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!

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.

The more I see of the arts industry the more it appears as a dense rhizomic mat of projects and networks, layered and interwoven. The Activate Promoters Exchange at Poole was led by Activate, hosted by the Poole Lighthouse, embedded within the Carte Blanche season, part-funded by the European Commission’s INTERREG IV programme, and a continuation of the work of the network of network initiatives that includes City Circ & the Cross Channel Circus Alliance (together: CCCCCA; each C must be louder than last, the A is pianissimo).

Following on from a similar meeting/gathering at Cherbourg’s extraordinary creation centre La Brèche in February, the Activate Promoters Exchange (delightfully: APE) was essentially a one-day Anglo-Franco meet-up that incorporated some presentations and panel discussions (aimed it seemed at blocking out some big concepts and ideas that could then be elaborated in free-form networking at the event, and beyond), a small showcase of developing work from new and established artists, and a bit of tense market action as artists sold their ideas/projects to the assembled promoters against the clock in the Peachy Coochy format.

Opening with the presentations and panel discussion (titled pragmatically and a touch aggressively ‘British contemporary circus: what can it offer to the UK and Europe?’, and featuring Circus Space’s Daisy Drury, Le Prato’s Patricia Kapusta, La Brèche’s Jean Vinet, Circomedia’s Bim Mason, and Lighthouse’s Elspeth McBain) representatives of each nation did the groundwork of laying out some of the major differences between the French and English models, with a particular focus on France’s radically higher level of funding, activity, skill, and pedagogical and professional resources. But naturally the grass is always greener. To the UK, France is a shimmering emerald green sea, while the French themselves turn jealous eyes to the vibrant, flourishing grass of Belgium. Belgium returns the longing gaze: France’s grass just seems better, thinker and lusher and longer.

I’m not sure who wants to be the UK, possibly no one, but as French arts funding is bitten away at the edges UK operators are seen as wily and entrepreneurial producers from whom the French are eager to learn — particularly resonant was the fact, compared between Jean Vinet and Elspeth McBain, that La Brèche is 80% funded and has to raise the remaining 20%, whereas for Lighthouse the split is exactly the opposite.

There is, as well, exportable work coming from the UK. French commentators who saw the strand of English work at the Cross Spring showcase in Cherbourg picked out the work of Sugar Beast Circus (Milkwood Rodeo & The Sugar Beast Circus Show) and Layla Rosa (What If…?) as being identifiably and desirably English, in SBC’s case responding to a tradition of music hall and variety, and in Layla’s tackling a subject (the Islamic veil) that in France is socially and politically entangled.

Defending the UK’s honour in the panel discussion, Circomedia’s Bim Mason covered a lot of interesting ground, saying that UK circus makes a virtue of its limitations by working with lower-level skills, and investing energy instead into the theatrical mechanisms that frame them; that UK companies are smaller and have greater interaction with the corporate scene, many of them working 50/50 on commercial and artistic work; that there are basically no, or very few, venues with the technical equipment or knowledge or will to host large-scale work; that there’s a diversity of work and aesthetic emerging from artist-led companies where the performers are the creators; and that circus in the UK has emerged more from street arts and outdoor performance.

Some of these key qualities were I think were borne out in a small platform of new work that followed the discussion, collecting as it did four disparate and stylistically wide-ranging pieces: Gisele Edwards delivered Art of Rope, a performance lecture in the style of, and coming out of work with, Jos Houben; Rachel Fox showed her Circomedia end of year piece, The Final Boarding Call, finishing on an impressive and prodigious piece of aerial choreography (and performance); Ilona Jäntti and Natalie Reckert offered a slither of full-length piece Double Dutch, their work together once again abstract and exquisite, like a snowed-on landscape, what you know hidden and changed; and, a man down, Gandini Juggling performed their 2010 Watch This Space commission Smashed!, twenty sublime minutes of Bauschian tanzjonglage (their word, a good one).

Then following was the Peachy Coochy session — where presenters have 6 minutes and forty seconds to talk about their project, the time divided into 20 second mini-presentations that follow the remorseless advance of a backdrop slideshow. Four companies presented their ideas and early workings for future shows. From Paper Cinema, having recently worked with Upswing on their piece Fallen (at the Mime Festival this year, btw) Nic Rawlings showed some of his previous work and spoke of his interest and excitement in finding ways to integrate circus movement with his particular style of crafted micro-animation. The Gandini’s revealed (excitingly!) that they are working with Circo Aereo’s Maksim Komaro, the director of Race Horse Company’s Petit Mal and himself a mean juggler, on a piece that goes back to what is simple and beautiful in the discipline by delving into the dreams of jugglers. Mimbre laid out plans for Bodies Falling Upwards, a projected outdoor work where five performers start in separate locations as soloists, earn an audience, and then draw them to a central point where the individual narratives may entwine and resolve. And Geneva Foster Gluck outlined the next step in The Sugar Beast Circus’ continuing interest in cracking the smooth, dissimulating surfaces of entertainment media – in this instance with a B-movie-esque piece, Event Dimension, staged as a gameshow and about gameshows (also: the nature of time).

I would like to see all of those made, and of course the chances of that increase radically if there’s this intelligent network of projects stretching over the country and across the Channel. It’s anyone’s guess what the next layered initiative will be, though one suggestion at APE was for a consortium of venues to collaborate in arranging tours of contemporary circus work in the UK and France; and beyond the specifics there was an encouraging feeling that everyone present, artists and promoters, were in difficult times willing to band together to become the guardians of circus’ eternal flame.

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.

Jugglers make difficult choices. For French company DeFracto, Guillaume Martinet and Minh Tam Kaplan, it’s a sequence set to Chopin’s Op. 10 No. 04: the two of them sat at a black table with a spread of white balls that they juggle, pass between each other and frantically rearrange into precise yet, to us, opaque configurations. As a scene it’s definitely reminiscent of Collectif Petit Travers’ juggling symphony Pan-Pot, with the same appreciation for the sublime drop, but DeFracto accelerate and shrink it and add an extra layer of difficulty — matching the high, technical beauty of the étude but also mirroring its defining characteristic as a piece where the melodic line is passed from one playing hand to the other.

‘We built the thing two seconds by two seconds,’ DeFracto say after, and you sense that this is how they like to work: slowly and painstakingly, with difficulty as an inspiration. At Stratford Circus for a week-long residency organised as part of Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe, the company are one of ten to have been selected as recipients of the Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe award to support new and emerging artists in contemporary circus. As a JTCE laureate they receive a mid-size grant, but the value of this is matched or surpassed by in-kind support. Asked what the scheme has given them, Minh Tam says immediately: ‘Everything. It changes everything. It’s almost embarrassing. It’s strange, the difference between before JTC and after, because before we were struggling to get residencies, places to play, visibility, but immediately after — money, residencies, support. Before it was the street, now it is the theatre… When we started we created this piece on our own and we wanted to play it, so we went outside on the street and played in the street. And now we’re playing in great theatres with technical teams — it changes everything.’

Any artist — any artist — will benefit from free space and time. For a company like DeFracto, progressing in two-second units, there is no other way for them to complete their project, Circuits Fermés, which eventually will become a full-length piece. They’ve had residencies in France and Sweden already, but alongside developing new material they have work to do adapting their street characters to the cooler aesthetic of Circuits Fermés‘ crisp set and lighting (cf these amazing photos by Pierre Morel) and its fragmented music (by David Maillard, built from samples, all tocs and taks). At Stratford Circus they had a half-day with director Emma Bernard to work on stage presence and character as expressed through posture and mien rather than movement or action, and they plan to bring in a director to work extensively and finally on the project further down the line.

In the meantime they will do what they do: work on the micro-scale, as jugglers, choosing the most difficult thing. Next DeFracto go to Paris for the final JTCE showcase, where they will join the nine other JTCE laureates for a two-day showcase before an industry audience of promoters, programmers, directors, journalists and miscellaneous other bigwigs and players. It will be by some distance their most intimidating ever gig. Guillaume: ‘If we do something good in Paris in November we will have money and residencies; if we do something bad we’ll have the street again.’

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.

1. (20/07/2010)

A rusty old fan with no guard (a safety hazard); a trike scooter; a disemvehicled wheel; a plastic bag full of screwed-up newspapers; a heavy black motorbike helmet w/ visor; a bucketful of multipoint adaptors (possibly not trash); a couple of black iron ship signals that fold out into the skeleton of a spheroid: two circles cutting through each other; anglepoise and bedside lamps; a translucent, stained square of mosquito net; the parts of a disassembled German Wheel; boxes.

Acrojou’s Waste Time builds on a fairly simple premise: that none of the materials of the production should be purchased, with secondhand or reclaimed items servings as props/set/devising tools, and that the resulting show should instil in young audiences a similar attitude of thrift, care and creative renewal. The company, Jeni Barnard and Barney White, recently lucked in by moving onto a houseboat where the previous tenant (/captain) had left everything unwanted behind, and heaped here at the front of the cold over-ACed main theatre of Stratford Circus – where the company have been placed on a City Circ residency – is a share of the junk hoard they have inherited.

Joining them today is SC technician Nick, here in part to assess, and in many cases fix, the old boat lights and recovered electrical appliances that fit the show’s ethos but need a little work to remove the hazards of fire, injury, electrocution, etcetera – also proving himself a valuable collaborator as he matches Jeni and Barney’s aim of aesthetically re-purposing waste objects with an imaginative and at times gleeful approach to McGuivering theatre tech. An early idea to turn a kettle into a hazer is abandoned as he begins to piece together what in the course of the day will become his great work: an old light is clipped to the hang below the front of a Morrisons trolley and the excess flex (a trip hazard) gathered and stored in the bed – creating, in this first incarnation, ‘a lighting stand with integrated cable management’. On wheels, naturally.

In a few days the company are due an informal showing to a local school class, and today are gearing up for a first shaky run-through, still working out a few of the basics. In the story they’ve engineered, a personable old television is thrown away for a newer model, even though he works just fine, and Jeni and Barney find they need to represent his character in various ways, at various scales, at specific moments. A plan to gut a broken TV and use its frame was abandoned when Jeni asked around and did some reading and learned that dissecting a television might kill you (her dad’s advice: go ahead). So instead they’re mocking up a TV using a vegetable box with the bottom cut away. They seem down about this, seeing it perhaps as a second-best solution, but on Nick’s suggestion the mosquito net is stretched over the front and backlit by fairy lights and it starts to look the part. They resolve to ‘pimp up’ their vegetable box with tinfoil and leave it for later.

The cut-out shadow puppets they’ve made are tested, music is listened to but not chosen, and they begin to map the movement of the children in the space. At the start the class will be called upon to sit in the stage’s middle range and huddle under sheets of wadded newspaper – a light behind them casting their silhouette to form the heaped shadows and gulfs of a rubbish dump.

By the time they’re done with this the Morrisons trolley has gotten a laptop and two sheets of acetate, orange and blue, that hang in front of the light and when lifted simulate a sunrise, by these improvements evolving into a portable tri-channel projection, music and synthetic environment control-point with integrated cable management, omnidirectional ventilation and 4GB RAM. As the weather simulator casts its warm, broadening glow, the company go into a rough run-through.

Playing the role of a hormonally advanced and super-tall child (and in light of personal history savouring slightly the irony of this) I sit on the floor below the box TV and watch Barney cycle through a series of grotesque admen, diving down for costume changes and reappearing to sell critical, life-changing products – a silvery front-swept wig (artist’s rendition) gives way to a mass of flowing, blonde tresses. Leaning out and forward from the frame of the box he is coy and lushly inviting as he contemplates the superior shampoo brand which will bring popularity and lasting happiness by the advantage of excellent hair. Soon the scene shifts, the backing screen is lifted to reveal a grotto-ish assemblage of junk objects, everything goes a bit blurry, and then they’re blocking out the ending – a fight between the heroine and Barney’s swollen greed monster. Later they will write the script and fill in the gaps ready for their trial run w/ live audience.

2. (26/07/2010)

Wheel parts remain, but there are fewer trash items. Music is the cold, hopeless Blade Runner soundtrack. It seems this time more of a curated collection of objects: a white sheet, a megaphone that is also a siren, folds of wire netting that I later realise is the spring block of a mattress, the motorcycle helmet once more.

The presentation to the school audience was a few days ago (it went well) and this is the last day of their current residency block. Freed from the constraints of an imminent public showing the focus shifts away from pulling ideas together into scenes and a narrative line and toward generating new material.

The helmet is first, one of those ones with heavy foam that protects the head and as an unwelcome side-function soaks up sweat and holds odour in permanent, deep archive. Whose is it? Whose was it? When was it ever cleaned? Jeni, to Barney: ‘Put it on.‘ Some resistance, perhaps a shudder, and the helmet is pulled on and chunks down. Barney crashes a couple head spins, then works the helmet off and tries bouncing it as a basketball on the spring of the mattress; eventually it finds a better purpose as Jeni fits it over an anglepoise lamp, light emanating rather than streaming from the visor, the head moving curiously on its long and articulable neck – alien, alive, tilting. Today Nick isn’t here to say it, but this fine puppet is also a fire hazard.

The mattress is used to improvise a dance – an insomniac (Barney) is trying to sleep, but rogue bounces travel up from the springs and move through his body, tossing limbs back and forth, pushing him to his feet; he falls and is thrown up again. In a straight fight the mattress is like an expert and unmoveable martial artist, folding/hanging awkwardly and heavily over whatever holds it up. Kicked into the air it gives a whole-body, fishy shiver and snaps back down.

They leave the dance and begin to play with light. A bare lightbulb inside a cage casts a spiral shadow on the floor and they envisage it pulling out and resolving into a location or a map; light shone through the mattress onto the bedsheet casts shadows like bubbles in glass, or like a lake during rain, or rain on a skylight, streaming. As well they’ve seen a way to turn the dense, matted coils of the mattress into a forest by shining light and running haze through it, the children crouching or lying to bring this miniature, panoramic scene to eye-level. They’re excited by the idea, and at the same time are fighting the impulse to work too much on it and make it too elaborate. I remember the R&D advice they got, and seemed very much to take in, from their director/mentor John-Paul Zaccarini when they were developing their adults’ show Wake: don’t refine it, not now; do it, record it, move on.

So they move on. Later in the year, Acrojou will be back at Stratford Circus to do further work on Waste Time with the director and visual artist David Harradine, whose company Fevered Sleep have fallen into making exemplary and acclaimed work for children; and with the Belgian mime/dancer/puppeteer Nicole Mossoux, not exactly known for producing child-friendly shows, but known (and brought in here) for her work with object animation.

Race Horse Company
Petit Mal
@Nuffield Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Lighthouse, Eden Court
31 May – 2 June, 4-6 June, 8 June, 15-16 June

Petit Mal is more exciting than South Africa V Uruguay. It is an anarchic cocktail of choreographed insanity that sticks two fingers up to health and safety. It reads Lewis Carol and watches Scrapheap Challenge. It is reasonable family entertainment spoiling for a fight. 

Petri Tuominen is sullen, belligerent, ape-like and has a personal grudge. Rauli Kosonen is either like a feather or A.A. Milne’s Tigger; he is disconcertingly seductive (when in horse form), the ultimate Michelin Man, and destined for a successful career in gay cabaret. Kalle Lehto is underconsidered, but considered rangey.

All three are self-absorbed and brooding,  playful and competitive and menacing and confrontational. They are street-wise dudes and also school boys. They are masculine, masculine, masculine.

So: kill for a ticket.

*************** <– 15 Stars.

Reviewed by Lyn Gardner, Donald Hutera, Simon Cole, PB, Naima Khan, Terry O’Donovan, David Penrose & Jenny Macfie

[Note that: if you are now kicking yourself for missing a 15-star tour de force, Petit Mal is coming back for a longer UK tour next year. You can excuse yourself the burden of remembering this by signing up to the COL newsletter.]

It’s the morning of a beautiful day. Ugly buildings standing sharp against the blue sky; reflected light firing across lines of windows. I am on the Southbank, somewhere in the tangled middle of a daydream in which I micromanage the rebranding of Peter Andre as ‘P. Andre’ (for his new rap career), walking to London Studios for the rehearsals and shoot of an episode of Channel 4’s new 5 O’Clock Show—specifically the Friday episode, on which members of Finnish Race Horse Company will be teaching host Peter Andre the rudiments of acrobatic ball.

Peter is known in Finland, it turns out. Not for any recent personal/public traumas or reality television appearances or death rumours (exaggerated), but for his retrospectively inexplicable chart-run through the early half of the 1990s, the image of him emerging shirtless from the sea a strangely enduring memory for anyone now passing through their twenties and with a childhood in an EU state. Race Horse knew who he was, and immediately hit up YouTube when the possibility of going on his show was floated. It was funny to them and to anyone who heard; the company like dissonant situations and scenes, and there was a lot of friction just from imagining it: Petri Tuominen, Rauli Kosonen and Kalle Lehto, a trio who in performance (and out of it) alternate between a sort of sullen, gang-like insularity and flights of giddy and uncontrolled overstimulation, who are not just unconcerned with the projection of a market image but seemingly oblivious to the need for one, who strongly project the attitude of independence and extreme unconcern which is usually called cool—these three on stage with an airbrushed former pop star in a cheery daytime TV segment meant for desperate purposeless celebrities, hosts of other C4 shows, sportsmen angling to become broadcasters, current airbrushed low-grade pop stars, self-promotionists and soap actors. Myself I have been looking forward to it immensely.

But outside London Studios, the company don’t look so happy. Rauli especially is distracted and glum. Ordinarily he is both the most well-mannered (the one you would rely on; the one your mother would like best) and the live wire among the group: the one who in the company’s street show, Rusty Road Circus, paces angrily back and forth roaring and blustering in half a dozen pigeon languages and grammelots like a transnational amalgam of the greatest circus barkers, wrestlers and mountebanks of all time. Today he is muted, and explains that performing at the Nuffield Theatre last night he injured his ankle. As often happens in circus, it wasn’t from doing trampoline or ground acrobatics or teeterboard or any of the other dangerous skills in the show—he just stepped backward and put all his weight on the side of his foot. The ankle’s been injured before and then the company ended up cancelling a show; this time it’s perhaps not so bad, but it’s early to tell. As we go inside members of Crying Out Loud are talking to one of the show producers, trying to get a physio for Rauli, trying to get a good one. In the meantime there are rehearsals to run.

A television studio is amazing. You don’t ever see it from the film; the camerawork cuts the sides and the lights obscure the roof. What you get on screen is just the set, which in this instance is a red floor and blue sponge-mottled walls (thin, flimsy) punched with various-size circular holes that have then been covered over with sheets of transparent coloured plastic. The largest cutout is the entranceway, backed with a web of lights affixed to steel concentric circles, and fronted by a three-stair staircase for guests to jauntily descend. Pillars (not load-bearing, made from plastic, lit from within) line the walls, and off to one side is the presenting desk and a velvety red chair for interviewees. PETER is spelled out in giant letters on a wire frame above the desk and there’s bunting everywhere, like it’s his surprise party.

Looking around, I can only imagine that all sets are less interesting than the guts of the buildings they rest in. The studio isn’t cluttered, but every space around the stage is used: thick cable snaking over the floor and coiled on the walls; soundproofing; crowds of ground lights; four big cameras on wheeled pneumatic platforms to be lifted up and down and tracked around; another camera fixed to the arm of a counterweighted crane; attractive control panels with names like STUDIO 8 WALLBOX 322 and flick-switches like a pilot’s dashboard and plugs covered over by circular hinged caps. The ceiling is beautiful, a hanging garden of lights, some of them on fixed poles, others on articulable armatures, one (pinned with a DO NOT USE sign) hanging from a sort of accordion lattice that doesn’t look stable, safe or functional. Directly over the stage there’s a cluster of newer models, quite small, the main body of the light rectangular but bulbous, like the abdomen of a beetle or arachnid, and each one set within a cradle that allows it to be directed by remote control. As I watch, someone, somewhere switches them on. They come to life, wheeling round in a flock, the lens of each light unmistakeably now an eye, moving as though seeking, clicking and humming with synthetic intelligence.

Race Horse are sitting below, onstage, getting briefed by one of the scores of producers who seem mostly to have business anywhere but the studio, passing through it on diagonal courses with clipboards (everyone has a clipboard), purposeful and harried. The original plan was that the company would teach Peter Andre a trick on acrobatic ball (which is basically a Swiss ball) before filming so that he could execute it spontaneously to great shock and adulation. But at some point this has fallen by the wayside, and the producers now want two performances: Rauli opening the show on the larger ball, and Petri and Kalle starting the second half on two smaller ones. The company shrug. Perhaps there is a schedule and a plan, broken apart and distributed among the hundreds of clipboards, but it seems like the show is being constructed this morning around us. The set is criss-crossed by workmen putting finishing touches to the walls. The highest ranked producer is talking via headset with an invisible authority who is mostly displeased. Nobody is screaming, no one is crying; there’s a feeling that neither of these things would be unusual for the environment.

Rauli runs his routine a couple times, a little tentatively, landing the dismount on his one good foot, and at the behest of the producers makes it shorter, which is to say even shorter, and ends with a backward roll somersault that will push the ball over to the presenting desk as Peter makes his entrance. This is judged good enough; it’s ticked off somebody’s clipboard. Stage activity intensifies, and as banjo music floats in from off-set (courtesy of Woody the One Man Band, another of the programme’s guests) it starts to feel like a clownish skit about 30 people changing a lightbulb. One girl deposits a small pile (perhaps horde) of sweets on the ledge of one of the big cameras, puts a tick on her clipboard. I keep overhearing things:
‘I’ve never seen anyone actually solve the problem of the wobbly head.’
‘I tell you what: if he stands up we’re in trouble.’
Breathless, also forceful: ‘The headbands are coming in by courier.‘
‘Lunch time yesterday I seriously thought this was it—the end of all our careers. Regardless of the ratings.’
‘I’m too tired already.’

Slouching at the back of the stage Race Horse Company are mirrored by three members of the tech team grouped at the front, who in comparison with the producing caste are relaxed and amused, playing around using the Race Horse leafblower to upraise each other’s shirts M. Monroe-style. When one of the older-model ceiling lights needs to be adjusted/rotated/activated this is done by one of the team using just a hook on a long pole (which is hung on brackets on the wall when not in use, prominently, in the manner of a musket or ornamental sword). In everything they do you can sense their detachment from the show: their career does not depend on it.

As the tech guys busy themselves using the leafblower to try and dislodge various people’s hats, a small rush of low talk runs through the studio: Peter has arrived. Headset producer is superseded by the appearance of another, superior producer (I label them as greater and lesser producers, and as they share a forced joke make far-reaching assumptions about the strong constant hatred they feel for one another). They do a run-through of the interview sections with Peter reading off the autocue and the greater producer taking the sofa seat, fluidly pretending to be a female television presenter, a neurotic comedian, and a daytime soap star. There’s something queasy and discomfiting about his unfaltering confidence in the roleplay, and you can imagine the people whose personalities he is assuming pausing on their way to the studio or perhaps shuddering or brushing something invisible off their skin. Every now and then the producer stops the interview to make a change on the script, or to establish a contingency against an unexpected answer. Working out the expected flow of a conversation with Danny Wallace (the Yes Man), the producer is adamant that they need a ‘worst possible outcome’ scenario for when Peter asks the question ‘Will you wipe my shoes?’.

Changes are made. Peter rehearses with Woody the One Man Band for a section where he and a guest try out one-man-banding, a minion producer taking the place of the guest, Peter gamely chasing a hands-free harmonica that keeps falling forward, looking like he is trying to eat something tricky with chopsticks. This is judged good enough, also. Two clear sacks of wellington boots and several cardboard lecterns, one of which is piled high with Yorkshire puddings, are brought on then taken off, never returned, never explained. Everyone is calling Race Horse Company Petite Mal, which then gets semi-corrected to Petit Mal, which then gets changed to Petty Mal on the autocue at Peter’s request. He is sheepish about this. Rehearsals end. We’re sent away while they bring the audience in.

A C4 dressing room is like a hair salon: bright and long and low, heavily AC-ed; there are mirrors all around the walls and on wheeled frames, countertops and sinks, branded towels stacked on the successive shelves of a three-shelf trolley, steel and black leather chairs. The floor is sheeted linoleum.

In the shorter leg of the room’s L plan, Kalle is wearing circumaural headphones and breakdancing in front of one of the wall mirrors. The only noise is some bass leakage and the squeak of his shoes, plus heavy breathing: it’s both like and unlike his solo dance in Petit Mal, which is performed on a miked-up board of wood so that as his head scrapes the floor it sounds like the first waking movements of a stone giant. He has tied his hair handsomely in a samurai-style topknot, and looks calm and happy and in his element, like a swimmer slipped back in the water.

Around the corner, Rauli is lying out on one of the salon sofas and getting his foot strapped by a health care professional, the tape going round the ankle and under the heel to prevent lateral movement. What happens when you stretch your ligaments, the guy is explaining, is that it affects your proprioception—your ability to know where parts of your body are in relation to other parts—and when you think that your foot is level and in-line it can actually have drifted out to the side on the extra rein of those stretched ligaments, ready for you to go over it again and tear the tissues further. This problem is especially keen for a trampolinist, but with the ankle taped it’s impossible for Rauli to re-injure, and, the guy is saying, it’s only a matter of pain and endurance. Right after filiming, Race Horse are meant to be packing up and heading back for their last performance in Nuffield, but it’s up to Rauli to decide whether or not he wants to cancel. He is limping heavily around the dressing room when one of the producers comes in and says it’s time to go on.

I’ve never been to a TV shoot before. Why haven’t the lights gone down? I can see myself, and I can see the audience sloping down in front of me: perms; bottle dyes; a couple mother-daughters united by their love of Peter Andre (I know because they shout it); men in high-collar polo shirts; sweat-patched, corpulent heavy-breathers; humans of the future. One woman is wearing a see-through top where you really don’t want to see through, but feel drawn to, anyway. Sections of the audience appear as orchards that grow hoop earrings. On stage Rauli is standing balanced on the ball, waiting, looking glum and distracted, still. Ahead of the seating and before the stage the lesser producer raises his hands over his head, high, to signal and then to lead us in applause: the show is starting.

The crane swoops in, music kicks, and Rauli falls onto the ball to give a sharp and aggressive performance, untainted by injury. It’s only 30 seconds long; the producer tries to make us clap in time with the music, but it’s too fast and changeable and it ends up just a continuous low rattle, slightly uncomfortable, that intensifies as the show theme plays and Peter walks in. As rehearsed, Rauli does the high arching somersault to push the ball over to our host. He seems fine landing it, but when Peter rolls the ball back, Rauli stops it by punching it down quite a lot harder than he strictly needs to.

The cameras don’t see. The show has begun.

The first guest is Carol McGiffin, famous for being wedlocked to Chris Evans for 7 years, then more recently for being a co-host on ITV Lifestyle production Loose Women. She has an autobiography out, Oh, Carol! (subtitle: life, love and telling it like it is), which Peter retrieves from his hidden cache of show props and plants squarely on the desk for a lingering close-up. Subsequent conversation ranges widely over subjects of: Carol’s larcenous childhood; her first appearance on Loose Women and the little-known inner workings of the show; banging parties she and Peter have jointly attended; her fiancé’s reaction to the dark/salacious stretches of the autobiography; and her historic victory in a Reggae dance contest (refusing though to bust a move when Calypso music pipes in, and in spite of the combined exhortations of Peter and audience).

Carol’s book also apparently contains a reference to harmonicas, clearing the way magnificently for Woody to make his appearance—out of the web of light and down the stairs playing what could be a sophisticated mash-up of Tambourine Man and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Passacaglia, or something else entirely, I don’t know. There’s barely time for an introduction before Carol and Peter are out getting suited up with their own instruments by the members of the racehorsesque tech team, Carol pretending that the small drum that hangs from her shoulders and over her back is so heavy that it will pull her on her arse (I am unable to stop myself from thinking that she is a bad mime), the audience laughing constantly. Peter asks, What song should they play? A girl in front of me whispers longingly, Nobody Knows, but at any rate nobody hears and Peter shoots down McGiffin’s suggestion of One Man Band to steer us to the scripted outcome: Oh Carol. They play, terribly, as the audience cheers and whoops. Rauli is just visible off-set, appalled. It goes to a commercial break.

Already I have learned to dread these as they are the wretched domain of the Jim Davidsonesque audience fluffer, whose job appears to be to fill in any dead time by working the front rows of the audience with comments on the flowing abundance of their jewellery/cleavage, searching personal questions about Greatest Acts of Theft (in Woolworths), conspirational male-specific asides on urinal anxiety (so true), jokes about sexy calendars and the Chuckle Brothers, etcetera, etcetera. A riff on defecation is memorably awful, and very long, going wrong from the start, going on anyway. Finnish producer Maija sitting next to me is baffled and wants to know what he is talking about and whether she is translating wrong? No. No. There is nothing to translate.

The break ends. Petty Mal return. This time it’s Petri and Kalle, who perform an abbreviated and makeshift double performance on the smaller Swiss balls—not their discipline really and not what they prepared (this slot was originally going to be teeterboard on the company’s own version of the apparatus—a plank fed through a tyre on top of another tyre—with the show producers planning a skit employing a dummy and a jump cut where Peter comes on for a go and is sent flying madly through the air, reappearing dishevelled from behind his presenting desk). It goes OK, considering. It doesn’t look as good as Rauli’s routine, and they end short, clearly before they’re meant to, just standing at the back of the stage next to the balls as though these are horses they have lately dismounted. Petri appears, as so often, privately amused; Kalle raises a single eyebrow, slightly, his signature finish.

The show rolls on. Peter Andre is a nice man who is always in danger of drowning. His guest Danny Wallace is affable in the face of this. He delivers a series of mild anecdotes about social discomfort which you imagine will be exceeded entirely by the eventual retelling of this very television appearance, especially as he is dragged centrestage for the programme’s finale: egg roulette.

Summertime… fairs… World Egg Championships 2006… like everything else the provenance is only alluded to. Perhaps there is more information on the website? All we know is that egg roulette is like Russian roulette but with drastically lower stakes: two contestants sit facing each other across a table and take it in turns to pick an egg from a box and smash it on their forehead. The danger? Some of the eggs are hardboiled, some are raw. Also you might have an allergy. Or be wearing an excellent dress? Beware! The first person to smash a raw egg on their face is of course the loser, and after a warm-up battle in which Danny Wallace defeats Hollyoaks ‘hunk’ Ricky Whittle, it’s on to the main billing: Peter himself in the chair, matched against an elderly lady called Joyce. Joyce is not introduced; it seems we are meant to know her. Is she a recurring character? An audience member? Not for the first time, I feel like I’ve missed something, but I don’t think I have. Joyce and Peter are wearing goggles and transparent plastic macs which have almost certainly been bought specially for egg roulette and perhaps couriered in. The two are eyeballing each other through their goggles; the music is Wild West, I think Ennio Morricone. Tension builds, then discharges. The first eggs are duds. Both players are into it, the intensity of the battle, which means it’s taking longer than it should between rounds, and also that Peter can’t see the lesser producer, who’s wheeling his hand in big frantic circles to indicate there is no time remaining, moving to different areas of the set to try and get his attention. It’s not working. Peter is locked in his showdown; everything outside the arena of competition is darkness and wind. Eggs three and four are braved and survived. Joyce is especially vigorous in driving her egg onto her forehead; when she does it it is almost angry, like a gesture of remembered forgetfulness. I don’t know the probability but it seems improbable: eggs five and six are hard. I am watching the producer crouching and shifting between cameras and mouthing uselessly, thinking that this is the segment for which they should have designed a worst case scenario. I want it to end and at the same time could watch forever, but the fourth round brings relief. Joyce is the loser.

Mostly I am disappointed that Race Horse weren’t co-opted for the game, but as the audience are led in a last ditch effort of applause I realise they’ve disappeared: back to the dressing room to pack up the equipment ready to drive to Nuffield for the night’s performance. I catch them afterward, and they say that as artists they’re not happy doing this: showing themselves at less than their best. I think they feel used and wrung out, but that’s how it goes.

Part of it is that Race Horse aren’t used to doing publicity. In Helsinki I filmed the demo that Channel 4 needed to see before inviting them on the show, which was Rauli teaching the director of Circus Helsinki acrobatic ball while pretending she was Peter Andre—a strange and funny three minutes of video that ended with Rauli holding the ball aloft doing the Mysterious Girl dance. They don’t like selling themselves. Also in Helsinki I did an unsuccessful and quickly aborted video interview with them where I asked why people should come and see their show, and there was just a dead, blank silence for about a minute. Afterward, off-camera, Petri said: ‘I guess the Finnish answer to that is you don’t have to.’

It’s time to leave. The company agree that their day in television was awful. Rauli decides to go to Nuffield and perform on the ankle. The show is still great. You can see it, but you don’t have to. It’s the afternoon of a beautiful day.

* * *

You can watch Race Horse on the 5 O’Clock Show on the C4 website for the next 24 days, although ask yourself first if you truly want to. Petit Mal is at Eden Court, Inverness 15 & 16 June.

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