Tightrope

September

Very excited as have just been working on the Tightrope plotline, and now at end of act 1. It’s really delightful working on the draft, knowing we’ve got a tour booked for May.

Still looking out for exciting work that’s in the zone; the Tate Modern’s exhibition, Exposed, really freaked me out. Right. Out. 15 rooms of images and video, mostly taken without the subjects’ knowledge. Mostly sex, death, violence, drugs, just one of these would have been enough. Felt a bit overwhelmed, particularly by the images of Man Ray’s Barbette, a transvestite acrobat whose party piece was stripping off layers of women’s clothes, on a highwire, to reveal that he was a man. Lots of things that linked in to Tightrope and the shady world where everyone can be seen, whether they like it or not.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/exposure/default.shtm

Then onto the exquisite A Disappearing Number at the Novello, where the actors joyously shove scenery around and remove fake spectacles from each other to show us it’s all just theatre. But the emotions, and the maths, are real. http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2194:a-disappearing-number-novello-theatre&Itemid=27

The staging is amazing- huge screens seem to show what the actors are actually doing yet this changes sometimes before they do- the same with speech. An actor begins to talk, then a voiceover takes over. But the actor continues talking- who are we really hearing, and why does it matter?

There’s so much about this utterly beautiful show that gave me Tightrope shivers- particularly the beautiful score, by Nitin Sawnhey, and the controlled, delicate and violent movement that the superb cast enact.

August 2010

                                                        Le Cirque Invisible

Just been to see the lovely, old-fashioned and quirky show from Le Cirque Invisible at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. Victoria Chaplin (Charlie’s daughter, she’s nearly 60 but looks about 20, an amazingly bendy, wiry, childlike waif of a woman, hair down to her bum and just gorgeous as a performer) and her husband Jean Baptiste Thieree have been rolling this show out since 1971, but it’s an extraordinary spectacle nonetheless- a stage full of rabbits and ducks reading books, a woman who turns herself into a walking musical instrument, does the splits on a tightwire and inhabits a cafe table, chair and umbrella.

It’s all slightly surreal- the kids in the audience loved it- but I was convinced that Thieree was somebody’s mad old grandfather, escaped from an institution and let loose on a stage for three hours. He’s a French Tommy Cooper- his magic and juggling are deliberately rubbish, yet some moments of illusion take your breath away, and Chaplin’s ability to transform herself into a snake that eats herself, a bicycle and a Chinese dragon are astonishing.

Not obviously Tightrope territory, I thought at first, but there’s something striking about both the clowning- strangely seductive, because you want to know if he’ll ever do anything truly amazing- and the transformations that Chaplin creates. And given that Tightrope is all about things not being what they seem, it made me think about how the everyday can become amazing, which is what Ashley is all about, really.

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2019:le-cirque-invisible-qeh&Itemid=27