A few words on the cat boat. This is a refuge set up in a converted house boat on the canal Singel, where volunteers take in and look after Amsterdam's stray cats. There seemed to be quite a few of them, maybe thirty at first glance, and a bunch in quarantine in a different room. Belyndy and I were patting a grey and white one in a little basket, when a Singaporean man who had been watching us and chuckling said, 'Careful of that one. She's schizophrenic.' Really? 'Yes. One minute nice. Next minute, ssch!' It turned out that this man was a retiree living temporarily in Amsterdam to help out on the boat. We chatted for a while and exchanged email addresses for photo-swapping, and when Belyndy mentioned that she works with costumes, the man hurried into the reception area to fetch a magazine for her to look at. This turned out to be an issue
of Vice with an article in it about a woman who creates costumes for cats. He showed us pictures of cats dressed as musketeers, bees, alligators... Looking at the photos on my own camera I realise I've taken lots of pictures of animals. This makes me feel sentimental and silly, but it's good to know that there are people out there who are far more obsessed than I am.After my Amsterdam sojourn I caught the night train to Copenhagen: the first leg of my long journey to Oslo. For such a short stay, I feel like I have a lot of impressions of Copenhagen. I quickly became fond of a particular cafe on Istedgade, called Bang and Jensen's, where I frittered away both my Danish mornings over coffees that came with tiny chocolate bars. The cafe is candlelit, even at 9 in the morning, and they play an eclectic songlist which kept distracting me from my notebook - the first morning it was something heart-wrenching that reminded me of my first and only experience of fados, and the second morning they played Nancy and Lee. Nothing like a bit of country with your coffee.
I grew obsessed with the oxidised copper detailing on everything, to the point where I'd stop my chunky hired bicycle in the middle of a busy bridge to take a photo of a pale green monument or statue or roof. From the top of the Rundetårn I could document the spires of the entire city.
Christiania provided a haven from the grey roads and grandiose architecture which I'm unfortunately beginning to associate with sweatshop brands and overpriced sandwiches. It was a relief to spend a couple of hours wandering through the Freetown. What a thoroughly hippy place. Every last detail was wrought by artists, from the carved and painted park benches to the spectacularly graffiti-ed walls of the newer buildings and the carefully mosaiced facades of the older ones. Houses were bright. Gardens were mad. Materials were recyclable. I entered a gallery - one small room - decorated with pictures of Tibetan scenes, and put 10 kroner in a tin for Tibet, and for a badge which reads 'Chrisitiania, du har mit'. 'You have my heart,' apparently. Which it did, for an afternoon.
On my last night I saw the Australian company Acrobat performing Smaller Poorer Cheaper. This was interesting in light of my recent experience with the Jim Rose Circus. Acrobat used nudity as a drawcard, but in an entirely different way. For example, one of the three performed a simple disappearing handkerchief trick. He performed it several times, each time discovering the handkerchief in a different item of clothing, and then removing that item - shirt, pants, underpants. Finally, he performed the trick naked, and ended by pulling the handkerchief from his arsehole. How amazing to see this trick performed twice in a matter of weeks! Compare it to the same trick in the Jim Rose Circus: one of Jim's silent showgirls is naked but for a pair of high heels. He instructs her to put some clothes on. Finding a stagehand has removed the black leather number she initially shed, nameless minion sashays to the centre of the stage, turns her back to the audience, dances, then pulls something fuschia from her arsehole. She pulls this rag over her head and it turns out to be a transparent boob tube. Facing the audience, she then pulls a second piece of fuschia material from her vagina, and this tubey skirty thing forms the lower part of her ensemble. The audience of vocal young men goes absolutely ballistic. The cherry on top is Jim Rose roaring into the microphone, 'The only thing she doesn't pull out of her pussy and ass is my cock!'
(For the first time since starting this blog, I'm close to just finishing up this entry with an 'LOL'.)
I'm glad Acrobat came along to provide me with a naked circus alternative. They've reaffirmed my belief that if performers want to strip off and pull props and costumes from various orifices, that has the potential to be wildly entertaining. I've been considering this. Acrobat use the image as a punchline at the end of a standard sort of a routine. In Jim Rose, the trick is meant as another shocking freakshow display, which is dull in itself. But the worst thing is that the woman has no agency, no voice. She doesn't own the trick at all. She does what she is intructed to do, in a show which is filled with naked, silent women doing as they're instructed.
And blood! In one amazing sequence, one of the Acrobat crew dons white pants and does a series of climbing and tumbling moves using a vertically suspended red rope. (If anyone knows proper circus terminology for all this stuff, please correct me!) Soon the red from the rope is staining his white pants, and we realise that the rope is soaking wet, and as the act progresses the man's body becomes covered in red, and the floor beneath him is splattered. He finishes with a flailing tumble and comically lands, thud, on the floor, still entwined in the rope, red everywhere. Now, I'd already left by the time one of the Jim Rose women sprayed red paint from her arse, but perhaps someone who saw it (like Amy) could comment?
Finally, I arrived in Norway on a sleek Scandanavian train late on Wednesday night. Oslo has turned on the nicest weather I've seen since Greece. Tonight we leave for Bergen, where we venture through the fjords all weekend. Of course everything in Norway is incredibly expensive. Everything. I keep hopefully looking at pricetags, looking for the one thing, just one small thing, which you can get really, really cheaply. Even if it's something completely useless like grenadine, or a paperweight, or carob. But watching the crowds of new parents on leave, out in the sun on a workday, you soon realise that the only thing you can do relatively cheaply in Oslo is breed.
Next week, Berlin.
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