Late Nights

Late nights.
The sun sets early in Bahrain… and it cools down enough to be able to juggle on the roof.

Jago and are are reworking our show in preparation for a gig back in England on the 10th of November. This means learning new choreography and running tricky sequences over and over till they are polished.

My head is a mess of 8 count steps and siteswaps.

”Anomalies” is becoming truly insane in its scope, and yet i’m just beginning to feel like we actually understand what we are doing with this show. Its a million times different from anything i’ve done before, and after a summer of just hating the damned thing, i think i’m finally seeing some good here. After a day rehearsing in a huge shaded tent on the beach, and an evening of refining new sequences and fitting them to the correct rhythm structure of ‘love bird’ by Susumu Yakota, it feels like we are getting somewhere good. I’m excited.. i need to write 8 bars of synced 3 ball material in the theme of ‘juxtaposition’… big to small, wide to compressed, and then teach it to Jago. This is the kind of thing I love… diving into, exploring and pulling out the little gems of technique to make sequences of movement.

Its an odd time. Jago, well into his thirties, is beginning the step into full time juggling, and here i am,the young one, with 2 years of professional British circus under my belt. We are both ”untrained” artists in circus… no 3 year degree to show for anything, just a lovely set of mills mess variations, some really tight isolations, and a shared drive to make people actually care about all this throwing/catching/rolling nonsense. Neither of us will ever carry around any kind of ‘best ever’ title, and to try to acheive that would be entirely pointless. I just want to be ”understood” as a performer and to have people share the same sense of beauty for simple aesthetics and dynamics.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with rings… largely because of Ilona’s solo. I’ve never spent much time with them before, but I’m really enjoying the process of starting fresh and just exploring a prop with no boundaries. I like taking them in the pool, diving underwater and watching them float to the surface. I like the way they can be hung on the body. I like that they are white. I like 4-2-3 variations with them.
Its all new to me, full of potential… and learning them reminds me just how stupidly difficult everything else i do in the show is.

Posted by Ryan on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 3:22 pm under Ryan. RSS 2.0 feed of comments for this post. Trackback.