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| (c) Johannes Hjorth |
It is midnight in Paris
and I am cleaning broken glass off the soles of my bare feet. I’ve just danced a tango on a bed of broken
bottles. An hour before the show, I could be found on the rooftop smashing
bottles wrapped in a gingham table cloth with a lump hammer (bottles and hammer
kindly provided by the bar – the Eurostar do not take kindly to this sort of
equipment – transporting my hula hoops is difficult enough). Freshly smashed glass is very sharp. I get
changed quickly. Next up: hula hoops.Tomorrow, or next week,
I will be in a different city, with different people.
I started performing
during my time on the Creative Writing MA at UEA. I have performed in sumptuous mansions,
famous Wintergartens, the world’s largest green house (in Vienna), and
alongside some incredible and inspirational artists. At festivals and cabarets
all over Europe, from the dingy to the breathtaking. My dressing rooms have
been everything from a leaking, muddy tent or a disabled loo with no light
bulb, to an eighteenth century bedroom with silk wallpaper, or an exquisite
library filled with tame owls.
Between these sojourns,
back at home I’ll make breakfast for my five year old and do the school run. I
marvel at these different versions of myself, these skins, jostling up against
each other. Back at the house, I traverse the steep ladder (far more
death-defying, with a cup of scalding coffee in one hand and a laptop in the
other, than the feats I perform in my other skin) to the attic, my eyrie, and
write.
I realise now that
whether it’s staring down a blank page, wondering how a collection of words can
be made transportive, or holding onto a rope seven metres in the air, while it
bites a tightening tourniquet around your thigh, plucking up the courage to let
go - the discipline required is the same. It is about pushing mind or body to
its limits, to where you are not sure it’s safe to go, or not sure that if you
do return, you will ever be the same. It’s also about training; most mornings I
train intensively, not only flexing familiar muscles and rehearsing, but also
pushing myself. Then I close my laptop, get changed and head to my training
space, and do the same with my body. Learning circus as an adult has been a
challenge: the body isn’t as forgiving, and the mind interferes –overthinking
when what you need to harness is the childlike willingness to try something
without judgement.
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| (c) Neil Kendall |
When inspiration (though
the word is not visceral enough to convey the sensation) flows through you, as
when the light is perfect and the painter must put oil to canvas, it can flow.
Whether it’s circus performing, writing, music, or oil paints – to me, all
these mediums are different outlets for the same outcome: you strive to
connect, to elicit an emotional response. But you won’t always feel inspired. I
saw a picture recently: on one end of the spectrum, absolute narcissism; on the
other, crippling doubt. And in the centre: Art.
A large proportion of the battle to succeed in any art form is just
carrying on. My 500 words a day are my training. I won’t necessarily use what’s
in them, feel like writing them, or even like them, but just like when I’m
having an off day training, or tired or injured it feels futile, I just have to
trust that my body is remembering, my muscle memory is percolating: it is a
process of accumulation. A very good
friend of mine recently asked me why I forgive myself more in the process of
physical learning than in writing: I may get frustrated when I keep dropping the
hoop when learning a new trick, but I understand that dropping it is part of
the process. We accept that there is gravity: sometimes, you will drop the
hoop. It took me much longer to understand this in relation to writing, but
learning the process through which physical skills, and performance skills, are
attained has made me better at the process of writing. You let go of the rope
and after some freefall, you know that it will catch you because you trust
yourself.
Performing; this is a
different beast. At the moment my book exists in solitude, and when it is
published, whether I write another book or not, I will be judged by it again
and again. When I perform, it lives and dies in the moment. We connect. I tell
my story. The feedback is instant. It is over. And tomorrow I’ll do it again,
and it will be entirely different, even if it’s the same act. This is where the
road forks.
I grew up surrounded by
a family of artists. My mother has quietly accepted that I appear to have
chosen just about the most ostensibly unstable career path possible. Not just
one of them, but two of them. And did I mention that my partner Alex reads
minds for a living? You can imagine the
conversations we’ve had when applying for a mortgage.
In 2012 my partner Alex
and I created Gossamer Thread’s Vaudeville Co. Both of us foster a love for the
era of vaudeville; the aesthetic, the variety, the stories. As well as our
individual disciplines, Alex and I perform double-acts and we are working on a
full two-person show. We also produce sell-out circus and cabaret shows,
predominantly at the Norwich Arts Centre (“Quite
simply the best show in town’-Marc Gracey, Future Radio). I want the
audience to never know what they are going to see next, but when they do to
feel it is so right that it couldn’t have been anything else. Much like
plotting a novel. Each act tells a
story. The next show is ‘Gossamer Thread’s Kubla Khan Cabaret,’ 12th
June, based around Coleridge’s poem. We
book performers from all over the country. Alex and I often create bespoke new
acts: favourites of my own have been a conjoined twins aerial hoop act and an
aerial silks act in which I was Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole –
narratives, journeys.
I have found a pattern
which works: five hundred words every morning; training in the afternoon. Then
teaching circus or performing in the evenings. Our son has seen us both
perform; he is surrounded by a network of family and friends. I want him to see that it is possible to do whatever
he wants to do.
Daisy Black
(aka Daisy Bourne) is freelance circus performer based in Norwich.
Co-director of Gossamer Thread’s Vaudeville Co., she performs aerial hoop and
silks, hula hoops and sideshow. She is also a producer and teaches circus
skills in Norwich. She writes short stories, and is working on two novels, the
current one is about the ‘father of modern circus’, Philip Astley. She
graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia in
2013.
