With a grounding in both parkour and circus, Ward Mortier is an acrobat with a love for public space. For Circus Without Circus he undertook residencies with Harvey Bewley in Reims and Ilon Lodewijks in Split.
Can you say a bit about your background and how you came into circus?
I started with parkour when I was 14 years old – jumping on walls everywhere, left and right, traveling by train through Belgium and then the Netherlands, France, and other countries. I really discovered Europe through jumping on walls.
Then at some point the local circus school here in Ghent asked me and my friend Thomas Decaesstecker, who I’d grown up doing parkour with, if we could come and do some teaching in at the circus school. They invited us to an open training and we discovered the world of circus technique and circus people doing completely crazy stuff. We were very attracted to it, and so we went to train there and things got serious. Later, I went to study at ESAC in Brussels where I specialised in Chinese pole.
The first circus act Thomas and I made together was for a street festival in Ghent and we realised we liked to play for the public. We founded a company, Be Flat, and made a moving performance, Follow Me, as a way to bring the audience with us – not just to show them something but to take them with us on a journey.
Perhaps most people who go into circus have the goal of performing, but is it a less common ambition in parkour?
I think in parkour people are really interested in filming things – and it’s spectacular in a way that really invites it. Parkour is also in the here and now, in the moment, like live performance, but instead of sharing it as it’s happening, it’s more something they film and share. So it’s not live performance exactly, but it is performative.
At its core, parkour is also very improvised. You go outside and you see a wall and you test if it’s strong enough. I always say that parkour adapts to a space, whereas circus has the tendency to construct its own spaces. In theatre as well, you build a scenography and construct this kind of alternate reality. With parkour it’s more like you ask yourself, How can I be creative where I am?
You first residency was with Harvey Bewley, an industrial designer – not the most obvious collaborator for a performing artist. What were you thinking going into that residency?
I was like, ‘industrial designer… what does that mean?’ Straight away I was expecting that Harvey would propose we design a circus prop or piece of apparatus that I would move in relation to.
So I was really happy when that wasn’t our path and Harvey shared a little about his approach – he was talking about his work with soft robotics and performing objects, and the idea of having empathy for an object that isn’t alive. He had this idea of working with air and the transportation of air within a system that he wanted to look into.
I thought it was very cool, but I was also asking myself, How do we make this physical? How do we make this circus? So that was a very interesting starting point to depart from, because it was really not so obvious where we were going to go.
And how did you make it physical – or make it circus?
Once we actually got to the residency I have the feeling that our question was not so much how can we make it circus, and we never really felt the pressure to ‘circusify’ anything. Instead, we departed much more from an exploration of who we were, our respective approaches to our disciplines – and how we go beyond them or maybe work at the edges of them. That was interesting and I think we found our own way to approach circus and design.
But we were working in the winter circus in Reims, this beautiful space with maybe a thousand places for people to sit. It’s really huge, very high, and with no poles in the middle, just a big ring something like 13 metres in diameter. So it was just the two of us with our little balloons and a little tube. The question was how can we use this tool and make people connect across this vast space? So we focused more on the question of people and space than on coming up with stuff like me doing a backflip and landing on a balloon.
We were looking at how we would connect people across the space, on opposite sides of the ring. So we started to add more tubing, realised we needed valves to direct air on one route or another and have it travel in space. Then we also started to want to scale it – make it bigger. We went to a carnival store and bought huge balloons, got bigger tubes, an air mattress, found a yoga ball so you can bounce up and down on it, to push the air. We got hand pumps the audience could use to blow air into the system. So in this way, it became physical.
Your second residency was with Ilon Lodewijks in Split. When I spoke to her she said that you’d come up with this idea of ‘Imposing Spaces, Exposing People’. Where did that come from?
It came out of watching the work Ilon and Dora Komenda did in Reims, when they worked in a fountain in the park. It was a space that imposed a certain structure – the jets of water would follow a set sequence and then loop back to repeat their pattern.
So you can imagine a similar thing for all kinds of spaces, with rhythms that might be more or less regular. So waiting for a train at a station, the different platforms and tracks you can see is affected by the trains going out and coming in. It felt like that would be an interesting thing to work with.
Then for the exposing people part – it’s by creating a performance, an installation, or a happening that you bring a new perspective, a new attention, to the space and the people in it. Passers-by, people who just happen to be sitting there – you expose them in the sense of making them visible in a new way.
How did that work with the different skills you and Ilon brought to the residency?
We gave a little presentation at the end of the residency, and the way we framed it was that I have this immediate, embodied approach to space, whereas Ilon is more analytical and driven to dig down into the layers of meaning and history that a space contains. Ilon would also talk about the idea of turning down the fader on the performer – reducing their presence in order to give more space to objects or to the audience themselves. But one thing we had in common was that intimacy – eye to eye contact – is very important to us in performance.
Our ‘Imposing Spaces, Exposing People’ framework also challenged us to think outside our respective boxes and go beyond our limitations. Being able to adopt the other’s approach was part of that and was very, very satisfying I think. Ilon was challenged to do more and to be more embodied in space, and I was challenged to do less and to think more about the spaces and the people in them.
Has Circus Without Circus changed how you might work in future?
It already changed my ideas of how to make circus, and showed the potential of approaching certain themes, spaces, objects from a completely different point of view. So with our company Be Flat we have started to create a new performance where we mix circus artists and non-circus artists, because it just opens up so many different approaches.
In both residencies, with Ilon and with Harvey, the performer was less central. It was really much more about objects, but also more about the atmosphere and about creating this kind of constellation between audience and subject or theme, in which physical skill is not the central thing happening.
It was really a nice feeling for me to realise you can also make interesting stuff without it being spectacular. Less is more sometimes – it’s quite a good lesson for me.
Circus Without Circus is trying to expand a little bit the boundaries or definition of circus. How do you define the form?
When I was writing the logbook for the exchange with Ilon, I went back to my original application for the project and I noticed that my definition of circus had changed over the course of the last two and a half years.
I would define circus very differently now. Back then I really focused on the balance between virtuosity and absurdity. It was in the meeting between those two things that I found circus.
But now I take a much larger perspective, and link it more to the tradition of circus and of inviting people into a space, having them make the space in some way, and be part of whatever happens there.
Contemporary circus can be so many different things. But these days my own approach is to question the centrality of the performer, and to put greater emphasis on the different elements of space, people, performer. The meeting of those things, that’s my circus.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)