Tumbled Together

Tina Segner doesn't like the status quo. She left the stable, picturesque Sweden she grew up in as soon as she reached adulthood, and has been spurning the ordinary ever since. “We're always trying to find new ways of doing old tricks,” she says of Tumble Circus, a company she runs together with Dublin-born Ken Fanning. The example she gives makes it clear that the two like to experiment: “We put this new show together with a harpist, and we ended up making her play it backwards and lying down, playing it with a spoon and putting it through loop pedals, and making punk music with a harp.”

The show they're taking to the Fringe isn't quite punk music on a harp – it's a bit more personal than that. Segner and Fanning met on the streets of Dublin 17 years ago and have been performing together ever since, but for the first six of those years they were in a relationship. This Is What We Do For A Living is an exploration of love and performing, and of falling out of love while continuing to perform as a pair. It's tough source material, but the story is told with humour and never loses sight of the simple beauty of good circus.

In fact, the toughest part was in the devising, says Segner, because it dredged up sensitive issues that had previously been best left buried. “In the beginning I think it was quite hard. I think it was quite hard to put it together because we ended up diving into quite personal things that we tried to ignore for years and years and years,” she explains. “Now it's a show. So now we're just putting on the show.”

The relationship between circus performers is a different kind of professional relationship anyway, Segner says, and one that needs to be incredibly strong for a show to succeed. “I think the professional relationship between circus performers, it goes deeper in a way than other professionals together. And I think it has a lot to do with the trust – the physical trust, especially. When you're standing on someone's head or doing a handstand on somebody,” she points out, “you have to trust that they're always going to be there.”

“It's physical and emotional trust,” she continues. “And you have to trust each other, no matter what's happened beforehand or will happen afterwards.”

Segner's carnie lifestyle bloomed from boredom, after a childhood and adolescence in Sweden. “When I was 20, I decided to leave Sweden because it was all too perfect and too lovely and too nice, and I wanted to go and have an adventure.” She and a friend ended up in Dublin, and though she hadn't really intended to run away and join the circus, that is what happened. Now, she wouldn't have had it any other way. “I've never had another job, so this is the only job I know,” says Segner. “And sometimes it's really tough... and then it's great again, and then it's really hard. But I wouldn't change it for anything else. I think it's the best job you can ever have. It's amazing. And it's not just a job, either, it's a whole lifestyle. For circus performers, their whole life revolves around circus.”