That video of me with the cyclist

Last month I went over to Boston to go and see Cirque Eloize perform iD – a show that’s being brought over to the UK for a short tour later in the year. It’s a great show and definitely worth catching.

I was sent over there by the theatres that will be putting on the show over here. They wanted me to interview some of the performers, speak to the artistic team and have a go at a few circus skills. I’d then provide some written copy and, ideally, some video content that they could use to sell the show.

They sent me because, as well as being able to do a reasonable job on the traditional written stuff, I have a sense of the social media content too. Not that I’ve done that much video work before. I was game for trying some circus tomfoolery too. So, I chatted to people, recorded an interview on video and recorded some rehearsal footage to provide for some cutaways.

I went for lunch with a few of the company – the tour director, stage manager and Thibault, the trial cyclist. There’s a bit in the show where a volunteer is plucked from the audience and he jumps back and forth over them while they lie on the stage. It’s very impressive.

We chatted over noodles about what I was going to do – they were going to let me have a go at juggling, trampolining and anything else I fancied. I said that it’d be great if he could do that routine on video and use me as the volunteer. He said sure, no problem.

So that’s what we did.

It was a bit worrying – I’d seen him do the routine once without any problems and seen him doing other tricks too, so I was pretty confident I’d be fine. On the other hand, the performers with Cirque Eloize are still only human and mistakes are made…

The reaction to the video’s been fun. It’s had more views than expected and, from a work point of view, it’s always fascinating to see how something makes its way through the networks. Especially when something gets picked up by something like The Daily What or the Huffington Post and you see it picked up on the comet-trail of spam blogs that follow behind.

The video’s been up for just shy of a week and has had 150,000 views so far. That’s good going. I’ve collected together a few of the mentions the video has had with links to the bigger sites that have picked up on it:

Some of my favourite comments:

• BALLS OF STEEL!
• I don’t care how pro he is. I wouldn’t do that, and I don’t even have balls.
• Balls of Steel! I’m in love.
• With balls that big, I’m surprised they didn’t get clipped from that bike tread.
• Nutsack of the year right here…
• Brave, beautiful motherf*cker.
• Kinda disappointed he didn’t get hit in the face.
• This is so full of badassery it hurts.

Trust me when I say it feels odd to have so many people commenting on your testicles.

I’m collecting links and so on using delicious using the tag ceidbike.