Upside Down in a Hoop – Tricia Durdey
ISBN: 9781788649414
£10.99
I’m doing something I’ve never done before. I’m hanging upside down in a circus hoop suspended from the beams of a redundant church in Sheffield. I’m not very far from the floor, but the way I feel I may as well be. What am I scared of? Fear just is. It’s there in the muscle memory…Now, knees gripping the metal hoop I let go with my hands and see the world upside down.
Upside Down in a Hoop is memoir about loss and letting go. What is it that keeps us going through the tough times? The joy of dancing as a child? The adventures we dare to take as adults?
Through fear and holding on, to freedom.
Author Biography
Tricia Durdey grew up in Chester and trained as a dancer and choreographer in London and Amsterdam, where she was involved with the experimental dance scene in 1970s, and drew a lifetime of inspiration from working with the forerunners of New Dance.
As well as dancing, she has always written, and her interest in the partnership between words and movement has led to making many text-based performances. She began writing fiction during a hiatus in her dance career and has been published by Chester University Press, Myslexia, Cinnamon Press, Shoestring Press and the Radio 3 website for The Verb.
During her year dancing in Amsterdam she lived in a Dutch merchant’s house opposite Anne Frank’s secret annexe. The memory of this, and her preoccupation with the history of WW2 and its legacy, led her to write The Green Table, published in 2015, and The Dancer at World’s End, 2021. In these novels she aspires to get into the skin of both the collaborators and the heroes of Nazi occupation.
Upside Down in a Hoop, a memoir about her parents, her childhood in dance, and selling the family house of 60 years in Chester, is her most recent publication.
Tricia writes in a room in Haarlem Mill Arts Space in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, with two other writers, many visual artists and several dogs. As a challenge, she is learning aerial skills and hoop at Tuyo Circus Arts in Nottingham, and studying the German language with Duolingo.
Visit her web site/blog: www.movingthemind.co.uk