Jarkko Lehmus Diary

What Happened Then And Who Needs The Alps Anyway?

It has only been a couple of weeks since my last contribution on the circus arena of entertainment, but there sure have been some significant happenings in the life of Brian... For once I'll keep it short and give you a lot of photos.

First of all: I've got a place in the Festival programme, so I don't need to pimp my dancing arse all over Harlem anymore. Second: there were a couple of grannies that wanted to marry me in the Pimp Jazz Club on 159th between St Nicholas and Amsterdam. They were pushing 70 with a habit of powdering their noses too often, so I passed. Third: I'm hopeless when it comes to women close to my age.

Chilling out at Chelsea Pier with Mika. Lovely owner avoided the camera. ©

Me, Chioma and Kevin after Colour Purple on Broadway. ©

In the footsteps of Peter Parker. Photo by Jeff Forney ©

The Alps? Aberfoyle is where it's at! The less subtle one is mine. ©

A Pound Of Cow And Lesbians In Leopard Coats

I was thinking about writing this on Sunday morning at 9.30am, but I was far too awake and sober to come up with anything suitably disastrous for our image conscious PR-girls to get all hot and bothered about.

So it's Monday, mine and Garfield's favourite day, and I'm here tapping my talons on the long-suffering keyboard wondering where to start. Hmmm... Begining is the classic place to start...

2.37am, 3.02am, 3.41am, 5.12am, 6.37am andl, finally, 8.00am. Time to get up. If only I could. Where's that phone? Bugger... Three hours and fifteen minutes later I was full of Nurofen waiting for a call back from half a dozen osteopaths and manipulative physiotherapists. Of course it was Saturday and I was in Edinburgh: they were all playing golf and I was limping to the ballet class. The prospect of walking up the stairs to the dressing room was daunting enough, let alone doing two shows on the same day, but when friends have trekked far and wide to see me snogging men for money and I'm a sucker for punishment. The major reason was really that Brice, our lovely frenchie from outer space, was out of action and I didn't want to shuffle the pack any more. In the end I got lucky and a bloke called Robbie Smith turned up and lifted the engine back on the tracks again. Nice one, Rob.

There's nothing unusual about the aforementioned scenario. Just about any dancer can relate to it. I don't really have anything to whinge about. A few aches and pains here and there. I don't even need to wear those pointy booties. You should see the things formerly known as toes pulled out of them after a long day's work!

So that was Edinburgh. We ran the company so close to the ground before the opening night that it would have entered Russian airspace without a single bleep from the radar. Once we actually got to performing things started picking up a bit, but it's still so disheartening when you dance your heart out and the blue rinse majority of the Saturday matinee audience can't even be bothered to clap until the curtain hits the deck. The situation was totally recovered in the evening show by the unstoppable combination of a very drunk friend sitting next to an equally vocal geezer with a Down-syndrome. The best cheers for a long time. Although my friend Sarah, the owner of Traci the Cat, is only half the woman she used to be after losing 16st she still makes one hell of a racket. Big up to the Aberdeen posse!

The week before Edinburgh the compeny was recovering from London, shrugging the Cinders out of it's hair and polishing the Triple Bill into oblivion. For our hard work we got the Saturday off. Half-way through the week Paul Liburd decided that Robert would have a dinner party on that Saturday. We told him on Friday night after inviting everybody. Respect to the man for throwing a big chunk of some hapless cow into a pot and whipping up some quality stew and mash to go with it. I woke up on Monday morning and went home to get changed for work. That kind of sandblasting is never big or clever, but it's needed once a decade to wipe the slate clean.

Take a little hop back and we land in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the exciting and exotic Stoke-on-Trent. Last time I got to know the town well enough to warrant forking out the extra for a single room... So exciting it was that I was in the pool doing a work-out before breakfast after which I ran to the theatre, crawled back after the show and went relatively straight to bed. 'Nuff said.

So that's about it. Except for a years woth of madness in London! Paul (who much prefers manuals, by the way) rented a car to get the hell out of Dodge and dropped me off at my friend's place in the beautiful Canada Water, that was pretending to look like Beirut. While I was still unpacking my friend fetched dinner: two half-pounders emerged from the bag, and then two more. A pound of lips, ears, hooves and snouts of assorted animals at 2.30am is just what a man needs to keep the digestive tract in prime condition.

Pull my finger, baby. © Andy Ross

Usually I'm in London only for a couple of weeks at a time and only see a handfull of people, but since I was there for a full week, I had the obligation and the want to see everybody. An excess of lunches, dinners and more lunches was interrupted by massages, my first wushu class for ten years, a few chance encounters and even a ballet class. All that in two days. The rest of the company traveled down on Monday, so we only got properly stuck in on Tuesday and we opened on the same night. Not much time on the stage to get two productions on, then.

London's undoubtedly got the most educated dance audience in the country, the company's been hyped to the brink of bursting and Ashley's emitting enough emotinal vibes to measure on the Richter scale. To be fair to him, he contained himself exemplarily and dealt with the pressure and all the issues it brought with it in a very constructive manner. He's definitelly growing with the job, and it's great to watch. The release after the first night was enormous but short lived: once the first butterflies drowned in the opening night's wine the next batch was hatching already only to break out in full flight on Thursday. Doing as big a programme as the Triple Bill just once for the London audience was enough to give the whole company a huge adrenaline high with all its good and bad sides. A rocking show and a raving audience followed and after the sweat and blood was mopped off the stage the mayhem started in the mosh pit of stage door. Old friends, even older friends, old friends I'd never met before, new acquintances, lost sheep and leopard coats... From Thursday onwards the rest of the week was a blur of late night drinks, last dances, Swedish bouncers, blagging taxis, a couple of shows, living room floors and hotel baths all spiced up by intriguing conversations and punctuated by very long blinks. Once I finally got on the cramped minibus back up to Scotsland on Sunday morning the coma was guaranteed to take over: "Are we there yet? No, Donkey!"

Three wise monkeys. © Andy Ross

That fractured timeline should give you some kind of caleidoscopic view of the inner workings of my brain for the past month. I started jotting this down with the best of intentions on a lovely Monday evening and I'm running head on into Tuesday already! Tomorrow we'll apply some French polish onto the already gleaming surface of the show just to dazzle the eyes out of the Glasgow audience. Saturday the 8th of April is the last show of the season and the company's last performance for a good four months. What happens after that depends how much my arse impresses Mr Krzysztof Pastor, who's watching the shows to cast his piece for the Festival. At least he'll cop a good eyefull to help him to make up his mind.

Now that the past and the present are dealt with there's only one way left to go and that's back to the future in a silver DeLorean, Marty! Because most of the stuff the company is doing for the Festival is new the only thing that can be rehearsed next week is Van Manen's 'Two Pieces For Het'. It essentially consists of a couple of duets, so majority of the company won't be involved in rehearsing it. Holiday? No. Instead we are starting our choreographic workshops. They were originally supposed to happen on the first two weeks of May. Yeah, I still got plenty of time... Panic!!! It's nice to have a few extra days to put something together, but because of lack of preparation I'll mostly be pulling it out of my sleeve as we go along. Unfortunatelly after the early start it all grinds to a halt again for the rest of April; Pat Neary is back to rehearse Agon. I would imagine most of the company being involved in that process, so I'll just swing my loose cannon around and try to find something else to do for a couple of weeks before the choreographic workshops kick in again. Maybe a screen actor's workshop? Mr Pastor comes back on the 15th of May to get his piece, 'In Light And Shadow', in order, but whether I'll be in it still depends on how well I swing my derriere on stage this week.

9.30am on Sunday? 1.30am on Tuesday is much more like it. Another bleary-eyed ballet class then.