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.

                                                        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

July 2010 

Just been to see Streedance the movie in 3D- I expected it to be a load of old tosh, since colleagues had rubbished it for inane dialogue, unbelievable coincidences and silly set-ups. I thought I’d probably last half an hour if that.

I loved it from beginning to end.

What’s not to like?

Charming performers, particularly the slightly awkward, toothy, truthful Nichola Burley (‘I learnt to streetdance in six weeks. It was easy.’) playing the heroine who saves the crew; the dance routines, the romantic sub-plot and the sometimes quite lovely mix of ballet and streetdance. There were some real clunkers, true; ‘Welcome to my world’, ballet boy says when he shows the heroine around his humble home- ‘You can’t afford much on a student income..’ -yet London looks fab, throughout.  Still, there’s something essentially moving about the storyline; a bunch of ordinary kids who can dance may- just may- have a chance of winning the UK Streetdance championships, when at the last minute, their leader quits for some ‘time out.’

Of course seasoned streetdancers find the film bland and formulaic, and the dancing too slick and packaged, but there’s something pleasingly simple here. I spent a large part of the film trying not to cry. (Oh, that was just me, then…)

There’s something here that gets to the heart of what Tightrope is/should be about. A community who can’t and won’t express themselves for fear of reprisals/shame/looking stupid. People who daren’t step outside their own un/safe world because ‘it won’t work.’ When Charlotte Rampling challenges Carly to make a ballet/streedance mix work, Carly says; ‘We’re from different worlds. It don’t work.’ She just wants cheap rehearsal space; Rampling wants her ballet dancers to have some heart and soul and she believes they can get that from Carly’s crew, with their lack of formal training and their joie de vivre. Rampling’s retort, ‘How do you know until you’ve tried?’ is the classic riposte to a disaffected teen,  and it works. In the final scene, when the renegade crew take the stage with their ballet/streetdance fusion, the (teenage) crowd catcall; ‘This ain’t streetdance.’ But what they’ve created is what they vowed they’d do; ballet meets streetdance, and somewhere in between in is something beautiful and true. I don’t care if it’s naff. I don’t care if it doesn’t represent the truth of being a young adult in an inner city environment (it doesn’t, and it doesn’t even pretend to); it got me. Not sure how much the 3Dness added- although there are moments when you think a particularly energetic dancer is heading right at you and about to kick you in the face. That’s kinda fun.

I didn’t think this would have any connection with Tightrope, but went to see Gomito’s production of The Lamplighter’s Lament. Puppets, LEDs, big sheets of plastic. (This is doing a beautiful show a disservice). A man obsessively lights lamps; his little daughter drowns at sea. He repeats his solitary routine every night until he realises he must send her light back to her, wherever she is. The daughter is a puppet, and so beautifully created I almost prayed an actress wouldn’t turn up. She didn’t. But it made me think that puppets are so amazingly emotional, could a puppet be Cindi, climbing high, falling low? The simplest things become magical, and very few words were involved- I may be doing myself out of a job here, but I guess we need to think about less, less, less wordiness and more storytelling through action.

I loved Epiphany, at the HatFactory in Luton. Promenade meant that we were led by the magnetic storyteller, Dan Marcus Clark. Also a rather compelling musician Dan led us into and gently around the space that 3 leading hip hop artists create. While hip hop/street arts and theatre don’t always mix without awkwardness, here they do- with the added twist that the performers are telling their own loaded stories to an audience, and risking the judgment we all bring to performance. It also made me think a lot about how we involve an audience in a participatory way- here, we were asked not to influence the outcome or change the story/journey, but to take part in it as it evolved. We clapped, we danced (sort of), we were treated as characters on the fringe of the stories, and one bemused audience member was asked to hand out flyers for a fictional dance class. Bless.

Seeing the THEATRE IS and Throwdown UK production of Epiphany also made me think about words; there are probably slightly too many in the show for my taste (again, talking myself out of what I do for a living) but when they form strong, repeated motifs, they work wonderfully well. So; simple, frequent, and building. A rhythym, then, less than poetry, and not as musical as lyric.

This may seem tenuous, but in the light of this coalition government continually asking ‘The People’ what financial cuts they’d like to make, and now what laws we should lose/change, it again made me think about the community in Tightrope who don’t feel they have any ability to influence what happens around them, or to change their lives. As various Tories keep repeating, with rights come responsibilities, and young people are aware of their rights as never before. So what price do they/should they pay for those rights? This is one of the fundamental questions at the heart of Tightrope.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to absorb as much circus as possible to keep the Tightrope thread alive…from the (truly terrible) Moscow State Circus, Legenda- ‘You’ll only see it once!’- because they couldn’t pay you to see it twice..heavy old aerialists dressed in 1970s porn star costumes, and selling ice creams at the interval to very confused children- to the wonderfully refreshing young performers from Les Sept Doights. This lot are ex-Cirque du Soleil.

 In their programme they say ‘rejected the fanciful production qualities of standard circuses for the intimate environment of an artist’s loft.’ Hmm.

Any road, Traces, their most recent show, managed to successfully combine a beautiful physicality with a compelling narrative. I’m not sure I understood it all…but circus gets away with that aspect I reckon.

Same goes for the awesome No Fit State, the Cardiff-based circus who wowed audiences at the Roundhouse with the Lush Tabu. Lovely seeing some much older performers, and not as, erm, slender as you’d expect; riding bikes along tight-wires directly above the audience’s heads, very disorienting!  Totally used the Roundhouse’s circular space and made us move about, rather quickly, to catch some new bit of movement, which came from above, around, behind, everywhere. Very much in the world of Tightrope; this felt like being part of a community, whether you liked it or not.

Saw le Grande C by Compagnie XY at the Roundhouse in late April- amazing, here’s an extract;

le Grande C by Compagnie XY at the Roundhouse April 2010

-17 young performers who just use their bodies and huge elements of surprise and charm in this quintessentially French circus spectacle. I loved the way they formed a family, then squabbled and fell out; made up, fell in love, changed partners and all with tumbling, stage diving with apparently no certainty they’d be caught, and forming ridiculously high pyramids.

Everything they did made me think of the world of Tightrope:

      urban chaos, the unexpected around every corner and in every shadow, the power and danger and excitement that just using your body, or the power of a mass of bodies… makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking much more along these lines, rather than aerially etc. But then every (good) new circus I see makes me think, ‘oh, that’s the answer! That’s the language which we can use to tell this story!’.

I must stop going to the Roundhouse, because the work is so damn good that it feels like I’m wanting to reinvent and reinterpret the work all the time.