Statements by artists and audience members

Compiled von Jenny Patschovsky

Circus artists are performers in a (more or less) public space. They perceive their environment, negotiate with it, experiment and reorganise it – always using their bodies, which express and create meaning. The performance of something unusual, new, or unique has the power to draw a crowd – usually a circle of curious onlookers gathered around the ring. The artist Johann Le Guillerm speaks of the natural architecture of the gathering, of a space of focal points that arises around the fascinating or astonishing, which is regarded here as a ‘minority practice’.

The parameters of space, body and the extraordinary have always formed the starting point for a circus-specific, often non-verbal encounter between performers and spectators. How do circus artists shape this encounter today? How does this relationship change when the performance context changes? And do creative encounters in public spaces also foster a motivation to attend other cultural events?

Five circus artists shared their thoughts and approaches on the subject of the audience. The two artists from the XY collective, Amaia and Clémence, respond jointly, as the group’s collective philosophy suggests that a range of views are always heard.

Yann Ecauvre - CIRQUE INEXTREMISTE

I always create real situations

In our first show, Extrêmités we spent a lot of time talking about risk manipulation and fear manipulation. I always create real situations. Real situations that are risky. And we all understand risk, no matter where we come from.

The starting point for Extrême Night Fever was me wondering why people sometimes get completely carried away at parties and do crazy things. So, we create an emotional trance, and sometimes after the show, audience members say they felt like they were on drugs, even though they hadn’t taken any. I use three methods to achieve this. The first is tension, which arises from risk. This puts the audience in a special state. The second method is traditional dance, which gives you a lot of energy and allows you to meet lots of people you don’t know. And finally, we use techno music to reach a climax.

Damocles is the first show of a new kind, which is more of an experimental concept than a real show. The concept is to find out whether uncertainty makes people more beautiful and stronger. It is interesting that the play is different every time. It is also political because we create a new, dangerous world out of wood. And at the beginning of the show, I ask the audience to make a choice; they have to decide whether they want a democratic new world or a dictatorial new world – and in 90 per cent of cases, they choose the dictatorial new world. And then I have to find a dictator for this new world.

There are many different ways of interaction. Sometimes I also see it as a magical concept, but unlike classical magic, where people know, they are going to see magical things, we in circus use magic tricks to be heroes. I was once told that I use magical concepts to create emotions. So that’s the dark side of magic. For me, it is manipulation of the audience so that they feel exactly what I want them to feel – good, bad, strange or fearful.

WARNING is even more about manipulation. I first create a really strong sense of trust in the audience. People put their lives in danger because they feel safe. So, I go ahead and create a fake problem, and within seconds, everyone loses their trust. In less than an hour, I turn the entire audience into fascists, similar to works by Marina Abramovic or The Wave experiment. I bring four people from the audience onto the stage, but the real subject here are the people who remain seated and watch. After the performance, 80 per cent of the audience stays with us to talk about the experience. People don’t believe they can be manipulated. And they realise: Oh, I have to be careful, more careful for the rest of my life. I try to use the small, small power of culture to fight for a better world. And I use culture through the door of circus.

Extrême Night Fever, Cirque Inextremiste © Laetitia Baranger

Amaia Valle & Clémence Gilbert - COLLECTIF XY

We want to honour that person

Les Voyages relies on the element of surprise. At festivals there is usually a kind of expectation. There is no need to win people over at a festival because they already know us. They already trust us, they know it’s part of the show. Whereas with Les Voyages some-one walking down the street suddenly sees things happening. There’s a whole moment of ‘what is that?’ There can even be a little bit of mistrust and then it’s our job to build trust with these people. So, the very first approach is really different. We need more time. We are involving people in a way they didn’t expect at all, because they were just going about their usual daily routine. And suddenly, something completely extraordinary, out of the ordinary happens in that routine. There is a small disturbance of reality that is different from people who come to a festival.

Something very important is having a good group cohesion. When we arrive, we manage to listen well to each other and maintain a wonderful calm. We really need this awareness and openness to the world around us because in all our interventions we don’t talk. Everything happens through eye contact, empathy, invita-tions and gestures, through the body. People can talk to us, but we respond non-verbally and it works, people understand us. And sometimes they understand, but they still don’t want to participate and that’s okay. In fact, these are invitations. If a person accepts the invitation, the adventure begins. Then we want to honour that person. By looking at each person, we also reveal their beauty. We don’t want them to ever feel ridiculed.

We also highlight buildings, the architecture in the neigh-bourhood. If we build for example an acrobatic column, it will slightly disrupt the way people see this building, giving it another dimension, allowing them to see their own neighbourhood a little differently for a moment.

During each intervention, we also give out invitations, little origami pieces that we make in advance, with an invitation for the last day, to join us for the ‘big event’. People feel personally invited. And then there’s all the rumours that circulate in an area when you’re there for several days.

Before we go to a place usually there is a three-day scouting mission that we call “repérage”: a small team will come to the area, the neighbourhood, to meet the people, to feel the atmosphere there and to look for partners. Sometimes we collaborate with amateurs or professionals from the neighbourhood. And we look for the spots that can bring people together. Our presence can also stimulate the creation of new links between the people who live there, people who don’t interact much in their daily life.

We don’t know if we’re motivating people to go to the theatre. In any case, we believe that something is stirred within the people who experience this with us. Sometimes they come back to see us; they seek us out; they wait for us for an hour after we’ve gone. It’s clear that we touch them in some way.

We work on fundamental concepts. Be it trust, working together gently, looking after one another, brightening up the world a little, and looking each other in the eye. We live in a fast-paced world where we easily shut ourselves off from the world around us, especially through our mobile phones. So, our ‘performance expe-rience’ is simply about looking up, taking the time to slow down, rebuilding connections and being together.

Les Voyages, Collectif XY © Samuel Buton

Audience voices

I like it when different art forms blend together. The circus elements provide a certain thrill, but when combined with other elements, they also create a sense of depth. This makes the experience all the more intense.
Sandra Aschenbrenner, 41, Teacher

When it comes to attracting a more diverse audience, I don’t see much evidence of this in contemporary circus. At a time when we are grappling with the climate crisis, inflation and a shift to the right, I had imagined something quite different when I thought of ideology and criticism, the body and discourse.
Yaël Koutouan, 31, Culture journalist

I’m familiar with Circus Krone, the Cologne Christmas Circus and, above all, Roncalli. And I always watch the Monte Carlo Festival when it’s on TV. I haven’t heard of contemporary circus before, but seeing the poster has certainly piqued my interest. I really love the choreography in the circus and the physical control; that fascinates me greatly. But I don’t like animals in the circus.
Vladi Cruz Fernandez, 62 Jahre, Lifeguard

On the one hand, I’m interested in the artistic performance, but I’m also drawn to the fact that contemporary circus tells a story or addresses themes that are currently relevant or that people are grappling with at the time. However, the circus is a world that isn’t all that easy to discover; it’s not exactly a typical leisure activity, which is why I like to take my friends along so they can experience it too.
Lilith Zömbik, 17, Student

Hanna Mampuys - THERE THERE COMPANY

The audience is part of the process

With Hugs and Handshakes we wanted to have interaction not only between us as acrobats, but also with our audience. We searched for a way to have a bigger impact on people‘s lives, to do more than just ‚showing a performance‘. Even if we know this impact is still minimal, we feel that it adds value to our work.

Partner acrobatics is a very specific form of circus because there‘s always human interaction. Even if you do a very virtuosic trick and throw each other in the air, behind that is always a relationship and trust. There‘s always looking out for each other and attention for each other. We felt that this is so valuable that we wanted to try to share this idea with the audience.

The moment you put your foot on someone, and you start climbing and you feel carried. Or you carry and you feel the weight; you experience these feelings in a micro-sensitive way.

Before we perform Hugs and Handshakes, we start by giving a workshop where we introduce the basics of partner acrobatics and some games. We call the workshop participants “the educated audience” and afterwards, they are our gateway to the rest of the audience because they sit amongst them. They did not learn a choreography or particular cues, but they have stood on our shoulders and have carried someone. For some scenes, it‘s even better if they are not prepared at all, it makes it more natural. The fact that we have the ‚prepared‘ audience members makes participation smoother, and safer. It is really the blend of all the different layers: performers, educated audience, and ad hoc audience that seems to make it work so well. The feeling of doing it together is magical. We often receive comments that people felt they were part of some-thing they didn‘t expect to be so powerful and warm.

I think circus has always sought this reaction from the audience. I think it‘s in our roots and we all carry it in a certain way. This “it‘s incredible what this person can do”. There is a kind of invitation of feeling and experiencing together with us, the artists. But I think what is very beautiful in contemporary circus is that we took this aspect of audience reaction as an interaction. And we asked what can we do differently with it? Can we also tell other stuff through it?

The principles we work with are consent and humanity. We try to always be transparent in what we ask from the audience and gain their explicit consent for participation. And we try to be as humane as possible. Also showing the real effort of the work, showing the failure, the stress and the real human connection and joy among us during the performance. Communicating with this ‚we are as human as all of you‘.

We want people to feel that it‘s not dangerous to trust someone that you don‘t know.

Benjamin Richter

Reducing hierarchies

For me, one purpose of art is to generate presence in people. Different art forms have different ways of generating presence. In circus it’s the unusual and the virtuoso. The thing that makes you take a breath or the thing makes you feel present because you haven’t experienced it before. Circus in a public space can suspend people in a moment of not being able to name what is going on. That's an opening experience.

In TAKTiL I involve the audience in games of building sculptures. I create a flat hierarchy between myself, the objects and the audience, where everybody can discover games together in a very delicate and fine connection. Communication arises through people’s aesthetic and playful choices; I notice these choices and highlight them to guide the focus of the happening. So, in TAKTiL the audience is both part of the art and watching the art that they create together, and with me.

I work with a concept I developed and called “Jugglicality.” Jugglicality relates to objects in the same way that musicality relates to sound – everybody has it. Interactions exist on a spec-trum – from functional, everyday handling to playful, non-functional engagement, often called juggling or object manipulation. Because everyone possesses Jugglicality, these interactions can become a shared language. Just as a group of strangers might begin to sing together, they can also connect through objects.

I think there has been a shift in power relations concerning the audience in contemporary circus. It’s now often more about actively involving the audience rather than them just watching or being an instrumentalised volunteer. Starting from an Object-Oriented Ontology, my work is rooted in the reduction of hierarchies. When hierarchies dissolve, it shifts the power of the induvidual to the power of the collective; that is a large part of what I want to facilitate with my work. In Care With Handle we create this collective feeling. The starting point was this very simple situation that everybody knows: ‘Can you hold this please? Usually, people say yes and in this “yes” there's a little spark of friendly connection. In that moment there is no projection of meaning, only perception and feeling. That’s why we use the slogan “contact is content” because it’s about this real-life content of that moment.

I think contemporary circus, like every art form, exists on a spectrum of accessibility. Some work that identifies as “contemporary” can be very easily understood and enjoyed, and other work will require more background knowledge and experience for the audience to not feel excluded. But in my 30 years of experience of one of the most accessible formats of contemporary circus, the outdoor festival, I have encountered a vast majority of audiences in Germany to be of a white middle class background. Even when festivals program performances in areas populated predominantly by people of colour and of other classes, often the white middle-class audience predominates, and the locals often stay away. In those situations, there is sometimes a sense of intrusion, rather than inclusion.