Contemporary Circus

Katie Lavers, Louis Patrick Leroux, Jon Burtt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317190134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In this volume, twenty-four creators come together with three scholars to discuss Contemporary Circus, bridging the divide between practice and theory.

Lavers, Leroux, and Burtt offer conversations across four key themes: Apparatus, Politics, Performers, and New Work. Extensively illustrated with fifty photos of Contemporary Circus productions, and extensively annotated, Contemporary Circus thematically groups and contextualises extracts of conversations to provide a sophisticated and wide-ranging study supported by critical theory.

Of interest to both practitioners and scholars, Contemporary Circus uses the lens of 'contestation, ' or calling things into question, to provide a portal into ways of seeing today's circus performance.

Conversations with: Lachlan Binns and Jascha Boyce (Gravity and Other Myths), Tilde Björfors (Cirkus Cirkör), Kim 'Busty Beatz' Bowers (Hot Brown Honey), Shana Carroll (The 7 Fingers), David Clarkson (Stalker), Philippe Decouflé (Compagnie DCA), Fez Faanana (Briefs), Mike Finch (Circus Oz), Daniele Finzi Pasca (Compagnia Finzi Pasca), Sean Gandini (Gandini Juggling), Firenza Guidi (ElanFrantoio, NoFit State Circus), Jo Lancaster and Simon Yates (Acrobat), Johann Le Guillerm (Cirque Ici), Yaron Lifschitz (Circa), Chelsea McGuffin (Company 2), Phia Ménard (Compagnie Non Nova), Jennifer Miller (Circus Amok), Adrien Mondot (Compagnie Adrien M and Claire B), Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch (Ockham's Razor), Philippe Petit (high wire artist), and Elizabeth Streb (STREB EXTREME ACTION).

1

Apparatus in Contemporary Circus

Apparatus in Contemporary Circus – contesting mastery

Contemporary Circus performance is now no longer a unified field of practice but instead is an artform distinguished by the enormous variety of work it encompasses, ranging from the immersive work of NoFit State Circus under the artistic direction of Firenza Guidi, to the performance-art-based work of Phia Ménard who juggles with ice, to the stripped-back acrobatics of Circa, to the anarchic biting humour and commedia dell’arte of Acrobat.

Through the conversations that the authors have had with the creators included in the Voices section of this chapter, it has become clear that in relation to apparatus some major changes are occurring and that these mark some fundamental distinctions which are emerging between Traditional Circus and Contemporary Circus.¹ These distinctions are predicated on emerging extended definitions of what exactly can constitute a circus apparatus and what its function might be, and also on an evolving process of questioning and contesting the possible nature of the performer’s relationship with their apparatus.²

In Traditional Circus, ‘apparatus’ could perhaps best be defined as a piece of equipment that enables the performer to demonstrate their own bodily prowess, their mastery over the object, and in addition their mastery over forces such as gravity. This Traditional Circus understanding of what constitutes apparatus is now being contested in a number of diverse ways in Contemporary Circus.

A radically extended definition of apparatus is proposed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In his 2009 essay ‘What is an Apparatus?’ he writes: ‘I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.’³

Agamben builds on Michel Foucault’s work⁴ listing apparatus as, ‘Not only therefore prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones,’⁵ and he continues, ‘today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.’⁶

This extended definition of apparatus can be seen as radical and transformative and lies at the heart of many of the innovative developments in Contemporary Circus. New performance works using apparatus made from materials such as ice and clay, which are mutable and transform during the performance, or virtual apparatus which allow the performer and the audience to interact with invisible forces, such as infrared beams, are radically extending understandings of what circus apparatus can be.

In the same essay Giorgio Agamben goes on to propose that the world is split into two, that is into living beings and apparatus, and he suggests that subjectivity emerges as a third element arising from the interaction between the two.

Expanding on this idea further, Dance Studies scholar André Lepecki proposes that the possible relationships with apparatus are rapidly becoming more complex, and that

as we produce objects, we produce apparatuses that subjugate and diminish our own capacity to produce non-subjugated subjectivities. As we produce objects, we find ourselves being produced by objects. In the struggle between the living and the inorganic, it is not only as if objects are taking command – subjectivity itself is becoming a kind of objecthood.⁷

This changing understanding of possible interrelationships with objects, has led some philosophers to describe one of the complex new kinds of subjectivities that can emerge as creating a form of ‘extended self,’ a term coined in 1998 by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers.⁸ They argue that, ‘essentially, the mind and the self are extended to those devices that help us perform what we ordinarily think of as our cognitive tasks.’⁹ Philosopher Michael Lynch, speaking about this idea of the extended self, says that Clark and Chalmers are proposing that ‘the shopping list, for example, becomes part of our memory, the mind spilling out beyond the confines of our skull to encompass anything that helps it think.’¹⁰ This rethinking of the relationship with apparatus is emphasised still further by Lynch, who writes,

Smartphones were only the first step towards the world we live in now – the ‘internet of things.’ More and more devices – from refrigerators to cars to socks – interact with the internet on a nearly constant basis, leaving a trail of digital exhaust. That means greater convenience, but increasingly it also means that our devices are becoming ‘ready at hand’ as Heidegger would have said. We’ve begun to see them as extensions of ourselves.¹¹

Given this changing and increasingly complex understanding of the nature of the relationship between people and things, the Traditional Circus relationship in which the artist demonstrates mastery over the apparatus, can be seen as restricting and limiting the range of contemporary subjectivities that could be investigated through performance with objects.

Some Contemporary Circus creators and performers, by exploring an increasingly diverse range of possible relationships with apparatus, are beginning to negotiate new, more nuanced subjectivities. One interesting paradox which lies at the centre of these new forms of Contemporary Circus is that the mastery of the apparatus is, in and of itself, a pre-requisite – a vital element in the performative process of being able to effectively problematise the notion of mastery, and it is perhaps this tension which makes this area of development in Contemporary Circus so compelling.

Apparatus and training

The relationship between the circus performer and their particular apparatus has always been intense. It is often painful and is, for the most part, central to their circus practice, and the body of the circus performer is often marked, calloused, and scarred by the interaction. Contemporary Circus students in particular, until they become accustomed to working hours a day with their apparatus, often spend breaks between training sessions comparing, and sometimes documenting on social media, the blisters, scratches, and scars they have received from working on their own specific apparatus.

Circus performers spend years interacting with the particular objects that they use as props, or apparatus, in their acts, often working with the same piece of apparatus many hours a day, at least five days a week, over an extended period of many years. Their muscles change. Their body changes shape in response to the specialised physical demands placed on it by the interaction with their particular apparatus. This intense relationship between performer and apparatus in circus not only shapes the performer’s body, changing the structure of their muscles and their physical appearance, but in some cases has also been proven to physically alter the structure of their brain.

Brain scans taken of 24 people who had practised juggling for half an hour a day over a period of six weeks showed radical change when compared with a control group of 24 non-jugglers over the same period. In this short six-week period of the trial, the brains of those learning juggling had increased not only in grey matter, as had been shown in previous studies of juggling, but also, as this study undertaken in 2009 by Jan Scholtz and colleagues at Oxford University shows, had increased in ‘white matter,’ a term used for ‘mostly axons – outgrowths of nerve cells that connect different cells.’¹²

Before and after this training period, the researchers scanned the brains of the jugglers along with those of 24 people who didn’t do any juggling, using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging that reveals the structure of white matter. They found that there was no change in the brains of the non-jugglers, but the jugglers grew more white matter in a part of the parietal lobe – an area involved in connecting what we see to how we move.¹³

Contemporary Circus performers now most often specialise in one form of circus apparatus. In many cases professional circus schools expect the student auditioning for entrance to already have a prior speciality with a particular apparatus. If accepted into the school, the student is often expected to commit to the same piece of circus apparatus, and to continue to specialise in it, dedicating themselves to mastering it. The student will spend the next three years developing the physical capacity to perform on or with that specific apparatus at peak level. They will focus on conditioning the body to best suit the apparatus of choice by, for example, developing the increased upper body strength necessary for aerial straps, or the particular extreme back and hip flexibility necessary for lyra (aerial hoop), as well as undertaking extended periods of training on the actual apparatus itself.

In Contemporary Circus, which also has an underlying pressure of innovation, training is undertaken first of all to master the pre-existing tricks already developed for the apparatus, and to work on the flow and transition between these skills, and then on developing new skills. In the professional circus schools this is all mostly undertaken with the ultimate aim of being able to create an innovative act through which to present mastery over the apparatus in the final performance at graduation.

New and emerging forms of apparatus

Innovative forms of circus apparatus have emerged in the last 50 years which have now been widely adopted in Contemporary Circus.

Acrobat Alexander Moiseev is credited as being the Concept Creator of the Russian Bar in 1978.¹⁴ In the Russian Bar act a fibreglass bar is balanced between the shoulders of two porters (or bases). An acrobat stands on the bar, and in coordination with these porters, can be propelled up into the air to perform turns and tumbles high in the air above the bar.¹⁵ Alexander Moiseev twice performed with the Russian Bar at the International Circus Festival of Monte-Carlo winning a Gold and a Silver Clown. He went on to become Head Coach and Acrobatic Advisor with Cirque Du Soleil, and Advisor on the show Alegria (1994).

André Simard, a former Olympic gymnast and then National Coach of the Canadian gymnastics team, worked as a coach at the National Circus School in Montreal for ten years, before going on to be a member of Cirque du Soleil’s permanent creation team. In the early 1990s, Simard developed a new, secure safety line system enabling acrobats to perform complex aerial turns and tumbles safely during aerial high flying. His inventi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Apparatus in Contemporary Circus
• 2 Politics in Contemporary Circus
• 3 Performers in Contemporary Circus
• 4 New work in Contemporary Circus
• Index