Dutch artist Ilon Lodewijks specialises in participatory forms. For Circus Without Circus, she was paired with Dora Komenda for a residency in Reims, and then with Ward Mortier for two weeks in Split.
You describe yourself as working in the intersection of performance arts and social engagement. What lead you there?
I actually started my education with a Bachelors in Social Work, many years ago, and I’ve always been interested in this question of how people live together in a society – what works and what doesn’t, what are the difficulties, where do we meet each other.
I started moving into theatre in order to work more with people. I was really fascinated by the creative space it offered – a space which is not often cultivated in our capitalist society where you can express yourself in ways you normally wouldn’t, about things that matter to all of us.
Later, I started to work a lot with big theatre organisations that had education departments reaching out to young people, or amateur performers. Eventually, I got a little frustrated that in that context we would always be asked to react to a professional piece – so we would do a workshop relating to the Shakespeare production happening on the main stage. I started to think that actually the work we were doing with young people, in these workshops, could be the art experience on its own. The workshop could be its own artwork. That led me to the kind of participatory work I make today.
What drew you to Circus Without Circus?
In the way I work I generally start from a concept or idea, which arises from something that I see in society, and that opens a kind of theoretical frame for research. What was interesting to me about Circus Without Circus was the opportunity to explore a more embodied approach: what if the starting point is the body and its relation to space?
That also meant a shift in perspective for me. I’m not so comfortable being a performer, and see my position as being together with the audience almost.
In your first residency with Dora Komenda though you went away from an embodied approach and decided to take the performer out of things entirely…
Yes, we made this decision to take the performer out of the centre, and to work with passers-by as our potential audience – rather than with an informed audience that comes to a certain place to see a show – with the overall goal of interrupting public space. That meant that in all our experimentation the focus was on materials, because if you want to remove the performer then something has to replace them and pull in attention. What you do becomes very installation-like.
We ended up at working at the park’s fountain, and looking back on it maybe that was because it had an in-built element of performance. The fountain had its own rhythm, and that meant we could add something very small to it – in our case some balloons that rose and fell on the jets of water – and already it became a kind of performance.
Did you try a lot of other spaces in the park?
Yes, we researched lots of ways to make interventions in the park. It was actually already a very playful space, but in a very set, ordered way – like this is the place where you do table tennis, this is the workout spot, this a bench.
There was also a big empty field there, and we had the idea to make a snake from balloons, some of them filled with helium, some not, so that it would float over the field and move itself about in a serpentine way. It was a very nice concept, and I still want to make it, but in practice it didn’t work. We didn’t have the materials and of course you’d need it to be huge to fill this space the size of a football field.
Looking back on it, I think we should have worked at the fountain from that start. But perhaps that’s the difficulty with this project. Are you at the residency to make some material? Are you researching an idea? Are you meeting another artist and just seeing where it goes? It is so free and open, which is a real luxury, but it’s also its own kind of constraint.
What did you learn from the experience?
I learned a lot from Dora personally – she has a very different practice to mine, but we really complemented each other, even if the fact that we both work conceptually maybe held us back in this collaboration.
Apart from that, I think the main realisation was that if you want to take the performer out of focus and you don’t want to work with an informed audience then you move more into installation, and that’s really another context to be doing research in.
Another thing that has stuck with me is just how much the variability of public space manifested in that fountain. If the wind was blowing, if it was sunny, it behaved different and was used differently. On the day we presented suddenly it was 22 degrees and the whole fountain was full of naked kids. And of course you can’t control it. That’s fine for research, but makes it harder to fix a performance in this installation style.
Your second residency was in Split with Ward Mortier. He has a very different background to yours, but you’ve both made work in public space. How did that residency begin?
We had a totally different starting point for the second residency, because when I was with Dora in Reims, Ward was also there for his first residency with Harvey Bewley. So we’d already lived together for two weeks and knew each other in a way.
So we’d talked already and Ward had seen the presentation Dora and I had done at the fountain. He was very drawn to the idea that a place can set a rhythm which a performer can work to. From that he came up with this phrase ‘Imposing Spaces, Exposing People’ – which means that a space imposes a certain rhythm on your work and then the work can expose certain details about the people in that space. He wanted to see how this played out with other kinds of spaces.
So we had this idea, and then when we got to Split we decided to just go straight into it, and get to know each other’s practices better along the way.
So did you start scouting for spaces as soon as you got to Split?
Yes, we went walking through the city scanning for good places. Immediately, it became very clear that Ward has such an embodied approach. He’ll just start testing things straight away – putting his weight on a wall to see if it’s steady enough to climb and jump on, tapping things, shaking things. I followed along and copied him with all the tapping and testing.
Then when we found a good spot we’d just stay there for a while. That was also really Ward’s approach – just to be somewhere for a time, stay there an hour, and see what happens and what you feel like doing. It was a very impulsive style of working.
As part of that process, we talked a lot about all the references for a work. For Ward, he usually makes a show first and then later, with the help of a dramaturg perhaps, he finds out what could be the ‘why’ for it. The why evolves out of the process, or it’s rooted in the fact of doing something in public space. For me it’s the other way round: the why comes first.
It was super, super interesting. But of course at some point the question became: What can I do? Ward is very at home performing in public space and he has this circus vocabulary ready to use. So I felt a little bit like, Oof, what can I add here?
What did you do to try and combine your approaches?
Split is very touristy so we did these tests in different places. Like there’s this gate in the old town where a lot of people pass by on guided tours. We were talking about how Ward likes really big gestures with his work – so big that usually there’s no doubt that he is performing. And we decided to play with that and to bring some ambiguity into it.
We spent a few hours at this gate area, which has a kind of square with these beautiful marble tiles. Guided tours come in and the people stop to look. We were there with them and we were barefoot – and because we were barefoot, for a lot of people that was the code: oh, you’re a performer. So we looked for these more subtle things, and were thinking a lot about what are the codes of performance in public space, in interaction with the architecture, the people, the space, and how could we use those to communicate with an audience.
As the residency went on, we kind of agreed that I had to do more and Ward had to do less, in whatever space we found. We would set an alarm and start walking around and then wherever the alarm went off – that was our space to work with.
Are there any spaces that stick out in your memory?
One day we were working on this concrete walk by the sea. There was a place there where you could lie with your belly on the concrete and look down into the water, and you could see all the way to the seabed because the water was very still there. We thought it could be a very nice viewpoint for the audience, if they could lie there and watch some kind of object theatre – if we could use mirrors and have things appear and disappear on the water.
So one day I decided to work in that place for half an hour, but on that day it was very windy and the sea was super wild. So I was like, Fuck, what do I do now? Because you couldn’t see anything, and if you lay there on your belly you’d just get wet.
I took a walk on the beach and gathered up all the things I found washed-up there that were human made, with the idea of making a kind of ballet of found objects. But then when I tried to attach these objects with ropes to a rock in the water, they kept getting washed around by the waves and it didn’t come out as I wanted. Ward said, Oh, but maybe you could go out there and sit on the rock and then maybe the waves can also flow over you, and you can slowly fall into the water as well and then… It was an interesting provocation – by myself I would never have thought to sit out there. It would put me in a place where I’m not comfortable, but usually that’s the place where magic can be found.
Do you think it’s had an effect on your practice going forwards?
I think we got quite far with this Imposing Spaces, Exposing People concept, and we know for ourselves what it means. Next week I’m going to do some site-specific work on an island and for sure a lot of ideas from the residency with Ward are going to be with me in that.
I’ll also take away this experience of greater embodiment, which I think can be another entry into conceptual work. Ward and I talked a lot about how to develop responsiveness to all the layers of a space, including the social codes and constructs it contains. One time when we set the alarm, I ended up in these football cages that kids play in. As soon as I got in, I had this sense that it felt like public space, but actually wasn’t – and felt that I was kind of intruding on their space. But if you feel that way, walking in there, then maybe that’s the topic that’s there in the space. So that can become very interesting material to work with.
Another thing to come out Circus Without Circus is I’m going to work with one of the other artists, Joren De Cooman, on a project he called WEB where the audience are connected with cords and ropes, and the aim is to build up trust between them so they can challenge their physical boundaries. So he asked me to work with him on this interactive part, on how to engage an audience. We’re going to make the show this summer/autumn, with the premiere in December.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)