, Slowly, on Instagram in tribute. See the first tribute I came across, which was how I found out, by Garron Noone @garron_music. 

Once, in Valencian days of old, I went on a motorbike ride, no helmet, several vodka-fantas to the wind, my arms tight around a crush taking me for a spin, trying to counterbalance (pretty dangerous, I learned fast to lean in!) as we zoomed horizontally round corners at break-neck speed. My best friend was furious. In part at the risk, in part because he observed I never held him like that when on the back of his scooter.

Once does that to you. Takes you on a trip down memory lane of all the lovers that could have been, but weren't, because girl-code, or friend-code, won out.

I had been following Hansard's music for years, ever since the Commitments came out at sixth form, and I would have the music on play, reading my way through the world of Roddy Doyle thanks to my then boyfriend. But there was something about the timing of this film too. The young mother whose husband is working overseas and befriends a busker nursing a broken heart. She brings joy, a lightness, a gentle friendship and a musical partnership develops, but ultimately she stays with her husband.

In a funny old way it is the story of this blog. The fleeting moment of creative connection with a young musician who gifted me a CD of his love songs (not about me, I hasten to add, but I still blushed). The joy of feeling plugged in to that energy, and the need to find an outlet for my own spark, before risking a fire that would burn down my own home, well, that's what led me into the arms of circus.

And in the period of transition, closing one door, to open the next, Once, the Musical came to the West End. I was feeling very raw at the time and found healing through the story and the music. That's the power of the arts. I was not alone. Later I went back with my brother and his wife for an encore, and we ended up on stage at the bar, fully immersed.

I'd just whipped out my phone to search out a couple of lunatic affirmations I had saved on Instagram when I was caught out by the notice of Hansard's death. The news ripped away the scrolling. And then this week, I found myself wondering at all the other people, the histories and herstories, Glen Hansard's music has touched over the years. My daughter and I were lying on the grass in a clearing on the Common gazing up at the extraordinarily low and large Buck Moon, moving into Aquarius, a herald of upheaval, a jolt for old shapes to give way to new ones. We reminisced about our sailing days when we would lie on the trampoline at the bow of La Cigale and look up at Orion's Belt on ocean crossings. Here now, we could make out the constellation Lyra in the night sky, the one where Orpheus' harp meets aerial hoop.

A question formed, in the words of Mary Oliver. I asked my daughter, dear one,

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Her answer is hers to keep. Mine is to share: I'm going to write my heart out...

The Irish Creative Collective is bringing together An Evening for Glen Hansard at The Regent, Islington, on Sunday 2nd August from 6pm. The evening is in aid of the Simon Community, living and working with London's homeless, a charity he very much supported. Entry is free and there is an opportunity for donations, collected throughout the night. https://www.simoncommunity.org.uk/

Chapter 241: Return of THE GODZ

So here we were, my husband and I in the box, if not The Box, for an afternoon of boylesque comedy acrobatics. I’d already had quite a ride. London was in a heatwave and there I was, in a flimsy dress on the back of a bike, hearing my mother’s voice as clearly as when I was 18, warning me that my skimpy French-supermarket sundress would attract the wrong sort of attention.

“Safer on a bike than walking, Mum!” I’d blithely replied back then, before speeding down a hill without brakes, momentarily distracted by another driver approaching a roundabout, then clipping a kerb and catapulting over the handlebars. Within the hour, I was in an ambulance winging its way to A&E, my summer written off. I looked like a circus side show, John Hurt's Elephant Man, people in the street momentarily curious, then turning away, faces a blend of horror, disgust and pity. I turned down offers of a skin graft. These scars, long since faded, told a story after all, and it was only reading Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love" years later, narrated by Olympia, an albino hunchback dwarf, that I punched the air. She got it. 

This time round, in the second half of life, I play it safe. The double-black-diamond ski slopes are a thing of the past. I have more to lose as a mother of three, albeit with one already fledged and another on the verge of university. The point is though, that I understand the adrenaline-fuelled clowning around: the rush of speed, flying through the air, intentional or otherwise, the thin line of balancing acts, all set against calculated risk. It also explains why, even with the safest of bikers, I still wince whenever we weave through traffic or approach a kerb.

Round the corner from the Peacock Theatre stood a giant globe of a map. I posed for a photo. “She’s got the whole world in her hands…” popped into my head, the happy-clappy melody of my school days, educated by Southern Irish nuns. I gave thanks to my guardian angel and St Christopher, not to mention my blessed husband, for arriving safely. Now, though, it was time to park my religion, so I thought, along with the bike, and embrace the divine comedy of Greek deities.

From our vantage point in the gods, I watched a group of friends in full-on togas take their seats in the stalls, in high spirits. Clearly repeat visitors, their arrival signalled that we were in for a feel-good, irreverent ride that leaves audiences coming back for more, whoever or whatever they fancy. Head First Acrobats came to the Peacock trailing serious pedigree too, with multiple Fringe World, Adelaide Fringe and Melbourne Fringe awards behind them. This crowd knew exactly what they had come for.

The curtain rose on a pose of statuesque buff Godz: Dionysos (AJ Saltalamacchia), Apollo (Thomas Gorham) and their cousin Hercules (Cal Harris), with Cupid (Liam Dummer) completing the original four. The cast has now expanded to include Matt Piva’s Hermes, adding another god to the mischief.

What followed was a torrent of circus skills: pyramid acrobalances, Hermes basing Apollo with Cupid perched on top in a three-high; Dionysos rotating around the bar table in a high-octane juggling sequence, a flow I loved; and then another, with Apollo pouring Hercules a cup of wine while holding a one-handed inversion on a stand.

Then Hercules, gratifyingly, got his whip out.

The play with expectation was part of the trick: he extinguished a candle with expert timing, then let the audience in on the sleight of hand that had made it look so impressive. There was knife throwing, with Dionysos hurling blades at Apollo, and chair stacking, Cupid crouching high above the stage before winging his way back down. Then came the most ridiculous ladder act, Hercules balancing on top of a freestanding ladder before, bloody hell, performing a handstand on it. No trick there, just sheer tradecraft, undercut by the comedy of a saboteur waiting in the wings to steal his thunder.

“But what was it all about, Mum?” my youngest asked afterwards. What’s the story, morning glory?

That really kicked in during the second half. Dust sheets covered the statuesque Godz, and in came Hercules with a feather duster to give them a spring clean. Move over, Ken Dodd’s giggle stick. You can imagine the innuendo and flossing that followed as each was revealed, in turn, to be stark bollock naked, clutching a circular gold tray to protect his modesty, the only time I shall use that word in connection with these guys.

The tray, that is.

Overhead, Zeus thundered his outrage at the Homerotic monkeying around between the cousins and delivered his verdict: Hercules was to be dragged off to Hades for punishment. Somewhere amid this divine chaos came Apollo's aerial turn on a single-point dance trapeze. His outfit suggested a Percy Jackson hooded street look crossed with a hint of S&M, while the head-balancing, spins, speed and choreography were out of this world.

But Hades, Zeus decided, was not punishment enough. It was time to take matters a step further and pack Hercules off to Christian Hell.

At this point, he was tormented by three flying nuns, Rihanna’s “S&M” blaring, no less. Someone in wardrobe has a sense of humour and the costumes, by designer Chelsea Angell, deserve their own mention too: equal parts glitter, camp and precision. Hermes, in a leather harness and shorts, blended parkour with poi-style hellfire spinning, and it was insane. The heat was certainly rising to a crescendo.

You possibly need to be a cradle Catholic with a particularly dark sense of humour to appreciate the full force of the final punishment. I shall leave that to your imagination. But it did take me back to a school trip to Germany as a teenager, when I got chatting to some Turkish lads in Bonn who found us free tickets to a nightclub. Of course, the teachers came along too, and Mother Bernadine’s wimple lighting up under the UV lights struck us all as the perfect clubbing gear, long before I saw footage of Berliners getting into the habit at the KitKatClub.

For the finale, Cupid performed the most beautiful airborne turn in Pleasers. In stature and style, he reminded me of my favourite boylesquer, Danny Ash. See Shhh! Cabaret, Chapter 151 - click here . My heart soared again. It felt inclusive and joyful, putting the elatory and aleatory into celebratory.

I only wish I had access to the playlist for the show. It rocked. They really should put one on Spotify. 

Along with the music, I wish I could remember all the jokes. But while you may forget what someone says, you will never forget how they make you feel. What I remember is my cheeks and belly aching from laughter, and the joy of my husband whooping it up in the audience as much as I was. GODZ is one of those shows that knows exactly who it is flirting with, yet somehow makes everyone in the room, regardless of their persuasion, feel like the target audience.

Afterwards, Hermes was in the foyer, ready for a photo op, and of course I caught his eye and jumped right in to have an arm around me, while my husband, no fan of playing photographer, stepped up and snapped us anyway. Hermes had done his job and delivered the message: the Godz were smiling and watching over me.

I left with a huge grin, feeling protected, energised and convinced that life did not get much better than this.

Outside, the world shone that bit more brightly, and my husband announced that we’d take the scenic route home. Being Pride month, there was rainbow bunting through the streets and the embassies were all flying their flags, with a particularly large banner outside the Spanish Embassy making me especially proud of the language I teach.

So here's to joy, inclusivity and sex appeal for all. The colours of my life, as Barnum might say, and the greatest show on Earth.

And now that Christopher Nolan’s own epic saga has landed in cinemas, IMAX and all, I’d say GODZ was the essential foreplay: a Bodyssey before the Odyssey, the gods misbehaving in the flesh long before Matt Damon starts his ten-year trip home.

Chapter 240: GODZ (Part 1) - Time to get Greece'd

Let's be clear: it had been my husband's idea initially to take me to a male revue for our wedding anniversary (see previous post). It was only a few days after that, though, that I twigged that Head First Acrobats were over in the UK at Sadler's Wells. Think Magic Mike, but with circus, the Wizards of Oz.

I first came across Head First Acrobats a while back in a life before sailing. Let's Circus needed help taking down their beautiful black and white circus tent (The Magpie - click here) in Chiswick, and I volunteered as a roustabout. I turned up, without a clue, to find Head First Acrobats Tom and Cal, strapping lads, lifting deadweight poles without breaking sweat. Fat lot of use I would be. But I had a lot of fun. Cal and I swapped notes on singer Frank Turner. He loves a bit of circus too, and at one of his pop up concerts in Brixton I'd arrived to find Cheryl doing the warm up act on flying pole (See "The Electric Pole Star and Frank Turner" - click here). An act I'd already booked her in for the following month in the cabaret I curated at Jacksons Lane (See "A pat on the ...Shhh! click here) . Back to the boys. Tom and Cal showed me how to crack a whip, and after numerous attempts slicing my back, I like to think I got the hang of it, with a satisfying pop. The sound it made reminded me of the mascleta, the sound crackers let off to mark festivities and Fallas in Valencia. Great craic. A couple of years later, sailing from France to Australia on board our catamaran La Cigale, our steering cable snapped on a hair-raising night sail past St Vincents in the Grenadines. We improvised for the next 12 hours, and I ended up whipping up and out a lasso to pull us in to dock in Rodney Bay, St Lucia. I thought of the HFA boys. Maybe the trick should have been recorded for an audition tape...

But I keep missing Head First Acrobats shows. First at the Edinburgh Fringe, then at the Brisbane Fringe, when La Cigale was moored down the road on the Gold Coast. An Australian girlfriend, El, from another sailing family who we'd been sailing with since the Canaries, had offered to drive us both to see Elixir, HFA's anarchic zombie cabaret, but we had the kids on board and a family night in the offing, so for once I stayed put. If you can call 18 months at sea "staying put".

Then a couple of weeks ago, on the night of the World Cup when England v. Croatia, I hopped onto Instagram on a hydration break to see if anyone else was watching, as no-one else at home was, and I was looking for company. There I saw a story by artist Barbara @artbarbaralt, who was legging it back for the footie after watching GODZ, and was raving about it. I had come across Barbara thanks to a recent trip to Giffords Circus' Waterfield (see Chapter 233 - click here), and love her work, especially a recent series of watercolours that capture the essence of the show and performers. She was so enthusiastic and encouraging, that within minutes I was double-checking our calendar. There were only a few performances left, it was term time, school functions and all sorts so nope, zero evenings coincided. And then I spotted the Saturday matinee. My husband looked at me through narrowed eyes when I broached the subject. He knows my spending habits and that I would quite happily mortgage my soul for circus. Not so much careless, as carefree. "I've got this," I assured him. Cheapest tickets in the house, albeit restricted view, but I knew the Godz would smile, and so they did.

Preparation is key. The term at school was taking its toll on my back (following an operation I had last year to remove part of a bone digging into a nerve, not to mention a couple of herniated discs that didn't appreciate doing the Official Big Half with the school running club), which is why I've had to resign, limping through to the end of term. So I booked myself in for a restorative pre-emptive massage the day before. Time to get Greece'd was the tagline for the show, and was in part the inspiration to get oiled up. Floating out afterwards, a bright red and pink satin Zara dress in the window of a thrift shop caught my eye. A bargain! We were off to the Peacock Theatre, after all. Next stop Superdrug, to take the radioactive glare off my legs, yet to see the Valencian sun. A complete novice and in need of a helping hand, I was lucky to have one of my sisters on speed-dial to navigate the aisle of mousses, mitts and sprays. Sorted. Next a bit of height. Out came my old pair of tango heels. I may not be able to walk in heels right now, but I can certainly dance in them, and where better than Sadler's Wells?!

Dress zipped, legs out, heels on, off we went. Half the fun of going out with my Swiss francophone husband is the journey, riding pillion on the Vespa. Mais oui, ciao amore! We zoomed into town, though my heart lurched at Waterloo as police stopped us for a demonstration coming by. I could just make out the first two letters of a placard "Re...". Dear Godz. Reform. Farage. Bloody hell. Here we go. I steeled myself for the onslaught of Lairy Neanderthals. Only I didn't have my glasses on, and as they got closer, re-read "Remain" and my heart soared as wave after wave of Cheery Cosmopolitans marched past, to huge applause. The last time I had seen HFAs bringing down that tent was a week before the Brexit vote, when the idea we should ever leave Europe, our family, had been ridiculous, and a bubble of us thought we had it in the bag. There is still hope. Isn't there? As an erstwhile languages teacher seeing the knock-on impact on secondary schools of the closure of MFL department at Nottingham University, and the hundreds of impending redundancies in Humanities, including languages, at Exeter University, the jury is out. But good to see people speaking up and out.

At the theatre we took our seats. A box for three. The third seat, previously empty, was now filled, and I felt for the punter who clearly did not want to play gooseberry to a couple of lovebirds, and had his own interest in being there. So I took my husband by the hand and we moved up a level. To the gods. Les enfants du paradis, as the French call it. The side box up there we had to ourselves, and the view was superb. Restricted on paper, but no limits. And now, on to the show, watch this space ...

Chapter 239: You wonder how we made it down the aisle...

"We're out of step. We disagree. What's right for you, is wrong for me... you wonder how we made it down the aisle, well I like your style." 
Barnum, The Musical 

After twenty-three years of marriage, it could be easy to fall into a comfortable rhythm. Or fall completely out of it. Twenty-three is an unlucky number for my husband, and while we had made the most of two years sailing round the world en famille, playing Cicada on our catamaran La Cigale, named after the La Fontaine story riffing off Aesop's fable, since then we had both been back on laborious Ant mode, giving everything to work to keep the proverbial boat afloat. Time to turn the energy around and have some fun. This year's anniversary was saved by a pop-up on Instagram. An invitation to an evening of the Seven Sins of Tango by Candlelight by London Concertante caught my eye, the mood conjuring up Pedro Pascal's recent viral video, reciting in Spanish the love scenes from Romeo and Juliet, transposed into his native tongue by Chilean poet Neruda (click here). This could be just the algo-rhythm for us to find our groove. I instantly messaged my husband. Fancy going to this? 

He replied with a link to a male revue called "Forbidden Nights" at Clapham Infernos. "Thought this circus might be more to your taste." Pop went the bubble. No it bloody wouldn't, I thought, with a sense of humour failure. I'm not some sort of middle-aged hormonally overloaded bungalow bunny who needs to drool over Magic Mikes for kicks. Then I took a step back and paused. Oh... wait... god... am I? Is that my lot now I've turned 50? ... And would that be so wrong, anyway?! From Seven Sins to Forbidden Nights is just un pasito adelante after all, or un pasito atrás, quizás. I thought about it for a moment, checked in with both my angels and little devils, and found my answer: "I'd prefer tango."

Tango means so much to me. As a hispanophile, there is a poetry of movement that speaks to the yearning of my heart. I love the push and pull, the power play with boundaries, the flicks and the fire, the intensity. It speaks to my restless spirit, that impish chispa or spark, that flamenco dancers refer to as duende. As young lovers in our 20s, newly fiancéed, we took lessons from Paul and Michiko in the crypt of a church in Farringdon, with a view to it being our first wedding dance. They were extraordinary. Paul was so gracious and debonair (he had taught Al Pacino tango for the film "Scent of a Woman") and Michiko was sublime, precise, sinuous and steeled. We could be dancing to anything from Gardel to the Jungle Book, and I loved watching them take a turn to illustrate a move. But they had this rule of changing partners for each dance, and my fiancé and I barely ever caught a turn together, so after six months of lessons we decided instead to improvise some swing ceroc for our wedding dance, in which we were so practiced from numerous family weddings on the Continent.  

A few months later that summer, we arrived in Valparaíso, Chile, for the wedding of friends, my former flatmate, a Chilean actress I had lived with in Spain, and an Argentine director. The whole crowd were experienced performers - actors, ballet dancers, musicians - all well versed in tango, and so when moment came to dance, this gringa grabbed her husband's wrist and dragged him to the pasillo outside to dance, unobserved, so I thought, until I lifted my head from his shoulder to find the entire wedding party had decamped to watch us, and then applaud our efforts. What can you do but laugh, really? My first lesson in clowning around with tango.

23 years later we arrived at the baroque beauty that is St George's Church in Hanover Square. Only we were two hours early, as it turned out they had two shows, and we'd booked the wrong one. Still, the lovely usher took pity on us and said they could squeeze us in. We took a pew at the back. I looked around, disappointed by the visibility. Then I spotted a gallery upstairs. I slipped back to the foyer, wondering if this was pushing my luck (but worth a shot)... could we move there? She said we could give it a go, if there was space. We nipped up, slipped past the organ, right round the side and ended up with a fabulous view of the orchestra, all in different colours of velvet jackets: mustard, burgundy, royal blue, emerald green, cut through with a slash of scarlet dresses. Vibrant. The colours of my life, as Barnum once sang to Mrs Barnum, at least for the evening.

The Seven Sins of Tango has seven musical chapters, each inspired by one of the deadly sins. From where we sat, we could see the dancers appear in the wings, already in character, strikingly composed. He was a slick porteño, immaculately suited, all contained power and watchful precision. She had three costume changes, gratifyingly, each one completely different in style: flamboyant, sensuous, sparkling, complementing the narrative arc of pecadillos. But it was the chemistry between them that gave the evening its impact. Their choreography did not simply decorate the music; it listened to it, teased it, answered it back. A flick of the foot, a sudden pause, a hand offered or withheld, a turn that seemed to surrender and resist at once. They brought each selected piece to life through expressive choreography that caught the emotional intensity of the score: desire, provocation, pride, playfulness, danger. All utterly eye-catching, all gravity defying, and there we were in the gallery, just the two of us in our section, marvelling at it all. Reconnecting. Remembering. Admiring the virtuosity of the music and the electricity of the dance.

They kicked off with Lust. Hallelujah! But in my excitement I knocked over my bottle of sparkling water. Thank god it was just water, but I still had visions of it dripping through the floorboards to a statue below and felt a Derry Girls moment coming on. If you've seen the episode with the miracle of the weeping virgin you'll get it...being brought up by Irish nuns, including a sardonic Sr Michael, it's very close to the bone. You can't take me anywhere!

Then came Gluttony. I felt smugly virtuous having opted for water over wine (for once), but in church there are magic tricks for that and the evening certainly produced an intoxicating effect as we were transported by both music and spectacle. There were also moments when the musicians took centre stage with virtuoso playing from strings, accordion and piano in dialogue with each other. Together it all whipped up the charged intensity I had longed for.

Afterwards I picked up a CD of London Concertante's Gypsy Strings, playing as I write now, full of life, mischief and joy. We then went out to a wildly romantic Italian restaurant round the corner for ridiculous cocktails and aphrodisiac arancini, before taking the Vespa home through streets still strung with Pride bunting, the embassies proudly flying gigantic rainbow flags. Inclusivity through diversity, and my mind todo un Libertango, the show finale.

Piazzolla was fifty when he recorded Libertango, music that broke the rules of traditional tango and declared his freedom from the old form. He had long been reviled by purists for dragging tango away from the dance floor and into something stranger, sharper, more rebellious. Today, Libertango belongs to everyone who understands what it means to refuse the old form and insist on your own.

It struck me then that circus and tango have always spoken to each other. Both grew out of liminal spaces: port cities and fairgrounds, bordellos and backstreets, travelling families and immigrant rooms, the places where people live at an angle to respectability. Both took bodies the mainstream world preferred not to look at too closely and put them centre stage. The acrobat, the clown, the sharp tanguero, the sequinned sylph: all of them saying, look again. There is grace here. There is discipline here. There is suppleness. There is desire, danger, wit and art.

Perhaps that is why both forms feel so wildly alive to me. They are not about fitting in. They are about turning marginality into theatre. About making a virtue of imbalance. About finding, in the push and pull, the possibility of flight. The surrealists understood this, of course. Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo wrote in Espantapájaros (Scarecrow) that women who do not know how to fly are wasting their time trying to seduce him. Angela Carter's winged aerialiste Fevvers embodied it in Nights at the Circus, half woman, half myth, refusing every neat category offered to her. And artist Leonora Carrington knew it in her bones, with her moon-women, horse-women, wild women and dream creatures slipping the leash of the ordinary (see Chapter 235: The Luminous Spell of Leonora Carrington)

Flight, after all, is not only acrobatics or letting go the trapeze bar. It is refusal. Refusal to stay earthbound. Refusal to be sensible. Refusal to accept the shape the world has handed you. So very circus. So very tango. The colours of my life. Barnum, encore.

Ah, it was an evening to make us dream of picking up tango up again. Buenos Aires had already begun to call to me. Last year, while creating a bespoke cultural and linguistic crash course of ten lessons for a private student travelling to Argentina, I found myself wandering, virtually at least, through San Telmo, La Boca and Almagro, following the music again through the city’s historical and colourful quarters. Then one of my sisters went at Christmas, and my sense of FOMO sharpened. I have sent others there in my imagination often enough. One day, ¡ojalá! I'll go and explore todo el tango.

And then today, the Argentine Tango School popped up on Instagram as a connection. And guess who the teachers are? The performers from the tango night I had hitherto only known as Him and Her. They are Adrien Bariki-Alaoui and Iro Davlanti-Lo, UK and European Tango Champions. Iro, nicknamed the Maria Callas of Tango, trained in fifteen dance styles and founded her own tango couture house. Adrien started at La Viruta in Buenos Aires, training four to five hours a day. Together they teach in London every week. Still in the thick of term time teaching and marking summer exams at school, I'm not ready to dive in just yet, but it's coming, this embrace of the second half of life. Lento, pero viene...

The Argentine School of Tango has the next beginner's course starting 9 July, with no partner or previous experience needed, at £15 a class or £120 for the full eight-week course. Classes run every Monday, Thursday and Sunday. See  theargentinetangoschool.com (click here)

The next performance of  London Concertante's The Seven Sins of Tango is in Exeter, 26th June (click here) . 

Time to post now this now. Tuesday, 23 June. Lucky for some! 

Chapter 238: Stinky Little Pilgrim

 Où est la sortie?! 

Bonjour! Bonjour! Normally there is absolutely no way I'd go out on a school night, particularly a Monday with a full week ahead. But Riss Obolensky's Stinky Little Pilgrim at Jacksons Lane, part of this year’s London Clown Festival, was beckoning. They had me at the title, quite frankly (see previous post). As I walked into the foyer I heard a group of friends hailing each other in French with hilarity, as though sharing some sort of inside joke. My ears pricked up. You can take the French teacher out of the classroom, mais...

In honour of the occasion I had put round my neck a pilgrim's conch shell, a present from my sister who walked the Camino to Santiago. And my naked mermaid, a sailing talisman echoing the siren call of the evening. As it turned out, exactly the right company for the evening ahead.

Having arrived in the nick of time, I tested the patience of the theatre gods and ordered a gin and tonic, then immediately stressed about the delay, my own doing, as I'd booked a seat right at the front in the centre as a show of support and was suddenly worried about being conspicuous, picking my way through other punters as the show was about to start. Then I worried the lovely bar staff would pick up on my stress and didn't want them to worry. Some days I am my own worst enemy.

I slid into my seat. A beautiful spirit with all the grace and bearing of a dancer took their seat next to me, clearly knowing half the row, with an exuberance that set the tone for the audience there. The lights dimmed. A voiceover introduced us to the world of a medieval French pilgrim. And in came Riss with all the ribald earthiness of jester pilgrim. They took in the audience and within minutes got our knees dancing and shoulders shrugging off with gallic insouciance all the cares of the day. Bonjour! Bonjour! Encore! Choral repetition in different registers, which is exactly what I do in the classroom to switch the energy round of reluctant teenagers. Home from home, really. But Riss takes it to another level. There was an energy generated by a boundless freedom of movement and bonkersness that could go in any direction.

Theirs was a pilgrim wearing pantaloons held up with a belt, a tunic and a white pilgrim's capuchon like Marianne, French liberté incarnate, their face and legs caked in clay with streaks of mud and Jesus-style sandals. This is a pilgrim who had walked miles (to say kilometres here feels reductive). Their presence loomed so large, I was struck later by their petite frame in contrast.

Our pilgrim launched into a quirky franglais with a couple of Spanish kinks that delighted the audience. The teacher in me approved of their choice of cognate, Les Voyageurs, rather than pèlerin or peregrino, though they later slipped that in en passant, to encompass the audience in a sentiment of camaraderie. And locations took on an exotic hue. Where are you from? Bethnal Verde, par exemple, ou bien, Bal-jambon? The language play was as gratifying as the physical comedy. We followed a narrative arc of a pilgrim on the cusp of arriving at their destination. Looking for what? The Holy Grail? Not quite, as it turns out. But I don't want a spoiler. This is a work in progress and part of the joy of it as an audience member is not knowing where the show will lead.

Immersed in their world, with a receptive audience, Riss drew out the clown in certain audience members too and riffed off the energy.  Their physical comedy is absurd and anarchic, quicksilver in pace and wit, never quite where you expect it to go, yet they get the audience to follow them anywhere.  

There was one moment I won't describe in full. It involved an object, dirty if not disgusting, and what they did with it, in a sequence of escalating audacity, culminated in the audience erupting in a collective gasp once became clear where it is heading. They paused. Looked at us. Then took it further. The bouffon at work. The French have a word, jolielaid.e, which describes their transformation through clowning so well. Grotesque, gleeful, completely committed. They had us right where they wanted us.

At one point we were directed to take off our shoes. My neighbour was apologetic, and that made me laugh. Suddenly I was twenty again, on a long train journey to Málaga, incarcerated in an enclosed carriage for six opposite a Spanish grandmother, opening her wicker picnic basket and cutting into a particularly fruity cheese, while four Japanese tourists blithely took off their trainers after clearly having spent the day sightseeing. Nothing will ever beat that stench in my imaginings.

 I tried to take refuge in the restaurant car, but the guard sent me back with the sentence ringing in my ears: "It is the smell of humanity, señorita, welcome to the world." And that's the point, isn't it? We are all stinky little pilgrims farting and belching our way through life. If you aren't, you are not living. As someone somewhere once said, our ass is always clenched because we're afraid to express ourselves, afraid to be alienated or singled out. And that's the function of a great clown, to release all that hot air with which we puff ourselves up, to give ourselves permission to let go, to get us through that embarrassment, to celebrate this big fat juicy life, to join in and laugh at it.

As fellow ClownFester Jamie Wood puts it: "for me clowning is reconnecting to a part of all of us that doesn't mind being seen as ridiculous and idiotic… a celebration of what it is to be human… the live connection between all of us in this thing that will never happen again in this constellation." Sacré bleu!

Amidst the comedy of errors there is a poignancy too. What the Stinky Little Pilgrim does expertly is illustrate how the journey is both one of companionship and of aloneness, and there are moments where we cannot say au revoir, but, needs must, have to bid adieu. It triggered a memory. The day after Mum died, walking along the corridor to her bedroom, with one of my sisters. I had never seen a dead body before. As I came to the door, my chest tightened, as though my heart was being squeezed in a tourniquet, and I realised with force that I would have to cross the threshold on my own. That's death for you. There is a fine line between le seuil and le deuil. But the need to say farewell with Love trumped fear, which carried me across, and while it took several months for the pain in my sternum to ease up, the experience is not one I would trade for the world. It marked a transition period, a falling into the second half of life for me.

This show puts the spotlight on that transformation too, catharsis for all our lives' journeys. In a world where the Pope recently got thunderous applause globally for his warnings about AI, the work of performers is a case in point as to the art of living. As Riss themself puts it: "I wish more people understood that clowning is in essence magic and energy work." We all need luminaries in our life to light up the way ahead. I hung around after to say thank you. Riss was radiant. Having discovered we both practice Qi Gong, we talked energy and the way certain practitioners weave this quietly into their creative process, a conversation to be explored further another time.

Outside the theatre, there was a magnificent sunset. I basked in the glow of an evening light, having laughed my heart out, and surreptitiously shed a few tears in the dark. I then thought of capturing a snapshot for posterity, but I am rubbish at selfies. A passer-by spotted my flailing attempts and offered to take a picture. He was a confident Continental in a classic navy quilted jacket, off home after a day in the city - the type my Swiss husband would know or be.  So, while my automatic British instinct would have been to politely decline, not wanting to be a bother, I checked myself and handed over my phone to this complete stranger, who was somehow familiar. "You want the church in the background, yes?" It's not a church, it's a theatre, I replied, a bit too quickly, possibly a tad defensively. Checked myself again. I was just nervous about being looked at, albeit through a lens. And then it struck me that perhaps the fates had aligned for this encounter not so much to capture a photo, but to bring home how fitting the ecclesiastical structure of Jacksons Lane was for the pilgrim's journey. The knave had found their nave. Divine intervention, peut-être…?

When I got home that night I drew a card from a meditation deck of cards to gather my thoughts and drew The Fool, stepping off a cliff. Of course. It brought to mind the work of François Villon, medieval poet, from university days. Inspired now to return to his words, I like the synchronicty of the Fool leading into what could easily be a pilgrim's hymn. Or hers. Or theirs. All ours:

 

En mon pays suis en terre loingtaine,               In my own country I am in a far off land
[…]                                                                   […]
Puissant je suis sans force et sans pouoir,       I am strong but I have no force or power
Je gaigne tout et demeure perdent,                  I win all yet remain a loser
Au point du jour diz:                                        At break of day I say
«Dieu vous doint bon soir!»"                           Goodnight.
[…]                                                                   […]
Gisant envers j'ay grand paour de chëoir        When I lie down I have a great fear of falling.

François Villon - Ballade du concours de Blois

NEXT work in progress sharing is on 16 July at Shoreditch Town Hall as part of  "SUMMER IN THE DITCH" (9-18 July). 

Cover photo credit: Riss Obolensky