When I give my biography, there is always one line that makes people stop and ask me to repeat myself:
It is not the fact that I used to work at Microsoft or that I left the corporate world to produce large, rave-like dance parties (though in my defense, my events were more about saturating the senses with music, art, performance, than about consuming large amounts of drugs... but that is another story)
That one sentence starts the flurry of questions.
So why not start my tale there this time?
Back in 2005, I left my corporate job and started producing events. One of those events was a monthly club night called, Breaks and Freaks:
For those of you that know electronic music, the theme of this monthly was broken beat music of any kind--breaks, jungle, DNB, etc.--and performers, the more freaky, the better. After seeing the performance that lead to the article, Falling in Love with Piercings and Suspensions, I started working with PURE Cirkus more and more.
Not only...
I was so entranced by the idea of pushing the limits of the human body, that I started stilt-walking, fire dancing, and hula-hooping. While I was pretty good at it, of course my real talent is in management.
By that time, I was already managing several artists, including electronic producers and painters. I would get them gigs in festivals and events both locally and internationally. Given my love for PURE, that naturally extended to them.
PURE Cirkus was made up of several rings--acrobatics, aerials, clowns, fire performance, piercing/suspension/freakshow, contortion/stilting/hooping--and had four co-owners. Of the co-owners, the ringmaster and the head of the piercing were the two most with-it. The other two had great intentions, but they just couldn't handle the details and drama that come with a circus.... and man was there drama! You have to understand, most of the people in this 20+ person group were just kids looking to forge an identity. Some had been druggies, and almost all misfits. The circus gave them an identity, training meant not overdoing it with drugs and alcohol (most of the time), and the community of like-minded freaks meant that they were finally in a group that understood them.
I was the mother figure, while the ringmaster was more like the warped big-brother. He was strict with them when he had to, but he also gave them lots of space, and more often than I would have liked, he was just like them! I was trying to run shows, so I often found myself having to be the one to wrangle them together into a performance. But the best times were when we pulled off the impossible show, when things fell into place, and the crazy individuals became a finely tuned work of art. The magic in those moments was palpable.
And it was even sweeter because we knew we got there by working together. There were no external teachers, no massive Youtube database to teach us how. We got there by using creativity, tenacity, grit, and a little bit of charm.
I didn't get the opportunity to work with them as long as I would have like. At one of our shows, I met a new-entry, fell in love and ran off to Europe with him to join an even bigger circus, Cirque du Soleil.
I only keep in touch with a few of the kids from that time, but the memory of them is forever with me. Most of them don't know how much they changed my life. They showed me that limits are just things we impose on ourselves and that the human body is something to be played with.
