The Sisters of Misconception
I'm watching a Cirque du Soleil performance on TV. It's an utterly breathtaking montage of theatre, opera and exquisite human endeavour. I've always adored circus and was lucky enought to spend at every summer for 10 years at Worthy Farm in Pilton for Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts. I was a stage manager working in the Theatre and Circus Fields for Arabella Churchill [Sir Winston's grandaughter] before going walkabout and doing Street Theatre as The Sisters of Misconception [a group of fetish nuns] and De Facto Films [a coked up camera crew].

I think the Theatre and Circus backstage is the best place on site to hang. You don't get the media hoopla like behind the music stages and it's a only a short behind the scenes hop to the Cabaret Marquee, Jazz Stage and Green Fields. The Green Room has a cocktail bar and restaurant with a volleyball net that people juggle over outside. Sometimes bands head over from the main stages to do accoustic sets, and there is live comedy every night. You wake up to people walking past your tent on their hands and go to sleep to the sounds of laughter.



One year I had to look after Napthalene the fire performers from French anarcho-circus Archaos. These are the guys that the chainsaw jugglers considered mad. Their big Saturday performance was to include a walkabout through the Theatre fields, or that's what we thought.

I'd just finished my shift as a stage manager and had rewarded myself by sharing a spliff with the crew. Someone came running up to me with a fluoro jacket and a bottle of water as theu were one fire steward short. The deal was that their 4 insect Creatures [enormous 8 legged beasts made up of two performers wearing leg and hand stilts] would wander through the fields, with the rest of the troupe on foot letting off thunderflashes. When a thunderflash has gone off you throw it on the ground where it stays red hot. Our job was to pour water on them in case a munted members of the public decided to pick up the pretty glowing things.

The Creatures set off from the Outside Theatre Stage, through the Circus Field and into the other Theatre field past the Cabaret Marquee and Funfair. At this point they were meant to double back but instead they started heading off towards Babylon. To Glastonbury crew the site is divided in two. Avalon (Theatre, Circus, Jazz, and the Green Fields), and Babylon which starts in the Market Fields. It pretty much covers the rest of the site and all the big music stages. Once the festival has kicked off you pretty much stay backstage or in Avalon until Sunday night. You cannot conceive how big Glastonbury really is. A city of around 200,000 people set on a dairy farm (or three) in the South West of the UK for one weekend a year.



So these 4 towering bug like Creatures with their mad French attendents, are merrily throwing hot glowing things in the path of addled festival goers and heading off towards the crowded Market Fields with me trying to head them off in stoned and rusty French. By this point our water supplies are running low, and I have double vision from pouring water on hot glowing things. We ended up begging water off stallholders and chasing after the insane Creatures. By the time we made it back to the safety of the Theatre Fields I had collapsed. And what did Napthalene do? They towered over me with a crazy look in their eyes laughing. Trust me - out of all the freaks in the circus - watch out for French fire performers.



If you are one of the lucky ones to have a Glastonbury ticket this year, make sure you make it out of Babylon at least once. Getting to see the biggest bands in the world is great but there is so much more than the music. Go and see a solar powered circus in the Green Futures Field, or have a go on an outdoor trapeze. See Steve Crumbie and his Amazing Spike of Death on the Outside Theatre Stage or the wacth the best walkabout performers in the world wandering the site. Glastonbury. Probably the best festival in the world.

Glastonbury Festival 2000 pics from: www.efestivals.co.uk
Aerial pics: www.lastrefuge.co.uk