Hip-Hop Circus?!?

Natalie McFarlane learns a bit about the artistic journey of Vicki Amedume, Artistic Director of Upswing Aerial

Tell us about Upswing Aerial. When was the company established and what is its artistic ethos?

Upswing was set up in 2004 by myself and another aerialist call Maria. We were at the time, I think, we were the only two black aerialists working in London and we just gravitated towards each other because we were both interested in the same kind of movement, vocabulary, same kind of work. And we didn’t see anything out there that was kind of representing us so we just came together and the company formed quite organically. We made a piece of work and it started touring so we had to set up a company to tour the piece. And the growth of the company has been fairly organic until about 2006 where we realised that there was a lot of momentum behind us and we had to formulate and organise our structures properly.

Once you started the company, how did you go about selecting the dancers and performers?

The dancers that we select for each piece that we make kind of go on a project by project basis. There are a few dancers/aerialists that I have worked with for a number of years that we have developed a vocabulary with so they would be first choice for the pieces that we make. But what we look for are people that are open to trying new things and, obviously, people who are physically fit and strong and athletic. If they have had a grounding in gymnastics or any kind of acrobatics, that is really useful. But it is mainly people who are fit, strong, have a good understanding of the body, how you move. When you start taking dancers in the air there is always a level of disorientation because very rarely are you upside down. And in a lot of aerial work you are functioning upside down and having to orientate yourself by your body rather than by where the ground is and where other people are.

How did you get involved with circus?

My journey with the circus started probably about 15 years ago. I had always been interested in dance and gymnastics and sports. I have done a lot of sports as a young person, lots of athletics so I was fairly fit. But I wanted to be a scientist. Yeah, that was my ambition from being very little. I always wanted to be a scientist so there was always that battle with me between the artistic side and the scientific side. But when I went to University the scientific side won and I studied pharmacology and physiology and did a year of engineering as well. I was basically bouncing round trying to find what it was that I wanted to do. And, this is going to sound really strange, but I lived across the street from two women who ran a circus company call Exponential and I started hanging out with them and they took me to their training space and that was it really. The artistic side just won over. It was the first thing I had done that I had found incredibly challenging, the first thing I had done that molded the physical side of me, the artistic side of me and the scientific side of me. Because there is a lot around aerial, not just the physical performance. There is the rigging, design, all of those aspects really contribute to make a really, really, tight, beautiful product. So it was the first thing I found that I was able to use all of those things that I loved.

It really goes to show that no matter what we do, everything that we do in life is kind of interconnected - because you were able to apply your scientific side to what you are doing now. So are you at the point where you can conclusively say that the artistic side has more prominence? How did you get to be where you are today?

It is interesting that you say “is there a point where the artistic side takes prominence”. I think there are phases where the artistic side takes prominence, even now. For the first few years, when I started training aerial, I worked with a number of companies and I was able to function purely as an artist because I was kind of looked after by those companies. I really appreciated that. It gave me a period to develop my physical skills, my technical ability and to understand how to work as part of a group. And then I went through a phase where I left working for UK companies. I went abroad and worked with quite large organisations, quite big circuses, where, again, I was able to function as an artist but in a very different way I was able to concentrate on myself as a solo performer which was amazing. And then I came back to the UK and it all changed again. I had to function as a freelancer where all of a sudden the artistic side isn’t so prominent. You are thinking of yourself as a business and marketing yourself and trying to generate work. When I started Upswing with Maria we were able to let the artistic side take over again because we wanted to start something new and create an identity. So we poured out our energy into developing a style and that is an ongoing journey, I don’t feel like I have reached the artistic goal that I want to get to yet.

And what is that goal?

I think it is the same goal that all artists have - to make a piece of work that you are completely satisfied with. I haven’t done that yet. But things have switched around again now. Upswing has become a Regularly Funded Organisation of the Arts Council. We are becoming a company. Things are becoming much, much more organised and regimented. And I find myself constantly having to swing between being an artist and being an Artistic Director and I think those two things are very different. They support each other but there are different priorities for each.

So how do you strike that balance?

I think it is a constant battle, battle is the wrong word actually, it’s a constant struggle to find the right balance and I think part of the pleasure of being where I am at the moment is that struggle - finding the balance. Because that’s two sides of my personality that really enjoy functioning as a producer and artistic director and managing a company and the way people view a company nowadays is that you have to see yourself as a business. I find that really fascinating. But I love being able to let go of all that and just think I want to do this as an artist. The two things don’t necessarily marry but I think the point where they contact and start to cross over is the point where you are really challenged and I love being challenged.

At what point did you realise this is something I want to do professionally? Tell us more about your personal artistic journey.

It was a really, really tough decision for me to admit that I wanted to do circus professionally. I think from the very first moment I got on a trapeze and started doing it there was some part of me which was like, yes this is it! But the sensible part of my head was going “mmmh hmmm and how are you going to make a living doing this?” And coming from the family that I came from-it’s a very traditional African family - all my cousins, aunts, uncles have degrees coming out of their ears, you know. The aspiration is to be a doctor, a lawyer or something professional. It is not to be a circus performer. Where my family comes from, circus is not what it is here. It is not an art form. I think it has taken my mom a long time to realise I am not a pole dancer…(she laughs) so it was a really tough decision but the moment that I did it, I knew that this was what I wanted to. But I was always battling against that because I was struggling to see how I could make a career out of it. I think the point where I decided that I was going to pursue it professionally and made a conscious decision rather than trying to fit all the aspects of my life together was when I decided to take a place at a training course in France - The National Circus School and it was the first real commitment I had made. I had managed to fit the other work I had done with UK companies around whilst still functioning in education - doing a masters and then in the summers I’d be running off to go work with circus companies and training every evening, keeping fit and learning new skills and gathering as much information as I could on a kind of ad hoc basis. But when I decided to go to France and enroll in a proper training program that is when I knew that I had stepped out of the other world. I am in this world and I have to make a go of it.

What would say are you greatest personal achievements to date?

I have been, as I said, in circus for about 15 years and I think my greatest personal achievement is still being here. (She laughs animatedly) I think it is really tough for artists in the UK to keep going. There is so much of life that you miss out on or you have to sacrifice in order to keep making your own work. So I think that my greatest personal achievement is to still be here and to still be able to make my own work rather than have to work for other people.

And what are Upswing’s greatest achievements to date?

(Pauses to ponder) That’s a really, really tough question to answer. I think we have done a lot of really interesting work artistically and I think we are really trying to push the boundaries of what you can express with circus and how you can use circus. I think our greatest achievement has been the way that we are trying to mix art forms with bringing in Hip-Hop into circus, bringing contemporary dance into circus. I think our greatest achievement is that and, I don’t know whether it is a strength or not, but every piece of work that we have done has always been different. There has always been an evolution and we haven’t been static, repeating the same things. I don’t think we have ever made the same piece of work and I don’t think I could repeat work that I have made in the past because it is an evolution and I feel like I am very much on a journey.

Your piece Loved Up mixes Hip-Hop dance with aerial circus. How did the idea arise?

Loved up was a piece that we made in 2006. And it was an exploration of how you could mix Hip-Hop into circus. I was really excited by Hip-Hop and street dance. Maria, who I started Upswing with, was really into street dance and I really loved street dance and what I loved about street dance was the energy of it, the speed, the dynamism of it and sometimes my frustration with the aerial work or the equipment that we were using at the time was that you couldn’t get that same dynamic energy unless you were dropping. But it was hard to get choreographically complex with what we were doing. For traditional aerial work on upright equipment, a lot of your energy is expended staying in the air, staying where you are and you are always holding on in some way with one limb or another, so it kind of limits the range of movement that you had. And at the same time I had just spent some time in South Africa, I had been working out there and I met Jonzi D and we just started talking and we were really interested in finding a way to bring a few things together so we just locked ourselves in a room for a couple of weeks really with a few artists and we came up with Loved Up. I know that sounds like it just happened by magic but what happened is there was a lot of talking before. There was a lot of talking about the different ways we could bring the things together and there was a lot of play - we spent a few days experimenting with a few dancers who were really great and gave us their time and then we just thought ok, we are going to work this way. We shut ourselves in a room for a couple weeks and we made a piece. It kind of just flowed out.

Can you share with us some more about the process of developing the piece?

I think the process is always evolving and I think the trick with circus, particularly in making circus work is keeping the process as creative just because there are so many technical aspects to the work. And you can get stuck in technicality and you can get stuck in technically delivering tricks. It’s about keeping the process fluid and creative so that you can kind of look beyond traditional aesthetic and look beyond obvious ways of using bits of equipment and find kind of novel ways of movement. The great thing about the Loved Up process was that Jonzi D had not worked with circus before and he was coming at it with really fresh eyes, which was cool. And, I don’t know, what was the process, ahmm, we played a lot and it was part of the key of keeping things energized and creative. There is a point where you have to start setting material and you have to be quite structured about how you do that but one of the key things was allowing ourselves some time to play and enjoy it and have fun and find out what the pleasure would be for the audience watching that piece. And that piece is great because there is a real sense of joy about it - the way that the performers fly but they are still in contact with the ground, they are still able to communicate with each other and make contact with each other. And they had a real sense of joy about what they were doing which I don’t think we would have found if we didn’t play as much as we did. But the process for making each piece of work is different depending on what you are trying to achieve.

When did the show debut?

In 2006, we were commissioned by the Trafalgar Square Festival which is an initiative that was set up by the Mayor of London to create a three week arts festival in Trafalgar Square

and it was amazing to be part of that. Because there were other performances, other companies showing new work and this piece was new and fairly experimental and we really did not know how people would take it. It was a bit of a risk. But it went down really well. That show is so fun and so exciting. The audience really went with it and we learnt so much making that first piece of work, since then I have been reworking the piece and I think the piece is, next year, going to go on another stage of development. What we have at the moment is a really, really, tight physical exploration and it is light and it is fun. Next year I am looking to work with a spoken word artist or a writer to kind of help develop mini narratives and expand the piece and look at if we can now communicate concept and idea with the piece rather that it just being a physical exercise because I think I have moved past that now.

Why Hip-Hop/Street Dance and Circus together? What kinds of connections are there between the two?

I think there are really, really strong connections between the two just because we are two arts forms at the moment that are struggling to be accepted as credible and it is frustrating. I read a review of a Hip-Hop piece that went out a while ago that said, something like, it’s all very nice but it is actually for a minority audience. This was by a theatre reviewer and I thought the reviewer has failed to realise that the minority is actually the majority of the population that is into Hip- hop and street dance. The same with circus. A week later I read a review of a circus piece, which was a piece done by an artist that I really respect. And she made this really beautiful rope piece and the reviewer at the end of it said, it was all very nice but it doesn’t amount to a series of tricks. And I was like, he is not looking. And I think both art forms speak to quite wide audiences. The great thing about circus and Hip-Hop is that you can appreciate the skill but if you get it right it can also communicate something really, really powerful. I think they are both forms that people don’t really understand or don’t have anything to judge them against. If you are working in ballet or another form of dance people always have something to judge you against so they can say that’s good because I understand this about it. Whereas with circus and Hip-Hop, there aren’t documented forms.

And given that reviews are mostly subjective, how much of an impact do these have on the perception of the art form by the dance community?

Reviews are for a certain section of the community. I mean our work and a lot of other work appeals to people who probably traditionally would not go to the theatre and therefore wouldn’t traditionally read reviews. I think reviews are more for the artistic community if you are trying to move work on in the future, you need strong reviews and you need the artistic community to understand what you are doing because the people who control the money and the venues are the people who read the Guardian and the reviews. So that’s the struggle. We may appeal to huge audiences but the artistic community needs to understand how to connect with our work, how to market it or how to judge it for us to progress.

So, what’s next for Upswing?

Hopefully, there will be collaboration with ADAD. This next year is really going to be very much a year of development. We have been very lucky in getting some core funding and we want to use that wisely to kind of take some time to consider what we do and put some time into developing the quality of our work. The struggle for us in the past is we have always worked on a project and project basis and it has always been commissions or working to somebody else’s schedule. The same with everybody. If you are getting the money from somewhere, it always comes with strings attached and a deadline and it doesn’t always allow you to be completely flexible or free about what you make. You can’t take risks and I guess in some ways you have to hold back. We have been really lucky and I want to use next year as a year for exploration. And the thing I am really keen to explore is collaborations with other artists outside of circus, outside of what I know. Just because I feel there is a lot of information and a lot of learning I need to do and the best way to do that is collaborating with people who are really good at what they already do.

It is intriguing that you have never created a piece of work that you are fully satisfied with, what would it take for you to really get there or are you that much of a perfectionist that you may never really get there because you are always looking at ways to improve a piece…?

I’m a Libran, what can I say. (She laughs with a twinkle in her eye) I don’t know if I will ever produce something that I am fully satisfied with but I think there are levels of satisfaction that you can achieve. And I think it’s about having enough freedom to take risks. In the past there have always been some restrictions on how much of a risk you can take and I think there I always restrictions on how much risk you can take. Even where we are now, we can’t completely go mental and go off the wall. Off the wall, hmm, that’s a good concept... (She says laughing)… But it’s also a factor of time. I am now able to give myself time and hopefully that will take me closer to what I hope to achieve artistically.

So should dancers or choreographers interested in working with Upswing get in contact with you?

Yes, they should give me a call! We are keen to make contact with dancers and choreographers as much as they are keen to work with us on aerial and circus work. So this year we are looking to set up a series of processes where we can share. This will be done through a series of workshops for dancers and choreographers in a space called the Hanger Arts in Southeast London. We’ll reveal more details closer to the time.