Knocked off the trapeze by pandemic lockdown (now back on it), Elise Bjerkelund Reine joined Circus Without Circus to explore new approaches. For her residencies, she collaborated with dancer Natacha Kierbel in Split and visual artist Ivan Svagusa in Reims.
In your application to the Circus Without Circus project you mentioned that the pandemic had stopped you from doing trapeze, and that you were in a moment of rebranding.
Well, when I wrote the application it really was still the pandemic and I’d been forced to make all these changes. The ability to do trapeze had just disappeared and I was left with just the body. It felt quite naked. I had a lot of time to develop movement quality, contortion, handstands – so that part of my artistic research became much richer than it would have done otherwise.
Now, I’ve started doing trapeze again, but what I do still evolves over time. When I went to circus school I did swinging trapeze, that was really my thing, and then at some point I stopped that and went towards fixed trapeze and contortion. In the process, things have become more open. Doing swinging trapeze you really have your box of tricks: you can do a pirouette, you can do a salto, and so on. Fixed trapeze also has a vocabulary, but it’s a bit more loose. And then contortion has even more space for improvisation with qualities of movement.
I think I reached a point where I was asking myself, What do I really do? Before it was so clear. So participating in Circus Without Circus has been a way to explore that by meeting other artists and other practices.
Your first residency was with Natacha Kierbel in Split. How did that one play out?
I think we came in with different levels of experience, but it was also a nice meeting – and really fun to work with this kind of younger, more excited energy. I guess we met in the middle there, as well as between dance and circus, so it was all about taking inspiration from each other and having fun with that. I think we managed to have a lot of playfulness and freedom in our collaboration.
You decided to bring materials into the research – clay and cardboard. What was the thinking there?
I think Natacha had the idea to come in with cardboard, and I had the idea to use clay. We could have come in with nothing and just improvised with movement, but it felt like if we added some extra element then we could start to explore something new together, with our different languages. I think it’s a bit easier than just arriving on an empty floor and being like: Let’s move.
The clay idea came about because we had a mentor for the residency, Jakov labrovic, who was working with sculpture. During the residency we also made a clay replica of my hand, with the idea we were going to use it somehow, but then the process took so long that it wasn’t finished until we left. So it became more about the experience of being in the workshop and making it.
For me, that’s fine – I see Circus Without Circus as being a project about research. It’s not really about the results, so it’s not something to get frustrated about.
You mentioned in your logbook that you concentrated a bit more on the work with cardboard. What kind of things were you trying?
I think with the cardboard we created quite a lot of choreographies and images, and more of a scenic world. With the clay it was more about making imagery and improvisations out in the city, playing with this idea of the feet being stuck in the clay. It wasn’t meant to be anything spectacular, or to be put on stage really.
With the cardboard, we were actually working on stage – and we tried a lot of things. We tried climbing on the boxes and balancing on them, seeing where we could put weight, moving around them, and then we also built various towers to see how high we could go. And then we also had an evening where we made like a little art atelier and we painted on them. A lot of it was just putting on music and then improvising: if we have this setup, like this landscape of cardboard, how can we move around in it and create different images and atmospheres.
A lot of the CWC residencies have this point about halfway through where they flip from being pure research to ordering and shaping material ready for a final showing. Was that the case for you?
With the clay, it was pure research. I guess we have some film footage somewhere, but we never edited it. For the cardboard, at first it started off as research and then Natacha was interested in putting it together, so we went with it. I said she should write it and then I could assist, because for me I’ve had this experience of putting material together a lot of times already.
Your second residency was with the visual artist Ivan Svagusa – which is more of a stretch compared to working with a dancer. How did you plan that collaboration?
We did talk a bit beforehand. At first we thought we’d be working in the circus building in Reims. It’s a really beautiful old space, but then when we arrived we switched to another one – more of a typical theatre.
I think it was a little bit difficult for Ivan, because in his mind he had a clear vision about how the space was going to look. But when we managed to adjust I think it became quite easy and fun to work together. We listened to a lot of strange music and did improvisations in the dark. I tried to learn a little bit about how to sketch, and then I’d brought this loop of rope which I helped Ivan to play around with – just exploring how to be comfortable with moving and giving weight.
We also went out into the city and did sketches. We had a very fun residency I think. The result looks very dark and poetic, but we had a lot of fun creating this dark and poetic universe.
Was it hard to bring your skills together and work in the same space – rather than working separately and just sort of reacting to each other?
I wouldn’t say that it was very hard, but it’s kind of two very different languages and two solo disciplines. But we had the right energy together I think.
We also kind knew that we would arrive with two very different languages. In the beginning we maybe did more of what we were comfortable with, but that also gives each person the time to kind of understand what the other one does – and where are the places we could realistically collaborate.
Again, we tried not to put a lot of pressure on the results but instead to really find inspiration from and support each other.
Ivan mentioned that working with circus artists has helped him find some new ways of being more physically engaged when he draws. Did working with an illustrator give you any new ideas or inspiration as a circus artist?
We did this exercise where Ivan would draw a kind of map to set a path, and then I’d do improvised dance or some kind of movement based on these lines. I’ve used that technique again since – imagining the lines I make in the space with my movement. It’s given me a wider focus on the whole shape of a movement. It’s quite a direct way of getting inspiration – this very fluent way of being in the lines.
For the final presentation you worked with large-scale projections and live drawings. How was it to show your work?
In one way it’s very nice to show something, but the big theatre space in Reims can feel like a very pompous place to show something that’s really just research.
But it felt quite chill to actually do it, even if it was weird to show something modest in such a big space. The presentation itself was actually quite defined, and we ran it several times, but there were also spaces in there for improvisation.
In the end, the showing doesn’t matter to me so much. It was about the research we did, and the meeting of the two of us. It was quite a nice combination – to have this visual artist coming from Split in Croatia, and me, a circus artist from Norway but representing Denmark in the project. It was really nice just to meet Ivan and hear his views and opinions on things.
Circus Without Circus is trying to expand the circus art form a little. So, what is circus for you?
It’s a hard question. But when I think about what circus has, what is its ‘thing’, then I think it has to do with risk. It doesn’t have to be dangerous, but it’s kind of a key concept for the genre. When I was doing swinging trapeze, the risk was very direct, and it came with these big adrenaline kicks. Now when I’m improvising, there’s not a lot of adrenaline, but I still feel there’s some risk at the heart of it.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)