Still dripping

Another grey, wet day, but there hasn't been nearly as much rain as forecast. It was pouring when we set off to the Centre Culturel yesterday evening, but it's only 10 minutes' careful driving away. Inside, we could hear the rain drumming on the roof, but it had stopped by the time we came out and the drive home was dry.

The show was Membre Fantôme (Ghost Limb) by circus company Bancale. The theme was the injuries and general wear and tear on circus performers and the scene was set by a pile of crutches and a wheelchair on an empty stage. The blurb had already informed us that one of the four acrobats had had an accident which resulted in amputation, but it was still a bit of a shock when one of the others grabbed his leg in mid-routine and it came off in his hands.

It was a good show, a little different from most acrobatic shows as the aim was to show the behind the scenes work. So sometimes the artistes would be talking to the audience while they vaulted, swung, and leapt. The amount of trust and care needed between the performers is always evident, but here the practice showed jokes, play ("Hey, let's take Karim's leg and throw it around between us!"), laughter, camaraderie, competition, and the occasional fall. All part of a day's work. 

It was interesting to hear Karim describe the broken bones and subsequent infection which led to multiple operations and his foot feeling like a lump of concrete on the end of his leg, a burden to drag around. Deciding on amputation freed him from pain and disability to find new ways of performing. See the video ... that prosthetic leg must be pretty robust! You could rarely see a difference between him and the others in terms of performance, apart from the occasional wobble on landing. Plus the bits he did with only one leg of course. I also enjoyed Silvana's routine doing the equivalent of rope-climbing acrobatics with a slippery bit of cloth. "I've had loads of falls practising this," she said frankly, and did a couple in the show (yes there were mattresses for this bit!).

Anyway. I started baking for my cake stall today, and later we'll be Zooming with lapsed blipper Bundle.

Edit: Oh. Look at last year's blip!