Chapter 246: Catch "Step and a Half" at the Edinburgh Fringe

On Friday I went back to Jacksons Lane for a sharing of Kook Ensemble's beautiful show SAND ahead of its Edinburgh Fringe run. Chatting afterwards to another performer, Tamzen, about weekend plans, I learned she was going the following day to see the Palestinian Circus and its show Step and a Half at Soho Theatre Walthamstow. Wait, what? How did I miss that?!

The show Step and a Half is made up of graduates from The Palestinian Circus School, an organisation which came onto my radar over twenty years ago. A university friend had sown the seeds of my own aerial journey when she had begun taking trapeze classes at what was then the Circus Space in Old Street, now the National Centre for Circus Arts (NCCA). Her day job then took her to the Foreign Office in Jerusalem, where she also worked to secure necessary travel and security permits so Palestinian staff at youth circus hubs could cross military checkpoints to teach. About a decade later, taking evening classes at the NCCA myself, I met her former trapeze teacher, Claire. In one of those beautiful twists that make the circus world feel so tightly woven, Claire had also travelled out to work with the school, and we talked about her involvement and how my friend's intervention had helped. I cannot be certain that the circus project my friend and Claire supported was this exact organisation, and I have not had time to check before leaving for a family holiday tomorrow. But the connection resonated nonetheless, that whole network of commitment and solidarity around grassroots circus in Palestine. The fact that the performers in Step and a Half were graduates from the school struck me too, having seen the NCCA’s own graduation show only last month. They were counterparts, in a sense, and I imagined circus graduates and professionals based here in the UK sitting in the audience in solidarity. It is a global family.

As much as the circus connection, it was the mention of Palestine itself that drew me. Last August I went with a colleague from school, another Lucy, to see Farah Nabulsi's film The Teacher. It follows a Palestinian schoolteacher trying to protect his students while navigating the realities of occupation and concealing an American-Israeli hostage in his basement. The film brought to life complexities that newspaper articles and internet arguments never quite reach. That is the power of the arts. They take something apparently distant and make you sit inside it.

And so, to Walthamstow. I've grown increasingly familiar with the place these past few weeks. It began with Revel Pucks' A Glimmer Daze Gambit in a big top, not that you'd know it from this blog, as I'm still chasing my tail, writing everything out of order. Then, a couple of weeks later, came my first visit to Soho Theatre Walthamstow, for a sharing of Grayson Perry’s autobiographical musical, which is another story still waiting to be told.. The point is, while I may come from deep south of the river, I can now get up to Walthamstow in under forty minutes, and it's beginning to feel like a home from home.

I returned this time with yet another Lucy (we are legion), who'd also come with me to Tao of Glass (See Chapter 243 - click here). Catching up before the show, taking our seats in the auditorium, I realised with a sinking feeling that my post about Tao, posted the night before and already viewed hundreds of times, badly needed an edit. I had written it in haste, trying to do justice to something that touched on my niece and felt deeply personal. Having only just made my Instagram public, I felt horribly exposed there too. But the theatre Wi-Fi was not working. Too late for a quick fix or a retreat to draft. I simply had to sit with the discomfort.

Fortunately, the moment the performers took the stage, staying present wasn't difficult.

The performers wandered on stage one by one and then came together, the music propulsive, joyous, unmistakably Levantine. Picture dancers, hands round shoulders, in a line or semicircle, “stamping the ground” together, which gives the Dabkeh dance its name. It threads through the whole show, in music and in symbol: community, solidarity, connection to the land. The audience began clapping along, joy through resistance, resilience in motion. I later learned that the title of the show refers to the rhythmic wahdeh w nos  “one and a half step” in Dabkeh. To me, it also suggested progress under constraint: not even two full steps possible, perhaps, but still a step and a half forward. Not two steps back.

Within minutes the line between stage and auditorium had dissolved. One performer fell backwards into a crowd of waiting hands. The audience cheered and whooped. Sandwiched between young children in the rows ahead and behind, their faces lit with delight, I soaked up that spontaneous exclamation of wonder, thinking it just might be the most beautiful noise in the world.

There was group juggling, objects passing between performers in a shared rhythm. A ball dropped, the flow carried on regardless. Moments like that don't diminish circus, they bring its difficulty into focus and make the success that follows more exhilarating.

An aerial sequence on straps ended with a performer suspended by one arm. A voice spoke of the strength of her body, the possibility of hope. The physical language made the words tangible: strength, body, hope, resistance. I found myself thinking of the spoken word artist Polarbear (Steven Camden), who was involved in a Gaza Monologues fundraiser some years ago. This sequence had that same quality of spoken-word poetry becoming flesh.

Then Hamed Khdour's Cyr wheel. There is something mesmerising in that circling stillness, particularly the movement that resembles a spinning penny with ever-decreasing momentum. Fresh from Tao I thought of the three rings of light representing three levels of consciousness, the largest reaching down to the most diminutive as the penny settles, sheer essence, and Phelim McDermott's call for Deep Democracy in the world. In the spinning I found the Tao and the Now, connecting to source. My heart went out later, reading a Fest interview (click here) with executive director Mohammad Rabar, to learn that Hamed’s brother was shot at seventeen and that he carries his memory into every performance. The whirling became, in retrospect, not simply extraordinary technique but a deeper connection to love.

I loved the female performers’ costumes, their jeans opening into skirt-like flares. They made me think of my daughter, partly because I have lately been borrowing (back!) her trousers with a skirt overlay. She would have admired the embroidery too, as she is developing her own textiles work. She's been talking about taking up circus skills at uni, and she's passionately principled in how she sees the world, so I could see her spirit soar as their bodies did, such strength, such embodied grace. Circus really does give you wings. I don't need the reminder, I have a pair tattooed onto my wrist now, after coming across a market stall in Valencia recently called Soul Journey, un viaje al alma. That's what this show did too. It took my soul on a journey.

A later duet on white silks, preceded by what read as a couple's rite of union, carried its own romance: love strewn across the stage in white and red petals, a veil placed on the Beloved. I've been thinking more and more, these days, about the mystical search for the Beloved as I fall into this second half of life, whether in the poetry of St John of the Cross, in Rumi, or in Elif Shafak's portrait of the deep well of love between Rumi and Shams in The Forty Rules of Love. It made me think too of Sufi dancer Aakash Odedra's recent performance The Song of the Bulbul at Sadler's Wells East (click here for video trailer), whirling across a stage of rose petals, lifting them into the air as he turned. Here, the red and white petals went airborne on the spin of silks.

Then there was a recent conversation about how the skirts of Sufi dancers echo those of Gujarati garba in Garbh (click here), which I had seen the previous weekend at the Ensemble Festival, and flamenco too, with that same grace carried in the hands. Flamenco itself was shaped profoundly by the Spanish Romani, or Gitano, people, whose ancestors travelled west from India, as well as by the Arab-Andalusian and North African traditions of southern Spain. Even my favourite Spanish word, that yearning ojalá, trailing its whimsical subjunctive, descends from the Arabic inshallah. May it be so. This was a production of hope.

Watching the Palestinian Circus, all of it resurfaced: the hand gestures, the fabric, the stamping feet, the whirling circles, different traditions speaking to one another across borders. If ever there was duende, it was here.

The show seemed to hold an impossible number of climaxes. A diabolo travelled in zigzags of pure joy, at lightning speed with such creativity of patterns that I wished every juggler I knew could be there to see it. Fire poi traced patterns of light, the momentum building until the performer bent backwards and a wheel of fire skimmed his stomach, so precise, how could he not catch fire? The hour flew, and we were all instantly on our feet at the end, applauding.

In the Q&A, Mohammad described how the organisation began twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, when checkpoints, walls and violence transformed everyday life. The circus was founded as a way of working with children and young people, rebuilding society through art. Despite everything since, he said, circus, music and dance would keep carrying Palestinian culture from one generation to the next.

Asked about their dreams, diabolo juggler Noor said he wanted to become a professional artist, perform at the highest level and travel the world. Aerialist Layan Rafidi spoke of wanting to teach as many children as possible, particularly in Palestine.

Then the showstopper question. What did they want the audience to take away?

Mohammad turned the question back on us. We needed to be free too, he said, not only to speak up and demonstrate, but to change how we live. "After three years nothing has stopped... the West, the UK and all Europe, the US, all this silence. I know a lot of people supported us but the genocide is going on."

Then Layan took the microphone. "We love to dance, we love to sing, we do everything," she said. "The checkpoints, the Occupation, don't define us."

That was the essence of the show. The tragedy of the situation does not define them. They are joy. They are movement. They are dance. They are resilience.

Noor thanked the audience for the wizard energy they had given the performers, energy he wanted to carry back to the West Bank to give them patience and strength to survive.

Afterwards, in the foyer, we saw Layla Rosa, Green Party councillor for Walthamstow and an experienced circus practitioner who'd be leading the next day's Q&A. I feel a rush of gratitude every time I bump into her, remembering her static trapeze classes at the National Centre, where she still teaches. If ever a show made you want to take to the air again, this was it. She was preserving her voice, so Lucy and I chatted away to her, both struck by Layan's words. Give Layan the microphone tomorrow, we said. We wanted to hear more from her.

Then I managed to puncture my own sense of uplift. Two performers came into the foyer and, in my head, I decided they were the people from the Q&A. I launched into praise of their skills, and the give-Layan-the-microphone moment. I had mistaken Julia for Layan. My heart dropped like lead. Welcome to the UK and casual racism. Nice one, Lucy. Six years teaching in diverse inner-city classrooms, priding myself on seeing each student as an individual, and still I had done this. That was my dropped ball. They were gracious. I apologised. We moved on. But it was the most important lesson of the day: I can get so absorbed in my own narrative that I stop paying proper attention to the much simpler reality of who is standing directly in front of me.

Later, I stepped outside for a few deep breaths (on my vape, a recent habit I really need to drop) and saw the performers sitting together on the steps. Still tender from my mistake, I might have slipped away. My friend, though, still had that wizard energy in her, and mine returned. That was the energy I wanted the cast to carry away from us too.

On the walk back to the Tube, Lucy and I passed a patisserie that winked at us. In the window were trompe-l'oeil pears that were actually cakes, passion fruits made of mousse, all sorts. We went in. On the counter stood a little Laurel and Hardy statue, a welcome talisman for the clown in the rose-tattoo dress. The woman serving us, in a hijab, was about to take a break with her son, who was chatting merrily away in Arabic with some adults at another table at the back. The world of the performance gently dissolved into the everyday life around us.

And again that lesson: Stop. Pay attention to what, and who, is directly in front of you.

There is one final thread I want to pull. My postgraduate research explored Cuban theatre during the Special Period of the early 1990s, and how representations of utopia on stage helped people endure economic crisis, shortages and power cuts. Watching Step and a Half, I was reminded more powerfully than ever of the ability of art to respond to hardship by imagining an alternative future. Joy as an act of resistance. My feed has been serving up more of the same since: the humanitarian clown Sabine Choucair, founder of Clown Me In, describing a show where the terrifying buzz of a military drone was transformed into the sound of a wasp, something that could be comically chased and squashed.

Performance changes the terms of reality.

Circus may be the ultimate utopian space. It shows us the apparently impossible, made possible through expertise, discipline, imagination, trust. In an ensemble, every extraordinary individual achievement depends on other people too: those who throw, catch, hold, steady, watch.

Which brings me back to that image from the beginning: a performer falling backwards into a crowd of rising hands. There is trust there. We are family, lifting each other up. And perhaps, ultimately, that's one message from Palestine to the international community.

Catch us.

Performers: Mohamad AbuTaleb, Hamed Khdour, Julia Rafidi, Omara Sharabati, Layan Rafidi, Sana Joani, Qamar Asbah, Nouraldin Jadallah.  

See the official trailer on Vimeo (click here). 

The Palestinian Circus with Showpoines as the lead producer for the UK production, collaborating with Medical Aid for Palestinians is taking Step and a Half to the Edinburgh Fringe and will be at Underbelly's Circus Hub on the Meadows from 8-29 August every day at 2.05pm except 17 and 24 August. 

www.edfringe.com/tickets - click here

There is also a crowdfunder aiming to raise £10,000 to support the Palestinian Circus’s visits to Soho Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe. It remains open for donations: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-palestinian-circus-school-comes-to-the-uk

 Lead photo credit: www.sohotheatre.com