The Stage talks to Adrian Berry

With the launch of its summer-long Postcards Festival, Jacksons Lane in London is continuing to build its strong reputation among circus fans. Liz Arratoon asks artistic director Adrian Berry what the fuss is all about...

When you think about circus venues in London, those that probably spring to mind are the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm or South Kensington’s Royal Albert Hall, which hosts Cirque du Soleil every January. But for the past few years another venue, in north London, has been carving a niche for itself.

Jacksons Lane in Highgate, which celebrates its 35th birthday this year, is a converted red-brick Gothic church. As well as a 160-seat theatre, it boasts a studio under the eaves, which is one of the largest rehearsal spaces in the capital. Its extremely high ceiling makes it ideal for aerial acts and juggling, while other smaller spaces suit disciplines such as low-level acrobatics or slackwire. And with the recent closure of Croydon’s Braithwaite Hall - a former reference library also with a high ceiling - it has become an even more important place for circus practitioners.

Artistic director Adrian Berry has been at the venue on and off for four years, but in the past three has been instrumental in making it into the circus hub is it today. But he didn’t just turn up, see the high ceiling and think, a-ha, circus.

“If only it were that simple,” he says with a wry laugh. “You can’t just open a venue and go, right, I’m going to put on circus and expect to get audiences. So I’ve been doing it slightly off the radar, and integrating it into the programme gradually. Now it’s become the defining thing of what we do. We support, programme and produce new contemporary circus, and are established as the main venue of this scale doing that, with strategic relationships with the Roundhouse, Circus Space, and lots of other circus-creation centres.”

Handily, Berry - a performer himself with the band Alberteen - has circus in his background. In the early nineties he ran the education programme at Deptford’s Albany, which always had a history of circus because of the nature of its space, and was involved in programming Archaos and Mamaloucos. It was an exciting time, when the notion of circus in theatres was being reintroduced, and he carried that on during four years at Trinity in Tunbridge Wells.

Initially he didn’t know a huge amount about circus, but started bringing people such as Legs on the Wall from Australia, and fusing circus with contemporary theatre companies, such as Derevo. He says: “It wasn’t just about people coming and juggling or showing off their circus skills on stage, it was more a case of trying to bring work that had a narrative and integrating circus skills with something new, contemporary and interesting.”

Berry admits he’d been interested in Jacksons Lane for years but had never worked out what it did. “I looked at its history and the contemporary circus I’d been involved with in the nineties had appeared here off and on. It was a case of reintroducing it, and I became more and more fascinated by the work and the artists. We no longer wait for work to appear, we create it. That’s the most exciting thing, approaching artists, curating and commissioning work.”

In the past two years, it has supported 40 circus productions and companies that specialise in short to mid-scale performances, five of which - including German-wheel specialists Acrojou - were short-listed for last year’s prestigious Jeune Talents Cirque Europe competition.

And this week Jacksons Lane has launched a new festival of circus, cabaret and extraordinary performance, called Postcards. It gives a platform to circus and performance artists to create and perform new work.

Berry explains how it came about. “As well as developing all these productions and residencies, companies and artists kept telling me, ‘We’ve got this brilliant three-minute piece, but nowhere to perform it’. There was so much work I was turning down, it got me thinking how we could bring it all together, and about the stuff that crosses over into cabaret, dance and visual theatre. I got so excited about putting it all together. Gisele Edwards, who’d just done a great two-minute piece at LSO St Luke’s, approached us and we started to curate nights and that was quite new for us. We approached the clown Mooky Cornish, from Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai, and Wendy Houstoun, the amazing dance artist, and found this momentum. It went from being a weekend to six weeks.”

The name, Postcards, defines what the festival is - short works and quick bursts that are very visual and international, with artists from 14 countries. Berry is full of enthusiasm for his intriguing and extensive line-up: “We’ve got an amazing cabaret on June 10, when we’re taking over the whole building. You pay a tenner for the night and there will be performances literally all over the building, a massive finale in the theatre, live music, acrobatics in Studio 1, cabaret. We’ve got 40 artists performing and are really excited about it.”

It includes various triple bills, which will give people the chance to sample three very different pieces on each night. The first on June 17-18 sees Cornish’s show, The Glories of Gloria in the theatre, plus Spanish acrobatic and juggling duo Dodgy Whiskers - another Jacksons Lane-supported company - with Irish company Ponydance doing a site-specific dance piece elsewhere in the building.

Berry continues: “Another, on June 24-25, has Stefano Di Renzo’s show, On My Way, a kind of surreal piece on slack wire, which we’ve developed with him. He’s on with aerialists Collectif And Then…, before Francesca Martello’s short piece …Sera. Those three have all got a relationship with us that we’re really pleased about.”

Jacksons Lane has been called a ‘destination venue’ because it puts on shows that can’t be seen anywhere else, and Postcards will undoubtedly attract audiences from near and far. “The interest in the festival before it started was so huge that I’m sure it will become a real fixture in the London festival calendar and get bigger and better annually. But we don’t want it to be niche. It’s really accessible and anyone can come. We’re doing a £35 ticket where you can see everything in the festival, which works out at £2 per performance. We’re saying, take a risk, come and try it.”

Having been awarded standstill funding by Arts Council England for 2012-15, Berry has many plans in the pipeline. He says: “I feel like we’re just getting started. Every year, there’s something different, and we have new ambitions. Certainly with the circus programme, I’ve got plans through to 2012/13. We’re looking at developing a really exciting new circus piece based on the 1908 London Olympics.”

So, watch this circus space.

Published Friday 10 June 2011 at 17:10 by Liz Arratoon