VoxCarnyx

Sean Gandini, founder of Gandini Juggling, talks to KEITH BRUCE about his company’s first appearance at the East Neuk Festival

As many have observed, the pandemic and lockdown restrictions played havoc with perceptions of the passage of time, so that memories of events past can seem more distant or more recent than expected.

Five years ago, in the Dreel Halls in Anstruther, two young musicians played the work of composer Steve Reich in a concert that was to prove more the start of a journey for one than the other, although both have maintained a strong connection with the East Neuk Festival and are part of the 2022 programme.

Guitarist Sean Shibe unveiled elements of his softLOUD project that would go on to wow the Edinburgh Fringe and win him the first of a sequence of awards in its recorded form. Clarinettist Julian Bliss, on the other hand, took a different path by forming a jazz septet. The George Gershwin music he subsequently performed at ENF recently won huge acclaim at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the group brings a new programme of show tunes, entitled Hooray for Holywood, to Anstruther Town Hall on Friday July 1.

Shibe returns this year in the company of violinist Benjamin Baker, both of them former beneficiaries of East Neuk Retreats that enabled the focus on new directions in their music. This year Baker and Shibe are working with ENF debutantes Gandini Juggling on Light the Lights, a son et lumiere combination of music and movement that is another new direction for the festival.

While artistic director Svend Brown has built rewarding loyalties with chamber musicians and ensembles that are the heart of the East Neuk Festival, he has included various non-classical ingredients in the recipe over the years. Visual art, from sand sculpture to film-making, has often been present, while a flirtation with literary events came and went, possibly because of the boom in book festivals at other picturesque locations in Scotland.

This year, as well as jazz and movie music, there is choreography, both from the Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company, who are in the Anstruther venue the evening after Bliss, and from the Gandinis, whose back catalogue has paired their juggling skills with contemporary dance – especially the work of the late Pina Bausch – as well as Indian classical dance and ballet.

Five years ago in Gandini Juggling history, Sean Gandini received a Herald Archangel Award from the Glasgow-based newspaper for his decades of contribution to Edinburgh’s August festivities, and the Angel-winning shows he had brought to the capital. At the time, his group had also recently made a ground-breaking contribution to Phelim McDermott’s acclaimed production of the Philip Glass opera Ahknaten which earned it a Grammy award at the Metropolitan Opera and an Olivier award for English National Opera in London.

When he and I speak, he has just returned from a revival of Ahknaten in New York, and ENO will re-stage the work at the Coliseum next spring. He is now in France, where Lyon’s Les Nuits de Fourviere festival is presenting both parts of the Bausch-influenced shows, Smashed and Smashed 2, together for the first time.

“That is happening at the same time as the Scottish performance which is a much more musical affair,” says Gandini. “We have split the team in two, because we live in an age of extremes and we are now weirdly busy after the pandemic – and one thing we have learned to do is work remotely!” With German juggler Doreen Grossman in charge of realising the ENF project, after Gandini has edited the shape of it via online rehearsals, Light the Lights will premiere at The Bowhouse near St Monans the day before the Gandinis open in Lyon.

“They have had Pina Bausch’s company many times and we will be performing the shows back-to-back at night in a square in front of the opera house where she used to perform.”

The music of Steve Reich is to the fore once more in the East Neuk show, alongside that of Bach, and Grossman will be programming the illuminated juggling to synchronise with the score.

“Light the Lights is a one-off commission, although we have worked before with these light-emitting clubs that are programmed to change colour in time with the music.” Gandini explains.

“It includes Reich’s work with phasing that accelerates a bit of material so that you end up staggered in timing. That is something that is of great interest to us, especially coming straight after working on the Glass. They are so similar and yet so different, those two composers.

“There was dialogue, but it was the Festival that suggested the choice of music and I hope that the show will have a further life, because that is the way that we work. At least elements of it will certainly return because we are working more with live music, and that is so special.”

Beyond any debate is the way that Gandini Juggling has taken the discipline at the heart of its art out of the world of circus and street performance into more exalted company.

“I’d love to do more opera,” Gandini confirms. “There was some suspicion of our involvement in Ahknaten until people actually saw it. It is a very unusual way of using juggling, but then there is a problem of hierarchy in the arts: juggling is lower in the pecking order than opera. Perhaps if Louis XIV had been obsessed with hula-hoops rather than ballet, things might have turned out differently!”

Light the Lights has its first, and so far sole, performance at The Bowhouse on Friday July 1, as part of the East Neuk Festival, June 29 to July 3. Full details of the whole programme are available at eastneukfestival.com