My friend Rosa Parkin, who has died of cancer aged 43, was a magician, performer and traveller whose creative talents were matched by an incredible drive. We were friends at nursery and then at Cherwell school in Oxford, and although she was younger by a year, she led the way throughout our teenage years, as we lived in squats and became new age travellers. In her 20s she began roving farther afield, particularly to India, where she travelled many times.
As an artist, Rosa found her feet with the alternative circus troupe Turbo Unit, making props for its shows in France, Spain and the UK in the mid-90s. After this, I roped her into art directing my first short film, That Sinking Feeling, a modern-day reworking of The Little Mermaid that required underwater effects and the construction of a lift that opened out into the sea. Her swift mastery of the role of art director, her craft skills, and her management of both the budget and the team, meant that she was inundated with offers of commercial work afterwards. Her real desire, however, incubated at Turbo, was to perform.
Rosa had many chapters in her life, but found her ultimate metier in magic. She studied at the Centre National des Arts du Cirque in Châlons-en-Champagne, and as a female magician, she was a rarity. As a born storyteller, she effortlessly drew in an audience, through theatrics and absurdity, into something more intangible and wonderfully transformative. Her most recent show, La Sibylle, a Victorian-style illusion tent containing the floating, fortune-telling head of a Greek oracle, continues to tour.
Rosa was born in Canterbury, the daughter of Frank Parkin, a political sociologist and Oxford don who taught at Magdalen College, and his first wife, Diana Wignall, a left-wing activist and historian.
During her many years in France, Rosa acquired fluent French and ran several theatre companies. At the same time, she was also performing at events and festivals around the world. She became an accomplished lindy hopper, learning the dance at classes and clubs, and was still dancing weeks before she died.
Rosa’s curiosity and wonder at the world drove her to explore, but much of what she accomplished in her life had no road map: she created artworks, shows, businesses, and new starts in different countries from nothing, over and over again, each time succeeding with aplomb. Her enthusiasm was infectious.
Rosa is survived by her long-term partner and Turbo Unit colleague, Dadu Massy, by her son, Manu, by her mother, three brothers and a half-sister.
