The 'Opening New Markets for Circus Arts' project offers a unique opportunity for circus artists to explore new markets in North America. The initiative is a collaboration between Circuscentrum Vlaanderen, the International Market for Contemporary Circus (produced by La TOHU in Montréal) and En Piste (the Canadian National Circus Arts Alliance) and the American Circus Alliance. A Flemish delegation is heading to Canada in July, but there was already an online meeting this past March in which artists and organisers shared their experiences from both sides of the ocean. - By Liv Laveyne

The relationship between Flanders and North America has always been strong. Among the wave of emigrants from Flanders to the US and Canada in the early 1900s were many Flemish circus performers, such as Polly Bentos and Henri Frans. Some remained there to perform in the big circuses, vaudeville shows and fairs, while others travelled back and forth. But now, over a century later, it has become increasingly challenging to tour a circus show overseas, given the current political, environmental and financial climate. The initial online meeting sparked an animated conversation about the opportunities and obstacles facing artists in both continents.

Gathered around the virtual table were a mix of companies and festival organisers: Aaron Marquise (la TOHU, Canada), Francis Julien (FLIP Fabrique, Canada), Shayna Swanson (Aloft, USA), Stijn Grupping (Post uit Hessdalen, Flanders) and Patrick De Groote (Zomer van Antwerpen, Flanders).

Canadian tundra, the American Wild West and densely populated Flanders

Based out of Montreal, Canada’s Cirque du Soleil may be world-renowned, but the number of large Canadian circus companies touring outside of Quebec remains quite limited. Compared to the field of dance, for example, where a rich tradition is already well established (including in exchange with Flanders), the circus landscape is relatively young and still developing. ‘We often hear the refrain, “Yeah, but you guys have Cirque du soleil, right?” It can be both a blessing and a curse,’ says Aaron Marquise, Deputy Director of Circus Arts Programming at TOHU and MONTRÉAL COMPLÈTEMENT CiRQUE Festival. ‘In terms of growing audiences, you find that people will pay $100 or more per ticket for a Cirque du Soleil performance and then they've “had” their circus for the year. Our job, and challenge at TOHU, is to educate the Montréal audience who enjoys Cirque du Soleil to realize there is another artistic approach outside of the firmly established international brand that is Cirque du Soleil’

Francis Julien is Director of Development for another big Canadian circus company, FLIP Fabrique, which is currently touring seven shows at once. The company has already performed in over 30 countries, traversing around 500,000 km – that’s 12 times around the globe. On average, they perform in front of 150,000 to 180,000 spectators a year. Having started small in 2011, the city of Quebec pushed them to develop a big, annual summer show that could compete with Cirque du Soleil and entertain big crowds, including tourists. FLIP Fabrique also puts on shows in the US and Europe. ‘That rapid transition meant we had to mature quickly and gain insight into how the market works. In Europe we mainly perform within the Schengen Area, working with booking offices that mainly target France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. The number of venues where we can perform in Canada is fairly limited, beyond our home base in Quebec. In that respect, Canada is a bit tricky: it’s mostly desolate tundra. We focus on the francophone region in Canada, as well as the line from the West Coast of Canada to the US.’

Chiming in to put the Flemish situation into perspective is Patrick De Groote, festival consultant and artistic director of Zomer van Antwerpen festival and music festival Sfinks. ‘Flanders is 13,500 km², Canada 9,985,000 km². That makes Flanders 740 times smaller than Canada, and 1,471 km² smaller than the US and Canada put together.’ We shouldn't develop an inferiority complex over these figures; perhaps it's more a David versus Goliath situation. ‘Flanders is small and densely populated but also enjoys a dense concentration of culture: with around 60 circus companies, 40 festivals that present circus shows (albeit not all exclusively circus), and almost 200 cultural centres, that allows for a varied circus offering. You have programming all year round: with indoor and outdoor work, tents and theatres, big and small, experimental and commercial.’ It’s a finely intermeshed cultural network for which Flanders is acclaimed (and envied). ‘Flanders may be small but culturally speaking it's remarkably active and has a strategically advantageous location in Europe. On top of that, Flanders has a historical bond with the Netherlands, and Wallonia has a strong connection with the French circus world, so it's possible to approach the market from two sides.’

Shayna Swanson is the artistic director of Aloft, a circus company based in Chicago. ‘When I founded Aloft in 2005, there was not much going on in terms of circus arts. There was no infrastructure but gradually we were able to change that. We transformed an old church into a training and presentation space, where we also give classes.’ When Swanson began twenty years ago, young and impatient, she had a dream. ‘I had already toured with some bands. That required an extremely DIY mentality: jumping in the van with all your gear, finding gigs, performing for, at best, free drinks and modest pay, then sleeping one someone’s floor before moving on to the next city. There was also a book at the time called Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, which was sort of the Bible of anarchic touring. I set out to apply that same model when I went on the road with my first circus show, El Circo Cheapo Cabaret. The result was that we toured mainly circus schools for five weeks in a beat-up van that was constantly breaking down.’

Aloft’s latest show, Brave Space, which has a completely female cast, is a collective event where the public enters into the experience by building the tent themselves. With a compact set design – picture a big dome tent – and a limited cast, Swanson had hoped to take the same DIY approach, ‘but then you find you're always dreaming bigger than what is sometimes possible in reality.’ In the meantime she has taken the show to more than 45 cities in the US and Canada, including at MONTRÉAL COMPLÈTEMENT CiRQUE Festival. Swanson takes care of the bookings herself for lack of an alternative.

The management agency Cluster Arts will relieve her of that duty for the European tour. ‘All I have to do is show up and perform; everything else is taken care of. That’s a luxury, but sometimes I do miss choosing places yourself, choosing the audiences that you reach. You don’t get to set your own ticket prices either. At some festivals and art houses, they can be really high and create a barrier that keeps some audiences out.’

‘In that sense, I do still value the DIY approach a lot. Because I believe that this approach can inspire the new generation of circus artists to take matters into their own hands. But I’ve only tried that model in the US. I can imagine things are a lot more regulated in Europe. In that regard, America is still the Wild West,’ Swanson laughs.

It's all about the money

Stijn Grupping and Ine Van Baelen of Flemish circus company Post uit Hessdalen were flattered that their production Pakman was so warmly received at European festivals as well as among overseas programmers. ‘We soon received enquiries from Australia, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Brazil and Canada. Our show takes place in a converted truck, which made it not so straightforward in terms of transport. So we decided to build a replica of the interior that would fit inside a container, so we could easily ship our set.’

©Robin Reynders

‘As Post uit Hessdalen, we toured Canada in early 2020, playing the first five days at the Mois Multi Festival in Quebec, before moving on to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Since we had a jam-packed schedule that year, we decided to leave the container behind, thinking that it might enable us to perform more shows, because we also had done a showcase in Philadelphia to promote ourselves on the American market. But then came Covid.’

‘After our tour in Japan and Canada, we decided not to tour intercontinentally anymore.’ There are enough festivals here in Europe to keep our calendar filled. Of course, there’s a certain prestige attached to a successful tour across the pond, and it’s nice to make an impression in faraway places, but it doesn’t quite outweigh all the difficulties that are involved.’

The fact that Post uit Hessdalen is a very small company, currently consisting of just two artists and a touring manager, may make them more agile than larger companies, but the pressure of doing everything themselves is immense. And apart from the time and energy they put into it, there is the financial aspect. ‘It seemed like a smart idea to recreate the scenic design in a container, but the shipping costs are enormous. Since Corona, costs have tripled. Before Corona it cost us 10,000 euro to transport a container overseas, from Antwerp to Canada and back. Now it's 35,000 euro. That’s an extraordinary amount of money, especially when your audience capacity is 32 persons per show, 3 times a day.’

Ask for advice and get money (if you're lucky)

To reduce transport costs, FLIP Fabrique and Aloft both took a different approach: they made replicas of their sets that they keep stocked in Europe. FLIP Fabrique tours in Europe a lot but admits that it’s not something to attempt without support and that you need strong partners overseas, or an international touring agent to organise the tour, like they have in Kas Van Baasbank. ‘We don't know the region, the way everything works, and we don’t have the right contacts. It's great to be able to offload all that stuff and not have to organise it ourselves. Compared to America, Europe is super clean and organised. When you arrive, there’s already a team standing by to help you unload and they’re there to load up again after. It struck me that all the technicians in Europe wear braces.’ ‘And you guys also have beautiful theatres and venues there,’ Swanson adds. ‘At CIRKL festival, Aloft got to perform in a church. I was moved to tears and also felt how alive the circus community was there.’

De Groote has had good experiences with the Canadian embassy and the Canadian Arts Council as a representative of Zomer van Antwerpen festival. ‘Their people are very helpful. Canadian policy is clearly geared toward the import and export of culture. The situation in the US and some other countries is often different … not that this is a deal-breaker. The Delegation of Flanders in New York is very much open to cultural exchange, for example.’

‘In the US, when it comes to touring circus productions, there are no options for structural financial support. There are a number of organisations that provide support to bring companies over, like Mid-Atlantic Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. If you search far and wide, you will find them. But it's usually up to the presentation venues to acquire funding,’ says Swanson.

‘For Canadian companies, there are national subsidies (CAC) and then there’s the subsidies from Quebec itself (CALQ),’ Julien explains. ‘The amount you receive depends on whether you can guarantee a minimum number of presentations. It can be useful, for example, to double your number of shows by pairing a school presentation with a presentation for general audiences. Then there are a number of overseas collaborations, like what we have in Wales, where one organisation from Quebec works with one from Wales and they split the fee, so that half is contributed by each respective government.’

Money therefore remains the biggest challenge on both sides of the pond. ‘The artists and companies face rising costs, which are rightly passed onto the organisers of cultural venues and festivals. There, however, the budgets are often no longer rising, but in some cases even falling,’ says De Groote. What really grinds his gears is the way the market sometimes works. ‘Negotiation no longer serves a common goal – that of making a project possible – but has become a guessing game where you must haggle despite budgets not being communicated clearly. In order to make beautiful things possible together, we need to be able to talk about dirty things like money in full transparency and with respect for each other. We must also dare to look beyond the established fundraising paths and tap into other funds as well: for example, we have had haptic vests developed for people with visual and hearing impairments, which are paid for through a sponsor outside the cultural sector.’

Blue skies or grey clouds ahead?

All these financial and practical problems aside, we mustn’t neglect the biggest issue of them all: climate. Regrettably, it is often the last point on the agenda – including in this discussion. ‘Climate and sustainable touring is undoubtably the biggest challenge,’ says Swanson. ‘We have to dare to ask ourselves: how sustainable is it to have artists fly over the pond for one or two shows, and to transport sets in containers? Because that's the way it’s currently done. In Europe, I drive our set around in a truck, and the cast is obligated to travel by train, which they hate. And I understand that: it's stressful and uncomfortable, but we have to make that mental shift.’ While Post uit Hessdalen travels by truck (a Diesel no less), their means of transport is also their presentation venue.

The search for alternative approaches is gaining momentum. In Europe, for example, there is an increasing number of rental companies who provide props at low prices, following a circular economy approach. Innovative initiatives are on the rise in theatre, too. Dutch theatre company Het Zuidelijk Toneel lets its various directors share a stage and the Flemish company Ontroerend Goed has been successfully touring internationally for two decades with their credo that a set should fit into two suitcases. For their latest production, Handle with Care, Ontroerend Goed is going one step further with a DIY kit that theatres can perform themselves. No need for a container or even personal transport – just a package.

Even healthier, perhaps, is this critical reflex: we are seeing more and more circus companies consciously choosing to stay local. ‘We have to get away from the idea that everything has to be tourable internationally. If that's your ambition, you need to at least gear the production towards that goal from the outset: financially, production-wise and on a human level,’ Grupping concludes.

This article was published in connection with the project "Opening New Markets for Circus Arts", supported by the Flemish and Québec governments.

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