My second official day (a month ago now, blimey) with Crying Out Loud didn’t take place at Toynbee Studios, the company’s base, but instead down in Poole, Dorset, notable for its natural harbour, Brownsea Island, and the fact that the train line cuts impractically right through the high street. At Lighthouse (Poole’s Centre for the Arts, apparently the largest arts centre outside London) I was attending a weekend meeting of the Cross-Channel Circus Arts Alliance (try saying that 10 times fast). Part of the Carte Blanche festival, a celebration of Northern French and Southern English circus, the centrepiece of the weekend was Le Grande C by French acrobats Compagnie XY (produced by Crying Out Loud).

The show combines elements of contemporary dance with extremely demanding feats of balance and acrobatics in a tense but beautifully peaceful show. Staying in Poole for the weekend, I was on Saturday night (after more conferences and performances) left alone in Poole by my colleagues to see that the company managed their second performance without preparatory hiccups; to find something that they’d eat in Britain (they love flapjacks and pineapple juice, NOT orange juice – just so you know); to help the company run some workshops with school pupils; and to ensure that they then got on their way to their next tour dates.

I have very little French, and most of the acrobats had very little English, but we muddled through with me apologising many times for being a typical Brit that can’t learn foreign languages. Annoyingly, when I thought about it after, less panicked at the simple prospect of talking, I am certain that much of what I said in English I could have at least got out in broken Frenglish. I need to take some lessons. I’m really beginning to admire those who are at least mildly bilingual.

I am making this sound worse than it was (if I told you how glamorous it really was you’d be too jealous). It wasn’t much of a baptism of fire really; it was great to have the opportunity to have some responsibility so early on in the DCMS Jerwood placement process and I enjoyed it. I’m never happier than when I’m running round the backstage of a theatre making sure someone washes costumes correctly (as if I know!). I also got to have some really good fish and chips by the sea one night. Alone. Cold…

These were not typical days in the office though, clearly. I have spent a lot of my time composing emails. This may sound boring, but I’m writing them to people who I would never have had the opportunity to deal with previously, so it’s still very novel. And I’ve been to meetings with lots of people I would like to end up in the positions of! They’d better watch out. But that’s still a long time away – I am, of course, as a DCMS Jerwood Creative Bursary recipient, just out of university, and very thankful for the opportunity to be here at Crying Out Loud. Life in the office is relaxed (usually) and I already feel right at home amongst the slimlined Macs, old school (literally) chalkboard and vintage three-piece-suite. The office lights are always atmospherically dim too. I am, as I keep being reminded, the first and only male in the company. These last two facts are definitely not connected.

If you’re lucky enough to pay a visit to the office, you’ll also be greeted by my artistic handiwork, covering an empty wall with a Tetris-style mosaic of Crying Out Loud’s history in flyers. Glamorous, I told you.

It’s exactly like an encounter with one of the denizens of the 159 bus – the guy that falls into the adjacent seat and would like to have a conversation with you about the surveillance chip in his mobile phone; or the growling woman in the giant coat lying sprawled at the extreme rear; or the man with an aggressive and penetrating and incredibly far-reaching body odour, built you can imagine over a period of years, wafting and seeking. You have to stay until it’s time to get off; you’re only there so you can get somewhere else. Your best strategy is, or seems to be, passivity and stony absence. Don’t engage. Never respond.

Crawling over the back rank of the small audience a mic-ed up Jordi Querol rumbles to himself in a thick, low voice, admiring the women, playing drums on the heads of the people in front, thrusting his face into your face. Hello. It’s funny a bit, and intimidating, and maniacal, and as an opening to Subliminati Corporation’s (in-progress showing of) File-Tone, a good enough introduction to the company’s style. They work with improvisation, starting with a parodic idea and then reaching inside to give it a sharp twist – whatever the starting-point, the end will be morbid or unsettling or violent.

They work the audience over. At one point acrobat Mael Tebibi is Barack Obama (juggler Mikel Ayala is Fidel Castro, meanwhile) and to save the world he must make a daring leap from the top of a high, high ladder to the thin-looking mattress that lies beneath. Jordi drives him on. You can do it Barack! One more step! Save the whales! The audience are asked if we want to see him jump. Yes. DO YOU WANT TO SEE HIM JUMP? YES. He falls from the highest rung and rolls to a stop. Fidel Castro tests his corpse with a nudging foot.

Emerging from these improvisations are images of immigration, torture, trafficking – images that sort of kick their way through. Burly in a red dress, Jordi sits and rapidly opens and shuts the outer metal brace of an accordion while the most typical of French circus music plays; it’s funny. Then, still in the dress, Jordi is exhorted to dance. Would we like to see her dance? Yes. Mikel threatens her to dance, and to enjoy herself, and hooks a bungee cord either side of her mouth to force the shape of a smile. Then Mikel addresses the audience again: Would we like to see her sex? Would we?

As Jeunes Talents Cirque Laureates, Subliminati Corporation were giving a work-in-progress performance to conclude a week-long residency at Toynbee Studios, and in a short discussion afterwards were asked why the changes of direction, from humour to violence, were so sudden and fierce. Jordi’s answer was that the audience feel wrenched and uncomfortable ‘because they’ve said Yes’ – they’ve said Yes to wanting to seeing the girl dance, and when the scene turns they feel as though they’ve said Yes to its final outcome.

But I don’t know. Are the audience saying Yes because they really want Barack to jump from the ladder and save the whales, or because they want to see the performance fly and work at its best? And when Subliminati turn on you, aren’t you just getting slapped for participating? For being, in some way, polite? My own feeling is that the complicity of a theatre audience isn’t all the way effective as a metaphor for society’s passive role in the perpetuation of domestic violence and human rights abuse, where the proper targets are greed and ignorance and neglect – but that it perhaps works better as an analogy for that challenging interaction on the 159, where your easiest option is to nod along and just hope this person leaves and takes their problems with them.

What will be interesting is whether, in later and longer performances, the audience start to anticipate and adjust their reactions. Because if the core mechanism of File-Tone is the dramatic-tonal equivalent of flooring it through some savage S-bends, it’s hard to see how that can be sustained for a full-length piece without the company building in some further awareness of the audience’s secondary response as they wise up to what the Corporation are up to. Perhaps that’s exactly what they’ll do. Like DeFracto, Subliminati have chosen to use the luxury of their JTCE time to develop raw material which will be ordered, changed and refined at a later date – and right now it really is raw: skinless and pained and ugly and a little bit fascinating.

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.

.

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.

Üsküdar’a gider iken aldi da bir yağmur
When going to Üsküdar, rain started

Katibimin setresi uzun eteği çamur
My scribes’ coats are long, his skirt is muddy

Katip uykudan uyanmış gözleri mahmur
The scribe has woken up from sleep, his eyes are cloudy

Katip benim ben katibin el ne karışır
The scribe is mine, and I’m the scribes, hands will mix

Katibime kolalı da gömlek ne güzel yaraşır
How much it suits my scribe to have a starched collar

Üsküdar’a gider iken bir mendil buldum
On the way to Üsküdar I found a kerchief

Mendilimin içine lokum doldurdum
And I filled the kerchief with Iokum (Turkish delight)

Ben yarimi arar iken yanımda buldum
When I looked for my helper, I found him at my side.

Katip benim ben katibin el ne karışır
The scribe is mine and I’m the scribes and hands will mix

Katibime kolalı da gömlek ne güzel yaraşır
How much it suits my scribe to have a starched collar

One thing I have found interesting observing two weeks of rehearsals is the way that, in a piece combining so many different art forms it can be a challenge to unite these elements. Whilst the artists vision remains the most vital part of the process it is interesting how technical elements can add or take away from this. Although Layla expresses a wish that the installation videos could be more of an installation which the audience walks around I think it works how it is. The turning off of the screens creating quite a dramatic moment in itself, focusing the audiences attention on the stage in preparation for the performance to come.

The piece draws the audience in till you find yourself immersed in the music and movement. The Jacksons Lane theatre space fits this perfectly as the audience is close enought to feel the emotions of the performers but far enough away to enjoy the overall visual image of the piece. Excitement and anticipation surround tonights opening performance and if you don’t make it along tonight i recommend you don’t miss this exciting performance.

Today I saw the different aspects of the show really working together, the music, dance, circus, song and visual effects blend together surprisingly well. Layla is clear about what she wants which I think comes from the fact that the piece is so personal to her. There is a real feel of this about the rehearsal, everyone seems invested in this work and doing it justice for Layla.

The space and costumes are very powerful and even at this stage where the performers are walking things through for technical cues I can see the Layla’s message is a strong one and she uses many elements to portray it. The Burka’s effect the performers movements somewhat, especially on the trapeeze and it is important to consider that women who wear Burkas cannot show their legs. It is clearly important to Layla to maintain this attention to detail from costume details through to the movements themselves.

Although What If has been performed before the new space will add something different to the performance. It is an exciting work which I think will surprise and enlighten audiences later in the week. I recommend the post show talk on Thursday with Rupa Huq for anyone who would like to learn more about the piece and Layla’s ideas behind it.

Layla’s focus was on how to keep an installation feel to the piece in this new space, it seems that performing a piece in a different space effects not only the performance but also the relationship with the audience and overall feel of the work.

Watching Layla rehearse with the performers I noticed a real attention to detail in the work. The movement worked perfectly with the musical score. The floor space and the ropes seemed to become a character’s in themselves as the performers interacted with the smokey space and I began to understand the nature of the work further. Moments of silence and stillness added together with the score and beautiful ariel choreography were really coming together.

By the end of the week it was clear that the different aspects of the work- live music, performers, lights and the smoke all had to come together in order to portray something to the audience. This was something very interesting about watching a work develop over the course of a week. The development period opened up new aspects of the work and the fusion of all the elements working together to create the artists vision.

Having seen the development of the piece so far I think Friday and Saturday’s performances will be exciting, I for one will be looking forward to getting the full effect of this new piece in the theatre at Jacksons Lane.