Carnival nights are ones to remember

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10 April 2012

On a recent night out with friends, the first thing I did as I got through the doors of the venue was hitch up the six layers of taffeta on the skirt of my ball-gown and dive, giant-genie-hat first, into a ball pool. Instead of making a spectacle of myself at the Secret Garden Party Winter Voyage, a festival-style party on the make-believe ocean liner HMS Ulysses (aka The Troxy theatre in east London), I was doing the right thing to fit in.

As I channelled my inner five-year-old, chucking coloured plastic bubbles around, other guests in pirate costumes contemplated stripping to their underwear for a dip in a nearby hot tub while free-runners dressed as sailors somersaulted off the banisters of the Imperial staircase. In a tent, girls (pretending to be Kate Winslet in Titanic) reclined on chaises longues while onlookers (pretending to be Leo) drew pictures of them in felt-tip pen.

No doubt, just down the road, other Londoners — a lot less fancily dressed — were in the pub downing pints, so that in the morning they wouldn't recall the banality of their evening. But not us. We may have spent £40 on our tickets but we had come for the carnival and we wouldn't want to forget a single moment of it.

"It's so easy to go into central London, spend £50 in the pub and think: Well, that was rubbish'," says Polly Betton, co-founder of The White Blackbird, an organisation which, alongside Secret Garden Party, is ensuring that carnival nights are the best way to have a good time in the capital. Not to be confused with sex parties, cabaret or burlesque; these events are filled with alternative performance artists, hidden rooms, bizarre activities and a whole lot of fancy dress.

"Our nights take at least a solid month or more of production alone. A huge amount of effort goes into making sure everyone has a really good time ... Anyone who wanted to create the same thing privately would have to spend about £20,000."

At the weekend, White Blackbird hosted "Tweed" at Stoke Place, a 17th-century country-house hotel in Buckinghamshire. A coach collected guests (dressed head-to-toe in tweed) from a central London pick-up point and dashed them up to the hotel where they engaged in literary readings (while toasting marshmallows), confessed their sins by candlelight, sang along to piano tunes and found ponies (fellow guests who didn't mind donning horse heads) to take part in the "most
unusual horse race".

"We never know exactly how the night is going to pan out," says Betton. "Every performer creates something unique for each event and often I don't even get to see the acts until the day." Previous White Blackbird events included pillow-fighting rings, rooms filled with giant green balloons and performers emerging from bathtubs in the hotel bedrooms.

"Escapism has never been more attractive than now in this era of solid misery," says Tobias Slater, co-founder of White Mischief, whose carnival event at The Scala in March will feature a scientist who sends lightning bolts across the room and conducts electricity through his body piercings and a sculptor who carves with a chainsaw.

"The popularity of festivals has really grown," says Slater. "Right from the beginning we wanted to capture that festival atmosphere in our nights but without the trench-foot-filled fields."

The same is clearly true for the man behind my jaunt on HMS Ulysses. Secret Garden Party began as a festival (albeit one that is well known for being like Wonderland). Now founder Freddie Fellowes uses that concept for his London-based nights and the next event will be a two-week carnival extravaganza at an undisclosed venue the end of March that, like the festival, will involve a host of totally off-the-wall
activities.

As Fellowes has emphasised from the beginning: "With that atmosphere, barriers are broken down and you meet new people. The best parties you've been to are not because of the music or price of beer, but whether you met new friends."

Suzette Field, co-founder of The Last Tuesday Society, shares that attitude. She describes her events as "a combination of the cerebral and the carnival". Her next is a Renaissance masked ball with storytelling, live music and life drawing at the V&A. The last was a bacchanalian-style ball in which naked, gold-painted performance artists writhed atop a banqueting table while some of the 2,500 fancy-dressed guests took turns on a bucking w (shaped like a penis, no less).

"Before, going out was only about seeing how drunk you could get," says Field. "We make our nights interactive, to get people talking to each other."

Similarly, both Slater and Betton agree that crowd participation is as important as the performances and that, as Betton says, "everybody always comments that they've never had so many conversations with complete strangers".

So it seems that in the aching expanse of the capital, it's not the pub but at carnival nights that you will meet new people. And, if conversation does fail, you can always regress and dive into the ball pool.

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