One man, one woman. Ropes, a static trapeze, strops, straps, juggling clubs, hoops, a shared red dress, a sofa, a pile of cushions. A whole load of tricks, and a bunch of kitchen sink stories. Two reconstructed shoulders, a smashed wrist, and a broken foot. Seventeen years, 7 months, 23 days.
She’s called Tina, and she’s from Sweden. Seventeen years ago she was a bit of a punkish rebel. She left Sweden, she went to Belfast. He’s called Ken, and he’s from Belfast. Ken is a bit of a joker – Belfast was ‘big in the 80s’, he says.
Ken and Tina have been together, on and off stage, for – yes – 17 years, 7 months, and 23 days. They work, they play, they fight, they make up. This Is What We Do For a Living tells their turbulent story – or stories, they agree on very little. ‘I left Sweden for this?’ she howls, and he can’t even remember that she doesn’t drink tea, only coffee. Yet still the love is there…
The show is a hotch-potch of performance modes and means, the whole thing (like their personal relationship, like their circus relationship) somehow hanging together, dangling by a delicate thread. We ricochet from rhythmical recorded texts – lists of dates, personal and professional landmarks, and injuries – to ranting monologues, to clever tricks mixed with spoken commentary, to audience interaction. Tina designates a man in the audience ‘my new boyfriend’ and does a spell of hula-hooping for her beau, dressed in a cute red dress. Ken dubs him a ‘dirty old man’ and retaliates by trying to win the heart of a lady in the second row with a corde lisse act to the tune of Je T’Aime, built around a quest for a rose at the top of the rope.
Abandoning their new ‘lovers’ and going back to each other, there’s a nice play on gender expectations with that red dress migrating from her to him in the course of an acrobalance sequence in which both base, both fly. And there’s a poignant reflection on the decision whether or not to have a baby, in which the cushions are gainfully employed – ending in a great flutter of feathers across the stage as a music-box tune tinkles way. A nifty aerial double-act – a nice mix of doubles trapeze, and side-by-side trapeze and corde lisse – is the show highlight, followed by a cheery cushion-throwing finale that the audience joins in with eagerly. The final words bring us full-circle: they’ve decided to stay together. They can’t do anything else. This is what they do for a living…
It’s not the only show out there in which circus turns the gaze on itself – there is, for example Cirkus Cirkör’s Underman, recently seen at CircusFest at the Roundhouse. But that’s OK – there’s room for both, it’s a worthy subject. And I suppose you could argue that the narrative is built around a series of pre-existing circus turns – but as the piece is about making circus, and about being in a circus-making relationship, that seems fair enough to me. There are a few odd transitions and some clunky moments, and there are sections I’d trim or cut – but for the most part it, it all works very well, and I’m genuinely drawn to these two honest-to-goodness circus lifers.