From research notes for a book to be called 'A Century of Slapstick'

1989


- Hello. This is John Smith-Welsh. Thank you for calling. I'm sorry I'm not able to answer my phone right now but leave your name and number and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Please speak after the tone.

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- Oh, you're not there again. It seems like we're doomed to play telephone tennis. Um, it's Greg here - Greg Millander, returning your call which returned my call which - blah de blah. It's Thursday evening. Yeah, I mean, uh, seriously I would like to help with the book you're writing but there's a problem cos I'm about to go on a world tour with Circus Serieuse and I'll be away for three months, so, er, unless you can ring me bef- ...

No, wait, I'm not going to be home much before I leave on Sunday. Listen, erm - why don't I try and answer the questions in your letter right now? I'll just jabber on till the tape runs out, yep? Okay. Sound like a good idea?

Er, yes, John, you were right, I was the first British member of Los Hombres Del Fango, Which was - ooh - 1989. Did a year with them - one show. Came back in January the following year when the tour ended in Brussels.

What can I say? It was ... it was - just the most incredible experience. Well you know the sort of stuff they do. Crazy, in-yer-face and unbelievably fucking messy. And to be part of it - well ...

You see, I'd come from like this physical theatre background and I'd had the circus training too which is why Antunez and Alex wanted me. Oh, and I also play the sax so I fitted cos the company do their own music. But I'd never seen them perform. I knew they sort of did performance art stuff amongst the audience and so on, but all the business with paint and sawdust and eggs was ... well, I couldn't believe it at first.

It was a complete mind-fuck really. I mean I remember flying out on the Sunday. Arrived in Barcelona late at night. Got taken to this huge, creaky, disused warehouse in a dodgy part of town and upstairs was this sort of hippy commune where I was given something to eat - bean casserole, probably, it was always bean casserole - and a bunk to sleep in. And the next morning there are all these naked bodies wandering back and forth to the rudimentary shower and someone's brewing coffee and then Alex arrives and suddenly it's 'Ejercicios' - exercises - and those of us in the company were put through this hard physical ...

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... workout. WHAT?

[muffled voice]

I'M ON THE PHONE.

[muffled voice]

I'M UPSTAIRS, HON. I'M ON THE PHONE. Sorry about that - what was I saying? Did I say it was like a hippy commune? Yup, but at the same time there was this absolutely rock-solid discipline. There had to be, cos when we came to do the show the safety of the audience - and our own safety - depended on it. Not kidding, at ten thirty every morning, no matter how late we'd been or how much conac we'd drunk the night before, all the company - thirteen men - would strip down to the jockstrap-y dance support things we'd wear for the show and do this blazing workout. And of course it turned out to be such a physical show - so demanding - you really needed to be fit as fuck.

But that first morning ... I won't say it was my initiation but I think I was being tested. Alex said, 'Okay, we'll try something new.' My Catalan wasn't very good at this point but I understood that much. And the rest of them put back on their overalls but I was told to stay in just my jock.

There was this scaffolding tower and I was suspended by my wrists and sent swinging. And above me was this bag full of yellow paint that they split open so I swung in and out of this drizzly stream of paint and got covered in it. They swung me higher and higher till one of them who was on the opposite side on top of the tower grabbed my ankles and I was left suspended horizontally with the paint still spilling all over me. Then suddenly my wrist clamps gave way and I started plunging backwards - headfirst towards the floor. I screamed - I know I did. But what I hadn't realised was that they'd attached my ankles to the opposite crossbar so I was left swinging upside down quite safely. They let me down and each of them gave me a hug and a kiss, and from then on I was un hombre del fango - a man of the mud - like them.

I mean there was absolutely no privacy. We ate, slept and worked together. There were some women who hung around and helped. Sounds sexist now but they mostly cooked and washed and stuff. We never wore our own clothes - just took the next clean jock and guardapolvos, which means pair of overalls - from the line. And there was only one proper loo so the men all pissed in a bucket. Plus we worked non-stop. It was total. We'd rehearse all afternoon and evening, putting the show together, every one of us coming up with new ideas. Oh yes - and there was Antunez. He was amazing. There wasn't supposed to be a star but we all knew Antunez would get the most attention. He just looked like the essence of The Fangos with his big, strong, shaved head and his cheekbones and his washboard stomach. He had real presence. Scary presence. And in the show he spent the entire time in just a jock. All the women - and half the men too - were crazy for him.

Anyhow, he'd always be the one to suggest something way out. One time we were discussing how we'd make it look like we were squeezing piss out of plastic bags over each other. We were going to use coloured water but Antunez jumped up and shouted, 'No! Use the real thing!' and poured the entire contents of the communal bucket over himself. He had no limits.

We had a decent amount of time to create the show. I'd arrived in early February and our first scheduled performance wasn't till Easter - but about a month beforehand Alex started making us do the show in full every night. Kind of like informal previews, only right there in our home-cum-rehearsal-space. That was the best time. Everyone would invite friends along and afterwards we'd party. It was wild. Happy. We were all having affairs. I've always swung both ways and I remember I was having a fling with this fantastic girl called Mireia who helped make stuff for the show but at the same time - better keep my voice down, my partner's downstairs and I haven't confessed to half of this - at the same time I was making out with Antunez. Jeez, I was lucky.

Yeah, the show that year was called Bailamos, Apestando which roughly translates as We Dance, Stinking - and it was all very post-holocaust. There was a sort of narrative about survivors but most people in the audience said they were just overwhelmed by the loud rock band and the fireworks and the stunts and the atmosphere - and by being right in the middle of the action, herded around by us all the time.

I can be honest now - I was terrified every single night before the show. I'd worry we'd accidentally hurt someone in the audience - or get hurt ourselves. Thank Christ no-one did. Well not seriously. I mean we all got grazes and bumps. You couldn't help it cos usually we'd do the show in warehouses or bus garages or that summer on tour in Spain in the open air in the middle of the town square so you'd be falling and crawling around on concrete. I mean in the first scene me and Antunez and Enric each had to knock down a hole in a brick wall we built before each show then crawl slowly into the crowd pushing barrels. We were just wearing dance-jocks. And we'd tip the barrels over ourselves and they were filled with sawdust and whole raw eggs and we'd break the shells with our teeth and gnaw the eggs to let the yolk run all down us and we'd then writhe on the ground in the sawdust. You got bruised sometimes.

And I also worried at first I wouldn't have the authority. Like you were out there with your arse on display trying to get six hundred and fifty or however many people to move where you wanted them to. But you do it a few times and you gain confidence. And once it was over well, I've never felt so exhilarated. Cos you really had survived an ordeal. Every night.

You know, things could always have gone wrong. It was knife-edge-y stuff. I mean at times we were clambering over scaffolding nineteen, twenty feet high in pitch darkness. No safety nets. Yeah, once I was crouching inside an oil drum just after I'd had an entire bucket of blue paint poured over me - I had about twenty minutes like that while other stuff was going on - and I felt the paint that had dripped off me getting hotter and hotter round my ankles. Scalding. I had to break out of character and peer out of the oil drum. One of the flaming torches the other guys had dropped from the scaffolding tower in the destruction sequence was still alight right beside my barrel. I moved it in time, but shit, I could have got burned.

Mind you, mostly we were too swept along even to notice stuff like that. I mean - that final sequence that everyone remembers with the white wall and the transparent bags of paint suspended against it. You know, where we were in the harnesses, thirteen feet up on wires, and were suddenly slammed into the wall, then winched down it to the ground, bursting the bags as we went. Explosions of colour everywhere. Over the floor, over our bodies. And then how we rolled and flailed about on the deck in the spilled paint till the lights finally dimmed I mean, I just can't describe what that felt like to do.

And before that, the fight sequence I had with Antunez. I mean, honestly, something primal would take over. It was pure testosterone. We'd been chucking these pots of dry flour and millet seeds and sawdust over each other that had stuck to the paint we were already covered in - so by then we looked scarcely human. And in our clinch, before I grabbed the final huge bucket of paint to chuck at him, Antunez would sometimes growl, 'Delo!' - give it to me. And I knew I could hurl it straight at his face or at his balls with all my force and he'd take it.

And after I'd thrown it I'd watch him standing there like some undefeated warrior, his strong legs wide apart, the sinews in his thighs pulsing, and the paint dripping down the muscles of his abdomen onto the jutty bulge his knob made in his jock - and fuck me - it was beyond sex.

Then afterwards ... well, isn't afterwards always a comedown? Exhilaration, then exhaustion, then Jesus fuck I just want to get clean. Never any showers. For the outdoor shows they'd simply turn the hose on us while teenagers milled about and giggled. Or we'd put our overalls on top and hope to get a bath somewhere later. I was picking bits of sawdust and dried egg-yolk out of my pubes all year. And even six weeks after I'd got back to London I was lying in bed one night and this thing fell out of my ear and there on the pillow, the size

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[ Transcript of a message left on my telephone answering machine by Greg Millander (b.1963), mime, aerialist, and erstwhile member of Los Hombres del Fango, the Barcelona based physical theatre company. ]