Trained as a trapeze artist, Bambou Monnet joined Circus Without Circus at a time of soul searching and redefinition. Her two residencies were with filmmaker and animator Natko Stipanicev in Ghent, and dancer Elliot Minogue-Stone in Split.
When you applied for Circus Without Circus you said you wanted to see how you could keep making circus ‘without necessarily being prisoner to physical technique’. What did you mean?
When I applied I was at a moment in life when I was training a lot less. That’s something that can happen in the career of a circus artist – or at least has in mine. When you’re at school you can train a lot, 40 hours a week. But then when you graduate you come into the world of work, and what happened to me is that I just didn’t get much work in my discipline of fixed trapeze. So instead I trained in magie nouvelle, and became a technician in that genre in parallel with my circus career.
So I was training a lot less, and when I applied to Circus Without Circus, in 2020, it was at a time when I was realising both that I had lost a lot of my technique, and that, in spite of this, I still felt that I was a circus artist. I remember I would watch videos of trapeze artists on Instagram – very, very good ones – and ask myself: if I am not the best in the world, and never can be, am I still a circus artist? Not during the application, but after it, I developed the concept of a cirque indigne (‘unworthy circus’) to address this feeling of doing circus and never being good enough. It was something that had been developing for a long time in my mind – the desire to defend my work as a performer, and to say: OK, maybe I can’t do a salto, but I am still a circus artist.
How did that affect your first residency with Natko Stipanicev in Ghent?
We were in touch a bit by mail beforehand. At the start we told each other about our artistic approaches and current research, and so I told Natko straight away about this feeling of being unworthy, of not being good enough, of knowing I would never be the best in world. And he said to me that in animation, in his art form, everything is possible. In reality, you have gravity, you have weight, there are these limitations and physical constraints that surround us. But in animation, anything is possible.
I instantly thought, Wow – here’s me, the circus artist who can’t do a salto, and with animation I can do a salto. That’s what we started with. There were some other things we wanted to do, involving huge white screens and high tech video projectors, but we quickly realised we couldn’t pull those off due to technical constraints.
During the residency, we started off making 3D models that could be animated on the computer to do impossible things. The problem was that this was a really, really time consuming process, and we realised that if we went further down that road then there wouldn’t be much for me to do – it would just be Natko making the animation alone on his computer.
So we had the idea instead to work on a stop motion animation. The idea was that we’d try to invent impossible movements on the trapeze – things you couldn’t do under gravity.
In your logbook from the residency it says that for the four-minute move you eventually created, you had to lie on the floor for 12 hours. How did that feel, as a collaboration?
Honestly, it would have been better if we could have broken the residency up into smaller pieces and worked together on several occasions, with spaces in between. As it was, it was very long – 15 days!
I’ve always worked alongside video, and make a lot of projects and little video clips with my partner. So no worries there. But it’s true that I was a little bit a marionette – which I was OK with because it was for a project and for something we’d decided to make. But of course when you apply for a residency in a European laboratory of different art forms, you don’t expect to spend four days lying on the ground.
All the same, I am very happy with the result. I love the animation we made, and also the process of reflection that came with conceiving impossible movements for the trapeze. It was very interesting, to ask what you can do when gravity is reversed.
I was able as well to tackle the question I came with: how do you do circus without circus? And it really was that, in the video: I did trapeze without doing trapeze. And yet it is trapeze because there are two ropes, a bar, and a body which does tricks under and over it. So, I answered my question.
Your second residency was with the dancer Elliot Minogue-Stone in Split. Was that a closer meeting of disciplines?
Yes – I’ve worked before with lots of dancers, lots of circus artists. And these days circus and dance are very, very close. When I was at school I had lots of dance classes, and when Elliot was at dance school he had circus and acrobatics classes.
The first day of the residency we had a studio filled with trapezes, silks, and so we hung up a lot of equipment. We tried a few different things – like making a kind of aerial forest, but in a fairly aimless way. It was just a means to get to know each other. On stage, we played lots of music, sang, it was very enjoyable. And then afterwards we started to talk a lot about our respective art forms, and in fact I felt very lost at the start of the residency because I kept telling myself that I needed to get back to my primary goal, which was to research within a laboratory called Circus Without Circus. What was the base of our collaboration then? We started from scratch and asked ourselves, What is circus? What is dance?
We came up with a lot of questions for ourselves, and talked a lot about the notion of heritage – what that means for a circus artist in 2023. I’m very interested in the history of the circus and love the codes of the classical circus – the circus ring, the chapiteau, the notion of prowess, the risk of death. I love them but I don’t meet them myself – because I’m scared of death, I have vertigo, I don’t know how to do a salto. Yet I think I do circus.
How did those conversations inform your physical work?
Alongside the talking we tried different physical things, like some choreography around jumping – Elliot jumping as a dancer and me jumping up to grasp the trapeze bar. But never with any connection to our conversations. It was a constant question for us: how to put these discussions into the body? How to translate something cerebral into the body? We never managed it.
Still, I was very happy to dive back into the question of circus’ history and legacy, to ask what are the markers of circus, what makes circus, all of that. These are questions that interest me but that I never take the time to go into – because when I’m at home it’s not like I’m sitting down at my desk for an hour to reflect on what circus is.
In that case, now you’ve had some time to think about it, what is circus for you?
This is the most important question in my life – what is circus for me. Because I want to defend a different circus, but when people ask me what is this ‘different circus’, I have to say I don’t know.
I can define the legacy of circus, and I love it, but I don’t fit in the collective imagination of an audience. It is terrible because I don’t know what kind of circus I am.
In 2020, I had this question of how to do circus without circus, without prowess, without technique. But now it is even more pressing – because today I don’t do trapeze anymore. I do a little bit of acro, but only a little, and I’m going to start a new show next year without trapeze, with a bit of acrobatics, and perhaps a lot of clown.
When I was planning the project I needed to write a dossier for it, and to define my way of doing circus, and the label cirque indigne came from that. It’s my way of saying, OK, I don’t match the collective imagination, I don’t know how to do a salto, I’m scared of hurting myself, I have a bad back, I can’t jump very high – and yet I make circus all the same.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)