Sideshow

Lyn wrote about the David Metcalf letter in the Guardian, and while I b r o a d l y agree, I don’t think the newspapers necessarily picked the circus schools (as opposed to the colleges running acupuncture or ancient medicine courses) for their headlines because circus is the most ridiculous—I think it has something more to do with the quality of circus, just the word circus, as a hook. It’s readable, clickable; looks great in bold. Traditional circuses are either more savvy about the marketability of their artform, or else contemporary companies don’t want to buy into a network of misapprehension and prejudgement for the sake of a little attention. But seeing something like Big Top—Amanda Holden’s ill-starred sitcom—using its premise to pull in attention which it then betrays by having only the shallowest connection to the world it purports to exist in makes me wish someone would do it right: bring an audience in with circus’ symbols and archetypes, only to confound them. Then that audience might be longer-lived than a packet of steam.

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Also, as a note: punctuation criminals Collectif and then… are beginning to devise their new show and want people to fill in this short survey about living in London. The richer, darker, more terrifying, queerly stilted, violent, perverse, X-rated, nauseating and intensely personal your answers the better their show will eventually be. When we talk about people working with ‘material’ for a production I suppose I imagine something light and quick—thoughts belonging after all to the element of air—but in this case ‘the material’ should have a menacing self-possession: a night-black extraterrestrial ooze that cannot be captured, knowing only how to grow and consume.