After five years of touring his first show, and on the cusp of creating his second, circus artist Nicolas Fraiseau joined the Circus Without Circus project to explore long-standing interests in instability and fire as a material for performance. His residencies were with Italian architect Cristina Gallizioli in Split, and with Croatian filmmaker Natko Stipanicev in Odense.
You came into the Circus Without Circus project wanting to work with some elements – fire, wax, a broken up Chinese pole. Where did these things come from?
A lot of it goes back to my training at CNAC. The first year in Châlons, I was not happy. I’d done a year at Rosny before, and there it was quite strict: you have classes from 8am to maybe 5 or 6pm and every week it’s the same thing, the same schedule. But then in Châlons it changes all the time – one week maybe you are doing dance classes, then the next theatre, then singing. It’s really more free. It took me a year to figure out how to find my own path within the school, but in the second year I did a lot of my own research – and the material from that is stuff I’m still working with, now, five years later.
Most of it came about by accident. At the end of the training at Châlons you have to present something – a final act. I wanted to work with fire, and so I was working at the time with fire, candles, combustible costumes and flying lanterns. I was developing things for quite some time, and then during a presentation for the circus school in Châlons I burned myself in front of everyone. Right at the end of the presentation I did this thing with a big explosion of fire – everyone laughs and cheers. Then it’s 15 minutes of thanking people and everyone slowly going out of the chapiteau, and as soon as they’re all gone, after, it’s like FUCK.
It was quite a bad injury in the end. It took two and a half months to heal over.
After that, I wanted to keep working with fire and use it for the final act, but the school wouldn’t let me do it. I got pissed off and went out of the school to a park and set up a tiny pole there – with thin iron wires on the first day, then ropes on the second because the wires cut my hands. The third day was the presentation. I went on stage with my Chinese pole and ropes and did 25 minutes of complete shit – nothing was working.
But it was so funny – it was 25 minutes where the public was laughing at me and I was laughing at myself because there were so many accidents and nothing was working. After the presentation, the teachers told me, ‘Wow, that was really something.’
It came off somehow – a moment de grâce. Afterwards I decided to develop the concept more, and ended up working with the director Christophe Huysman. That became my first show, Instable.
Your first residency was with the architect Cristina Gallizioli. What did the two of you decide to work on?
We talked a couple of times on Zoom before the residency, and everything came together really fast. I told her I was working on instability and balance in circus, and that I was interested in going back to working with fire. And she was also working with imbalance, but in architecture – building structures without walls, or made only from lines, or using different materials like wood and fabric.
When we met in Split we bought some things to work with – candles, wax and sand. We tried to build a structure with melted wax – which was not easy – and then we started to work with fire in various ways. We looked at the architectural space created by a light (even the tiny ones created from a candle), and the ways fire transforms material – how wax melts very quickly, but then reverts from liquid to solid in just a few minutes, allowing us to make these really rapid moulds and designs.
The collaboration really worked with Cristina because she has this architectural meaning of life. We were staying in this very unusual house, and she took me on a tour through it asking me to feel the space, the energy of different distances and points of view… I loved it. It opened me to a new perspective.
In your logbook you say how you felt it was important not to retreat into your own art forms in a way that meant you were only doing performance and she was only doing architecture. Why did that matter?
I think it was because coming into the residency I really wanted to understand what’s important in public space. And for Cristina she wanted to try to feel what was important for me, in performance. Stepping into each other’s disciplines worked because we had common interests in terms of subject matter. We could talk a lot and, and agree on a lot of things, even if we’re on different paths. We didn’t do it, but if we’d split up and gone into two separate spaces, we could have made two completely different things but then they both would have been about balance, and would have been speaking the same language somehow.
Did you do a final showing?
Yeah, after one week with the candles and wax and sand we got a bit stuck. The presentation was coming and I was like, Fuck, what do we present!? We need to do a show!
We couldn’t perform any fire stuff in the end – they wouldn’t let us. After a week we’d smoked the building out too much. We were melting all this wax, which was made from paraffin, in an enclosed space. I remember that we were a bit intoxicated during the whole residency, which happens a lot when you work with fire. So in the end we presented some bits on Chinese pole, showed some videos of the fire stuff, and just talked about what we did.
What do you take away from it?
Actually, with Cristina I found a friend. Someone who has a different sensibility. I think this is the best thing. But I can’t say everything that’s come out of it yet, because our collaboration isn’t finished.
Now I’ve started to work on a new creation about fire, so the work with Cristina has gone into that. For this show I actually want to build a whole space where I can work with fire, so I called Cristina to ask how to start to imagine that: how do you design a space? And she told me some of the different ways you can do it – like you can build small models and try to see what it would be like to be inside them, or you can go in a field and mark things out to scale as a way of imagining it. Cristina is sort of my exterior, architectural brain – she’s really making me think differently about things.
Your second residency was with the filmmaker Natko Stipanicev – so a very different proposition. How did that one start off?
We spoke beforehand and tried to find the things we had in common, but even at the start it was difficult to connect. He’s a filmmaker, working with computer software, and also making experimental music. So his idea for the residency was to work with cell phones, attaching them to my body, on the wrists, the legs, and connecting them via Bluetooth so that as I moved it would change the music he was making on the computer. We did try this for a few days but it didn’t match for me. We found some ways to work together and made a film in the end. For that we spent two days filming movement clips and then after my movement was overlaid on other films and animation. We also created a silly dance choreography to ‘Histoire d’1 soir’ by bibi flash and dressed up like marines with fur to have some fun! We also did some impro piano with chinese pole.
I guess filmmaking, animation, coding has a different pace to live performance.
Yes – I work with the now, with presence, and Natko works through code. So in his case it is the computer which does something, but he is coding it and manipulating it, in this very defined process.
So it’s not easy to come together when you’re not starting from the same place. And yes you can say that in what we tried there was an almost-live connection between the cell phones and my movement, where the movement creates the data and then that is transformed in code – but in performance I feel this is something that has been done already. That was another way in which we lacked a common background: I saw things from the perspective of performance and its history, while he came from the worlds of experimental music and animation. So we had different contexts.
And I can also admit that part of it was really about my ego: I want to be in the now, I want to be present as a performer. So in a way we were not speaking about the same speed, the same goal, the same vision. It was quite tough, but that’s okay. I learned a lot from this.
What did you learn?
I learned that sometimes collaboration doesn’t work out – and that’s fine.
I also learned that how you end up collaborating depends a lot on where you are in that moment. In the residency with Natko, at the beginning of November, I’d been working like crazy since June with no break, working in three different projects, and with a lot of other things going on in life.
What I think now is that you need to find some calm, some focus, and have a clear mind to meet whatever comes up – and that’s also about accepting that what you do can be really good, or it can be a failure. So I learned that you always need to get anchored, and that I should be less fixed on my ideas or ways of approaching a collaboration.
Last question. Circus Without Circus is trying to expand or blur the boundaries around circus art. What is circus for you?
Johann Le Guillerm describes circus as a minority practice seen within the circle – and from all its points of view. So circus is things that are little known, little seen, or that don’t usually happen on stage. It has something to do with the exceptional. I like that definition, and then, for me, in circus there is also a universality. With Instable we toured a lot overseas and to all kinds of places. In Seoul we played in front of the city hall, right in the centre of the city, in an enormous plaza full of people. Then in Benin we played in a deserted field next to a village. The people that came to see us were called through a megaphone. At first there was no one, then five minutes later – 300 people.
Seoul, Benin, Turkey, La TOHU in Montreal – we toured everywhere and it worked everywhere because there is a universality within the physical act. In its movements people see whatever they want to. With Instable, it is about a man who tries to lift himself up and who can’t – someone who experiences failure again and again. That kind of determination is something universal. The audience see it, they know it, and for me there’s an incredible power in that. For me the circus is a space of multidisciplinary expression where an acrobatic body puts itself in a situation – only with its body (just the acrobatic movement), with a scenography (such as L’immédiat by Camille Boitel), or with an apparatus (like Horizon by Chloé Moglia). The circus is movement, rhythm, but also matter and a relationship to the world and to space.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)