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

Chapter 237: On Memories, Milestones and the Pilgrim Soul

“You know what a wine pairing has in common with giving birth…?”

“Mum, seriously?!”

“...You don’t know what you are getting and it’s always a lovely surprise.”

My husband Xavier raised an eyebrow. “Or a disappointment,” he observed drily, having ordered his own carafe, ever the cynic to my glass half full.  As they sing in Barnum, “you wonder how we made it down the aisle…”  I assured the kids he really was joking.

Anyway, there we were at Mallow last night, an outstanding vegan restaurant by Borough Market, which we had stumbled across by accident at Christmas with sailing friends. We had returned by special request to mark my daughter’s 18th birthday. She also shares her birthday with her father, a neat trick I’m particularly proud of, so we were there to celebrate the Gemini twins. Another circus act, obviously.

We were savouring their Market Menu upstairs in the Floret dining room, which felt right somehow, a little removed from the world, looking out. Gentle, nurturing, unhurried, mellow. As the Saturday evening darkened around us, the lights came up in Southwark Cathedral opposite, illuminating the stained glass in deep colour. We all clocked it together. Something quietly sacred in the middle of a special family night out.

It has been quite a week for milestones.

Writing the blog has picked up again, as I go with the flow, and this week it hit 350,000 hits. Still wondering who reads it. Still publishing with all the wobbly confidence of my early forays on the globe at National Circus. It does not get any easier, exactly, but it does seem to have its own momentum, something that propels me on when I might otherwise stop.

The readers it has gathered along the way, from all over the globe, are a constant source of wonder. As a languages teacher, that means the world to me. It also feels rather apt, because this whole circus journey was kickstarted by a trip to the National Circus on a taster afternoon with a dozen girlfriends of all nationalities, on what happened to be International Women's Day in 2014, while the BBC World Service was there filming (Chapter 1 - click here). Talk about synchronicity.

The other day, watching Rivals on television, I was reminded of the Yeats line, “but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,” and it has been rattling around my head ever since. Or one woman. Perhaps that is what birthdays, marriages, motherhood, friendship and old family jokes are really marking. The pilgrim soul in each of us, still travelling.

And so pilgrimages have been on my mind. A zeitgeist, perhaps. Last week, invigilating an exam, I watched one boy give up the holy ghost over a blank paper. The last question asked why people go on pilgrimages. Did he know what a pilgrimage was? No, Miss, he replied despondently. How to explain that in a whisper, without giving the game away? I did my best. It stayed with me afterwards.

El Camino to Santiago has been calling for years. Last year one of my adult students sent me a virtual postcard when she arrived there after I taught about it, which settled matters. One day. One of my sisters and I have been talking about it, and daydreaming about paradors en route, in the wake of Mum's death. Maybe next year, which is a special Jubilee year.

Then yesterday at ParkRun, volunteering as a Park Walker, I had to pick up my pace to keep up with a grandmother called Ann, which was also my mum’s name. She was being met at the end by her granddaughter, Lucy. She has been doing ParkRun since the early Bushey Park days and is planning to reach her 350th milestone this month. It strikes me how many people I have met along the way who took up ParkRun because they had lost someone or something. The secular pilgrimage, it turns out, is everywhere. It felt like a sign.

And then another thought popped into my head. The London ClownFest is running at Jacksons Lane, and on Monday evening Riss Obolensky brings a work in progress, Stinky Little Pilgrim. “Part reckoning, part ritual, part prayer. An award-winning clown with a tent, walking around Jacksons Lane, asking where the nearest exit is. Get lost. Get found. Get lost again. Call your mum,” the blurb reads.

I used to call mine every day when I could. Maybe that is the gap writing is picking up to fill recently.

And then I noticed that Lamorna Ash had liked Riss's post. I read her book "Don't Forget We're Here Forever" in one go last Easter when it came out, an exploration of why a new generation is turning back toward faith in an age of uncertainty. There is a frequency there, a wavelength, a vibration. Sometimes, after losing someone, finding the faith to carry on the journey can create its own new connections.

The pilgrimage takes many forms. A Saturday morning ParkRun. A vegan restaurant by Borough Market where Southwark Cathedral lights up at dusk. A clown with a tent and an OS map that provides no answers. A blog that keeps moving forward even when you are not entirely sure where it is going.

We walk. We question. We put ourselves out there. Occasionally, we hide back under the duvet until the embarrassment passes.

It is a funny old world, as Dad used to say.

And perhaps that is why we keep walking.

Riss Obolensky's "Stinky Little Pilgrim" is a work in progress, part of London Clown Fest, and showing tomorrow night (Monday 8th June) at Jacksons Lane. Click here for tickets. 

Photo credit: Pilgrims in stained glass window of Canterbury Cathedral taken by Peter Barritt as featured in Guardian article (click here)

Chapter 236: Take That... and Circus!

"Mark, meet Lucy, she loves circus and goes to trapeze classes." A mutual friend waved me over to jump the coffee queue at Nero's to join them. That was over ten years ago now, but it comes back to me now in the form of a zeitgeist. Mark said he liked trapeze too, and had some experience himself. There it was, an open door, an invitation. And instead of walking through it, and asking questions, I launched into an enthusiastic monologue about the oversubscribed classes at the National Circus, the history of Circus Space, and my top tips for him enrolling there, then grabbed my coffee and dashed out, with the feeling I had just embarrassed myself, but not quite sure why.

It was only as the caffeine kicked in that the penny dropped.

Of course Mark Owen knew about circus. It was the theme of the whole sell-out Take That tour. Turns out not only had I skipped one queue, I missed another cue entirely. I felt like a muppet. A well-meaning, trapeze-enthusiast muppet at the beginning of a circus journey, who had just lectured a superstar with a wealth of experience about how to book an aerial beginners class...

Maybe I hadn't clicked sooner because for the Mum on the school coffee run this was all out of context. The world of Take That had hitherto belonged to the sixth form common room at school. I remember us all watching an entire concert on television, the kind of communal experience that doesn't really exist anymore, everyone on the same sofa, at the same moment, singing our hearts out, no scrolling away.

A couple of years after the Nero's encounter I found myself at the 02 for The Circus Live, a girls' night out with all the giggles that entails. It was brilliant in the truest sense of the word, dazzling, luminous, joyful. Cloudswing. Pyrotechnics blazing through Relight My Fire. A spinning globe with aerialist Katherine Arnold suspended beneath it, the whole world turning. A duo act in red silks. Luminous birds thrown against darkness. Clown Joe Dieffenbacher in a hamster wheel, The Engineer who magicked up a flying bike that carried the singers aloft. The kind of show that makes you understand why human beings have always gathered in the dark to watch other human beings do impossible things.

I cannot believe I never wrote about it. In retrospect, now I get it. That same month I had celebrated a wedding anniversary and a family wedding, and when Giffords Circus came to town I went to that too, which did make it onto the blog, the only post that month in 2015. And then there was the small matter of hosting a Moulin Rouge party for my husband's fortieth a couple of days after the concert. I had opened the door early that evening, for a pre-party cocktail in the garden, for neighbours en route to a West End cabaret. They turned up accompanied by their friend, actor Lesley Joseph, who took one look at me dolled up to the nines, choker, corset, red rose in my hair, backlit by red light from a flashing windmill sign and declared "Ooh, I'm not sure I should enter this den of iniquity!" Birds of a Feather, indeed. Take That!

And now Take That have brought the greatest show back, outdoors this summer, and I cannot be there. But this is the life we are given... and so I am living it vicariously, through the eyes and footage of those who are.

It was Instagram that first put the concert on my radar, as I follow tightwire walker Ellis Grover, whose footage stopped me mid-scroll. There he was, moving across the wire to Patience, that song about waiting and trust and things arriving in their own time, performing with the kind of grace and generosity that makes you forget you are watching something technically terrifying. He does stunts that should not be possible and makes them look like conversation. I have never seen him perform live. Watching the footage, I felt that particular wistfulness of the thing you almost had, the show you nearly booked, conversation cues not followed, the stories left unwritten.

Cirque Bijou, whose work I have long admired, are among those who provided acts for the tour. Outdoors, on that scale, it looks phenomenal. A Guardian review (click here) described a  a mechanical elephant emerging from beneath the stage, giant sky blue air balloon hovering over the crowd, fire-breathers, trampolinists, a hair-hanging aerialist, and during Relight My Fire, everyone on stage apparently holding a naked flame of some description. There was Joe Dieffenbacher again, making light of being stuck in an air balloon when it failed to descend on cue. That, more than any planned spectacle, is the art of the clown: meeting the unexpected and rolling with it.

What struck me as well was the encore of gratitude, with Take That thanking the audience for giving them the opportunity to perform and making the dream possible. 

I understand that impulse completely. This week as my blog quietly pushes past 350,000 hits, I find myself wondering about 350,000 moments of someone choosing to follow this meandering circus journey. I wonder about my readers the way perfomers on stage might think about an audience they never get to see, beyond the lights, out there somewhere, just out of sight...

The Osho Zen tarot card I keep drawing at the moment is called Slowing Down. The universe, as ever, is not being subtle. And perhaps there is something right about watching this particular tour from a distance, through Joe Dieffenbacher aloft in his balloon, through a crowd singing Rule the World with their phone lights held up. 

And through the feed of Ellis Grover, walking the wire to Patience.

Just that. One step at a time.

Photo credit above: Ellis Grover @ellisgrover
Top photo: Dan Reid @danreidphoto
Triptych: central image my own, 2015, of Katharine Arnold @katherinearnold.
Current tour courtesy of Joe Dieffenbacher @joeclownphysicalcomedy.
Fan photographs sourced via Facebook; original photographers unknown

Cirque Bijou @cirquebijou
Take That @takethat