Earlier in the month, I went to see circus-act finalists and winners of this year’s Circusnext selection process. Circusnext is a Europe-wide organization that promotes “contemporary circus”. A professional affair, selection happens more in the sense of a break dance battle: immediate context and experience over judgment of best or better. The big idea is to get quality creators in front of as many programmers as possible.
Contemporary circus is “New Circus” with a thematic bent. New Circus, broadly, developed out of non-hierarchical and non-violent ways of thinking about human relationships with the world around that started to get a hearing in the 1960s and 70s. Bent or not, New Circus beats Traditional or Old Circus any day of the week and all over the map.
When it doesn’t send a body wobbling off like a broken top along a blank wall, youthful trauma is very often the Hand of Fate, the casual shove that “volunteers” a body for the Atemporal Entangled Combat Section of Star Fleet, now plumping for recruits in the wake of heavy fighting in the Hercules quadrant. Interesting, if not easy, times incoming!
Hans, the hero of Heinrich Böll’s novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, gets a fateful trauma and gains insight into people, especially his own folks. Hans feels fear and anger when he realizes that his mother has hectored Henrietta, his sister, into joining the local NationalSozialistichesMädchensPointlessSuicideBattalion. But fateful trauma happens when he witnesses the mother sawing off and chawing down a big hunk of the family’s black-market ham. It’s true: there are stains that don’t rub out, foul things that resist even judgment. This ham-chaw is one. Thus is Hans volunteered to play Banquo on the post-Nazi BundesRepublik’s stage: he becomes a Clown.
The trauma of my first and last traditional circus performance is why I go to watch New Circus, why I am sitting through tryouts in Paris – in France, by golly! – why I have a record of enthusiastically recommending contemporary New Circus: Live Performance Pilgrimage, with Walkabout: Normandy’s Spring International Festival of New Circus.
The air, wet, chilly. Stinks of scared-kid, of that pink vomit-absorbent sawdust stuff, working stiff sweat, cheap beer: “Hey, Mabel! Carling Black Label”.
Dumb bunnies bunched in small knots, rough, rowdy and friendly-like, guarded, embarrassed, fearful. Dumb bunnies cowering, pointing fingers, cat-calling, guffawing. A couple of clowns near the big flap entry hunching together, taking big drags on fags, Chesterfields, Luckies. Shabby.
Already almost dark. Worn tents, red and white faded stripes. Naked light bulbs actinically bright. Chained lions, leopards, elephants, bears. A flabby zebra. Huge, unwashed, mangy. Cages. Bleacher seats.
No. No. No. No Old Circus.
I came across New Circus – a bright red big top not far from La Folie Titon, where the misquoted Reveillon had his wallpaper works and the Montgolfiers launched their globe aérostatique, hot air balloon – when my Son now 30 was still almost a tot.
No lions nor tamers. Clowns in civvies sans greasepaint doing stand-up. No elephants nor wranglers. Jugglers. No boa-ed, barefoot, busty chevalières leaping from horse to horse. Acrobats solo and en masse sensually swinging. German wheels and horizontal bars. High-wire bikes. No bears nor wrasslers. Unlikely moments and magicians. No flabby zebras.
If you ask my youthful trauma, the big thing about New Circus is that it’s other-species inclusive: other animals perform with but not under humans. As the brilliant horseman Bartabas puts it in the notes to Les cantiques du corbeau(“The Crow Canticles”), which is coming to Paris in mid-October 2025 for a run all the way to Christmas, “Horses [for instance] are no longer the saddles of human exploits or a [an anthropocentric] statement of ‘animal grace’”. Inclusiveness means that circus entertainment is in spirit a socially horizontal demonstration of exceptional individual and cooperative skill and daring, not unlike break or urban or hip hop dance or, indeed, contemporary dance since the 1980s.
To look at the literature and programming at Circusnext, contemporary New Circus is also performance + professional culture, local traditions and enduring social networks. In practice, an epitome of New Circus – again, on the model of break or hip hop or indeed, contemporary dance – is pretty much what can intrigue or wow circus professionals, fans and the public, who pick successes and failures and then, in complex interaction and over time, flail the wheat from the chaff.
Finally, if Movement is the start point and Imagination the end point of dance performance, Body and Body Potential bring together all the different bents of circus into a single genre, a unique way of experimenting with possibles or, as creators of contemporary circus want to look at it, with the themes or stories or meditations that they bring into space time with an act.
My favorite piece – it won no prizes – among the Circusnext runners-up, independent circus artist Antoine Linsale’sBestiare/Vestiare, seems to me to straddle all the points I’ve made above without exemplifying any one of them in particular. Using on-the-ground acrobatics, fabric and dis-logic (capilotraction – “splitting hairs”) Bestiare/Vestiare is cabaret as fashion show in seven parts over three hours. Linsale twists and turns around camp and traditional imageries and absurd ditties dressed in really spiffy costumes and in an overall tone that vibrates seamlessly from Monty Python-style parody to drag show to Sesame Street. Visual joie-de-vivre with mind-food.
Th/os/e who remain by Marius Fouilland and Aimé Rauzier, a Circusnext winner, uses on-the-ground acrobatics and life-size puppets to play with the idea of the other and dead body. The use of Body as vector for investigation of potential joins Fouillard and Rauzier’s piece to In difference by Marica Marinoni and Jef Everaert, in which apparent solos operate as a not-always-in-tandem duo on the Cyr or Mono Wheel.
Metaphoric Objects by David Martin, also a winner, uses juggling to segue into visual and verbal metaphor, developing insights that blaze out then fade off beyond words before I can quack out “Fearful Symmetry”. Objects is a demonstration of the sublime in the ordinary.
I’m not sure that my experience, and not the fleeting insights, is not the actual point of Martin’s shtick.
Salar la pena (“Pay the Price”) by Juan Carlos Panduro, a tight rope walker, uses fire-breathing to create a body poem on ecstasy. Ghetto by Marcelo Nunes, a fakir who clowns his way down from a trapeze for an active meditation on dopamine addiction while lolling, stamping, hopping and roiling in broken glass.
O scion of Bharata, you should understand that I am also the knower in all bodies, and to understand this body and its knower is called knowledge. That is My opinion. (Bhagavad-gita, Chapter 13, Verse 3)
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I saw Circusnext's 2025 tryout and winner representations on 22 May and 13 June 2025, respectively, at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale. Finalists included
“Hack the circus” - Cie Farö Céleste, with Justine Bernachon-Irisarri: tightrope, high wires. ·
“Insomnia” - Jakob Jacobsson: aerial rope
“In Difference” - Jef Everaert and Marica Marinoni: Cyr or Mono wheel
“Body Territory” - Cie Betterland, with Marion Coulomb and Pépita Car: aerial rope, knife throwing
“Ghetto” - Cie Dissociée, with Marcelo Nunes: trapeze, fakir, clown
“ES” - Cie Kimera, with Cecilia Alice Manfrini and Aivjà Pezza: on-the-ground acrobatics, tightrope, fakir
“Ce(ux) qui Reste(nt)” - Cie Inéluctable, with Marius Fouilland and Aimé Rauzier: on-the-ground acrobatics
“Salar la pena” - Juan Carlos Panduro: tightwire, poetry
“Bestiaire/Vestiaire” - Maison De La, with Antoine Linsale: on-the-ground acrobatics “Metaphoric Objects” - David Martin: juggling
“Des amoures chiennes aux amour-lichen” - Oriane Lautel: trapeze
“Arbo” - Cie !UKBUM!, with Jef Kinds & Mia Drobec: aerial straps, webbing
Mr. Danison, the graphics you choose are consistently magnificent.
Posted by: jim c | June 29, 2025 at 11:51 AM