HANG on a minute!
As arts cuts bite, quango hands acrobat £10k of taxpayers’ cash to stage bizarre show on egg donation
AN acrobat who donated her eggs to help a friend has been given £10,000 of taxpayers’ cash to stage a show about the experience.
Aerial artist Sarah Hebe Holmes, who won the funding from arts quango Creative Scotland, plans to premiere the autobiographical production EGG in December.
Miss Holmes, 34, who lives in Edinburgh but is from the US state of Maine, donated her eggs ten years ago and her friend gave birth to a son.
Now she has been awarded £10,304 from the quango’s Open Project Fund after deciding to revisit her decade-old decision in a 25-minute performance.
Miss Holmes said yesterday: ‘The heart of the show is what it is like to be 24 and wild, and suddenly making a choice that is quite intense and how that can change someone. It is about friendship, trust and faith.’
The funding comes at a time when the arts have seen swingeing budget cuts and communities have suffered from widespread library closures.
Miss Holmes’s show features her and fellow acrobats performing in mid-air, replacing their usual silks and cords with pvc to simulate hospital theatre conditions. She said: ‘It’s more visual theatre than anything else.’
It was shortly after becoming a circus performer that Miss Holmes was asked to donate her eggs by friends who were having difficulty conceiving naturally.
The baby – her biological son – celebrated his ninth birthday earlier this month, and lives in Maine. She said: ‘I went through the process of giving my eggs to a dear friend of mine who had been struggling with infertility for several years. Egg donation does happen, but it is more commonly done anonymously – a lot of college students will do it to get some extra money, but it was all about my friendship and seeing her struggle. When she asked me if I would give her my eggs, I thought, “Well, what a great adventure that sounds like”.’
Miss Holmes, who will perform EGG at the Traverse Rehearsal Rooms in Leith on December 16, added: ‘The process was traumatic because of how invasive the procedure and the legalities are. There were lots of lawyers involved, lots of paperwork. I had to be psychologically examined. Anyone can have a kid at any time and no one is sitting there filling out paperwork on you, but as soon as you require medical assistance it gets put into the public forum.’
The artist, who was present for the boy’s birth, said: ‘I am close to him. I am really involved with their lives and have spent every other Christmas with him.
‘He does not belong to any of the three of us, his mother and his father; we belong to him.’
She has no immediate plans for children with her long-term partner Ben Harrison, the co-artistic director of theatre company Grid Iron.
A Creative Scotland spokesman said: ‘There is a growing audience for aerial work across Scotland. Sarah Holmes has a strong record of producing and touring quality aerial work.’
‘What a great adventure’