#15ft6

Tain Molendijk started as a gymnast on the Australian national team before switching to circus at 18 and being scouted by Cirque du Soleil. After touring Canada with its show Amaluna she joined the Ghent-based collective 15ft6, which was formed in 2103 and is made up of Brit Richard Fox, Frenchman Thomas Dechaufour and Belgian Jasper D’Hondt. A specialist on Russian bar, she also enjoys the less strenuous pursuits of crochet, craft and photography and – perhaps unusually for a 21-year-old – loves the company of the elderly.

Having performed at the Out There Festival in Great Yarmouth in 2014, Tain returns to the UK for the London debut of 15ft6 show Dynamite & Poetry, which runs during the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival on 27 and 28 June, and tours until March 2016. She chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: Where are you from? You’ve got an interesting name. Tain Molendijk: I’m Australian but my mum’s Burmese and my dad’s Dutch.

What inspired you to switch from gymnastics to circus? I love training and I love doing acrobatics but I really didn’t like the competition side of it. I was sure that there was a way to keep doing acrobatics and to bring people joy doing it without the competitiveness. I found circus and that fitted exactly with what I wanted to do.

Did you see any particular troupe that inspired you? Australian circus is… wow, some of the best in the world now. Actually I didn’t know all that much about Australian circus then, unfortunately. So the first circus I saw when I was eight, which kind of changed everything was Cirque du Soleil’s show Alegria, which is a pretty typical thing when you’re my age. Up until the time I started circus professionally I hadn’t really seen something in Australia that caught my eye and I didn’t know about circus schools in Europe either. I knew about NICA in Australia but Cirque du Soleil seemed like the best thing for me to do.

So how did Cirque du Soleil find you? Did you audition? I’d quit gymnastics when I was 15 but when I finished high school I started doing circus for fun at a local circus school. Then when I decided to try for Cirque du Soleil I started training back at the gymnastics place where I’d trained before and I got scouted by them. My coach was in Montreal and she showed a friend who was an acrobatic casting person in Cirque du Soleil one of my videos and she picked me straight away.

That’s really impressive because a lot of people languish in their database and never get called. That’s such an accolade. I was very lucky! I think if I’d done the audition – because I was only 17 and still so shy and unsure of myself – I don’t think I would have gotten in. It was luck that at the time they were searching for what I had.

Could you do Russian bar by then? No, I only started Russian bar in mid-2013. It was the first time I’d ever done it. In 2011 I was selected to do an uneven-bars act in the show Amaluna [coming to London’s Royal Albert Hall in January 2016] so I started the creation of that in August 2011 as a gymnast in the house troupe.

How long did you stay with the company? I was contracted to stay two and a half years but I only ended up staying one and a half years because I found a different style of circus, contemporary circus in Europe that I really liked. I kind of discovered that Cirque du Soleil wasn’t quite for me. It was an amazing experience but I left them in March 2013 and came to Europe and kind of fell into working with the boys.

I was going to ask how you found the transition from competing to performing but as you didn’t like competing maybe it came naturally? Yes. Nothing feels as right as being onstage.

Were you always like that as a kid? No, not at all. I’m kind of shy when I’m not in front of an audience but when I have something I feel I can justify doing onstage I feel very comfortable doing it. The creation I did with Cirque du Soleil helped me overcome my shyness so much because the moment you get over that barrier of being too shy to improvise or act or do something else onstage life just becomes so much more fun.

So how did 15ft6 find you or did you find them? Is it OK if I tell the long story? Of course it is! I was with a boy in Australia who was a builder and when I left for Montreal he ended up coming to join me there. While he was there he was bored out of his brains because getting a visa to work in Canada was quite difficult so he started just training weights and stuff in the residence at Cirque du Soleil. There he met a boy who was on medical. He was in the show Zarkana but broke his leg. And they were Richard and Jasper, my bases. They started training together and got along really well and Jasper was looking for something new, because he didn’t want to do teeter board any more and I don’t know why he decided to choose a builder out of anyone, but him and Richard started working together. They went to Las Vegas and started training Russian bar under a Russian coach. Then they moved to Europe and started their own company with Thomas. So I’ve known them as friends for a long time and when I decide to leave my contract I just wanted to come and see them and get into the world of circus. At the time, it wasn’t quite working with the flyer they had so they decided not to work together anymore and I kind of fell into working with them.

I imagine you prefer the dynamics of a small troupe? Definitely.

Tell us about the show. Dynamite & Poetry is a show made by four very silly boys. [Laughs]

Four? Originally, yes, and then I came in and had to find my place as a girl in this very silly show. We have the intention of doing a fabulous show but as soon as we start everything just goes wrong… on purpose. I guess the show is just chaos and very… silly… humour. One of our main things was to not take ourselves too seriously because there are so many companies now that just take themselves so seriously and sometimes forget how fun circus is. We really have a licence to do whatever we want onstage and that’s also one of things that the boys had in mind when they created the show was do all the things they’ve always wanted to do onstage but never had the opportunity, so this show is a combination of very absurd things, like dressing up in a chicken costume and blowing things up with pirate bombs [laughs] and showing their bums onstage. [Laughs]

So there’s something literal about the title? It’s very literal. There’s dynamite and there’s poetry.

Russian bar is one my favourite disciplines. It’s so precise and exciting. How do you train for it? It’s a lot of trampoline.

But you have to land in that tiny little zone… The boys are very, very good at their job. [Laughs] The best thing is that we’ve known each other, one of them so well and the other one we’re such good friends that the trust is just there. I’ve never really thought of it as dangerous or anything cos I just trust that they’re going to be there.

Do you use pole-vault poles? Yes, the boys build the bars themselves. They bought three pole-vault poles and used silicon to stick them together and then put some padding on it.

What tip would you give someone thinking of taking it up? Ooh, I just say, ‘Try it’, because the beauty of this discipline is that it looks so much harder than it actually is. Oh, don’t tell us that! [Laughs] [Laughs] The principle is quite simple. My job is to do what I have to do in the air and the boys’ job is to catch me. It’s not like I have to search for this tiny little thing to come under my feet. That’s the thing. The hardest job is probably the bases’. As long as I do my acrobatics in the air well then it’s kind of up to them. [Laughs]

Do you enjoy taking risks? For sure I do because you’re always trying to achieve more difficult skills on the Russian bar. Also because we travel around doing summer festivals and different shows, the environment we perform in is always so different and that can be really scary… like if it’s really windy or the sun’s in my face or we’re performing on cobblestones, I’m always challenging myself in that way because there’s never a comfort zone. It’s not like we’re performing in the same place every day. When you have your pitch outdoors it’s so much more intimate with the audience, much more casual, more human, the performer and the audience. We prefer that. But we can perform the show inside. We just did an old glass factory in Meisenthal, France, that’s been converted into a cultural centre.

What are your plans after the tour? We’re always open to everything. We have our tour planned up until March next year. We do May until the end of September with Dynamite & Poetry, then Thomas leaves us for the winter and me and the two other boys go off to cabarets mostly in Germany with a Russian bar act called For David.

What’s it like being the only woman in the troupe? [Laughs] Er… the boys are so smelly, and they tease me all the time, they’re always making fun of me and annoy me so much but I absolutely love them. [Laughs] There are definitely benefits with working with all boys. You just say what you think and you just get things done, but I’ve never appreciated time with girls more than I do now. I seize every opportunity to hang out with my girlfriends. Being a female performer is quite difficult actually… to justify yourself onstage next to three boys can be quite a challenge.

You must have seen the women in Circa? They’re doing a lot for the cause of womankind. They’re wonderful. I feel exactly the same when I watch them. They make me feel really proud to be a woman onstage.

15ft6 appears for free at 14.50 and 17.20 on 27 June 2015 and at 13.50 and 16.20 on 28 June during the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival.

Twitter: @GDIF

15ft6 on Facebook

Follow The Widow Stanton on Twitter