#silver lining throwback

[thewidowstanton]

Kalyn ‘Lj’ Marles, aerial straps artist, Silver Lining

Circus artist Lj Marles, who is from Hackney in London, started on the youth programme at the National Centre for Circus Arts before joining the degree course and specialising in aerial straps. Six months after graduating in 2011 he was snapped up by the leading French Canadian company Les 7 doigts de la main to appear in the fifth cast of its worldwide hit show Traces, making his debut in New York and touring with it for two and half years.

Lj is a now appearing with the circus troupe Silver Lining, which was formed by fellow NCCA graduates, and performs in its show Throwback – a co-presentation with Jacksons Lane – at the Underbelly Circus Hub, The Meadows from 4-22 August during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: Where does the name Kalyn come from? Lj Marles: My mum is Turkish/Cypriot and Irish and my dad is Caribbean; he's Monserratian and Dominican but they were both born over here. They called me Kalyn after hearing the name at a Bobby Brown show.

Didn't you start out as a dancer? A few of my friends and I would just make little group dance routines, like outside or in our bedrooms just for fun. We ended up doing a few dance competitions and talent shows, so it was more just 'dancing' because I was never a trained dancer.

So at school were you sporty and acrobatic? Not so much. I was never really into sports but we had a rock climbing wall in our secondary school and I was really good at that and with the kids in my area I'd always be running around and climbing on walls and trees and stuff, so I was active but I wasn't really sporty. My friends in the dance group and I found a flyer about a project Bassline Circus was putting on, where they wanted local teenagers – dancers, singers, actors, spoken word people, poets – to put on a show.

We thought: "Ah great, we get to do like a talent show in a circus tent. That's awesome." But then they ended up teaching us stuff, like rope and trapeze. I really enjoyed it; it was another way to put all that climbing and stuff to use that wasn't just dancing. It was something new and fun and exciting. So I ended up being the only one from the dance group that carried on and continued with the show. They actually told me about the then Circus Space so I went to the youth circus audition.

Was Dainty Sue at Bassline? Yes, Sue! She's great, and Kerry Veitch. I did the youth circus for a year from from 17 to 18 and then because I hadn't really planned on going to a normal academic university they convinced me to at least audition for the degree programme and I was accepted.

Why did you choose to specialise in straps? I started on the youth circus doing static trapeze and in the audition for the degree programme I said I wanted to stick with that. [Laughs] Now I look back and feel silly. Straps looked challenging, it looked fun and it looked like I could put what I had already learnt to good use. I just liked the aspect of flying around and going high; I felt it had so much to offer.

I've heard you saying how painful it is… Oh yeah, it is. You just kind of get used to it or it kills all the nerve endings in your wrists and arms. It's still kind of painful now.

When you perform using one arm, do you then have to go off and repeat it all on the other arm? In theory I should be doing that… but when I first started learning straps in school I was doing everything on my right side but I injured my ribs, so I couldn't do anything on my right and started to do everything on my left. Then I got really comfortable and strong and good on my left and it took quite a while for my right side to recover and I never really trained on my right. I got into a really bad habit of doing everything on my left. My right side's not as strong and because I've done everything on my left I technically know the feeling of what I have to do to do certain moves on my right. Spinning on my right feels really alien to me.

I once interviewed Paul Bowler, when he was the cube man in Cirque du Soleil's Alegria, and he had to do the whole act again afterwards on the other arm. Oh, really? Maybe I should take a leaf out of his book.

I'm excited about your invention… the Marles straps… [Laughs] My tension straps?

Yes! Can you describe it for people who haven't seen it? The easiest way to describe it is a pair of straps attached to a floor point that causes tension. When I'm on it it's kind of a mixture between rope, silks, shiny pole, Chinese pole; it has a whole kind of other way of moving.

It's a bit like a figure four… That's something I've been working on more recently. It's still tension straps but only one of them is attached to the floor and it goes through the hand loop of the other strap. If you imagine on normal straps you have two hand loops where people put their hands, now one's going to the floor and going through the other hand loop. So when I pull out and I'm spinning around and the weight's going around it, it looks like a figure four. I started off having both attached to the floor but I've been experimenting and researching with only having one attached.

Are you calling it the Marles straps? [Laughs] I call it tension straps. If I had a cooler sounding last name it would be better but I don't know if I could get away with calling it the Marles straps…

I think you could because people are going to start copying it. How did you come up with it? I've been trying to think back and I was either having a debate with someone or arguing with myself about some people calling the Chinese pole an aerial discipline, because you do everything high up on the pole…

Oh, that's rubbish! Yeah, I always say, 'No, it's an acrobatic discipline because it's not attached to an aerial point', and I think I kind of stopped myself mid-sentence when I said, 'If I attached my straps to the floor it still doesn't make it an acrobatic discipline because it needs the aerial point', and thought, 'What if I attached my straps to the floor?'.

Is the pole-dancing pole known as shiny pole now? Yes, to stop calling it ‘stripper pole’ because people get offended and actually I've been doing a bit of research recently to see if I can transfer any moves on to my tension straps and it's a lot harder than what it's made out to be. It's just when you see people do it and they're half naked, you're like, 'Oh, that's so tacky', but it's a lot of skill, a lot of strength and a lot of flexibility, so I have to give a lot of credit to anyone who does shiny pole.

Let's go back a bit; how did you get into Traces? I didn't have a lot of knowledge going in to circus school, only what I'd seen in Bassline. I had an idea about Zippos Circus and Cirque du Soleil but I didn't really think it would be something I would like to do necessarily at that time because it was all Lycra and face paint and Spandex and stuff like that and when I saw Traces, like Bassline, it was a lot more urban and I could relate to it more. I first saw Traces when I was in my first year at Circus Space and I thought, 'Wow! This is great but I'm never going to be able to do it', because I didn't do anything in the show like playing piano, skateboarding, didn't know how to play basketball… hoop-diving, teeterboard, none of these things I knew how to do.

So when 7 Fingers came back with Psy, I was like, 'Wow, this company's really great. I feel like I could potentially do this show more so but I’d have my straps number instead of one of the solo acts', so ever since then I’d kept up to date with their work and what they were doing, and around the time I graduated I saw they were having auditions in Montreal. I sent my stuff and they were like: "Hey, are you going to be able to make it to Montreal?" When I said, 'No', they said: "Don't worry, we're having auditions in Paris soon so we'll let you know." And soon enough they invited me, Nathan and Isis and my other friend Lucas Boutin. Nathan and Isis heard back a few weeks later and me and Lucas were like, 'Oh my god, that's amazing!', but 7 Fingers came to us a few months later.

It sounds as if it were quite a training ground because you learnt all those other skills… teeterboard, hand-to-hand… Yes, it was a six-month training period with a few shows in between. It would be Monday to Friday, probably from 10 ’til 6, so it was kind of like being back at school. We'd spend the morning doing mise en scène, learning about what Traces was, the choreography… then in the afternoon we’d train all the acrobatics, the skateboard, the piano, the basketball, the double pole, the hoop-diving… I'm very lucky and very grateful to have been a part of such an amazing show. I learnt so much from everyone who's ever been in it and everyone I ever worked with during that show.

Is that you in the hoop-diving picture? It's really high! Yes, that's the last trick in the show and I got banquined up through six hoops.

Where did you tour to? We did a lot of Europe – France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg – a six-month tour of America, we also did Denmark, Norway, Sweden, China, Japan, Argentina…

Did you enjoy the touring? Yeah, it was really good, although we were never anywhere for really longer than three weeks, so living out of a suitcase kind of became a little bit tiring, especially towards the end but it was super fun. Again I was so grateful that I got to see all these amazing places and places I would never have thought to go to but had so much fun; Graz in Austria… I had some of the best times there.

So let's talk about Silver Lining. Were you one of the founders? No, they were Tom Ball, Niamh O'Reilly, Lydia Harper, along with Tom Gaskin and the Barely Methodical boys, Charlie, Beren and Louis. BMT became their own thing so they needed new recruits when they were going to do their first show Silver Lining again so they asked me because I'm good friends with them. It's always fun working with friends. So I did a few shows of Silver Lining and then they asked if I wanted to be part of the creation of the new show, which became Throwback. We did that for two weeks at Jacksons Lane in London in 2015.

So at Edinburgh you're doing a new version of Throwback? Pretty much. We're keeping the same ideas of thinking about memories and trying to get people to think of happy memories, sad memories, and throwing back to those memories. We wanna make a show with a lot of music and ideas that will make people think and make it really relatable and easily accessible for people to enjoy and understand.

Who else is in the cast now? Tom Ball, who does trapeze, Niamh, who's a hand-balancer and she sings, and then Craig Dagostino, who does Chinese pole, Sammy Dinneen, who's another hand-balancer, foot-juggler Ulrike Storch and me on straps, so it's a really nice crew. We've got some really fun stuff and I'm really excited to show what we've been up to.

Have you done Edinburgh before? No, I went up last year just to visit the Traces guys; I went to visit but I didn't see the show. [Laughs] I've seen it too many times. So I got to see a lot of other shows when I was there but I'm very, very excited to be performing this year.

What are your hopes for the future? Do you like being in a smaller company or would you consider something like Cirque du Soleil? Now that I'm back in London I'm doing quite a bit of cabaret work. I kind of miss being with the same group of people and doing the same show and being able to go out on the same stage and be able to do the same show, so hopefully I'd like to get back into doing that. If Throwback is a success at Edinburgh hopefully somebody will pick it up and we'll be able to tour it. And I never really rule out Cirque du Soleil because it is the biggest circus company in the world so it would be such a great honour to work with them, it just depends if I have anything that they want; if I'm good enough to be with them.

I’d definitely say you’re good enough! Thank you very much.

Lj appears in Silver Lining's Throwback – which is co-presented by Jacksons Lane – at 4.30pm at the Underbelly Circus Hub, The Meadows, during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 4-22 August 2016

For tickets click here

Twitter: @freeze_pop @SilverLiningCo_ @jacksons_lane @FollowTheCow @edfringe

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Read our interviews with Silver Lining's Niamh O'Reilly and Ulrike Storch, co-founder Lydia Harper, who is currently with Cirque du Soleil, and US cigar-box juggler Eric Bates, who was a guest artist in Throwback in 2015

[thewidowstanton]

Eric Bates, cigar box juggler and Russian bar base

American Eric Bates grew up in Vermont and is a graduate of the National Circus School in Montreal. He is considered to be one of the best cigar box jugglers in the world and also specialises as a Russian bar porter. He won a bronze medal at Cirque de Demain in 2012 and has appeared on the prestigious France2 TV show Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde. Eric has recently finished a three-year tour with the 7 Fingers in Sequence 8 and also performed in its show Queen of the Night. Based in Montreal, he is now in London as a guest artist in Throwback, which is staged by the British company Silver Lining and runs at Jacksons Lane as part of its 40th-anniversary celebrations. He tells Liz Arratoon about his career so far.

The Widow Stanton: What inspired you to start circus? Eric Bates: I was always doing it as a hobby, just juggling. There’s a big supportive network of circus in Vermont because there’s this thing called Circus Smirkus, who have a summer camp and residency programmes. I’m sure someone came into my school when I was very little and taught me to juggle and stuff. Then I did the summer camp and part of the camp tours old folk’s homes and nurseries or whatever and afterwards they have the actual tour that you have to audition for, which is 80 shows all around New England, travelling and setting up the tent and stuff, so I did that as part of my summer vacation in high school.

How old were you when you started juggling? I don’t remember learning to juggle but I’ve got a picture of myself juggling torches in 5th grade, so I was ten or so. I remember duct-taping gloves on to my hands, which we decided was the safest way to do it.

I reviewed Sequence 8 and said your act was “extraordinary”! Why did you choose cigar boxes? Well, when I was in Smirkus there was anther fellow called Jacob Sharpe who does diabolo and at the time people weren’t really doing diabolo that much, like three diabolos was a really big deal back in 2006. He came back the next summer and he was just riding the front of this wave; technically he was amazing. And I loved that idea of uncharted waters in terms of juggling. I remember growing up I had all the VHS tapes of all the cool jugglers and it always like, ‘If I train my whole life I’m barely gonna catch up to these guys and they’ll already have gone far into the future of juggling’. I also had cigar boxes and it was completely untapped. I learned the basics the day I got them and no one had ever gone beyond that. I liked the idea of being a frontrunner in a discipline. That was something I already enjoyed and came somewhat naturally to me. I liked having a blank canvas and decided to really push it and see if I could do the same thing with boxes that Jacob was doing with diabolo.

Everything about cigar boxes being uncharted territory made it beautiful and exciting. Having seen lots of people do the same basic moves but never anything different made me fairly certain that that was all that had been found collectively, so I could go into the metaphorical woods and make my own paths without worrying that I was bushwhacking while there was an already well established trail right next to me. There's this photographer, Robert Adams, whose work I love who also wrote a book called Beauty in Photography, in which he says: "For a picture to be beautiful it does not have to be shocking, but it must in some significant respect be unlike what has preceded it." That is what's exciting about exploring a new discipline; that you can be certain that your work won't be redundant. That alone gives creative energy, and that was my impetus to take on a discipline that I quickly realised was difficult, tiring and not inherently fluid, and probably why so few people did it.

Your style is quite balletic. Have you done any dance? No, no, except at circus school in Montreal where everyone has dance classes. Traditionally it’s quite ugly how people do boxes, like, it’s very staccato and up and down and stationary but part of what appealed to me… take diabolo, for example, it’s very fluid and moves around and part of what’s beautiful is how the performer moves. I thought that was really interesting to try to take something very square and right-angled and make it more fluid, because there’s that whole other branch involving inertia and swinging and stuff that’s a lot more rounded but no one works on that because it’s… really hard.

Yes, I was going to say you make it look very easy but has it just been years and years of practice and hard work? Well, I’m 27 now and I got my first set when I was 12. I auditioned for the circus school in Montreal with cigar boxes when I was 20. I was just starting to dabble with four boxes around then. So it was two hours a day for the next three years.

Your routine in Sequence 8 involved other cast members; is that something the 7 Fingers introduced for that show? No, that was something I’d been playing with for the last three years in circus school before that. I hadn’t really performed cigar boxes that much, you know, just here and there, but it was something we started doing… I’d worked with the 7 Fingers in first year as well. We did a project in Old Port and I loved the possibilities, and how to integrate other people; throwing stuff all over the place I thought was pretty cool. So I’ve used that in almost every act I’ve done with them in school and since then.

How did you cope with such a long tour? Did you mind doing the same thing over and over and over? Artistically that was one of the harder challenges. We did have breaks in the tour so I managed to do Cirque de Demain, I worked on Queen of the Night for a month, and I had quite a few other gigs here and there that kept it interesting. We had signed for two years, but the original cast all did three years. We definitely tired of doing the same thing over and over but that said it did evolve. We played in South America… we did the show in over five languages… every country the humour is really different and we were constantly on our toes with that, so I was surprised it didn’t get old right away. We managed to keep surprising ourselves and we ended up re-signing because we got along very well with the company, with our cast, and then anything we wanted to change in order to make us happier and stay they gladly did. We finished in New York at the New York City Center, which was also great because it was just a huge stage and opportunity and very close to our families; all of our families were there and a lot of friends from Montreal came down and it felt like a good natural high point to end on.

Was that your best moment on tour? Well, I’d say the strongest memory on tour was the first time we ever did the show because we played in Lyon at the Nuits de Fourvière in an old Roman amphitheatre: a 4,000-seat outdoor stone theatre. You’re out under the stars, it’s a beautiful night and we were completely full. The first time we’d ever performed this show… our minds were exploding. At the end, the tradition is that if they like show all these people stand up and the cushions that they hand out to sit on the rocks, they throw at the stage! So we were bowing for like, four minutes with pillows raining down on us… we were having pillow fights with the audience… and you just can’t top that.

What was it like being on Le Plus Grand Cabaret? I love that show! Well, you know what, it was a hoot because it was literally the day after Cirque de Demain. I’m not even joking, I just drank a lot and then went and did that the next day. I got two takes, so we filmed one in the morning with everyone, and then we got do one at night, so there was so much less pressure than the thing I’d done the night before. We had a blast. 

You are also, and I mean this is a bit weird for a juggler, a Russian bar base. How did you get into that? Usually jugglers juggle… Well, you hit 6’3 and people don’t let you be just a juggler any more. [Laughs] My sensitive hands, huh? [Laughs] I don’t know… I played rugby in high school and just love being physical and I got to circus school and one of my buddies from Circus Smirkus was in the same year and he was looking for a banquine porter so we started doing that together from day one. We just had a blast and then oddly enough, two of the guys who we were in Sequence 8 with later were learning to ‘port’ Russian bar and we thought, ‘Oh man, these guys from San Francisco, they can just do everything, you know, hoop-diving, pole, there’s no way they get to be good bases, too’. So we literally pushed them out of the way, took the Russian bar and started doing it. [Laughs] But growing up the style of show that really influenced me and my generation were things like Traces and Rain; these shows with smaller casts who did a lot of things.

So not Cirque du Soleil? I watched Viktor Kee growing up and he tagged me on Facebook in a picture of Cirque de Demain and that was a huge highlight for me, but what I liked were these more intimate, personal shows where the whole cast is just all over the place so that’s also always been part of it, doing a lot of acts. You know in Smirkus everyone does everything, so that’s also been a part of who I wanted to be in the circus.

How did you come to guest with Silver Lining in Throwback? I’m trying to remember exactly. Everyone knows everyone in the circus… we played here for a month with 7 Fingers and met some of them when we were performing in London. It’s just a lot of overlap and they’re all buddies. Coming out of Sequence 8 I’m really excited to do new projects. This is really different. We had a four- or five-month creation with the 7 Fingers and they obviously know just what’s going on. Even if we had a blank page to make that show it was still with directors and a whole network. That said it was still a very intimate experience creating with them. But this is just eight of us and then we’ve had an outside eye coming in this last week. So it feels like we’re on our own, which is scary but also very energising.

Can you tell us anything about the show? Well, not giving anything away, the flyer says “explosive circus performances, honest stories and a lot of fun”. I’ve been surprised seeing some of the other acts in the show. There are some cool numbers that I’ve never seen before and I think it is just what the poster says, cool circus and a lot of fun from people who have known each other for a very long time. Hopefully the show reflects that. I’m doing the box juggling and some acrobatics and what have you with the rest of the team. Jacksons Lane is a really intimate theatre; we’re often onstage during the show supporting each other. They have been really supportive of us, too, giving us access to anything we need.

What’s next for you? Throwback runs until 11th July and I fly out on 12th to do some projects back in Montreal and Chicago. I’m going to be with Midnight Circus in Chicago until mid-October. It’s kind of similar to Smirkus in that it’s a benefit to support all the parks in Chicago. They drop a circus tent in a new park in Chicago every weekend… people come back from school and there’s circus tent in their back yard, basically. It’s just a great family tented show. It’s a blast. The two directors – Jeff and Julie Jenkins – actually directed Smirkus when I was in it. They’ve got 50% old Smirkus people and 50% people from the circus school in Montreal who saw them and got excited about their show and wanted to work for them. So they’ve got quite a skilled and fun cast.

Silver Lining’s show Throwback runs at Jacksons Lane in London from 30 June-11 July 2015 as part of the venue’s 40th-anniversary celebrations.

Tickets: http://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/book-tickets/19252/

ericbates.com  Barcode Russian Bar

Twitter: @SilverLiningCo @jacksons_lane

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