The following is the latest article I have written on Cabaret, pending publication in December. Enjoy!
Life is a Cabaret of Pearls
Burning the Dark into Light
By Rose Lawless
‘The pain your neighbour bears is a Pearl of Exceeding Beauty,’
Kahlil Gibran on the oyster
‘Life is a Cabaret of Pearls, Ladies and gentlemen. Come to the Cabaret.’
Fish nets. Satire. Sketches. Sexual Cynicism. Singing girls just a little to the left of beautiful…
Dark loss…
The red nose of the clown.
To hide the red nose of the performer.
Alcoholic actors. Fallen women.
Tragedy.
Comedy. Applause. The cheery deathmask of the entertainer desperate for the big break built on diseased illusion…Decaying dreams…
Seedy seats. Recession audiences…
And through all this, the incredible longing of the Cabaret, this dark art full of longing… to transcend, to touch, to cross the curtains of humanity, to touch the broken heart of what is beautiful…of what is..
To go beyond the edges of existence to the edges of the stage, where actor meets audience and the rehearsed becomes real…to discover that we do not fall of the end of the world into oblivion - but we step into the epiphany of universal beauty…the universal moment free of illusion - where our Cabaret longings become realised - where the pearl of all our sweat and struggle is born into the eternal mind and memory…
Where we ‘burn the dark into the light.’
‘Welcome to the Cabaret of Pearls, ladies and gentlemen. Life is a Cabaret of Pearls’…
My name’s Rose lawless and I am a Cabaret animal. I was born one in my early twenties, when I faced an existential storm and began to hear these black songings brewing from beneath the hard crust of my life’s surface…
‘Song unsung,’ was the first.
I sang, ‘Noone’s ever sung my song,‘ and it was the call of a voice that has never looked into its own mirror in the vast wastelands of time and space.
It was a survival song formed of a blackout.
But by singing it I began to birth it from its charred layers.
And when you face these cold winds about the purpose of your own reality, you find you do not pursue what you desire, you hold on with all your will to what you need - to what is essential.
And I discovered Cabaret in my essence - as the means my essential self took to break through choking from its grave - to splutter through these tearing waters that -
- I WAS -
Cabaret sang the core song of my isness
From music mined in the coal regions of my soul -
I AM! BECAUSE I AM I’M GOOD! BECAUSE I AM I LOVE! BECAUSE I EXIST I LOVE!
I LOVE BECAUSE I EXIST! I LOVE!
This was the message in the madness, the meaning in the riddle, the purpose in the plan.
This was the Cabaret Pearl of beauty which rolled gently and lovingly to my feet out of the chaos.
‘Life is a Cabaret of Pearls, Ladies and gentlemen! Come to the Cabaret of Pearls’…
And through the years since then, I have followed the calling of my essential self.
My need has been my oar, my raft has been my art: Cabaret and I, oar and raft, christened together in history’s plan, following the light that calls us all home in chaos - the universal quest, the ancient search to which we are all meant to contribute:
WHO AM I? WHAT AM I HERE TO DO?
And the answer came in song.
Burn the dark into the light!
Transform meaninglessness into meaning. Transcend suffering with art.
Experience the gold of Living. Sing!
Cabaret became the gift with which I sought and found the gold, the string I held in the labyrinth of life, the means I took to ground myself in inner goodness -
- or inner God..
..if you like…
And gradually, it was the gift that grew. It grew into a troupe. And the troupe grew into a tour - and looking back over the years of touring troupe (actors, writers, clowns and comrades), what I am remembering is the infinitely gentle gentle glory of it all.
I’m not thinking of the glory in successful terms - rewards, applause, reviews - although we had those things..
I’m thinking of the glory of what was.
As it was.
I’m remembering the trials and troubles of a travelling player - the grind, the tests…
How often I wanted to run away from the Circus and join the normal world.
I’m remembering the gruelling and dishonest mechanisms of theatre life…The internal disputes… the financial struggles…
And how through it all I endured and I created Cabaret.
I wore my fishnets and I donned my clown nose- creating and creating and creating Cabaret - I wrote songs, stories, jokes and sketches - envisioning and envisioning Cabaret - from the times when everyone wanted to see us, to the times noone wanted to know - Cabaret, Cabaret, Cabaret… I realised and I manifested Cabaret - I toured and trundled Cabaret… packed and unpacked it…declared it and declaimed it - Cabaret, Cabaret, Cabaret -
Till it fell around me in the death throes of the troupe… Cabaret, Cabaret, Cabaret
Cabaret lived and died in me - The birth and death of it tore into my Being.
But it was all, with the eyes of today, the gentlest, gentlest, gentlest of Glorias….
Because if Cabaret has been the process by which I have lived, the process by which I have come to know and hear my real self - singing like birdsong in the pitch black night -
By which I have made my contribution to The Question …
If Cabaret has been the process -
Then I have been the processed.
I have been the Venus Pearl of Beauty born out of the shell of chaos. I have been the gold scorched in the furnace, the light woven out of shadows…
I have been The Answer
To the Question.
I have been the Revelation of Love rolling to my own feet.
Who I really am.
I have been the Beauty,
As I have been through the pain. .
And now when I sing, I sing with the unwavering certitude of this Love - this unwavering beacon of my own identity - and I sing that it might reach across the borders of the stage to touch the lives of those I sing to - awakening them to the ancient knowledge hidden in the deepest regions of our souls - that we are all bound to the same covenant of Love and Being and Beauty- we are all born to be Pearls in this Cabaret of Life…
We are all here to sing our unsung songs and contribute them to the timeless Quest to know ourselves and carry out our purposes.
We are all here to burn the dark into light.
‘Life is a Cabaret of Pearls, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the Cabaret’.
Rose Lawless sings her new show,’La Vie en Rose Lawless,’ which is a ‘Cabaret of Pearls,’ production, in The Cobalt Café on North Great Georges Street, Dublin 1, on 19th December. Come 7.30pm, Show starts 8.00pm
Tickets Euros 15
