Cirque déjà vu. Ten years of Flemish circus decree: 5 artists look back

In 2018 the Flemish circus decree, a measure with the aim of supporting the circus arts in Flanders, will have existed for 10 years. To celebrate this jubilee Circuscentrum and the youth theatre Kopergietery presented ‘Cirque déjà vu?’: a project that looks back at what has been and what is to come with the next generation. Five iconic circus performances from the past years have been reworked by five directors into five short scenes with children and young actors. The result was a unique performance, exclusive to the festival Smells Like Circus in January 2018. CircusMagazine wanted to hear reactions to the project and to the circus decree from the original artists: Bram Dobbelaere, Kurt Demey, Danny Ronaldo, Alexander Vantournhout and Frederique Snoeks.

Cie Ea Eo – m² (c) Jonah Samyn

[This article was published in CircusMagazine #53 – December 2017]
[Author: Liv Laveyne – Translation: Craig Weston]
[Copyright: Circuscentrum – please contact maarten[at]circuscentrum.be for more information]

m² / Cie Ea Eo

JUGGLING IN ONE SQUARE METER

What was the idea behind this piece?
Bram Dobbelaere: “During a residence in Paris we had to take the RER (sort of metro) to our rehearsal space every morning. All those people, sentenced to one another in spite of themselves, packed tightly into much too small a space: it’s terrible but at the same time really fascinating. I always think that that was the basis for ‘m²’: How do we react to one another when the artists are trapped on a stage floor that keeps getting smaller and smaller?”
Why do you think ‘m²’ is seen as a landmark in Flemish circus?
“For us I think it was the first time we actually worked in a proper way, professionally: with enough time in residence and consequential coaching. We consciously went for coaches outside of the circus world. Working with moving bodies in a particular space was second nature to Joke Laureyns and Kwint Manshoven (the duo of choreographers behind Kabinet k). Their expertise turned out to be inestimably valuable. What distinguished our performance from others was perhaps the pure simplicity of one readable concept and one circus technique, juggling.”
Is there a particular moment that remains with you?
“It was the first time we toured with this performance outside of Europe, and right off the bat, to the circus capital Montréal. It was an unforgettable experience. The audience there was used to big companies with all the circus arts on display, but there we were, four guys from Belgium juggling in one square meter. What’s more, the reactions were wildly enthusiastic.”
Cirque déjà vu is celebrating 10 years of the circus decree. What’s your advice for the future?
“The circus decree and the accompanying government funding helped us enormously on the path towards professionalisation. Taking the step from juggling around a bit in the park to creating an entirely professional production, was crucial for our development. In the meantime that professionalism has grown, not only with our generation but also the next. Unfortunately the means have not increased at the same rate. A circus artist remains someone who still drives his own van, constructs his own scenography, builds up the set, strikes it after the performance and then jumps in the van to drive like a crazy many to the next venue. I don’t see that happening in other stage arts.”

The Horned Man / Rode Boom

MENTALISM IN THE THEATRE

What was your inspiration for this performance?
Kurt Demey: “Strangely enough it started with the costume. In a store in Antwerp I came across some horns and the image came to me of a man with horns on his back. Surreal and poetic, beautiful and cruel, man and animal at the same time. A sort of other-worldly mythical creature. It was the first performance where I started to use mentalist tricks and that seemed to fit just perfectly with that feeling of something alien.”
Why do you think ‘The Horned Man’ is seen as a landmark in Flemish circus?
“Mentalism was at that point something quite unknown. Names like Jan Bardi were long forgotten, and Gili had just started out in the comedy circuit. But using tricks from mentalism for more than just pure show, in a theatrical context, was new. It brought about wonder and confusion.”
Is there a particular moment that remains with you?
“The performance evoked pretty heavy reactions: some spectators would really get angry with how I had ‘worked them over’, while others would wax lyrically and saw in me their spiritual brother. When I would tell them that mentalism was actually just a series of tricks, one of my ‘spiritual brothers’ whispered in my ear: ‘I realise that you have to keep quiet, you’ve been forbidden by the state to talk about it.’ I also had to figure out how to react to those extreme reactions: in telling people that it’s just a trick, you degrade yourself to a simple charlatan, while I really want people to see beyond the trick, to see a special performance.”
Cirque déjà vu is celebrating 10 years of the circus decree.  What are your recommendations for the future?
“Without the Flemish circus decree and the financial support it offered we would never be where we are today. The performances are richer, and we tour both nationally and internationally. But behind the scenes it’s all still terribly amateur. The subsidies give us the means to create and to tour, but leave us in a situation in which it’s impossible to employ people to aid us in that process. So we’re obliged to do most everything ourselves. The result is that much of that work, more specifically the writing of dossiers, promotion, relations with the press and networking ends up being far below standard, not to mention the stress that it puts on your private life. Unlike the other stage arts, we don’t have production houses that take over those responsibilities. What’s more, it’s time we circus artists pounded on the table. We have a statute for artists which barely earns the title, and is slowly evolving into a veritable witch-hunt.”

La Cucina dell’Arte / Circus Ronaldo

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE WITH PIZZAS

What was the idea behind this performance?
Danny Ronaldo: “When we were on tour in Italy, I saw a ‘pizzaiolo’ (pizza maker) throwing his dough and found it such a shame that no one had ever used that technique in the circus. We had so many things in common: not only the technique, but also the tradition behind that trade and how the craft gets passed down from generation to generation, from master to apprentice. I also found it interesting to juggle with material that’s alive, the dough that through manipulation takes on other forms and proportions. Another important source of inspiration was commedia dell’arte, a tradition that runs through our family veins. My brother (David Ronaldo) and I decided to unabashedly play out the master-servant relationship so typical in commedia dell’arte. In vaudeville theatre there was as well the standard ‘restaurant scene’, in which artists like the Perezoffs gained their fame.
Why do you think ‘La Cucina dell’Arte’ is seen as a landmark in Flemish circus?
“At that time, it was rare to mix circus with theatre in Flanders, even if that was already happening abroad in nouveau cirque. Traditional circus tends to happen in a tent with a whole mix of artists, each with their own number, I thought it would be a real challenge to build a performance around one setting, a restaurant, with only two artists on stage. For a good part of the audience that was really something they had to get used to, perhaps even more then than now, now that I am actually doing a solo in the piste with ‘Fidelis Fortibus’.”
Is there a particular moment that remains with you?
“We played the performance so often, in so many countries and in all kinds of contexts. What remains is that no matter how much humour and traditions may vary from country to country, there is one thing that everybody understands, and that’s the relationship between a master and his servant.”
Cirque déjà vu is celebrating 10 years of the circus decree.  What are your recommendations for the future?
“The circus decree is a bit of an empty box, full of good intentions but without the necessary financing to support those intentions. If there’s one thing the circus decree has accomplished, it’s having started a discussion about what circus is, what is contemporary, and what part tradition plays in the circus, but also – in the worst of cases – which kind of circus deserves a future? In that discussion the decree has mostly caused division because in the end there is just not enough money to support the diversity that exists within the field. I have the impression that dance and theatre are more open to questions about what can or may be considered as dance or theatre. Perhaps that comes from the fact that they enjoy broader support than the circus. At any rate, we now argue over a pie that’s much too small, and as a result everyone ends up defending their own little piece of territory.”

ANECKXANDER / Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens

ANATOMY OF A CIRCUS FREAK

What was the idea behind this performance?
Alexander Vantournhout: “The idea came to me during a residence in Norway when I was in a bathroom full of mirrors and began to analyse my own proportions. I started to measure, and then compare myself to the average, and I discovered that my neck and torso were too long, my limbs too short. We’re not talking about disproportion, we’re talking disfunctionality: after the many years of training with the Cyr wheel the muscles of my forearm were larger than my biceps. I realised I had become a freak of the circus, and wanted to explore how I could compensate for my ‘disproportions’ with the help of prosthetics; the Rubens collar and elevated shoes.”
Why do you think ‘ANECKXANDER’ is seen as a landmark in Flemish circus?
“It was one of the first circus performances in Flanders aimed at an exclusively adult audience, among other reasons because I’m naked for a good part of the performance. It was also a very static kind of circus, performed in a very small space, with few objects… very minimal. Almost Scandinavian in design, just like that bathroom in Norway.”
Is there a particular moment that sticks with you?
“What often came back in peoples’ reactions after having seen the performance was that they started to love their own bodies again, with all of its imperfections. I find that really special. Also the fact that I sometimes continued on stage, still in performer’s concentration, up to an hour after ‘the end’. That produced a rare complicity between myself and the audience.”
Cirque déjà vu is celebrating 10 years of the circus decree. What are your recommendations for the future?
“Something really has to happen with the structural funding. As long as we continue to work from project to project, we cannot afford to engage people for more than a short time, and we don’t have the funding to tour in a healthy way, financially or mentally. Also, all circus is now judged and funded by the same criteria, while there is a huge difference between touring in the commercial sector and touring in the artistic circuit.”

8 years, 5 months, 4 weeks, 2 days / Bert & Fred

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF A CIRCUS COUPLE

What was the idea behind this performance?
Frederique Snoeks: “The performance is a further realisation of the circus number that we graduated with at ACaPA in Tilburg. It was the number in which we challenged each other and went for real danger, with the necessary dose of humour.”
Why do you think your creation is seen as a landmark in Flemish circus?
“It’s circus as performance-art, in which we appear on stage as ourselves, and not as characters or purely as performers of tricks. You find that back in the title, which indicates how long we had been together at the moment our play officially opened. What is also special about the piece is that we use objects that are not related to traditional circus, like mouse-traps and a dartboard with darts. When we tour abroad our piece is often referred to as typically Flemish because of its black humour.”
Is there a particular moment that sticks with you?
“Personally I guess we will always remember our last rehearsal when Bert got hit with a hammer and had to be carted off to the hospital to get stitched up, which meant we had to postpone our try-out. And we’ll never forget all the touching reactions from the audience. The most beautiful (and bittersweet) reaction we received was from a woman who came to see our show together with her husband. A few months later her husband died while in palliative care. In one of his final moments, as he had to be hoisted up in his bed by some sort of crane mechanism, he joked with his wife:  ‘OK?… OK!’ That’s what we always say to each other in the show right before we would start doing something dangerous.”
Cirque déjà vu is celebrating 10 years of the circus decree.  What are your recommendations for the future?
“There is a real need for structural funding. Right now, as circus artists we have to do everything ourselves, and that may have a certain charm, but sometimes it’s just too much. It would be fantastic to be able to pass on some of those tasks to a co-worker that we could pay to do that work.”