Trained as a teeterboard artist, lately Joren De Cooman’s work has looked for new approaches combining circus with participatory forms. For Circus Without Circus he paired up with visual artist Ivan Svagusa in Copenhagen, and then with dancer Thalia Pigier in Odense, to explore working closer to the ground.
Even before joining Circus Without Circus you’d been focusing on interdisciplinary work – how did you come to it?
In the beginning, when I was in school, I wanted to do teeterboard. We’d seen some other people doing it, but this was before YouTube, so to learn it ourselves we had to go through a process of trial and error. The school only had a crappy old board left over by a Russian teacher, so at first we spent 20% of our education time dedicated to our real specialty: building teeterboards. The rest of the time we spent breaking them.
By the time we finished school, we’d managed to design a teeterboard that didn’t randomly break apart every now and then. We also worked out this one really sleek routine that we did with it, with mats underneath.
After that we worked a lot in Quebec, in the bigger companies, who all suddenly had exactly the same board as us. It was nice but things had shifted: it wasn’t about trying to build something better and then play with it anymore. It was only about perfecting a skill. And I was never in any company because I had the highest skill.
After a few years it felt like the only interest anyone had was to train for an extra twist. Meanwhile I was thinking, What if we got rid of the mats underneath? It’d be more dangerous, so we’d have to jump lower, but we’d have more space to move and to try other things. That’s when I first started to see that I needed to find what was next for me. I decided to work on my own – to find out what I could do alone on a teeterboard, and to get back to that feeling of trial and error.
Reading through the logbook of your first residency with Ivan Svagusa it seems like trial and error was an important part of it. How did the two of you get started?
One of my first ideas for the residency with Ivan was that I wanted to interact directly with audiences. Our residency was at Metropolis, who’re all about public space, so it made sense for us to work with the city. I wanted to go out into Copenhagen and look for ways to interact with the urban space and the people in it. Ivan meanwhile wanted to start from drawing movements, and so we tried to simply combine the two goals: we went into the city, I would work with people there, and he would draw the movements or sketch them out.
But I think we didn’t realise coming into the residency how different the creation processes are in visual arts and circus. Performance has this immediacy, but in visual arts it takes much longer to get to something concrete. After that first day we realised we had to re-evaluate everything. We decided to be more spontaneous, and for the rest of the residency I think the nicest things we found came from leaving our plans behind and starting to improvise.
How did you improvise together when you come from such different disciplines?
It was important to learn from each other how we create. We started by leading each other through our different warmups. And it’s funny because Ivan, as a visual artist, does physical warmups as well, because he needs his body to be in the right condition to be able to draw and paint. Then he was also teaching me how to draw lines and sketch things, and that’s when the two worlds started to come together – realising that to draw a certain line you needed your body in this position, that your shoulder has to be relaxed in a certain way or the line will come out too crisp. We started to mix painting with more acrobatic movements, and these warmups led us more and more to combine the things we did.
Another part of that was getting Ivan to take the stage more. I wanted to get away from this dynamic where I’m the one onstage doing things and he’s the one documenting it, and to try and really make it one thing that we do together. It’s always difficult not to go back to the things you already know, and to really put yourself in a different position.
It sounds like a very iterative process, and one thing that’s striking looking back on the photos from the residency is the sheer volume of drawings that were created – they almost cover the studio.
Yes, there’s something I really liked about all that material – the way it added a layer of reflection on top of the improvisations or exercises, or gave us something to look back on. Everything we’d done was still there. We could start working again the next day and literally work on top of what we did before. It’s something funny that doesn’t exist in live performance, where everything is gone the moment after you’ve done it.
Speaking of traces, the residency happened a long time ago now – more than a year. What’s left of it, or what did you learn from that experience?
I think you learn a lot working with somebody from such a different art field. One thing that sticks with me was the hours we worked and how constant it was. There was drawing going on all the time, even when we were eating; or sometimes we’d be with the other duo, at two in the morning, drawing in the studio, making music for fun, having some beers, and continuing the conversation of the day.
That’s also what Ivan always told me: that a residency for him is this time where you go to some secluded place and completely immerse yourself. You keep improvising, keep sketching – and you make the most of it. So that was a big eyeopener. That and the fact that in visual art it’s possible to keep a trace of your research, because what you make is there forever. It’s this body of material you can go back to and use in other ways later.
When I asked Ivan the same question he said he learned from you how to relax more – especially doing the movement work…
We did do a lot of duo movement work, which became about moving each other and painting with each other… At the moment I’m playing in a show where we’re four circus artists on stage with our fathers, who aren’t circus artists or physically trained. At the start of that creation we spent a month or two working with them and teaching them to move, how to give and carry weight, how to find the points where they could relax. I used the same stuff with Ivan and it worked really well because he’s very open and not scared to try things.
Your second residency was with Thalia Pigier. How did you approach that one after your experiences with Ivan?
We started off talking on Zoom beforehand, but I’d actually seen the presentation of Thalia and Villads Bugge Bang in Belgium, so that gave a lot of direction to our initial conversations.
There was a moment in that where a plant was suspended from the ceiling, and it was sort of orbiting around while Thalia was interacting with it. The plant leads the movement, the floating object becomes alive, and it’s like a subject to interact with.
So I think a first idea was to expand on this but to add verticality, like in aerial circus – even if I’m not an aerialist!
I guess dance and circus are closer as art forms – was the collaboration with Thalia more straightforward in that sense?
Not more straightforward, but there’s less that surprises you. Anyone who does circus has taken a lot of dance classes and done contemporary dance. The way artists from the two fields create can be quite similar, but then there are also things which are really different.
Part of what we focused on with the residency was creating an environment: we set up a lot of hanging objects, and set them all swinging, and then looked at how we could interact with this space that was moving all the time. We were in the Dynamo workspace, which is like a treasure cave for all kinds of weird objects – and we found all these funky helmets which we decided we could hang up. They were too light to swing for a long time, so we filled them with sand to make them really heavy.
I was like, Great, now let’s get in there! But Thalia was scared to do it. For me this was how to start: create an environment, and then look for the limits and the risk that’s in it. For Thalia it wasn’t like that. She was saying it doesn’t need to dangerous all the time, that we could look for something that’s soft – and we ended up getting this big bushy plant to hang up. So the circus thing is to look for the limits all the time, and for Thalia it was more about the aesthetics.
Then neither of us were aerialists, so we leaned into the idea that what we were doing didn’t have to be spectacular. We ended up looking at how we could build a space, an environment, while we were in the air, on the structure, and things were moving all around us. So the performance space is something that gets built from nothing. And the idea that we are so close to the ground makes it a bit absurd because there’s this idea that aerial always needs to be high up.
How did that go with the final presentation?
With the presentation the feeling was more that we had the opportunity to show something to an audience – it was just an option. As we were finding things throughout the residency we kept a list of anything we wanted to try out with an audience. But then in the end we decided not to show things we’d already done. We just put our list on the wall and said we could explain anything that was on there, but that we wanted to use the presentation to find more material. That fit for me because I like to work in a participatory way, and I’m not scared to do a presentation and have it fail completely. When that happens you can just stop and tell the audience it’s not working, and explain things for a bit before continuing.
The name of this project is Circus Without Circus, which is trying to get at this idea that circus isn’t just a list of disciplines, but is more like an approach or perspective. So, what is circus in your view?
When I think about that question, it’s more about the link to what circus used to be for me, and how I look back on doing teeterboard and use that background. And actually, now, I think about whether what I do is enough circus. Yes, I’m supported by a lot of institutions from the circus field, and my funding is from circus, but is it enough circus?
What I say now is that I give a little wink to the circus in my material. The piece I’m making at the moment is between participatory arts and circus. It’s based on research I’ve been working on for a long time and it ends with me doing teeterboard with the audience. The idea was to work with what it means to give yourself over to somebody and for them to show that they’re there for you, so that you become sort of like one body working together.
I also have a new project, a small performance, where I try to bring the audience together and to build, from nothing, something like a trampoline – a net that they can play on. And it’s not that I go on it and start doing somersaults; the audience can join in and play on it as well. I did some research showings, and the nicest was with this elderly woman who sits on the net and everybody pulls on the edges, and as the net goes taut she’s lifted one metre in the air – and she loves it.
And you see the audience love it as well. This playfulness from childhood comes back. And this is circus for me because it has this little thing of looking for a limit. Even if your limit isn’t that high, isn’t that spectacular, but you’re pushing it in a playful way, and all the others are there to help you out. Then when the limit is crossed it’s not one person who did it, it’s everyone together.
Interview by John Ellingsworth