French aerialist Noémie Deumié came into Circus Without Circus with the ambition of creating a kind of performative event. Her first residency took place in Copenhagen with musician Kwinten Mordijck, and her second in Split with the industrial designer Harvey Bewley.
Before coming into circus you had a background in swimming. Do you think it affected your approach to aerial and to circus work? Or gave you a different relationship to the audience?
I did artistic swimming for around ten years, and in a way it did affect my approach to circus. You have a lot of freedom in the pool, and I have the feeling it inspired me to try to move in a really organic way. At school I was not trying to learn how to do tricks, but more trying to find a path on the silks.
When I wrote my application for Circus Without Circus, I was working with a company that I still work for called Libertivore. The director Fanny Soriano is working a lot with internal feelings. She wants the people on stage to really be connected with themselves, and for the audience to be separate. We never break the fourth wall. It enhanced a lot an internal tendency I already had, but now I’m working with other companies where I’m much more direct on stage.
So now I try to combine the two approaches – to be both really internal and also to connect with the audience and ask them to be more active readers.
At school I felt stuck working on my own, even if I liked the material I developed there. Now I prefer to share the stage with someone. There are so many more possibilities, and I really like to be the secondary focus on stage. You don’t disappear, but you take a little bit less importance on the stage.
Your first residency for Circus Without Circus was with the musician Kwinten Mordijck. How do you normally use music as a performer, and did that influence how you planned the residency?
With music, I’m not someone who counts the beats or has that dance approach of keeping time, but still music really helps me – I lean on it, you could say, and use it more fluidly, along with silence.
For my final act at CNAC, I worked with a sound designer to mix these different sounds and pieces of music together and then to direct the sound to make it seem as though it was coming from above me. Kwinten and I talked about that and I told him I was very interested in this idea of directing sound, and of seeing how this could influence the body.
We imagined a lot of things together, and shared examples of installations, but then when we arrived in Metropolis (Copenhagen) we were limited a little by the space and by the equipment that we had on hand.
We had only four or five speakers, which made it a bit blurry for me to hear the sound travelling. Two days in I tried to talk Kwinten into changing the plan. I had this second idea of recording a podcast. We were in Metropolis, a place that works with urban spaces, and we had some circus artists in residency, and the people on the streets. So I thought we could do music and circus outside and record people’s reactions and make a kind of postcard journey of what circus in Copenhagen is in August 2021.
But I think for Kwinten it was too far from what he’d imagined and he wasn’t ready to kill that original idea – so we stuck with it, but did it in more of a low tech way.
You ended up working with a metronome in the residency. Was that challenging given how you normally perform with music?
I think Kwinten was really shocked when I said that I don’t count time. He wanted me to do lots of repetitive movements on the silks, but the height was limiting – I usually work with eight metres and we had only four.
So we worked for two days on listening to the music, and Kwinten helped me to create these kind of dynamic pops with the music, without strictly keeping time. I never worked like that before and it was really interesting.
But after that we were a bit stuck, so we decided to mix in some improvisation, where I would do something repetitive, and add layers to that repetition in a way that followed the music.
We made progress, but we were also really held back by my physical limits, because I can’t do eight hours a day on silks. I’m used to working when I’m really tired. It’s my work, it’s the essence of circus. But it was still very painful for me – for the hands, the stomach, everything, to do two weeks of full days.
What did you learn from the residency?
I learned a lot about how to use music in a different way, because I worked with Kwinten in a style that’s closer to how a dancer works with music. It changed a bit the way I do silks. Working for two weeks at a really low height, I just made a knot in the silks and worked there, and so I found a lot of nice things I can do without much height.
I think I also learned that I should trust myself and go with my instincts in a collaboration – not to impose my universe, but to have confidence in it and share it more with the other partners. I remember back when we did the residency it was a bit hard for me, because in this situation you are working with someone you don’t know, in another country, in a language that is not your mother tongue. I was maybe intimidated, or afraid of being like the ‘casting error’ – a bad match. So I felt I didn’t trust myself as a researcher enough. When Kwinten disagreed with my ideas, I was like, Ah, OK, let’s do yours. It felt a bit like I was compromising to avoid discussion or conflict.
If we redid the residency, I would approach it completely differently. For me, it would be interesting to search instead for something which is really between circus and music. And for me, that’s not what we did, even if what we did was really interesting and nice. As it was, I feel that we both stayed in our comfort zones – me in my silks, Kwinten in his instruments. We each did what we do best, and then combined those two things.
Your second residency then was with the industrial designer Harvey Bewley. How did that one take shape?
I met Harvey in Denmark beforehand, and he told me that he was working with performing objects. I looked at his website and I really enjoyed what he was doing with these latex robots. I really connected to it and found it very subtle, but I was also thinking, How are we going to combine our skills?
I really didn’t know, but I had this first idea that I wanted to work with a moving scenography. I had this idea of an infinite loop of silks that you can climb and climb and the silks move but you stay in the same place. I explained it to him and he made me understand that it’s not what he was searching for because circus people always ask for new objects and apparatuses they can play with. So I didn’t really push that.
Then he told me about the idea of using air to make these aerial paper sculptures move. I thought that was nice so we decided to choose that one idea and go through with it.
How did it go in practice?
We searched a lot with the paper sculptures, and how to make them travel in space, but for me it was too far from both of our skills. Neither of us are puppeteers, even if the puppets we made were really beautiful in themselves.
Still, for me the way to do Circus Without Circus is to have a lot of random experiments and then take the one thing that is relevant to both of you… So another thing we tried on the first day was using all these gymnastic rings that were hung up in the space. We ran through fishing line, attached to rope, attached to bigger rope, attached to sewn together curtains. For me, it was like, Wow, this is something that I could never have done by myself, or even thought of. It was the perfect combination between my apparatus, my discipline, and my wishes of having the apparatus travel within the space. It used my circus apparatus and Harvey’s knowledge of fishing and his design precision – so it was a meeting of our two disciplines.
But we also found it hard to come together in the way we worked. As a circus artist, I have to experience things with the body, whereas for Harvey he just has everything in his mind and he predicts if something will work or not based on that mental model.
For me, I can’t throw away an idea if I haven’t tried it seven times first. Because in circus it never works the first time. It was a bit challenging for me to explain this – that even if it shouldn’t work I still needed to experiment with it, that to find the potential in an idea we have to do it over and over, and that when you work like that often it will lead to something you never could have imagined beforehand. In the end, we did rehearse some things over and over, and we found tiny details that we hadn’t imagined.
I think the tricky thing with Circus Without Circus is you’re asking two people to work together who are used to working as individuals. I think what we missed was a separate time, before the residency, where we could establish a way of working together.
Do you think it’s a challenge to be an artist who has more embodied knowledge when you’re working with someone from another discipline?
In this case it was. For example, we used two silks for our presentation and I was doing the rigging myself to swap them over. So one day the carabiner got stuck in my hand while I was up there, and I started breathing a little bit more heavily to get oxygen to my muscles – and Harvey was afraid that I would fall.
In fact, I could have stayed up for two hours! But I realised that he didn’t know that, and that I didn’t explain to him that I wasn’t putting myself in a dangerous situation. I just forgot to tell him.
That reenforced the idea I had that Circus Without Circus should start with a short laboratory where we all come together to kind of share our ways of working and explain our capacities. As artists will all have a lot of unusual skills, but it’s hard to define them and to present them to each other. So there is a lot of misunderstanding, I think.
In your original application you said you were interested in creating a kind of ‘moving museum’. Was that relevant in the end?
When I wrote that what I had in mind was that I’d be doing silks and then people would move around the space and around me. So it was more an idea about changing public space. But when I look back on what Harvey and I did, I think it’s really close, in a different way. The object took much more focus, and it was the object that moved all around the space.
For me, silks have to be updated in order to continue to reinvent circus. And artistically I think we arrived at something that could be really interesting to develop. I imagine the objects moving all around the surroundings of the tent, going out and coming back in again. So the movement that I searched for can also be made by the apparatus, not the public.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)