Crying Out Loud Blog

On the wall of Rose English’s London studio, mounted on large sheets of white paper, I look at words and images. Men working at a furnace in one picture, and in the next swaddling a glass jar, just past molten, in a rough blanket; a young man flying through the air, thrown by three others; night-black scenes where contortionists balance crystal towers; a diablo joining two bright opalescent cups.  The words then are in pairs, connected to the images or perhaps floating free beside them. Reading down vertically, or picking couplets at random, a sense of a meaning flicks across a surface transparent to the configurations that lie beneath:

ecstatic élan
erratic metronome
percussive infrastructure

rarely wrought
spectral welding
hi tensile
hi voltage
ecstatic energy

alleviate anxiety
with
overarching elements

The words are actually a libretto, written for music that will be composed by Luke Stoneham, and for Rose English’s latest project, Lost in Music. Many years in the making but with a full premiere now slated for 2012, Lost in Music is Rose’s unique collaboration with twenty artists from Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe – the furthest point on the long line of her association with, and thinking on, circus, and a remarkable new work of acrobatics, glass, fire, song and synapse. Visiting her studio to talk about the project I started by asking about her background.

How did you end up making work for theatre and with circus?

I’ve been making shows for about 35 years now and I started off training as a visual artist at a time when all the categories between artforms were – in some arts schools, fortunately – being erased. You could work across a spectrum of activities, and whether it was making an artwork, an object or whatever you were actually working with something more ephemeral, which was performance. At the time it was called performance art and it’s gone through lots of different names, but essentially we felt we had discovered or invented this thing that I then later discovered was actually called theatre and had been around for thousands of years.

And I became quite interested in this thing called theatre – not coming from a theatre background but sort of through various fortunate accidents and through moving to London from Leeds where I met two colleagues, Sally Potter and Jacky Lansley. They had both been studying at The Place. Jacky was a dancer and Sally was both a dancer and choreographer and is now a film director – we collaborated on a number of works that were epic in scale and site-specific at a time before that particular title had been invented. And sort of through that work, both my own performance work where I invited people to be in it and the work in collaboration with Jacky and Sally, I started to full-time be making performances. Work in the 70s was large-scale, site-specific, quite image-based and then around the early eighties I discovered monologue, performing solo. Almost by accident, by having to do a gig in New York. And then I spent most of the 80s doing these improvised monologues that were called Abstract Vaudeville – they always had a philosophical question underneath them and they were funny. And I sometimes started to introduce one or two other performers – in the tradition of the conjurer’s assistant – and around about that time I started to be asked to compere various events and I started to really enjoy being on stage with a lot of other people. So I stared also to hanker after a larger scale of work again and started to make – through the late 80s and into the 90s – a series of large-scale pieces for proscenium stages. The first one was at the Hackney Empire – it was called Walks on Water and it had a company of 28, and three complete changes of scenery including a real waterfall at the very end, designed by Simon Vincenzi. And then also The Double Wedding and Tantamount Esperance, which were both on the main stage of the Royal Court – so it was a sort of trilogy of large-scale works, a real sort of mixture of co-performers, actors, dancers and circus performers. That was the first time I started to work with circus performers – around about ‘88.

I started to get interested in that strand of work by living in close proximity to two really important people – one was Sue Broadway, from Ra Ra Zoo, and the other was Jonathan Graham, who was the founder of the Circus Space, and I used to go and see their work and chat to them and became very intrigued by that sort of calibre of work and by that extraordinary thing about circus where actually a moment when someone is doing something extraordinarily physical lasts a nanosecond but takes years and years to get to – it is literally a heightened moment. And sort of through their association and through collaborating with Jonathan I started to introduce circus performers and conceive of specific images that use circus in my shows, and started to work with some really exciting circus performers. Teresa Blake from Circus Oz was the first person I collaborated with, on Walks on Water. She was my double, we were dressed the same, sort of similar heights, and she’s an astonishing acrobat and performer, and she made it appear that I was invincible – it was a show looking at intransigence and invincibility. And then with The Double Wedding there were two characters called The Viscera who were both acrobats and they were a foil to two ice skaters who danced on a tiny miniature ice rink in the centre of the Royal Court stage. And with Tantamount Esperance one of the key performers in that was Jeremy Robins, well-known for his bath piece, Slippery When Wet.

In Tantamout he performed a number of astonishing new flying techniques that we developed for the piece to make it look like a body travelled with velocity and power whilst being actually suspended – to sort of extend the vocabulary of tracked flying. Usually it looks very floaty, but Tantamount was about the soul and we wanted the soul to travel with velocity and speed.

[Gesturing to the sheets on the wall.] I’m quite interested in this – is it a map, or a plan, or…?

Actually it’s the libretto. Because another aspect of Lost in Music is its music – as well as the twenty acrobats there are quite a large number of singers. The music in Lost in Music will be written by Luke Stoneham, and it has this very spare libretto that I’ve written that is made up of pairs of words that were very mysterious to me when they first appeared – I didn’t know if they were surtitles, or names of scenes… And it sort of started life way way back when I first started working on the show as a pair of words and an image and a lot of those images originally were of Chinese acrobats from quite old books, and as a result of showing that particular early draft of the libretto to a friend he invited me to China and that’s when I started to conceive of the fact that these weren’t just inspirations, pictures of Chinese acrobatics, they were real. It’s powerful to work with words and images; sometimes they come true.

And that was sort of like a matrix, that original document, and now it’s become… in a way it is a map because each one of these big pages represents about fifteen or twenty minutes of music and then these two smaller pages are sort of almost like floating words that Luke can drop in when he likes. The other ones are sort of fixed to a particular action, which is indicated by the pictures – that’s a reference point; I can show him video of that bit of material. And then the sort of status of the words – some of them refer to objects; a word like fan evokes the thing itself, and sometimes the thing itself evokes the word. Sometimes they are what we’re calling satori moments – moments that are very fast across a world that’s quite filigree and fine and delicate – about balance. Sometimes they’re almost like a faultline across the work. Yet in a way it’s a score of the words, a visual score, and it is a map, in a way.

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From the images and video I’ve seen Lost in Music incorporates several disciplines – so alongside the handbalancing and contortion there are skills like diablo and jar. Did that come out of doing the workshops with these particular acrobats? Are they their specialties?

Well firstly the element of glass was always an important part of the piece, right from way back, and it’s because there seems to be this correlation between glass and singing. A song is almost like a metaphorical rendition of a glass object – both blown glass and singing are both formed from the breath. I was very interested in the phenomenon of entropy – the fact that a glass vessel can shatter, a flyer can fall, the voice can break. As well as actually that moment of suspension which is such an extraordinary thing – in acrobatics and in the making of an object which has to be wrought very quickly out of molten glass, within the moment that the glass is still molten. And also because a very important aspect of Chinese acrobatics is working with vessels of a different kinds. It’s a 2000 year old artform in china and it originated, I assume, with all sorts of rites and festivities around harvest, and so the jars that the jar juggler balances are vessels, and then there is an act called rolling cups which is now done with glasses and would have originally been done with bowls. There’s balancing of things on the nose which are often glasses, and there’s plate-spinning, plates being vessels of a different kind. And so quite early on we decided to work with people with those skills – jar juggling, plate-spinning, nose-balancing, rolling cups, etcetera. But we wanted to actually make their objects out of glass rather than china, porcelain, and that’s a sort of reversal in a way of the passage of objects between Europe and China – China sent porcelain and we sent glass back. And that’s been – both technically working with those artists and working with their objects – been an incredibly complex undertaking that’s involved three sets of workshops where I’ve had to ask the artists a great deal about both their practice and their objects.

The objects are designed so there’s an inherent wobble in the glass. So the little bowls that are balanced on the acrobat’s head have a piece that Simon has designed so that each bowl moves inside the others and it all looks slightly unstable – which is very much a tradition in Chinese acrobatics: even the balance bench, you make it unstable by putting a brick under it or something. Those increments of difficulty are part of the aesthetics of Chinese acrobatics.

With things like the plate-spinning we’ve made the plates out of glass. Originally they would have been porcelain but now they’re made of metal mainly, and somehow the object has been forgotten, and it’s about doing more difficult things whilst doing the plate-spinning and actually originally these porcelain plates would get broken at the end of the performance to show that they were breakable. We wanted to return it to the primacy of the objects.

Making the props has been highly technical, with the information brought back from workshops and given to the glass artists I’ve been working with – Max Jacquard and James Maskrey and others at the National Glass Centre. It’s incredibly detailed work to make these objects in glass, and it’s really only been able to happen because I’ve been fortunate in having this relationship with one troupe. I did an early work-in-progress in 2006 with two young artists from the Zhejiang Acrobatic Troupe, which is a smaller troupe, and then that was sort of my calling card and I was introduced to the Shanghai Troupe. The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe of China is one of the largest performing arts companies in China; they’re based in Shanghai and have a permanent building called Circus City.

I know a few people who’ve visited Chinese schools, and it seems like the artists there don’t have a lot of self-determination – they’re minutely choreographed and perhaps shut out of the creative process. I was wondering to what extent Lost in Music was worked on with the performers, or whether you were working with the school’s choreographers or trainers – how that worked.

Like a lot of troupes in China they were formed with the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949; in the early 50s it was a state policy to form these large state-funded troupes. So all the artists that before the revolution would have been itinerant and independent, and probably working in very straitened circumstances, were then embraced in these very large schools, which provided an infrastructure, space, etcetera. It also became the official artform and it was the work from those troupes that was sent out as sort of visiting cards to the rest of the world when the country decided to sort of open up. It was also one of the artforms that was used a lot for the entertainment of the masses; throughout history that’s been the fate of circus.

But then within that one then looks at the people inside those troupes, who are pretty amazing. And yes you can ask many questions about the training everywhere, and have questions and reservations about it. You can have as many reservations about the lack of training as you can about an overtraining or a lack of volition or volunteering to do a training, as well as what that training actually involves. These are complex questions and inside all of that actually what you’re sometimes dealing and working with is an artist of tremendous ability that you have a conversation with about what they’re doing now. It’s been an extraordinary journey for me in a way – to have a glimpse of how to work with this particular troupe and these particular young artists and their trainers. Because there have been extraordinary serendipities along the way. For instance the early draft that I was talking about, which was this sort of matrix of words and photos that I took from these old acrobatic books from China, from the 70s and 80s, that I’d always found very inspiring – these are very strange to contemporary acrobats inside China – they haven’t seen these books because they were produced for export by the foreign language press. But I found that when I took out my libretto images and showed them, they started to recognise the people in the photographs – and the people in the photographs from 30 years ago were now their teachers. It’s almost as if I’ve actually come to the source.

I think what I realised I would be able to do became very exciting to me. I’m working with a group of people who perform everyday, all day, with each other and have done for years, and there’s a particular synapse that exists as a result of doing that – and that’s quite rare. It’s quite difficult for that number of people to remain working together in Europe, it’s a different economy, there’s a different response to that – and so there’s something about honouring that synapse that exists, that deep intelligence about how you catch each other, how you hold that balance, how you are together in space and time – and revealing it in the work. To do that I had to work very closely with them and with their trainers and with Jonathan Graham, who’s been with me on this journey, to understand the particular traditions of the work, their particular acts and how we can embrace those and reimagine them for Lost in Music. It’s a very different sort of work for them – completely different to the other work that they do. 

There was a work-in-progress showing with three of the Shanghai acrobats at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland in 2009. I’ve seen pictures and it looks like an amazing venue. How did that performance come about?

What was so great about that was they came to me. When we did a piece in Liverpool in 2006 I worked with a UK-based Chinese artist and our project manager, who was based up in Newcastle, told Grainne Sweeney, the director of the National Glass Centre about the project, and Grainne got in touch with me.

It was great to have those three artists who came over from the Shanghai Troupe – have them actually there and introduce them to the actual glass maker who was going to make their props; it was just so much easier than me always to-ing and fro-ing. The other thing that was really lovely was to see how they respected each others’ technique and how excited they were by it.

Because glass has just been such a big part of the project there was something wonderful about being able to have people in front of the glass furnaces and feel the heat, see the molten glass and then see the object formed. The audience were in as close proximity as possible. What’s worked really well in the works-in-progress showings is that people feel inside it, that they’re celebrants as well, celebrants of something – of synapse, I don’t know. That a rite in some way, however abstract, is taking place.

Produced by Crying Out Loud and Reckless Moments, Lost in Music will have its full premiere in 2012. Keep an eye on the Crying Out Loud site for updates on the work, or head over here for a cluster of incredible images from the workshops and work-in-progress performances.

Above photographs from workshops and performances with artists from Shanghai and Zhejiang Acrobatic Troupes.