Fringe by the Sea: Let’s Twist Again
The Big Top, North Berwick 31/7/26
The Black Blues Brothers
A blue moon hangs over a train station in the back of beyond. Five black Brothers enter, sharply dressed city-slickers from around the 1950s. Their train appears to have been cancelled, or failed to stop; it’s not quite clear but they are stuck there waiting with time on their hands. They keep turning up coins, which the littlest one wants for the pay-phone in order to sweet-talk his high-maintenance girl, but the others want to use in the station juke box. To decide, they flip the coin, and the juke box usually wins. It blares out an iconic mid-century blues or dance song – Aretha Franklin, Glen Miller, Jackie Wilson, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker – and the Brothers launch into a stream of fast-paced acrobatics and dance moves.
With this show these amiable Brothers from Kenya (none of them actual siblings) have given more than a thousand performances to over 650,000 people (including King Charles) in many famous venues all over the world. Time they came to North Berwick.
They had not been on my radar but I booked in for the acrobatics. They do not disappoint. The five gymnasts keep the moves coming thick and fast: tumbling, climbing up each other with added tables, chairs, skipping ropes and drums. A striking image was when one of them skipped two ropes simultaneously – a long one turned by two colleagues and another turned, somewhat bemusedly, by himself. These bits of humour are the best. Some of the mimed humour between songs becomes a little long and laboured. I suppose they do need a break to catch breath!
The station furniture also serves as props. Metal café chairs are stacked high to catch the moon, litter bins serve as percussion, a level-crossing gate is progressively lowered for limbo dancing. It’s extreme limbo such that when the performer defies the laws of physics to make that final pass under the very low bar we cannot witness it. Big Top’s high stage masks anything below the ankle.
The audience could have been larger but could not have been more rapturous. The music will have helped. An unusually high number of zimmers had made it across the bumpy field. Appreciation was clearly enhanced if you had those tracks on a shelf at home or at least stacked in your memory.
It’s hard to believe my generation still needed formats like tango, waltz and quickstep to court youths on the dance-floor, but until I was thirteen that was the case. The local dance school allowed us to finish the session with a bit of desultory jive but jive at Greenhill Dance Classes was even worse than the more traditional steps. It made even greater demands on the inventiveness of your sweaty-palmed partner, while leaving you firmly interdependent.
Then Chubby Checker yelled out, “C’mon, let’s Twist!” - and we were free. You could squirm face-to-face if you needed the company, but you could also hit the floor alone and squirm for yourself. Then you could start varying and expanding on the moves. Chubby saved me.