Links to reality...

I dropped into a surreal landscape the other night. It was fantastic, magical, breathtaking, elaborate, sparkling, thought provoking, marvellous, wonderful, astounding… I liked it.

Sensory overload.

What is Cirque du Soleil about?

This is the third Cirque du Soleil I’ve seen. The first, ‘La Nouba’ in Florida had so much going on, so many images to take in, that I felt sick for the first half hour or so. There were just too many frames of reference for me to easily handle. Last year I saw ‘Delirium’. It was okay but I have to admit to coming away disappointed - too much music, some good spectacle, not enough Circus - and a little slow moving.

This week I experienced Quidam, I think it means ‘everyman’. There’s some sort of story going on, although I can’t say I understood it - but then, who cares? Cirque is about spectacle and Quidam does the spectacle thing really well.

One of the characters seems to have stepped straight out of a surrealist painting. Dressed in a raincoat and carrying an unfolded black umbrella, he reminds me of the painting ‘Not to be reproduced’ by Rene Magritte - a man stares into a mirror and, rather than his face being reflected as you might expect, you see the back of his head repeated in the mirror – only this character doesn’t have a head at all. Was he the Quidam of the title? He may have been.

There are some other odd characters in the show – a compeer/ringmaster, a human target, an angry lout with boxing glove hands, a she - rabbit, an angel with empty wings, dozens of lost souls wandering all over the place. It was like watching an animation by Hieronymus Bosch – very weird, incredibly wonderful – beautiful.

Quidam has plenty of circus – a man who rolls, spins, and tumbles inside a huge metal wheel, four tiny Chinese girls who whirl ‘diabolos’ high into the air, catch them up in the string, whirl them into the air again, all the time somersaulting and flipping as they do so – an androgynous aerial act who dangles and plunges in lengths of red silk – three women who whirl and balance in silver aerial hoops - a trapeze artist who flies and drops through the air on a swing trapeze – a spider’s web of rope tumblers.

... all gasps and applause.

… the skipping rope act is unbelievable. A stage full of people skip-dance and tumble in a multiple rope frenzy, each time jumping higher and faster. An acrobatic troupe that literally throws each other through the air, around the stage, tossing bodies from one to another, like a human chain, double flipping as they spin. The quiet beauty of the male/female duo performing a series of incredible balances, holding them for what seems like minutes, appearing to become living sculptures, at times entwined and interwoven into a single figure like a living Hans Bellmer sculpture, gorgeous in its strangeness. And probably the funniest clown I’ve ever seen, pulling and demanding people out of the audience to act out his clownish fantasies.

… all watching and laughter.

… and all of the time away from the main action, smaller actions taking place; a blue skirted women rapidly spinning for minute after minute in a corner of the stage, three celestial beings moving along the gantry above the performers, groups of drones statue-standing or dog-running between the circus performers, a pair of spike haired ballet dancers performing a routine in the wings.

For some these might have been distractions, but for me they are the attraction. It’s the incidental that gives the reality to the performance, the surreality to the experience.

No two people in the thousands strong audience see the same performance, no two experiences are the same, and every single person sees their own personal show.

Perhaps that is what Cirque du Soleil is all about.

And what about my Cirque du Soleil, the one single thing that I’ll keep to run over and over in the cinema in my head?

The twenty paper leaves that fluttered from the red balloon as it burst above the stage - the slowly moving, white-suited drone that blew them into the darkness using a huge silver desk fan on wheels.

Surreal.

For me that is what Cirque du Soleil is about.

A spell on the beach

Know anything about Runes?

To early people writing was a very serious thing - it was full of magical power.

In Europe our Germanic ancestors used a runic alphabet as their form of writing. They used it to identify their possessions - combs, brooches, shields, cattle, wives - help them to make calendars, encode secret messages, mark their sacred monuments and burial sites. They also used them to cast spells - make love charms, curse their enemies, cause their neighbours crops to fail, cure the pox. Usually the ceremony of writing the runes was accompanied by a chant or prayer and sometimes a curse to make the spell. They called this a rune as well, and the two runes combined – written and spoken - made the magic work.

They called it the ‘whispering, secret talk.’ I love that…the whispering, secret talk - it sounds so completely magical.

Ingwaz is the rune of harmony, approval, unity, agreement, love, peace. It’s an important rune, a powerful rune, a very positive rune. It was used to make fertility magic; magic for farming, growth, health, balance. It was the rune of the god Ing, and associated with Frey - god of the weather, generation and fertility - and it’s particularly potent at the time of the new moon.

I built this sculpture on Dinas Dinelle beach last summer – it’s the Ingwaz rune. I like to go there to watch the small planes at Caernarfon airport. They’re pleasure craft and go around and around in a ten mile circle, landing, taking off, then landing again. Don’t worry I’m not an airport freak, the airport is a really a landing strip and the planes are micro-lights, biplanes, and single engine Cesna’s…actually that does make me a plane freak doesn’t it.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the tide was out. The beach has a high pebble ridge along its length, falling away to firm sand at low tide. I found an old, rusty bike wheel, a broken branch and some polythene. I wanted to leave behind a statement about how beautiful the day was and how positive I felt on that day.

Yes, I’m bonkers - but you probably know that anyway, and if you need even more proof - here’s the whispering, secret talk I chanted to make the magic work.

Ingwaz
Rich dirt
My seed to grow
My hearth to simple burn
Rest godly laboured
Not worn in toil
Blessed by new life born

There you go, if you knew nothing about runes before, you know a little now… did the magic work?

Not so far I’m afraid.

Fish Circus...

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It’s a gloomy old day. Windy, wet, and cold - the sort of day for staying indoors or (if you’re bonkers like me) going for a walk on a beach somewhere. Still, it isn’t as gloomy as yesterday – I’ll try to be lighter today.

I love wrapping up warm (to quote Mothers everywhere), making ready to battle the wind and rain, and then sallying forth into the Weather (capital intentional). I enjoy the ‘struggle’ against the wind, rain, and whichever other elements are available in order to reach whatever goal takes my fancy (as long as the ‘struggle’ isn’t too struggley and the ‘goal’ has a nice warm fire at the end of it).

Yes, I like to sally forth.

‘Sallying forth’ – what a great term. It means ‘to set out in a sudden, energetic or violent manner often with an uncertain outcome’. Well, I’m not too sure about the sudden, energetic or violent part of the definition (I like to take my time when I’m sallying) but I love the idea of an uncertain outcome. Exciting isn’t it! Free in the wind and rain, a little unsure of where you are going or what you might find when you get there. It’s in that uncertainty that the anticipation and promise lays - or so I’m told. I won’t dwell on the uncertainty element though, it may take me off on a tangent.

Sometimes I sally forth along the beach at Porth Dinllaen towards the Ty Coch pub. The pub (which by the way is almost incidental to my sallying) is actually built on the beach in a beautiful little bay surrounded by mountains - it’s a great place for a pint (or two). We often sally there on New Years day. Once I found a long dried pipefish on the sand. I’ve kept it - it looks like a cross between a snake and a sea-horse. We’ve found a few pipe fish over the years - on various sallies along numerous Welsh beaches - and I’ve made them into a kind of sea sculpture (I really must post a photograph of it).

This brings me to what I set out to write about (at last)… Eileen Agar. God, I ramble sometimes!

Eileen Agar is number ten in my list of top ten surrealists, I’ll get around to them all eventually I expect, but let’s start with Eileen. She was a fervent beachcomber, often using the flotsam and jetsam she found washed up on the shore in her work. ‘Fish Circus’ features a real starfish that she found on a sally in 1939 near Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. She’s pinned it to the painting with a large blue drawing pin and painted and collaged other sea creatures along with some inevitable surrealist chequerboard patterns to the work. I don’t know what it is about surrealists and chequerboard – maybe it’s a perspective thing - perhaps they just like chequerboard.

She used ‘found objects’ in her sculptures as well. ‘Marine Object’ is one of my favourites, and yes, I know that it’s simple and anyone could have made it, but in the context of its time…

All in all, I think ‘Fish Circus’ and ‘Marine Object’ are lovely, light, whimsical works that on a grey day like today, and after a black day like yesterday, lift my spirits and make me want to sally forth along the nearest beach to see what I can find to ‘do’ something with.

How about you? Up for a sally? I’ve even arranged it so that you can do your sallying from the comfort of your own armchair…

- Here’s the Ty Coch webcam.
http://www.tycoch.co.uk/Java1.html

- And sally forth virtually along the beach at Porth Dinllaen on a sunny day.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/sites/walks/pages/porthdinllaen.shtml?1

Better still… sally forth along there sometime. It’s a great place in any weather and you never know what you may find.

Chin up! Summers just around the corner and I’m off to see Cirque du Soleil tonight which is a completely different kind of circus to Eileen's fishy one.

Dali's cat 2...

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You’ve probably noticed a surrealist theme emerging in my blog? Truth is - I guess I’ve always been a surrealist at heart. There is something about stumbling across the unusual in the usual, finding the the-out-of place in the in-place, seeing the slightly odd in the perfectly ordinary, that makes my imagination set alight.

André Breton was the major spokesman for the surrealist movement, he was a poet, and didn’t paint as far as I know. He wrote their manifesto. He said that Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in ‘an absolute reality - a surreality.’

Interesting…how often do you awake from a dream unsure if you are still dreaming? Could it be that just for that split second the world of dream is joined to the everyday rational world? Perhaps in that split second you truly are experiencing the surreal. What do you think?

People use the ‘surreal’ word a lot, usually out of context - I wish they wouldn’t. They use it to describe things that aren’t surreal at all. I once heard a friend describe a man walking along a busy high street in top hat and tails as surreal – ‘now that is SURREAL!’ he said. It wasn’t. It was just some man walking along a high street in top hat and tails probably on his way to a wedding. Now if his face had been devoid of any features, or he’d been floating in mid-air, or even if it’d been a sunny day and he hadn’t cast a shadow then he may have qualified. Another time I heard a chap in the pub call a packet of crisps 'surreal' because they were described as hedgehog flavour. Watch - my - lips.... Hedgehogs (even cooked hedgehogs that have been used to flavour crisps) are not surreal, they are just hedgehogs.

Anyway – here’s my Dali cat built from found stuff on the best wash-up beach in North Wales. I’ve been doodling Dali cats for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve built one.

Hope you like it.

Oh, and by the way - that funny little thing below is something that followed me out of a dream this morning and stuck around. I think that it might be Yves Tanguy’s pet mouse.