Circus gift helped to launch career
ONE of my highlights of 2016 was Citrus Arts’ performance of CEIRW at Skylight Circus Arts.
I caught up with James Doyle-Roberts, co-artistic director of Citrus Arts, who has an interesting story to tell:
“Including Skylight as one of our touring venues has been a really special thing for me, because the staff there not only introduced me to circus aerial work but they also taught me the value of how circus sessions can engage brilliantly with young people from very diverse backgrounds.
“On my 25th birthday a friend bought me a beginner’s course in trapeze and aerial skills as a present.
“As someone who was a breakdancer in the 1980s, I’d fallen away from physical expression while working in a record shop in Manchester.
“It was a great connection to the music scene in my then adopted home of Manchester, but I was missing something I’d really enjoyed in my teens - my brother and I were Wales’ under-16s breakdance champions in 1984.
“After running up a small debt to Skylight for unpaid training time there, the staff offered me some teaching work to repay it.
“That’s when I saw that teaching and sharing physical skills is just as important as performing them.
“If you don’t include the sharing and passing on of skills and knowledge in your professional artistic practise, people might suspect you’re just showing off.
“I like showing off the fact that if I can do this, then anyone who wants to put the hours in can do it too.
“A few years later, I was getting ready for a show at the Millennium Dome (now known as the O2 Arena), when I saw that Skylight was presenting a show there on the Our Town stage.
“I dropped in on the Skylight team before going to get ready for the main arena show and was incredibly moved by the honesty, skill and importance of what they were doing. As I went up to my pre-show position in the roof of the dome (150 feet above an audience of over 1,000 people), I saw the Skylight team take their places to watch the show and felt incredibly proud that I’d come from what the team at Skylight do so well.
“I may have had a tear in my eye thinking about that, but nothing concentrates the mind or overrides emotion more than dropping onto an audience on a steel cable winch from 150 feet!”