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19/06/2010

OK, first and foremost: as a catalogue and celebration of the absolute superiority and crushing might of French contemporary circus, Le Nuancier du Cirque is inspiring and exciting, richly cross-connective, LONG (nearly 6 hours), curiously structured, and very, very frustrating. Or frustrating at least for someone who lives outside of France and has little prospect of seeing much of the work so attractively trailed in the 178 short clips—clips of exceptional intrigue which include: a four-armed man smoking twenty cigarettes (Tide Company, Grunsvägen 7); virtuoso mouth-to-mouth ping pong ball juggling (Compagnie Galapiat, Risque ZérO); a matchmaking clown called Proserpine whose work is she goes to villages and talks to the inhabitants about their lives and relationships and dreams, writes it all down in a tiny notebook, then gathers the community together to make the connections between them they never knew existed (L’Apprentie Compagnie, La Fabrique de Liens); a woman who was once a man drawing a spiral through a circle of ice chips (Compagnie Non Nova, P.P.P.); trick cycle ballet (Compagnie 3.6/3.4, Trois-quatre petites pieces pour vélo); a man skateboarding on a large metal parabola which swings back and forth semi-obscuring the live portraiture being created behind him (Compagnie Mauvais Esprits, Léonard…Malagomie); an aerialist tangled in a web of hundreds of strands, to harp music (Compagnie Lunatic, Ariane(s)); a burly naked man bounding on all-fours through the woods, through leaves, over burning logs (Compagnie du Singe Debout, Le Course en Forêt); a man juggling sheets of paper and sonically propelling ping-pong balls from speaker cones (Compagnie Les Singuliers, Hodja); a game of snooker played out along the contours of the human body (Compagnie Les Argonautes, Pas Perdus (which is in Edinburgh, btw)); a man flying stage right and left astride an airborne double bass (Cirque Plume, Mélanges (opéra plume)); a cat climbing a rope then performing a perilous doubles trapeze routine with its human handler (Cirque Romanès, Romanès, Cirque Tsigane (WHY IS THIS NOT ON YOUTUBE?!?!?!!!)); a twisting dance piece, or performance of ‘body juggling’, inside a 10ft columnar tank of water, plus a ferociously complex and thorough investigation of horizontal and multi-planar juggling using long bronze chimes suspended on wires (both from artist Jörg Müller: c/o & Les Tubes); corde lisse in a pig mask (Volodia Lesluin, The Pink Room); lute playing and juggling finally combined (Compagnie Chant de Balles, Le Chant des Balles); a man balancing on the necks of bottles in steel curled shoes, plus a weird grooved hedgeball rolling independently around the stage of an empty auditorium (Johann Le Guillerm / Cirque Ici: Secret & La Motte – prototype IV (incidentally, Johann Le Guillerm, bodily: the Iggy Pop of circus)); a flying trapeze show about a legendary monkey (possibly; my translation: La Troupe Circus Baobab, La Légende du Singe Tambourinaire); and an outdoor juggling interpretation of Stravinsky’s entire Rite of Spring to an audience of approx 25 (François Chat, Le sacre du printemps des rues).

To name a few.

The content of the double-DVD has been compiled by academic-critic-author-researchers Jean-Michel Guy and Julien Rosemberg, with the two discs titled and divided as The Circus Spectrum, which identifies and traces back some of the long-term developments in contemporary circus, such as fewer productions in the chapiteau and the preponderance of mono- rather than poly-disciplinary shows, and Aesthetics, which takes a stab at categorising some of the different performance styles to have arisen in the last few decades. There are divisions and sub-divisions and sometimes sub-sub-divisions, with short introductions for the major sections to explain a little of the reasoning behind the title and selection. These are neither didactic nor particularly argumentative, and it feels as though the larger project is not to divide, but to outline the shape of circus while pushing gently at its limits—there’s some BMXing and some beautifully fast and sharp choreographed capoeira (this), placed within a section titled Blurring the Boundaries.

One of the richest sections is the circus for camera category (’A Screen of Possibilities’), but it does also expose one of the big problems of the DVDs (doubly acute for someone who doesn’t understand a lot of French), which is that in placing work within the plan of the project it isolates that work from standard context: to know about the company, the show, you have to stop the DVD and open a browser and see what you can find (and sometimes there’s nothing). Watching the clips in Screen of Possibilities I realised there was no way to know if they were clips, or whether they were complete films: Damien Manivel’s Viril felt as though it could have been entire, a kind of arthouse circus interpretation of the tropes of a gangster flick: young bald men in suits, lockers, blood on the wall, the suppression and emergence of violence; Pierre Kudlak’s Tempus Fugit might have been a short (and delightful) film, or a scene from something larger; I wasn’t sure about Adrien Mondot’s reTime until I found a longer version online.

It should be noted though that NDC isn’t really meant to be eaten whole, or treated like the MTV of contemporary circus. It’s framed as a teaching aid—a function amply demonstrated in the three-part, nine-hour mega-lecture given by J.M. Guy himself as part of the Circostrada seminar in Helsinki in May, which used the clips as base material for a wider discussion on circus aesthetics—and the plan of Hors Les Murs (and co-publishers Centre National des Arts du Cirque and Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique) is eventually to make the DVD footage available online, which seems to me the better form for the specifically or slightly interested. As it is now, Le Nuancier du Cirque is best as a presentational aid; as a research resource it’s disadvantaged by the fact that there’s no list of which companies/artists are included and where they’ve been placed. Even if you know what’s on there, the nested structure of the DVDs and the porousness of the category borders make it difficult to refind what you half-remember.

Still, it’s rich and frustrating and LONG. I can see how it would be useful to festival promoters and programmers, and I hope some of them pick it up. Even a brief look over the companies included proves how valuable LIMF is as a festival that has an eye turned toward this sort of work (a fair few of the DVD’s productions have been seen there, including, this past January, Pan-Pot, Ieto, and Eloge du Poil), but also how rare it is to see it in other contexts (Compagnie XY at the CircusFest excepted). At the end of the day, watching it on DVD only makes you want to see it live.

If you want to, you can purchase Le Nuancier du Cirque here.

Cross Spring

15/04/2010

‘It is 100% safe,’ says Jean Vinet, standing 12 metres above the ground on a reticulated net of this twisted silver wire that looks like it was graded for a sheep pen: thin, I mean. Very thin. I have a hand resting on a cylindrical matt-grey beam; and the beam is thick. This seems important. My hand rests lightly, casually, but I know that when the wires – inevitably – strain and snap I will be able to catch hold and pull myself to safety. Whatever happens here, I will survive.

The net is actually called a trampoline, and is designed expressly for easy rigging: it’s a floor that you can reach through, with the wires of the net/trampoline slack enough that you can muscle them to the side and create a hole big enough to get larger items down (again: 100% safe). A side-effect is that you can see all the way down to the distant floor of the building — in this case the floor of La Brèche, France’s only creation centre fully dedicated to circus arts — which is actually quite instructive if you can deal with the giddy sensation that you are previewing your own violent death. From above it’s possible to see what Jean (La Brèche’s director) had told us earlier in the day: that the centre was designed and built for maximum flexibility, and that the spaces and compartments which we had moved between at ground-level were really only ad hoc, mobile divisions of a giant single space.

Having never visited one, and with nothing to go on but testimonials warped by extreme admiration or jealousy, in my mind a French creation centre has always been about as real as a magic kingdom accessed through the arc of a rainbow: maybe it’s there; I’ve never been. Now that I have I can more or less confirm it all. I certainly wouldn’t want to accuse a man as pleasant and urbane as Jean Vinet of bragging, but his tour of the building was (or at first seemed to be) a comprehensive list of everything you could want in terms of facilities, administration and funding, the English contingent shocked but salivating at the idea of a venue that invites artists to rehearse and create, pays for their travel costs, pays for their accommodation, pays for their meals, and then actually pays them a wage as well. ‘We have to,’ says Jean. ‘It is the law.’ La Brèche’s budget for costs associated with the artists and their residencies is 1,000,000 Euros p/a, with the money drawn at all levels from national, regional and local sources. (Since we’re talking statistical measures of envy, one of the other memorable facts was English vs French RFO circus companies: 4 in England; too many in France for anyone to know off-hand, but probably something like 150.)

I was at La Brèche for Cross Spring, a week of British work organised and programmed by Crying Out Loud and hosted as part of the larger Spring festival taking place throughout Normandy — the event doubling as an opportunity to invite industry types from France and England to get together for a series of seminars/workshops and informal networking. I’d actually seen the whole UK programme before. At a night of shorts, Acrojou extracted two scenes from their work-in-progress Wake, which I’ve seen four times now in spite of the fact that there have been no formal showings, surely making me the company’s biggest fan (send £9.99 + p&p to receive the annual club fanzine); Upswing’s Loved Up moved from indoors after touring outdoor festivals last summer, and its lightness perhaps played a little less well in the more formal space — especially in respect of the final ten minutes, where audience members were pulled up on stage in order to get down despite their obvious reluctance to do so; and Genius Sweatshop showed a piece of their early-days project The man who wasn’t there, now quite a lot further down the line than it was at its Blue Elephant scratch in March or its JTC showing in Zagreb — with sharper dramaturgy it’s going to be an interesting show, approaching as it does object animation and puppetry with different sensibilities to your average circus production (the company combines four Wimbeldon College of Art graduates with two Circus Space students and a puppeteer who trained at LISPA) .

Showing full-length at Cross Spring were Layla Rosa’s speculative autobiography about her Saudi heritage, What If…, and the second part of Sugar Beast Circus‘ double-bill — originally The Sugar Beast Circus Show, renamed for France Beast Fair, in both incarnations a weird theatrical extrapolation of 19th Century circus’ links to Darwinism. (Sugar Beast are on at the moment as part of the Roundhouse’s CircusFest, and come recommended.) The very good, possibly old enough to be classic, Ockham’s Razor trilogy was on as well, but along with about a dozen others I blew it off to take a long, long minibus ride across Normandy to see Mignon Palace, a tented circus show directed by Gilles Defacque.

I liked everything before the show. Walking into the tent, smoky and large with high-rising ranks of wooden seats; cramming onto the rows while being directed by a man in a dress with both hands to cram more to fit everyone in; kids climbing over their parents to change places, then deciding to sit on the stairs in the aisle, then coming back for gross French sweets, kicking each other in high spirits. For the show itself I was disadvantaged by my position on the outer edge of the semi-circle (there was projection that I could see only as a flicker of light) and by my very weak French, which made it difficult to grasp more than the bare information that what we were seeing was set in a cinema. There was slapstick and clowning, traditional and very conservative aerial, not-so-interesting German Wheel and Roue Cyr. Other people thought it was risqué; I’m not so sure. There were brief naked breasts (man next to me: ’spectaculaire!’) and pantomimic tit-biting (in a girl-on-girl wrestling match) and so forth, but I don’t think it’s that unusual to find the average French audience more relaxed toward nudity and, at the same time, perhaps childishly, more titillated/amused by it. (I remember being quite young and on a family holiday in southern France when we went to some tiny outdoor festival on the beach of a seaside town. There was a freestanding rig with two ladders either side and two men who with great ceremony and importance were carrying buckets of sand up and depositing them into a metal trough at the top. A crowd gathered, the trough filled, and one of the porters pulled a lever to open sieves through which the sand poured in a continuous, hissing curtain. A giant naked man having a shower appeared there, projected, and washed his cock for three minutes; the crowd loved it. I was with my dad, and twelve, and mortified.) It was explained to me afterwards that Mignon Palace was, loosely, a work of autobiography, with the scenes corresponding to the various childhood memories of Defacque, and the unseen film actually archive footage of/from the cinema he grew up in — which all-in-all sounded quite a lot more interesting than the show I felt I saw.

Perhaps I wasn’t in the right mind for it. Given how little I know (and how much I’ve heard) about French circus, what I wanted most was to see work that was balanced precariously on the leading edge of the artform — something that felt different to UK work in more than the particulars of cultural attitudes towards the boundaries of mainstream taste. What made it worse was that one of the Cross Spring seminars fully revealed the breadth and richness of the French scene: critic Julien Rosemberg’s presentation on the aesthetics of contemporary circus. I haven’t had much contact with academic interpretations of circus (rather by choice to be honest), but Julien’s talk was actually very interesting. Showing some clips from his DVD Esthétiques du cirque contemporain, created in partnership with Jean-Michel Guy and Hors Les Murs, he identified six key trends in contemporary circus. Boiled down: 1) Even though audiences in France associate circus strongly with the tent (chapiteau), 80% of companies now tour without one (the tent adding 10-15% to the total cost of touring). 2) Circus shows used to be multidisciplinary – a single production would encompass the full range of skills – but it’s more common now for an artist or company to use a single skill or group of similar skills. 3) The borders between artforms are harder to discern and there is more cross-artform practice. 4) Circus artists are bringing more social, political, personal content into their shows, and are no longer, as they once were, simply tools of the producer. 5) There is diversification in the way that circus makes us laugh (it’s not just slapstick anymore), but the traditional circus still has a special social function of ‘permanence’: children laugh, adults laugh remembering how they experienced the circus as children themselves. 6) There is more ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning formalist artworks that present something without saying what it is. I don’t have a copy of the DVD, but I think the idea is that it excerpts scenes from about 400 contemporary circus productions in order to give a broad overview of the artform and to support Julien/Jean-Michel’s thesis. Apparently you can get it for free, though I’m not sure how, and if you’re interested there’s an English-language version of the text accompaniment here.

I absorbed more in the seminars which were about the aesthetic differences between French and English circus than the ones which covered the industry/production side, though I caught the gist: the English envious of the French infrastructure and the relative artistic status of circus (Rachel Clare, director of Crying Out Loud: ‘we’re about twenty years behind you’), and the French keen to communicate to the English that their country has problems of its own. Two separate people said that French circus ‘is not an El Dorado’ (although that’s exactly what you would say if you had an El Dorado), and apparently French organisations are being told to look to the ‘English model’, which they take to be an entrepreneurial system that meets shortfalls with private finance — in other words now that they have the infrastructure the (currently right wing) government wants them to do more to manage and fund it themselves. England meanwhile is being told to look to America as an ideal example, and who knows what model or distant shimmering mirage the US are in turn being urged to imitate.

Cross Spring was funded in part by Interreg, an EU programme that helps European countries/regions form partnerships to work on common projects. I’m not sure what the common project here might have been framed as — perhaps just contemporary circus — but the idea I think was to push people together and see what reactions might occur. And I think on the whole it worked. Ordinarily there’s something utterly wretched about networking (worst is the moment when the other person weighs up your usefulness and makes a decision about how long and with what level of interest to attend to you), but lengthening the process over a couple-three days drastically reduces your options for not talking to people. There’s really no escaping each other. It’s like the principle of trapping two people in a lift to force them to get along, but it’s actually closer to 50 people and it’s less a lift and more a beautiful port town in northern France on the three warmest days of the year. I hope they do it again.

Archaos Through Time

31/12/2009

Anyone who’s worked or has much more than a passing interest in physical theatre knows there are shows and companies, pretty much all from the last century, who have attained mythic status by being enormously influential while leaving behind only the thinnest documentation of their work. The one that exerts the most powerful grip on my imagination is The Carrier Frequency, a collaboration between Imapct Theatre Cooperative and the writer Russell Hoban (who also produced the seminal novel of disappearance and liminality — Fremder), but Archaos for me have a little of the same status and effect.

Recently I had cause to trawl the Internet for fresh Archaos references and it seems like the mists have cleared a little since I last checked: they’ve got a new website (which shall taunt you horribly with an inoperative English language button) and some videos have appeared online. Here’s a little excerpt from their show Bouinax:

It was recorded in 1991, the year in which, according to Wikipedia, things started to fall apart for them. I don’t know about that, but even without a particularly clear idea of circus history and the genealogy of the new/contemporary branch, it’s easy to see traces of the Archaos style in the work of a company like NoFit State.

At the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings site you can hear a recording of an old ICA discussion involving Archaos’ classically Gallic artistic director Pierrot Pillot-Bidon, plus their executive producer Adrian Evans. It’s from 1990, a year when they were perhaps at a peak, and certainly the scale of their growth and success is a shock if, like me, you weren’t around to see them — 1990 was the year they were the second ‘most successful’ (I guess in terms of ticket sales / audience numbers) show at the Edinburgh Festival/Fringe, beaten only by the military tattoo, which is notorious for bussing in audiences.

What’s most striking about the recording is hearing people talk about circus in more or less the same terms as today — describing it as an emergent artform on the cusp of mainstream acceptance. I suppose the difference is that the catalyst back then was an overseas company whereas now a lot of the momentum is coming from UK-based artists, but still you have to wonder if these things come and go in waves.

I wish there was more of this around — more Archaos documentation, sure (I’d love to see evidence of the freeroaming pig and the tightwire and crows act), but just more material available generally. I’ve been thinking about setting up a sort of online archive for awhile now, so perhaps that needs to be a resolution for 2010.