Circus Tricks, Parts 1 & 2

On Friday night I saw some of the best circus acts from all over the globe put on the most fantastic show: Cirque Du Soliel’s Varekai.
Cirque present circus as a breathtaking spectacle on a lavish, extravagant scale, and in doing so, their shows are so polished that the nearest thing to a sense of carny grit on Friday night came from the fact that their vast Grand Chapiteau tent had been erected in the car park of Manchester’s Trafford Centre.
Varekai, then, is tent circus on a vast scale, but despite the glorious set and fancifully grand linking story – a forest into which an Icarus-like winged creature falls – the focus is on the extraordinary acts, split-second timing and sheer sense of wonder generated by human beings whose bodies are capable of extraordinary feats: this is everything circus should be, and in this case, probably the best circus in the world. The astonishing artistry concentrated into each short routine is what makes Cirque’s world of enchantment so convincing that the audience is transported into an enthralling otherworld. Sitting close to the stage, the experience of watching Varekai was more intimate than you’d imagine from the size of the space: this was a truly magical show.
How extraordinary was brought home to me on Sunday, when I took part in a trapeze workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by Deborah Sanderson of Urban Angels. Perfecting a new aerial routine of my own invention known as The Sack Of Spuds, I struggled to heave my feet onto the bar, then wobbled to find a sense of balance as I teetered a mere few feet above an enormous crash mat, helped and encouraged by the endlessly patient, supportive Sanderson, who demonstrated moves, which seem impossible when it occurs to you that you’re about to try them, with a strength and grace that showed that she was as much at ease in the air as she was on the floor. It is, though, the most exhilarating feeling on earth to find that you are, even in an ungainly fashion, poised on a bar above the rest of the world, and that even the most unpractised body can be persuaded into positions – upside-down, inside-out – that seem to defy the limits of what your body can do (see pic), until someone like Sanderson shows you how. It would take a long time to feel weightless; I didn’t fly through the air with the greatest of ease, and I certainly wasn’t magnificent on my static trapeze, but it was an inspiring experience.
Deborah Sanderson will be doing a solo, site-specific aerial performance in Holy Trinity Church on Boar Lane in Leeds on April 1 at 7pm. Go, and wonder.

Better Start Wearing Purple..

Balkan beats, bellydancers, swishy skirts, stompy feet, fortune tellers and the whole three-ringed hoopla...the Disko Partizani circus is coming to Leeds tomorrow. Well worth crawling into work like a dirty old and useless clown the following morning.
PULSE, LUU, 9 til late.

Pasha And Bayadere

It would be lovely to think, particularly if you were a dance historian, that Roger Fenton’s 1958 photograph Pasha And Bayadere – currently newsworthy because the rare image is subject to a temporary export ban in the hope that the money can be raised to keep it in the UK – was a record of a Turkish dancing girl, costumed in the apparel of a dancer and using moves similar to those in modern bellydance.
Instead, Fenton’s image, which was inspired by his travels to the Crimea, is entirely staged, though who is to say that it might not have been his attempt to recreate a memorable scene from his expedition? The picture was taken in Fenton’s London studio. Fenton himself is the Pasha; the musician and the dancer are hired models. Perhaps most interestingly of all, because of the length of time required to take a photograph in the pioneering days of the art, the model’s arms are held up in the air with string in order for her to hold her pose.
The photograph is important in the history of orientalist art, and it is important to know that the characters in it are dressed up as other than what they actually are. When Pasha And Bayadere was first exhibited, its Victorian audience widely believed it to be an authentic record of the East, when it is actually an authentic record of the dreams, visions and representations of the orient - exotic, alluring and very strange - as seen through foreign eyes at a time when very few people ever left the country they were born in.
Orientalism has had, in post-colonial history, much to answer for in terms of generating reductive clichés of complex countries and people. And yet it would be fair to argue that, at least in terms of the history of art and photography, orientalist images are less exotic stereotypes, more the response of an Alice to an alluring Wonderland where everything was different, strange and – apparently – fantastic. It is not the fault of the 19th century orientalists that their work became seem in terms of stereotypes of veiled women and unbelievable luxury: they conjured what was to them a dream. If they failed to see everything around them, it is because their works, no matter how sumptuous, were the equivalent of holiday snaps: far from the big picture, but a memory of something unbelievable to be treasured, and kept.