So the Deconstructing Circus project (henceforth the d/c project) started officially a couple weeks ago and I am (a) pleased at how the individual interviews are going, and (b) regretful of the extremely brisk publication schedule I set myself two months ago. Anyway, we live and learn.
Another fantasy I'd had was that I could curate the order of the interviews and link one to the next in a conceptually profound chain. Anyone following their given sequence, I imagined, would come to experience an almost mysterious enlightenment. The logistics of scheduling and trying to be in the same country as other people have, of course, and obviously, annihilated that idea, but I like the relationship that's accidentally arisen between the first two entries – Gandini Juggling's Smashed, and Ockham's Razor's Not Until We Are Lost – and the different approaches they exhibit to handling gendered relationships. The Not Until We Are Lost extract is a chunky 13 minutes, but I'd urge you to give it the time. It's a good one.
Last piece of Sideshow news: I redesigned the site again. Hope you like it. I wish I had some screenshots of how it looked in 2009 when it was running on Joomla (the CMS that sounds the most like a circus elephant).
Turning to the rest of the circus world, Festival CIRCa is, as ever, the centrepiece of October. This year I'm probably going to spend more time cranking out interviews than actually seeing work, but I'm looking forward to Aurélien Bory's second collaboration with the Group Acrobatique de Tanger, Azimut, and to the new Collectif Petit Travers show Les beaux orages qui nous étaient promis. I've seen three Petit Travers shows and they've all been great; in fact each one has been a little better than the last, so not just a pattern but a linear graph is starting to emerge.
Other festivals to briefly flag are Paris' Village de Cirque, which features Un Loup pour l’Homme, Raoul Lambert, Collectif AOC and others, plus a circonférence on juggling lead by Jean-Michel Guy, and the Dommelhoffian Theater op de Markt, which starts right at the end of the month and bleeds into November, and which has some killer companies on the roster.
And that's it. In England a drear sky has unrolled and our long march into darkness now begins. See you in November.