#lab:time

Earlier in 2017, Catherine Boot of Can’t Sit Still won National Centre for Circus Arts Lab:time space and funding to research a new project to explore the role of gender stereotyping in childhood, taking the form of ‘high quality improvisational circus theatre’ for young children (ages 2-5).

She was joined by performers Hobbit and Jake England Johns, as well as musician Harriet Riley. 

Catherine found that circus for children works well as they ‘have a real fascination with the feats of the human body’. She noted that the performance seemed to elicit a visceral response in the young members of the audience: ‘the children were kneeling up and fidgeting (in a good way), even sometimes unconsciously mirroring the physicality of the performers. We liked this effect on the audience - circus and extended physicality clearly reaches something more primal than words do.’

During Research and Development, the group tried out various approaches towards improvisation and freedom of movement. When there was freedom of movement on both sides – the audience and the performers – it led to slightly comedic safety issues: ‘at times the performers weren’t able to commit to a trick or move fully as they were worried about hitting small people in the face.’

Another experiment involved a format where the children chose what happened next in the story; this however was found to only really benefit those members of the audience who had verbal skills. Catherine concluded that ‘in the future I would like to focus in on a fixed circus routine with the audience being able to move freely in the space … we need to work on this area more to allow curiosity and eagerness to flourish, whilst remaining in control of the space and structure.’

The performers also found success in engaging the adult members of the audience: ‘The adults were very drawn in at the moment when the performers started to use their circus skills – it felt as if all of a sudden they were sitting up and paying attention, like this wasn’t the sort of ‘children’s theatre’ they had expected to see.’ This was enhanced by the small, intimate space that the performances took place in: ‘the skills had more of an impact as they were literally within reaching distance and the adult audience felt more engaged as there was no barrier between themselves and the performance.’

Catherine described the project as having ‘great potential’. The show – now christened Plink and Boo – is currently in further development and will tour in Autumn 2018.

Find out more about our work with professional artists.

Lab:time -  MAKE//SHIFT company

MAKE//SHIFT company won Lab:time funding in early 2017 for their application for Insomniac’s Fable – a story on the theme of dreams within dreams cast against an eclectic soundtrack, with specially commissioned woodcuts as projections. The show is a wordless, narrative contemporary circus piece combining circus, dance and visual arts which aims to be an intimate piece about the realities - or unrealities - of love.

MAKE//SHIFT’s core members are Emma Lister, a ballet dancer and Sakari Mannisto, a juggler, circus artist and founding Artistic Director of Agit-Cirk and the Silence Festival.

They describe where the idea for the show came from:

The genesis of this project was our interest in the art of printmaking, specifically the techniques involved in woodcuts; where the relationship between a carved wooden block with ink applied, and the paper upon which it impresses a mirror image can be seen as a metaphor for two people’s perception of one event. Everyone is the protagonist in their own narrative and invariably people carry different memories and different interpretations from encounters. Around these ideas we constructed a narrative that’s somewhere between Vertigo and Inception, loosely inspired by the Renaissance book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

The larger working group consisted of artists from the UK and Finland: visual artist Angela Annesley, sound designer Tuomas Norvio, light designer Eero Auvinen, and choreography and movement assistant Ludovic Ondiviela (Royal Ballet, choreographer of the Gandini Juggling piece 4 x 4 Ephemeral Architectures).

Amongst other things, the team tested out various ways of making a nightmarish juggling scene, in which objects don’t behave the way they ought to: We tried to make juggling balls out of wet sponges, the aim was to try how that works technically and see how the liquid extracts while juggling. This experiment was also a success and will be seen in the final performance, it will be a part of a longer scene with multiple different juggling items changing shapes…In the end water would be replaced with a coloured thicker substance.

In conclusion, the team found ‘Lab:Time in the [Creation] studio was very helpful and useful to the progress of the piece. Having a calm space with good dance floor and mirrors is essential for the creative work.’

The finished show premiered at Manillatehdas, Turku, Finland.

Jonah Russell was awarded Lab:time funding earlier this year with his proposal to model organic reactions using the body: ‘At the heart of science is the use of models; systems or structures that aim to describe a reality that is not able to be experienced directly by our senses.’ 

In his application he stated: ‘I want to draw parallels between the four bonding orbitals of carbon (which is the element fundamental to organic chemistry) and the four human limbs’. Along with his creative team, Jonah spent time in the Creation Studio in February trying out his ideas, with the possible aim of creating a ‘novel movement language’.

The team involved in the project included circus artists Aaron Marshall and Lucie N'Duhirahe as well as dancer Martha Pasakopoulou who, like Russell, has a chemistry degree. At first the team played with the aesthetic of suspensions and pauses, mirroring the stabilising effects of carbonyl substituents. 

They then individually worked on creating a piece of movement based on a particular mechanism and found that they each took different approaches to mapping it on the body.

In his evaluation of the Lab:time, Russell wrote: ‘Having non-scientists look at these relatively opaque schemes and give them meaning was a fascinating experience, something that would be interesting to look into further.’ 

Ultimately he felt that ‘a lot of the work done could be extended further in a number of forms, highlighting new ways of looking at chemistry through the lens of movement’.

Kaveh Rahnama, the artistic director of Nearly There Yet, applied for Lab:time funding earlier this year to explore themes of displacement through the story of a skilled circus performer who is forced to leave his home country and clean dressing rooms in a theatre. The challenge of the project would be to perform acrobatics and juggling in such a confined space, and to use humour to keep the piece accessible and prevent it from being too politically overt. 

Kaveh wrote in his application for Lab:time: ‘I have been really interested in the way ideas can be conveyed in one-on-one theatre experiences or pieces which can only be performed for small audiences, as there is an element of extreme intimacy which I am really drawn to.’

Along with Umar Ahmed, who directed the piece, Floria Da Silva and Kaveh devised and performed the piece in a dressing room of Stratford Circus. The piece ‘ended up taking a different direction’ from the one they were expecting. Kaveh said of his conversations with Umar: ‘it became clear to us that the choice of having the conceit of a performer pretending to be a cleaner to a small audience was perhaps not our most interesting avenue.’

Here Kaveh describes an (unusual) showing of the piece:

Day three was a huge turning point in the development of the project. We decided to show a structured improvisation of the piece to Ed Stephen, Floria, and a man we had met the day before on his way to the local Job Centre who said he didn't go to the theatre because it was too expensive. His name was Malcolm.

Instead of 'acting', Umar got me to work on three snippets of interview he'd conducted with me the previous two days. He also got me to improvise a juggling section at the start of the showing. This piece was connected with the idea of memory and finding a sense of belonging in a physical action.

The response to this slightly scrappy, improvised piece was overwhelming. Clean and tidy it was not. But it had something. Malcolm was extremely moved. The references to race and class and misplacement seemed to resonate hugely with his own experiences. He also loved the juggling! 

The eventual decision was for Kaveh and Umar to develop it into a one-man show which can be performed in any space, the aim being to engage people who wouldn’t normally come to theatres. Moving forward they will be working with Stratford Circus amongst other partners. 

Kaveh signed off his evaluation of the project with this:

That she’d arrive at the corner of your eye like the ghost of herself going silent into the wind...

Catriona Johnston, aerial performer and dancer, won a Lab:time grant in November 2016 for her proposal BETH (The Dream), where she proposed to develop aerial dance for both film and live performances. The stimuli for the application were the poem Bowland Beth by David Harsent about the flight and death of the Hen Harrier by that name, and the present extreme conditions faced by Syrian refugees.

This was to be researched in a creative team with choreographer Catherine Seymour, filmmaker David Lefeber and composer Morgan Hayes.

Choreographer Catherine Seymour said after the research and development time in the Creation Studio:

Lab:time has blown open any preconceptions I may have had about choreographing for trapeze in the most positive way.

Due to the nature of our work it was important, when not being deliberately birdlike, to express as natural and human a quality as possible and we discovered through improvisation that working with the trapeze almost unnaturally close to the floor seemed to express more clearly and movingly the strength, vulnerability and humanity of the dancer. It was almost as if being caught between the air and the floor meant there was nowhere to hide, and a desired naturalness resulted from overcoming the unique physical challenges this presented.

We were able to invite into our process 16 year old aerial performer/dancer Ruby, who attends National Centre for Circus Arts youth classes. She participated as an equal and vital member of the team and was mentored on trapeze by Catriona. The skill and openness she brought to the process, despite her youth, meant it was possible to explore (albeit briefly) the possibilities for duets both in the air, and working aerially and in floor based dance at the same time.

From David Lefeber, filmmaker:

For those of us who had not worked with trapeze artists before, we were able to discover and explore the expressive potential inherent in the art, the musical engagement, and, very specifically for our project, character development along the path of a narrative framework, and the dramatic potential towards our poetic intentions.

And from composer Morgan Hayes:

Creatively I think the biggest gain from my point of view was being able to look at the film-footage David made as we were working. My head (and Kate's the clarinetist) tended to be buried in the score of the non improvised pieces so I only had a vague sense of how music and movement meshed. The footage tended to confound my expectations in a way which was very instructive.

Their future plans include an intimate film which, instead of a literal depiction of the Syrian refugee experience, moves ‘back into the power and subtlety of the poem’. Thus the music and the two trapeze performers would be the main focus in simple locations such as the native moors of the Hen Harrier. Therefore they have opened a dialogue with the RSPB in the hope of filming external footage of the birds and performers in situ.

Catriona finished up her analysis of the project with this insight:

An artistic collaboration like ours needs time, space and concentrated effort and imagination, away from every day interruptions and distractions, somewhere safe where the facilities are purpose built and can be trusted to be reliable.

The National Centre for Circus Arts provided this, and more. We were able to interact with each other’s creative inputs, see a bigger picture unfolding, new ideas appearing continually, all the time developing a trust and understanding of each other’s modes of working, sensibilities and temperaments in a comfortable studio space with amenable and friendly staff on hand if any needs emerged.

I cannot imagine having had a more successful outcome either personally or as a team for our time at National Centre for Circus Arts in the generous Lab:Time scheme.