Crying Out Loud Blog

COL Assistant Producer Daniel Pitt on COL’s circus artist and choreographers mash-up, The Blender.

On some of the coldest days of the year, spending your time in an uninsulated warehouse in London’s Docklands may not be top of anyone’s list of the top things to do. Braving the treacherous conditions to travel to Woolwich’s Hangar Arts Trust (in one case even getting stuck in the snow, abandoning the car, and returning with friends to dig them out) an open-minded group of circus performers and contemporary dance choreographers met for three days of intensive workshops that combined the two artforms. The Blender Project is kindly supported by the same generous people at the Jerwood Charitable Foundation who support me in my placement at Crying Out Loud.

After many many emails, we assembled a group of practitioners who were really open-minded to the opportunities of cross-artform collaboration. My role when it got to the weekend was just to keep everything running smoothly. The way to a performer’s heart is through their stomach, as I learnt in Poole, so my first mission was navigating the snowy one-way system ridden streets of Woolwich, to Sainsbury’s to buy enough snacks to keep everyone happy. A particularly impractical supermarket housed within a multi-storey car park meant that you got people with their full trolleys jamming up the lifts. And you had to go outdoors to get to the lifts. I was not pleased. The joy on people’s faces to learn that there was real fresh coffee available (rather than freeze-dried) made up for the idiosyncrasies of this particular shop, however. Note to self: food AND coffee win over hearts AND minds.

The three days were a huge success it seemed, with close to 100 cereal bars being eaten alongside more lunches than the café could cope with (goats’ cheese and roasted vegetables being the biggest hits). There was some fantastic work being made in a very short time; I thought it was testament to what can be achieved through less talking and more doing (though maybe the ‘hot air’ wouldn’t have gone amiss). The artists all complained that there wasn’t enough time, but as initial sketches of performance, the quality and variation that was achieved was extremely high. The choreographers seemed to provide emotion and narrative (whether explained or not) that the circus acts sometimes lacked previously.

Too much watching made me very envious, but there is no easily accessible apparatus that an impatient, flabby office worker can really have a go on. I stole a turn on the German wheel… and fell out, unsurprisingly. I was later helped up onto an aerial hoop, and once up there it was a piece of cake (relatively), but I’m not sure about how graceful I looked. They do all make it look so easy. I’m not sure I fancy the friction burns they all pretend not to get!

As I overheard one acrobat saying while practicing, ‘I’m not happy with the coming down yet – it doesn’t feel smooth.’ Well, if you want it smoother, obviously the answer is to put it in the Blender!