Natacha Kierbel is a dancer interested in how movement can emerge from the body. Her two Circus Without Circus residencies were in Split with Elise Bjerkelund Reine, and in Ghent with Petra Najman.
Your background is in dance, but you’ve worked with circus before, right?
Yes – I did a lot of ballet when I was young, and then switched into contemporary dance. When I graduated I first started to work in another European project – Shapers, led by the company Ex Nihilo, which was about making work in public space in the Euro-Mediterranean region. Already it showed me something completely different from what I knew. After that I worked on many projects, a lot of them involving public space.
My first encounter with circus was when an artist asked me to be an outside eye for his show. I didn’t know anything about circus at that time, but through this experience I kind of discovered what contemporary circus was like. I got into it and into acrobatics, and became surrounded by a lot of circus artists. It was a path for me to think about art differently.
Your first residency was in Split with Elise Bjerkelund Reine. How did that one begin?
The residency in Split was actually the first time I got a residency to carry out my own research, and to share a process with someone but to put my own name on it.
So I think I put a lot of pressure on it. I was thinking that I’d prefer to have too many ideas or too many materials prepared before the residency, rather than getting there and not knowing what to do. So basically Elise and I spoke before we met, and we each brought a proposition that interested us.
For Elise, it was working with clay. We planned to make moulds and sculpt extra hands and feet – things like this. For my part, I had this idea of working with cardboard boxes that I really wanted to explore. It came out of the thinking I’d done over the past years about how to communicate between dance and circus, and how to build a concrete relation with objects.
The cardboard itself came because the residency was happening during Covid, and for me it connected to themes of construction and reconstruction, of falling down and falling apart, and the idea that you can have a lot of things, many objects, but still they don’t help you and can’t stand up together. You can’t rest on them because they are empty, only air, and they are fake in some way – a kind of façade.
So that was the starting point. I was also thinking cardboard would be nice because we would be able to build the space very easily and quickly.
Do you think bringing an object or material into a collaboration makes it easier for two artists from different disciplines to relate to one another?
For me, I guess it does, because there is a kind of goal or something that we can count on. There is something concrete in the space. It’s not just abstract; there is an actual object. Having this helps me to come back down to earth sometimes.
How did having Elise there affect the way you went about doing your research?
As I said, it was my first residency in my own name and Elise has much more experience, because she’s been creating shows for many years. So she was really chill actually. I remember that as soon I would get stressed about things or a bit nervous or a bit stuck in some way she’d be like, OK, now we can relax, maybe take a little walk, and then come back to it.
So I think it helped me a lot, the fact that we were two in the residency. It brought something really playful, I would say.
Your second residency then was with the trapeze artist Petra Najman in Ghent. How did that one kick off?
For me it was a bit more complicated to start this process because I felt like I was already engaged in many things – my own projects and other people’s. So to start another research out of the blue was hard and I didn’t know what direction to go in, or what it would really make sense to try and develop in two weeks.
So with Petra we didn’t have that many ideas at the beginning before we met… and I guess it’s like a safe place for me to find some themes and some objects to work with and to use those as a kind of framework and a playground.
So that’s what we did: we decided to work around the theme of housework and of these 19th century images of the blanchisseuse (laundress) in France. From there we went into all the aspects and objects of housework – brooms, flour, buckets, stuff like that. We set out to find new ways to use these things and ways to create an environment with them.
Did you end up using trapeze a lot, as that’s Petra’s specialty?
Not really. At the beginning we had one trapeze and then made a second with a broom, a kind of fake trapeze which would be much more fragile. Then very quickly we put away the real trapeze and worked only with the broom trapeze, which was too fragile to do crazy stuff on it. So what we did was more related to the floor. We also suspended a second broom, hanging from a rope from the ceiling, which we could pull on and make swing in the space.
So I guess it was more about the objects than the circus.
What do you think you learned from your residencies?
Actually, I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself the same question and I don’t have a very concrete answer.
In these Circus Without Circus residencies, we don’t know each other, we work differently. You find yourself having to adapt all the time and it’s really interesting but somehow it can be very tiring as well. At the same time, the other artist can really inspire you in what they do and their way of being on stage or in the studio.
You already knew the circus field before coming into this project, but did it change your perception of the form?
It didn’t change my way of seeing circus as such, because I was already in the field. But it’s more like I feel that because the frame was more circusy, I allowed myself to go to some places I wouldn’t have gone go if it was more of a dance framing.
I think everything I did in this research, I saw it through the gaze of circus rather than dance. I think this allowed me some kind of freedom or a different perspective.
What interests me in circus is that when you move you do it as a necessity – you have to hang to something in order not to fall, or because you have a goal, or because you’re reaching towards something. That dynamic creates a particular sensation in the audience as well: playing with risk plays with the empathy of the audience.
Have any collaborations or new projects come out of your experience?
In fact, I am continuing the research with cardboard that I started with Elise and making a full performance from it – my first show. I think even before the residency, when I started to think about the subject of cardboard – how it related with Covid, what was happening at the time, and my state of mind – I already thought it was something I wanted to go further with than only two weeks of exploration. So now I am doing it!
Then another is that one of the other Circus Without Circus artists, Dora Komenda, asked me to replace her in the piece she’s developing with Cristina Gallizioli. My residency with Petra in Ghent was at the same time as theirs, so I saw their process, and then they asked me to come in to take Dora’s place for their presentation in Split. They want to continue the project, so probably I will join it.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)