JD and I, we met up and we laughed, a lot.
And I remember when my hand was first in his.
And it just felt right. It was a good fit.
As circus artists we're like doing a lot of physical things together.
And he's a man and I'm a woman.
And that means that we then have a lot of people asking us
to be this romantic couple on stage, which we're not.
We wanted to play with the expectation
and throughout the show it is always this question of like
when is it true, when is it not,
what relationship we have with the audience and with each other,
but all based on our actual story
which is also like because we spend so much time together all the time,
there is a very strong relationship
that feels a bit like a marriage sometimes.
One of the things that can feel very frustrating
when you're a circus artist and you're trying to create a show is that
the circus skills themselves can feel somehow like this separate bubble.
And however well a company sets up a story and a world
often then the minute they try to go into more of the circus skills
it can just feel like this break and it becomes this
like "OK, now it's the circus skills kind of segment of the show,"
and we wanted to have a show where it didn't have that feeling
that there was a feeling of there being a seamless connection.
How do you bring text together with movement
in a way that it doesn't feel like they're at odds with each other
or somehow in different worlds.
There are some truths that we haven't told you.
We just, we thought that you would like a story about a boy and a girl
and then they meet and then they fall in love
and they have ups and downs
and then it all just culminates in this beautiful kiss.
We really wanted to get the emotion of the story through the movement.
We've been working with different choreographers to try to achieve that
and because we had to learn all those things.
I'm 37.
And the only man that I've touched
in the last two and a half years has been JD.
The only hand that I've held
in the last two and a half years
has been JD's.
The only chest that I have had pressed up against mine has been JD's.
Contemporary circus has been something that's been developed
for many, many years in France and in Montreal
and these countries have developed their own style,
and in the UK there's been perhaps less of a tradition of it,
and so there's sort of an opportunity there to invent ourselves,
and there's an excitement around it.
♫