The following are two articles I have written on Cabaret. 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’.

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A CALL TO ARTS

(Why I’m writing a feature film in the middle of a recession and environmental crisis)

By Rose Lawless

(www.roselawless.com)

I am on the phone looking at the rain falling on the sea from my window.

My mother is talking about the recession.

She jumps on the subject joyfully. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘We’ll all be – ‘

‘No we won’t!’ I say.

We won’t be. We can’t be.

Be of course equals the workhouse and the gulag and an unmarked, unloved and unholy end.

Oh God.

I look out the window. It is not raining – not normal rain. The sky is leaking. There is a hole in the sky.

The angels are not weeping – or pissing – or spitting –

They are flushing their toilets and spilling their sewage on us.

They are trying to drown us.

I have a hole in the roof of my seaside cottage. The hole in the sky and the hole in my cottage have made friends and one is communicating to the other with the splashy kisses of a noisy waterfall.

I look at the waves from where I stand in my home and they look to me like the scales of a potential monster-tsunami that will rise roaring to get me and my coastal existence in Bray.

What was once an exclusive ‘sought-after seaview’ has become the child closest to the monster’s mauling…the pawn first in line for cannon-fodder.

My flatmate says I can always build a third floor and go to work on a boat.

What work. There is a recession.

We’ll all Be…

And so –

Ladies and Gentlemen (I’m a cabaret entertainer, that’s what I call the public… it’s allowed), I am writing a screenplay. Not a ‘short’ or a ‘little’ or a ‘not very tall’ –

A full length feature.

And I know that this is mad.

This is not a logical or linear response to the outlook of doom from my porch.

Features cost millions.

My prospects tell me I am going under – financially and aquatically.

I can see over the horizon, the count from sesame street, appearing out of his dustbin and crying-

‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Now the rubbish will rule the world!

You will live in a sewer and sanitary towels will float by like swans! You will feed with the rats and grow five heads –

Three of them will be tumors with eyes!

The other two, tumors with gills!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’

Art as a response to crisis and chaos is not logical.

I know this.

But daily I go into my own Cineplex and I find surprisingly a kind of sweet peace from it all.

I am writing about Cabaret, my most beloved and best-practiced art form – the one that has been soaked into my skin with years of treading the boards, touring the tents and traipsing the festivals.

I did the rounds and ran the track.

With my old troupe, The Fallen Angels.

The troupe has now gone the way of the Beatles.

But the Cabaret has remained.

(Much in the way the love song endures when the man is no longer endurable).

And I love it.

And daily I engage with this love for Cabaret in my feature film.

The man who invited me to write this article warned me: He said a feature is to a short, what dating is to a marriage.

I feel like I have spent the last couple of years of my life on a very wild romantic date with the Cabaret. And now as I commit to write about it in film, I am like a happily tamed man in his thirties, tying the knot because he knows he can find no better dame.

And everything I have learned from my life playing at Cabaret – the good and the bad and yes, sometimes, the unendurable men – seems to be finding a holy union in the synthesis of the drama of my film.

It is a wedding I am bounding into.

To be bound.

For better or for worse.

Ladies and Gentlemen, just at the moment, looking out my window, as Bray seems destined to become Venice without the churches – but with the chips - everything seems to be for worse.

But something in me feels called to respond to the difficulties of our times with this seemingly irrational inner rally call –

A Call to Arts, if you like.

And on the creative plane it makes perfect sense – and I have a sweet, peaceful and irrational intimation that this film is going to be made and that it will bring a lot of beauty and fun into the world.

I hope the scientists and economists have a more logical response.

But I’m going to entertain the troupes.

Rose Lawless 21 August 2008

(If you want to find out more about the anarchic Cabaret show called ‘La vie en Rose Lawless,’ go to www.roselawless.com).

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Rose writes Articles!

Life is a Cabaret of Pearls

A CALL TO ARTS

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