Chapter 22: Vivienne Westwood and the Fashion Circus

"I don't care how many beauty treatments you have, I don't care which bag you're carrying - 

you have to have a dress"

Dame Vivienne Westwood

Dress featured in Vogue Italia from Spring/Summer 2010 collection

Maybe it's our dire performance in the World Cup that turn my thoughts to something the British do quite well (along with understatement).  Fashion. Specifically Vivienne Westwood's Anglomania label. Vivienne and the Fashion Circus.  Now there's a thought.  I have my eye on a pair of her circus sailor shorts for starters:

I imagined Vivienne Westwood at the 25th Anniversary Gala thrown by the National Centre for Circus Arts recently.  I didn't go, you understand, but heard all about it from a friend who had a fabulous time there, and saw it celebrated on their website:

I had to watch the clip for a second, and then a third time to establish Vivienne Westwood really wasn't there, so vividly had I painted her in.  Well, circus is her space, isn't it?  She is the designer that Comic Relief originally turned to for their Red Nose Day t-shirts.

Maybe it was the runways. Maybe it was the memory of the once flaming red hair (still [to start] working on that chapter on Circus and the Redhead), the flamboyance, maintaining her edge while now not only a grande dame of the fashion industry, but a Dame by royal decree.  After all, isn't circus in some way the punk of the arts? The bad boy gradually being appropriated by the Establishment, taking centre stage at the likes of Sadlers' Wells and the Albert Hall?  

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from center"

said the voice of Kurt Vonnegut, on Twitter yesterday, haunting the ethernet along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain.  For me that is the crux of Vivienne Westwood's appeal, and that of the circus arts.  Building a path along what may appear to some a precipice, but blazing along the trail with a fleetness of foot, and a fire that forges the way ahead.




Maybe I'm just saying all this to justify the fact that I bought my first ever Vivienne Westwood dress the other day.  We had been invited to the opera at Holland Park to see Puccini's "Fanciulla del West" one evening, and that afternoon, just for fun, I stopped off at a local shop that stocks Westwood's clothes and accessories.  I always head for Westwood's rail first to see what's in, and look at each piece in turn, in wonder. This time the dress that caught my eye, was the Prophecy dress (see link), the print aptly named "mirage".  I couldn't believe my eyes.  That is the power of a well-cut piece, it drapes, it flatters, it graces and you radiate. 

Before I could cheque myself, out came the credit card and along came the dress. I'm my own fairy godmother.  I just need to wave my wand now at the fridge that is still leaking. 






The evening was stellar.   We were invited to have drinks with the cast afterwards, only it was past bewitching hour, and Prince Charming and I found the pumpkins were calling.  It was only when we got home and I had a moment to try on the dress properly, that it sunk in the dress looked even better, the right way round (pictured), as the shop assistant had advised. I laughed. What a fool.  Back to clown school.  Now, where did I put that nose...?

This little piggy went to market ...
As featured in last week's  Metro newspaper, 23rd June 2014

Chapter 20: Circus Kathmandu

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, from Songs of Innocence and Experience

Henri Rousseau's Tiger in a Tropical Storm
at The National Gallery

Tigers.  Magnificent, terrible, ferocious.  Shere Khan.  Sheer Pride.  Growing up, one of my sisters had a poster of a regal tiger in her bedroom with the caption: 

"It's hard to be humble, when you're as great as I am."  

Circus empowers.  Circus is a great space for tigers.  I am reminded of this yesterday when my daughter brings home a reading book from school.  It's about a little girl called Lucy, a redhead (and redheads in circus get their own chapter, to follow) who discovers a magical fairground horse that will take her wherever she wishes to go.

Nepal is across the border from India, and home to the first ever Nepali contemporary circus, Circus Kathmandu.  European circus professionals have been working with children and young adults rescued from savage exploitation in old-style circuses, to create a company that can now explore their own story through the language of circus, on their own terms.   You can get the low-down from the article Circus Kathmandu and the Fight Against Human Trafficking that appears in The Circus Diaries blog.    

I was interested, and not surprised, to read that one of the key players in helping that voice find expression is Ali Williams, creative director of NoFit State, who took a sabbatical to go out to Nepal and work with the troupe. It brings me back to this idea of circus providing a space, a safety net, for any Bird with a Broken Wing (see Chapter 9: NoFit State to Entertain) to recover their strength.  As one of their artists explains on the Circus Kathmandu Home Page:

"I feel proud now.  I can stand up on my own legs and feed myself.  I've started earning and I can look after my family."

Circus Kathmandu arrives at Glastonbury this weekend.   Are you going?  Are you there yet?!  If so, you can see their show "Swagatam", meaning welcome, at the Big Top tent today and tomorrow afternoon.   And lucky you.  I'm still waiting for my fairground ride to spirit me away.

Chapter 18: Kate Tempest, The Girl's on Fire, with I am Fya.

"Our fear pickles us, living in jars 'cos it's safer."

Sometimes you come slap bang against a voice so real it leaves you speechless.  So raw that your own words feel tinny, fake, artificial, laboured, the product of a relentless consumer.    Kate Tempest is an Author.  Roots in Authenticity.  Speaks with Authority.  The voice of a prophet of our time. Declamatory.  The voice quivers with strength and conviction. Her poetry is epic.  Check out Brand New Ancients, Part One, for starters.

She keeps words on their toes, one of a generation of poets who belong to the age-old tradition of bards duelling verses, and who now fight for survival in the quick-fire rounds of slams, exchanges of verbal bartering and battering in open mic evenings.  

"Them things you don't show I can see, them things you don't say speak to me."

That's what Kate does.  The album "Everybody Down" peels back the layers, gets under the skin to the broken hearts, wasted, lives fragmented, interconnected.  She has a vital way of nailing characters like Becky "eyes full of morning,  spent without sleeping", Harry, after Becky "heart opening up as like it was blinking", Marshall Law "wanking on about his artwork", and David, well, "even David's enthusiasm is boring".  I feel for David.

On stage at the Hootananny she radiated happy.  The biggest grin, sharing jokes with her crew.   I am Fya is touring with her,  and her video "I'm a girl" strikes out against the living doll, our surgery-obsessed age that rams the perfect woman down our throats until we regurgitate it.

And it makes me think of that aerial gig "Expectation", part of The Roundhouse's CircusFest 2014.   What body are we as women constructing?  Do I train in circus to have the perfect body or a strong one?  I tell myself it's the latter.

Back to last night, there was a sense of the home-girl, home-coming.   Somehow I ended up at the front with the French girls I'd met in the loo queue.  If the accent wasn't a dead giveaway, the flags on their cheeks were for sure. France had just thrashed Switzerland.  They were high.  The audience chorussed along and Kate got us sing back at her, something she said she'd avoided 'til now as naf.  She was having fun. She's great live.  With her band.  Voting is open here at Songkick: Best Live Act 2014.  It's in the can, right?!

"Once I set myself a task, there ain't no going back"

Chapter 16: Bird with a Broken Wing

The poetics of circus is a funny one.   The poetry of physical movement speaks volumes, but recently there seem to be more and more shows reciting, as well as embodying, the written word, with varying degrees of success.  One example is the Australian production "She Would Walk the Sky" which I saw at the Roundhouse as part of CircusFest 2014 back in April.

The narrative, such as it was, laid an emphasis on the idea of a circus family being a delicate balancing act.   The bird with a broken wing in this case is pining after her dearly departed sailor boy.   She leaves the company to search for him, with her ardent admirer, the Strong Man, in hot pursuit.  The faded grandeur of the circus carnival set mirrors the disintegration of the company as it loses one of its wings.  I loved the surreal clown who brought the story together, but whether he was too far out on a limb from the rest of the performers, having "wandered in from another show", and whether the story-telling simply distracts from the real talent of the acrobats. is an interesting point made in Lyn Gardner's review in The Guardian.  

What lingered for me, after the show, was the theme of the bird with a broken wing.  The strength, skill and extraordinary focus of the performers counter-poised with the potential danger, illicited frequent gasps from the audience, and had me leaning over to my brother at one point whispering "I'm not sure how much more I take of this ... "  The idea that however strong we all have our Achilles' heel, stayed with me; we are all damaged goods in one way or another.  The bird that is soaring may then find she is knocked off her perch by desire, the strong man may find himself unmanned by unrequited love, the family may realise it is missing a limb when a member goes walkabout.   

Life is so bloody fragile, I think.  A lesson that was brought home to me last Friday when I was training out on the Common and put my shoulder out of its socket.  In an excruciating moment of funny-bone pain, writhing around to knock it back in place, and with my training partner thinking I was having an epileptic fit, I remember thinking, "this just can't happen to me right now, I need to go and pick my son up from tennis in a minute, then my daughter from a playdate etc." Eventually, after a moment where time seemed to stand still and extend infinitely outwards in all directions, the bone slotted back into its groove.  I'm hyper-mobile and this has happened before, you see, though never quite as severely.  The pain went in an instant, but ache of vulnerability lingered.  

So going back on Tuesday evening to Circus School (ie. The National Centre for Circus Arts, formerly known as Circus Space) was not a little daunting.  I had missed two lessons and with Circus School's half-term to boot, my absence added up to a month.  Ditto my partner-in-crime Anne, doing the acrobalance course.   It was great to see the familyar faces in my group again, at the same time missing the couple that weren't there. We don't rely on each other physically, as the acrobalancers building human pyramids do, say, but there is an instant trust and support there.  My first lesson on static trapeze, then, was their third (that much was obvious!) but it was thanks to their encouragement that I could get up at all.  And also thanks to our teacher, Lorraine, who it turned out was subbing for the usual teacher.  That was a stroke of luck, as it turned out that Lorraine had taught static trapeze to my friend Vicky over a decade ago, and knew her very well.  And it was Vicky, her energy and her stories, that had inspired me to sign up, in turn.  

Lorraine had the perfect balance of encouraging us to go beyond our comfort levels without forcing the issue, and supporting us when we (ok, I!) froze.   We practiced moves again and again, at times with our eyes shut to reinforce the sensations.  It was fabulous.  At the end, Lorraine invited us to practice a move where you drop from sitting into a half-angel.  Half-angel.  Short a wing.  Love that.

After class, I found Anne had pulled a ligament up the back of her leg in her tumbling class.   She was in huge pain, not that that will ever stop her. Anne had been doing a star turn, complimented on her round offs,  and observed that pride does come before a fall.  I was hobbling too - simply because a surfeit of lactic acid, pumping into my muscles when fear gripped hold, meant my biceps and calf muscles had seized up as a result. What a pair we made.  Still, proud of our efforts, even when we have to wing it.  Birds a little broken, but still soaring ...

... and still tweeting.   Being on twitter this past month has retuned me into the delights of discoveries on radio as well.  I heard a song the other day that struck a chord.   "Let Her Go" by Passenger. Looking into Passenger's bio, I was fascinated to learn that he has made it big-time from busking, so, like circus, he has his roots in street performance.   No beauty without pain.  No flight without falling.  She Would Walk the Sky if you Let Her Go.

Chapter 15: The Rehearsal

Did you know yesterday was World Juggling Day?  It was also Father's Day's, World Gin Day, the day after our wedding anniversary, and we we were hosting a huge family lunch party.  Somewhere along the way I dropped a couple of balls, and social media was one of the first to go.

Sometimes it feels that life is a series of little failures, of dropping balls.  And it's funny, because when Rufus Norris was in conversation with Toby Jones the other evening at the Battersea Arts Centre (see Chapter 13), he referred to failure being just another word for rehearsal.  Hearing that was one of those light-bulb moments. It has become my mantra over the past week as I've been upping the ante on my harp practice, ready to play for my parents yesterday.  My father is 92, my mother in her 80s, and the occasions when they will come to London are few and far between, if ever.   They were not coming to hear me play the harp per se, but, quite frankly, if you can't slip in a serenade to your Dad on Father's Day, when can you?

I would love to say I played perfectly - that I astonished and delighted the audience with my dexterity and musicality.  The truth is I failed.  By my standards. There simply hadn't been the time to put the hours in, and while my harp teacher says that there is nothing like a glass of bubbly to lubricate your playing, there had been a fair few more than that over the long, long lunch before I remembered the "concert" I had promised. But the thing is life will never offer up perfect opportunities - you just have to work with what you are given.  I recovered from the odd slipped note, the kids running riot and pushed on.  Dad was delighted.  Mum thought I did very well, dear.  Job done. 

And the same goes for Circus School.  After a month away, I'm going back tomorrow for my first class on static trapeze, while my class-mates have already had two sessions.  I feel in NoFit State.  Again. But I guess you just have to take your chance and roll with it.  Accepting failure is one of the most excruciating lessons out there.  But actually,  I am more than happy rebranding it as a rehearsal.  And that is exactly what this blog is.  Sometimes you just have to keep harping on.

Chapter 13: On Moscow and the State of Circus

In a week when Shadow Culture Secretary of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, has caused a storm with her call for State-funded art in the UK to be more inclusive, I want to touch on the State of Education and the Performing Arts. There's no Harman that, right?!

And now for something completely different.  My fridge magnet.

I found it yesterday in a shop.   Its message made me think about the creation of our alter egos in social media, whether we use our real name or not.  We are nothing more (or so much more?) than a creation of our words and pictures, driven by our interests, memories and daydreams. A month ago LucyLovesCircus didn't exist.  Now she has her own Twitter account and Facebook page and is quite shameless.  Quite being the operative word.  And the world is opening up.

My thoughts have been turning to Russian circus recently.  It started in half-term when I was on a bus with the children on our way to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square to see  "Primetime" (link), a series of plays written by 8-11 year olds.  The bus changed final destination and we were left stranded by the police station at Battersea Bridge.   Trying to find a way to sell walking the rest of the way to the kids, I noticed a poster for the Moscow State Circus.  An attraction and a distraction. We laughed and took it as a sign we were on the right track, and, as we walked, we talked about our next new adventure.

Each show that the Moscow State Circus puts on has a story to tell, and the current show revolves around the space that is "Gorky Park", the historic amusement park in Moscow.   This reminds me of song by the German rock band Scorpions in the 80s, celebrating Glasnost and the end of the Cold War in The Wind of Change: "I follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change...".   I was a teenager staying with a pen-friend in Southern Germany at the time it came out, and that song was everywhere, the anthem of the moment, the zeitgeist.  

The kids and I missed the Moscow State Circus in Fulham, but we are determined to see the show at some point over the summer holidays.   I believe that circus has a lot to teach children beyond entertainment.  It fills them with awe as they gaze on astonishing feats, and I think childhood should be filled with wonder, wherever possible.  And it is a shared experience.  That to me is key, and a point I picked up on listening to Rufus Norris (BBC profile),  newly appointed artistic director of the National Theatre when he came to the Battersea Arts Centre on Tuesday.  He described the importance of theatre being a shared communal experience, and one that moves its audience.   He underlined that he sees his role going forward to be one of service, and this this was said with genuine commitment. Theatre, and by extension the performing arts, is the new religion, I thought, and isn't Rufus Norris divine?!

The Soviets didn't miss a (circus) trick when they nationalised the Moscow State Circus back in the 1920s and used the shows as a vehicle for Communist propaganda.  With performers as highly skilled, rigorously trained and valued as any classical ballet dancer, the shows were more accessible quite simply because the tickets were cheaper, enabling the State to reach its message out to a far greater proletarian audience.

I was fascinated to read in Wikipedia's article on the Moscow State Circus about one act in particular, a flying trapeze troupe named "The Cranes" after a song (see link) of the same name, remembering fallen soldiers of World War II who, instead of being buried in the ground, soar up to the sky like great birds. 

" The show, set to classical music, focused on the story being told, rather than on the incredible display of skill. One of the performers threw a “quad” (4 backwards rotations before being caught by the catcher), an impressive and incredibly rare trick, which would have been the focus of the act in any other kind of show; nevertheless, the performer said that the most important part of the act was the way the it was an aesthetic experience. He said it was not the individual skills, “but the simultaneity of our aerial gymnastics and the psychological effectiveness of our acting, all of it working together to move an audience...other circuses have first-rate performers, but we do something special — each act creates a small vignette. These are playlets that give spectators not only the flavor of our life, but also reveal the soul of Soviet man.” 

It reminded me of the way that Fidel Castro harnessed the power of travelling theatre companies to reach out to illiterate campesinos in remote mountainous parts of Cuba when he came to power in 1959.  

Back to the moment in the UK, Harriet Harman warned of the dire consequences of a generation coming through with "no meaningful exposure" to opera and classical music, and there has been much in the press and trending on twitter about cultural elitism.  But when Harman mentions culture on offer in Covent Garden, she means the Royal Opera House, while I think of the pedagogical goldmine that are the street performers right outside.  

Chatting to my yoga teacher yesterday evening, I heard about The Playful Monk,  the venerable Amarantho, who works with children in extremely deprived areas. He was giving a talk at the centre the night before.  "What if the children don't speak?"  Asked one parent there.  "You listen harder," he replied, "they will be saying something."  Silence speaks volumes.  I think yoga and circus skills inhabit the same space in many ways.  A space where discipline, laughter and an awareness of living in the moment go hand in hand.   And as if to illustrate this point, I read a feature recently in the Financial Times on Andy Puddicombe, the ex-Bhuddist monk and founder of the highly successful Headspace app, which guides you through a series of short daily meditations.   After he left his order, Andy Puddicombe spent time working in a circus in Russia, and found the yoga to be a key transferable skill.  Well, there you go, enlightening stuff.  Buddhism and an alternative religion.   If the performing arts are now the opium of the masses, then circus is my drug of choice. I wonder what Marx would have made of it all?!

 (see clip from 10 minutes in)

Circus is a State of Mind.  

Chapter 12: Send in the Clowns

"If word gets out I'm missing, 500 girls would kill themselves, and I wouldn't want them on my conscience…
Not when then ought to be ON MY FACE!"

Rik  Mayall as Lord  Flashheart in  Blackadder Goes Forth

9th June, 2014. This evening the barrage of punk references and Young Ones quotes and references to Lord Flashheart has slightly passed me by. I am just killing time until my harp lesson with a quick login to Facebook. I register, barely, that he has died. How sad, I think, he was funny, life is cruel. I move on. Then my harp teacher arrives, who had known Rik Mayall. Now, I have only been learning harp for a year, but there is a strong bond forged between teacher and pupil and I feel my stomach dropping out, a visceral reaction to her loss, to that of his family, of an outrageously funny, generous, grounded free spirit. Gutting.

Growing up I just caught the tail end of The Young Ones,  so for me Rik Mayall was all about Famous Five in  The Comic Strip Presents… and Lord Flashheart in Blackadder. For others it might be Bottom or The New Statesman, or Drop Dead Fred. For all, I believe, Rik Mayall's comedy was anarchic, irreverent, limitless, expressive and perfectly timed. He was the ultimate slapstick clown of our times.

"No, I live on the limit Vyvyan.  The Limit.  Because I'm a Rider at the Gates of Dawn and I take no prisoners."

as Rick in The Young Ones

I hear that Mayall died unexpectedly, and have been thinking of a friend's husband who died suddenly, whose daughter's birthday is today. So poignant, words fail. Then at bed-time this evening, my six-year-old daughter turns to me out-of-the blue, distraught: "Mummy, you are magic.  What will I do when you are gone? I am so scared to think I will lose you one day, so scared." I reassure. I hold. Close. She is at that age. My son went through it. So did I. So did my husband. So will our toddler in a few years time. It's hard-wired into our DNA to ask, what next? Still, I wonder what has brought this on right now? Is it something in the air? Today has been so very humid after all, so heavy. So close. Waiting for weather to break. I think of that later, watching a stunning piece by a student from the National Centre for Circus Arts entitled "Raindance":

And it's a funny thing, but I'm working on a harp piece to play to my own parents this weekend. The title of the piece, by Paraguayan composer Alfredo Rolando Ortiz, is "Esperando" which translates as "Waiting", and when I play this evening, I feel both an anticipated and real sense of loss flooding out.

In something akin to a zeitgeist, the website "Brainpickings" has been very much on my radar raising these issues in the past 24 hours. I went to bed last night reading the latest post on Tolstoy's Confession where, on  reaching 50, Tolstoy in crisis questions our place in the world, and sinks into an existential funk.  If there is no point to life, does it bear waiting til the end? Shouldn't we just call it quits? And then in today's "Brainspickings" offering, "On the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with the Loss", Megan O'Rourke  similarly touches on the tension produced by this sense of waiting for the end:

The dread of death is so primal, it overtakes me on a molecular level. In the lowest moments, it produces nihilism. If I am going to die, why not get it over with? Why live in this agony of anticipation?

The answer? Who knows? But if life is some absurd joke, let's celebrate the clowns who help us laugh at it. Let's live for those hilarious moments that help lift the burden and bring sheer release.

Outside the rain is thundering down. With the odd Flash.

Thank you Rik Mayall, and good night.

"Flash by name, Flash by nature."