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Showing posts with label pub. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pub. Show all posts
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Sunday, June 8, 2014
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The Aeronaut is what happens when a circus crashes headlong into a pub. It's the kind of place you'd expect to find on The Reeperbahn or perhaps nestled down a modishly raffish Parisian side street. But nope - this den of cabaret, swirling music and faint subversion is bang smack in the middle of the otherwise humdrum Acton High Street, within spitting distance of a gigantic Morrisons and two neighbouring pubs who've gone for a far more traditional "pint of Kronenberg and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps please" aesthetic. Bo-ring!
You can't fault the landlord for going all out on making this place stand out from the crowd. There's a lovely pub garden stuffed with tiny sheltered booths, the pub runs its own micro-brewery which churns out their own delicious drinks - even the graphic design is second to none, going for a faux-Victorian/art deco style that looks stylish as hell. All that said, it's the 'big top' performance room that impresses the most. Under white and red two-tone canvas there's a sizeable stage with tables and booths nestled around it. The crowd, composed primarily of groups of friends celebrating birthdays, weddings and anniversaries was primed to enjoy themselves - although I'm not sure they had much of an idea entirely what they were in for. I certainly didn't.
The Aeronaut's performances land somewhere in the hinterland between burlesque and cabaret: not erotic, but rather rebellious in a cheeky sort of way. These are performers booked for their skills, whether it be with your traditional juggling/trapeze-y type stuff, being able to do interesting things with their bodies or simply just being pretty damn funny.
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| Ria Lina |
Our compere for the evening was Ria Lina, a tightly wound bundle of energy whose mission objective is simply to wake us the hell up. Dressed in a very Weimar republic costume she quizzes the audience on who they and why they're here, biting back with sarcastic comments As far as comperes go she's pretty damn successful, as she stalks between tables, machine-gunning questions at hapless punters you begin to dread her heading towards you, and staring around the audience I found people mentally formulating something basically intelligent to say.
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| Jessiye Walters |
First on was Jessiye Walters with a hoop routine. It is, to say the least, an impressive start. I've been to quite a few shows of this ilk so I'd like to think I can pick out a good hoop act by now. I've come to the conclusion that it's less being able to spin the hoops - any mug can do that - and more about how well you can stop them. Walters runs on clockwork precision; the hoops moving in perfect geometry around her body and stopping on a dime. There's a moment where she tosses a hoop into the air and catches flips and poses with it in one motion that's so fast it's like a martial arts move, drawing a ripple of impressed applause from the audience.
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| Ian Marchant |
Ian Marchant followed; working through an endearing ramshackle juggling routine. Part of the thrill of these kinds of acts is feeling empathy for the performer. Marchant has to be a nice enough guy to make us want him to succeed on stage. So as he attempts a complex trick: twirling a hoop on his ankle, spinning a basketball on his finger, balancing a tennis racquet on his nose AND juggling at the same time, we really hope he can pull it off. The first two times he doesn't, the basketball spinning from his finger at a crucial moment. "Damn", we think "if he can't pull this off it's going to be pretty embarrassing for both of us (but mainly him)". He does, and our applause is borne of being impressed and relief.
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| Jackie Le |
Up next was Jackie Le on an aerial hoop. Though Le is obviously impressively skilled, this is perhaps the one act of the evening that doesn't really work in a pub (even a very circus-pub), simply for the fact that the ceiling just isn't high enough to create a real sense of danger. That the performer could plunge to bone-breaking misery at any moment is what adds spice to an aerial act, but if Le fell from here she might perhaps sprain her ankle. As she twists and turns I do feel a twinge of jealousy - I wish I could do things like that - and, at minimum, with the lights swirling around her she makes for an eye-catching spectacle.
Mixed into the middle is a performance by our compere where she drags people up from the audience to be backing dancers for Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Pulling volunteers from this audience felt a bit like pulling teeth, I was a dreading being press-ganged into service myself. That said, there was one wimp from the audience who got up on stage, went to prepare and promptly chickened out! The whole thing was eventually saved by some guy called George, who managed - I'm still not quite sure how - to salvage some dignity from the situation, returning to his seat (and his date) with the crowd chanting his name.
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| Laurence Owen |
Up next was, as far as I'm concerned, the undisputed highlight of the night: Laurence Owen. He plays just two songs, one about Halloween costumes and one about the career prospects of a woman in a Disney film, both of which utterly slay the crowd. In a night that's largely about physical feats, his are mental and literary. Of the two, the best is the epic exploration of misogyny in Disney; not exactly a subject that leaps out as a crowd-pleaser, but as he switches characters and pumps out killer rhyme after killer rhyme the audience laps it up like starving children. In a quickfire cabaret night like this he's the one I want to track down again as soon as I can. His songs can't all be this good.. can they?
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| Iona the Contortionist |
Closing out the night is Iona the Contortionist. Acts like these always send a shiver up my spine and god only knows what it's doing to hers. I am annoyingly inflexible, the idea of what it's like to bend into a pretzel with feet pressed over your face is kind of alien to me. Wearing a slickly organic bodysuit I imagine I can see her organs moving around under her skin. It's a mixture of horror and impressiveness - imagining the time, effort and pain that goes into being able to move like this.
If you're after a memorable birthday, or simply just want an night slightly out of the ordinary The Aeronaut is the place to be. Mashing up pub and circus is a slightly odd idea, but it's one that works undeniably well. I don't know Acton too well, but this has got to be one of the best things around - well worth an expedition to the hinterlands of Zone 3.
The Aeronaut holds performances 9-11pm every Friday and Saturday, £8 entry. Try to arrive at 8ish to get a good seat.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday, July 14, 2012
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In the Coach and Horses last night I was a stranger in a strange land. TFFCon was a meeting set up by 'The Future Fire', who publish new writing in "Speculative, Cyberpunk and Dark fiction". The room was packed with the authors and fans, and worryingly, everyone except me seemed to know everybody else. When I was invited, I figured it sounded like a neat change of pace and was attracted by the fact that they profess to promote fiction with a socio-political, queer, feminist or ecological focus. At the very least I thought it'd be a fun thing to write about after the fact.
It's a bit ironic that with this focus on social inclusiveness that I felt like an interloper. There were conversations where names or references would be dropped, and I would have no idea what was being talked about. Everybody there was nice and friendly, but at the same time I felt like I was interacting with people with a totally different set of cultural reference points to me.
The meat of the night was people reading excerpts from their long-form work, short stories or poems. These varied in quality. There seems to be some difficulty in finding the sweet spot between good writing and good oration. You can have a fantastic bit of writing, but if you mumble through it then it's all for naught. Conversely, you can speak as clear as day, but if what you're reading is terrible, then it's just easy to understand terribleness.
I think one of the main problems with these short readings is that science fiction or fantasy writing focuses on world-building more than pretty much every other genre of writing. Indeed, it seems at times that the world is the focus, and the characters and plot are an afterthought. So how do you pick an excerpt to read? If you leap right into the action then you're throwing the audience into something they cannot possibly hope to understand. This is a perfectly effective literary device in book form, where the reader can trust that all of these out there concepts will be explained further down the line, but in short form it tends to lead to confusion. On the other hand, if you do a reading that's more focussed on the nitty gritty of your fictional space then you run the risk of it being overly dry and technical. Without some kind of emotional connection why should we care about your fictional universe? Is it enough to just admire someone's imagination in setting it up?
The objectives of 'The Future Fire' in providing inclusive and socially conscious fiction are laudable, but on some level seem to me to run counter to the genres they promote. Part of the allure of science fiction and fantasy writing has to be a sense of escapism, to spend a few hours in worlds where good and evil are clearly defined and the individual can empower themselves or realise they're a 'chosen one'. I think the type of fiction that 'The Future Fire' publishes is a reaction against cliche on some level, but with mixed results. Naturally, a talented author can (and should, I think) make fiction in any setting relatable to the life of the reader, but the further away from a recognisable reality we travel, the harder it becomes to explore social issues in a concrete way.
That's why I think the best things I heard last night were those which took absurd concepts and wrapped them up in the mundane. Tori Truslow's work in progress piece about a gay royal wedding in 2030s London was both thoughtful, considerate and, importantly, funny. It successfully reframed the contemporary debate about gay marriage through the lens of the future, a tactic which exposes modern arguments against it as regressive and shortsighted. There were also some hilarious and creepy extrapolations of how social media and surveillance technology might combine. My favourite was the notion of a sentient Boris Bike (now in the future referred to simply as a 'Boris') implying that someone might need to lose a bit of weight, or that they should ride in order to gain 'Oyster Points'. I find myself more impressed with someone that can twist recognisable aspects of the modern world into a believable nightmare than with some of the other readings which seemed to recombine existing fictional devices in a different order rather than to innovate.
The success of this piece also underlines the effectiveness of humour in conveying a message. There is a rich British tradition of satirising the modern world through logically extending trends into the future, the most notable example being Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, or Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, both of which Truslow's reading reminded me of. Along similar lines, another reading I enjoyed was Paul Graham Raven's surreal story about an editor being a badger (incidentally, small woodland creatures popped up alarmingly frequently in various stories throughout the night). I'm a fan of stories which rely on one very surreal aspect in an otherwise realistic universe and explore the consequences and effects of this one change. Again, the author grounded the fantastic in something we can identify with, both in the behaviour of the characters and the world they inhabit, while also keeping a somewhat ironic and detached viewpoint on events. A great recipe for success.
At one point in the night there was an experiment where authors read stories in their native languages of Portuguese and Polish. The Brazilian author, Fabio Fernandes, seemed to have taken the time to pick something that worked lyrically without necessarily having to understand the content. Even so, there were handholds for the English-speaking audience to cling to. Names like Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Henry Ford were easily comprehensible, giving us an (extremely) vague idea of what Fernandes was talking about. Being able to understand just a few words is almost like having a Rosetta Stone, and rightly or wrongly we feel we might have a chance of working out some kind of meaning from it.
Unfortunately, the reading in Polish was less successful. The author chose to read a seemingly random page from his diary. Telling us this this lowers our expectations dramatically, as does telling the audience that this is a mere example of what the Polish language sounds like. That's all well and good, but I'd at least like to think I'm missing out on something wonderful rather than not being able to understand his personal record of a dinner in Islington.
It's telling that throughout the night there was no real criticism of any piece of work. There were a few really bad readings, but you wouldn't be able to tell from hearing or seeing the audience. With a few small exceptions, everyone politely and quietly paid attention to the person speaking, even if what they were reading out wasn't very good. At times like this the atmosphere seems to transform into that of a self-help group; a place where anyone can present their work and get validation from their peers. A telling moment was at the end when an author got a response from their publisher about their book and read out the praise and criticism to the group. It had a mild tinge of the confessional to it, of self-flagellation, and at that moment I fully appreciated the sense of community and mutual support in the room. I still have my suspicions that events like this function as a kind of echo-chamber of praise, but if the worst case scenario is that someone writing godawful fiction gets a boost to their confidence then how harmful can that be?
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