Circus. Seize the Moment
What speaks for an institutionalized promotion of the New Circus.
By Thomas Oberender
Circus, both old and new, is for me an art form of success. This is obvious in that it is so closely related to the danger. Much of the energy and intensity of experience emanating from it stems from the risk of failure that surrounds the performers in the eyes of those watching them in their difficult actions, which always seem so easily done, with a smile over the abyss of fear or of the uncertain. Circus makes the impossible possible, it celebrates ease in the face of the very difficult. It gives life to things and treats living bodies as things that free themselves from their function and become something completely different.
There is so much time in every moment of circus art - doing the same again and again until it succeeds. Therefore, the artistic moments also release so much more time than other arts - a pure wonder that creates peace and wonder around it. How does it work? The perhaps most essential question of human life is fundamental in circus: how does it work - in a very practical and technical way, because everything, especially its own integrity, depends on it.
Success in circus is almost always a victory over probability. It is unlikely for anyone who has never practiced these small, precise activities of the artist to be able to perform them without harm. The artist has made improbability the rule - but that alone is amazing. It is something primitive in this process because at some point everything was mastered for the first time: cycling, throwing a ball or shooting, anything that connects our body with a technique that exists independently of it and is incorporated by it. And from the joy and impudence emanating from this learning and success, something contagious arises: this gift of the artists, to carry things on, as they otherwise happen in life, to surprise and make us laugh.
There are deadly sad clowns, and yet a circus tragedy as a genre is hard to imagine. Failure works in the world of artistry as a fault of its own or as a problem of the object and often reminds of the involuntary humor of life, occasionally of moments of its absurdity, but not of fate in the classical sense. The stage of the circus shares with the antique arena but also with the round of the orchestra, even if it originated in the modern circus of the 18th century from the centrifugal force and orbit of the horse numbers and was surrounded by an audience that sits all around, everyone on par with each other, without box, without class barriers, in which something of its survival on the streets and the markets of the Middle Ages lives on.
To this day, circus is an intercultural art that is totally open to the public - it happens in places where nobody should be afraid, where everyone can feel «safe» in the sense of a diverse audience. There is no one who does not know the play, who knows no answers to questions, who cannot orient himself and who does not know the rites. Circus is inclusive and friendly.
For Wsewolod Meyerhold, the artist was the ideal of his biomechanical method - risk and body control were to characterize a new type of actor, for whom Majakowski, coined by the clown Vitaly Lazarenko, created a new form of literature for the arena. One hundred years after the circus premiere of the competitions of the universal struggle of 1920 staged by Meyerhold, a new circus has been created that combines artistic work with other arts and moves from the classic circus tent into new spaces – such as the urban space or the gantries of the theater.
The New Circus is not so new to the world of circus as it is in the world of established, high-level arts and all its institutional structures that have been institutionalized for over 150 years - from schools to political representation to venues and production subsidies. Somehow one still assumes that circus, as it has been doing for centuries, helps itself. And yet it could help us: after all, the fusion of artistic languages, the deregulation of the literary canon and a different understanding of ensemble work have long been the by-product of a «high culture» that has undergone profound changes due to digital cultural change.
The new cultural treasure that this world, transformed by digitalization and globalization, produces is as much influenced by the inventions of new narrative styles, characters, and hybrid worlds that shape games, social networks, and influencers as Shakespeare’s, the studio’s, or more epic series and fantasy worlds. And an important side effect of this culture of digitality and real-time is a new, resisting interest in anything that is initially tied to the values of communities and the credibility of unsellable qualities like aura or the free success of verses, tricks, and sounds.
Convinced of the great potential of New Circus, I am sure that it still has a long way to go - to its own language, through academic discourse, much like performance art did long before and the dance into which public criticism introduces and leads into the forums of political representation. Of course, there must be chairs for circus performers at drama schools, they must be present in juries for funding and residencies and the specialist departments in the cultural authorities must have appropriate experts for it.
The New Circus has before it the same development that the free theatre scene has undergone - from small productions to large forms at some point, which today, as the example of Rimini Protokoll shows, often lead even established theatres to the limits of their financial and infrastructural capacities.Circus is no ‘Kleinkunst’, even though it often shows great artistic work on a small scale.
It is precisely the cultural-political attitude, as it shows up in Germany as a federal structure that rewards and even demands experimentation, that accommodates this growth of the New Circus into other forms of perception and production in a way that is perhaps unique in the world.Nowhere are time-based arts produced so generously and institutionally secure as here in Germany. Why not the art of the moment, the New Circus?
Published in the program of Bundesverband Zeitgenössischer Zirkus 2019