Artist Spotlight with Ockham’s Razor
6 June 2024
Ockham’s Razor is a young circus company with a reputation for making unusual circus equipment with a simple brief: could we make a show for young people with complex disabilities or on the autistic spectrum – where they get to fly.
In 2009 Tim and Amanda Webb from Oily Cart came to us and asked if we would be interested in making a show with them. Tim had been in a school gym in South London where he had seen what he described as a rogue and inspired teacher with a parachute harness lifting his students out of their wheelchairs and up into the roof, where they swung themselves in the air – delighted. Oily Cart were in the midst of touring their show Pool Piece and were no strangers to the power of kinaesthetic experience. Yet Tim thought he had never seen people light up as much as the students that day.
This became Something in the Air a show where six young people, seated in suspended nest chairs were lifted in the air. They could swing, bounce and spin accompanied by a live band, a shifting set of sensory delights and us performing swinging trapeze, bungee and web spinning in the midst of them.
It was utterly life changing for us as circus makers. The greatest part was getting to work so intimately with an audience, performing in a way that was so utterly responsive – an improvisation between the live band, the team of chair drivers and the audience: it felt like a happening. What was most striking was although the piece didn’t have what you would consider a strict narrative – there was a clear emotional and atmospheric arc borne out of all the elements. It taught us how you could create theatre, a shared live experience that was relevant for an audience who often found it difficult to access shared experiences and traditional narratives.
Ellie Griffiths was one of the performers on that show. We had spent many hours, swinging, bouncing and spinning together and knew her to be an incredible maker we were not surprised when she was chosen to take the mantle from Tim as the new Artistic Director of Oily Cart and were delighted when she came to us and asked whether we would be interested in another adventure with them. This time to think how Oily Cart could make an outdoor show.
‘We wanted to create something that gave that kinaesthetic thrill from Something in the air but in a new way. We wanted to make something visual and bold outdoors, to make this work visible without the audience becoming a spectacle. This had to have co-creation at its heart, to preserve the feeling of being an improvisation with this audience.‘
As before we started with the sensation. We wanted to see if we could make a bicycle powered chariot that was accessible to all audiences, that could spin on a dime, accelerate with speed, turn, swoop or gently roll along. We thought of how that experience could be communal. We remembered the feeling of the freedom and joy of barrelling along with your mates in a bike gang on Summer nights. We wondered if we could have multiple chariots riding along with performers on skateboards, roller-skates and wheelchairs. To make a gang, a murmuration, a race, a whirling dance.
The Without Walls funding enabled us to work with young people to develop a prototype. We designed it so the audience sit side by side with a rider so they can communicate how they want the movement to be without a sense of power dynamic or hierarchy. We spent a glorious week outdoors improvising with different families and performers. We discovered their complete delight, freedom and joy in the sensation and their thrill of interacting with the performers weaving through them. How readily the audience wanted to reach out and connect with the performers.
We discovered that most of the audience were speed demons. They delighted in near collision and racing. Parents and teachers spoke of how positive risk is something often denied to this audience. We started to learn which additional elements – music, silk puppets, enclosures, giant flags built or distracted from the feeling of it.
At the end of the research, we felt our audience had given us a beautiful brief: to co-create a more delightful, sensory, risky play and find out its arc and theatre. We have called it Joyride, and I don’t doubt it will be.
Image credits © Shane Aurousseau
