Trained as an industrial designer, Harvey Bewley’s current work centres on storytelling with objects. For Circus Without Circus he joined forces with acrobat Ward Mortier for a first residency in Reims, and with aerialist Noémie Deumié for a second in Split.
You trained as an industrial designer, but have collaborated with performance companies and worked in a lot of different contexts. What was your path into your current work, and how do you describe it?
‘Industrial design’ means very little to most people. Even if you ask five industrial designers, they’ll probably give you five different definitions of what it is.
The first place I studied industrial design was Loughborough University in the UK, which was really like a product design factory. I learned a lot of skills but looking back on it now, I feel like any romantic ideas I’d had about creativity and making things were slowly beaten out of me there, as I was moulded for the industrial design profession. I went out of the factory and straight into a consulting job, working in Cambridge for a few years doing medical design and learning a lot about engineering and how to actually make stuff.
Then I suppose I almost had an early life crisis and ended up studying design again but at Konstfack, an art school in Stockholm. That gave me the freedom for the first time to explore what I’m interested in as an artist and as a person. I was trying to get back to a more instinctive way of playing around, making things, and telling stories.
Now, the way I usually describe myself is as an object designer, but my work is like a combination of storytelling, engineering, materials research, and puppetry. The challenge is finding a context for the work, and that’s why I’ve been kind of drawn to the world of performance.
Your past work with performing arts includes collaborating with John-Paul Zaccarini for a project at DOCH. How did that happen and was that your first circus experience?
I went to a workshop at DOCH as part of my masters project investigating playfulness. What does playfulness look like? How could you enact playfulness? I was trying to get my head around that, and what I’d seen and loved in circus was a bunch of people daring to do something absolutely ridiculous – but doing it with such intent and with such passion that it becomes meaningful. Like Washington trapeze, it’s like something a kid would invent: I’m gonna stand on my head, swing from the ceiling – I saw one guy at DOCH adding upside-down juggling to the discipline!
Most people think that’s ridiculous, but then there are these circus people who go to school to learn it and then practice it until it becomes meaningful or magical. I had no idea how I could use that with design, but it was just this manifestation of raw playfulness, of using your body, and of acting first and thinking after.
Eventually through this fascination with the circus world I met John-Paul Zaccarini. I think he was doing his PhD at the time and I had this extremely memorable meeting with him where he sat me down and he was very charming and very kind about the work I’d been doing, and he just looks me dead in the eyes and goes, So I’m doing a project where I’m gonna design a rope that’s like a penis – or it’s not like a penis, it’s more like a rope. It’s like a rope penis. So I need to move it, but then I also want to be able to circumcise it, and then maybe if that can sort of fall off and go into the audience…
For me, coming from traditional design consulting, I was sort of scratching my head. In the end, we had a minimal budget and a week to play with, so the best I could come up with was slightly animatronic tentacle and this rope that you could pull apart like you were pulling away flesh. But that was a kind of introduction to working in circus.
Your first residency for Circus Without Circus was with Ward Mortier, and you said in your logbook that you started from a simple principle – two balloons connected to each other with a tube. Where did that come from?
The idea initially came from my masters, when I kind of threw out everything that I’d learned about how to be a proper industrial designer and tried to get in touch with this more playful side.
I was forcing myself not to use any engineering tools or digital tools, and instead to just find stuff and put it together. I was looking at elasticity at the time, and basically just collecting loads of elastic stuff and pulling things together. Then at some point in a workshop with some other students, we had a pipe and a balloon attached at either end. And it sounds so obvious now when you describe it, when you show it, but basically you squeeze one balloon and the other balloon gets bigger.
It was like magic – because it sounds obvious, but then you start to think, Well, okay, how long can we make this pipe? And then you can make it infinitely long, or let’s say very long, and it doesn’t really take time for the action to travel from one end to the other.
And I’ve since learned that this is kind of the fundamentals of soft robotics, which is another thing I’ve been working on. But that magical moment that I felt like I’d stumbled upon led me down this path of making latex objects that would dance and move. When I described it to Ward he was so open and up for it that we just took the basic idea and ran with it.
If a lot of design work happens at a desk, or in a workshop, how did you make sure you could work together in a performance space?
It was a really interesting challenge. In a more classic workshop scenario you’d gather everything together and have a very well curated workshop for maybe half a day, but with this project you have to sort of drag it out over two weeks – keep it going, keep building on what you’ve got, and sustain the momentum and flow as well as you can.
I think I can be quite rapid with prototyping and putting stuff together, but it still takes time. So that’s why I wanted to work with something that I already had some experience with, to avoid all the boring practical stuff that can totally kill the flow. It meant that everything stayed at quite a low fidelity, but at the same time it was universally understandable and we could get all the pipes and things at the garden centre.
We did a final presentation, and for that we tried to lay everything out so that people could see us assembling and making things. It was deliberately presented as quite frantic and scattered, as that was a fair reflection on what had happened.
It led to some unplanned audience participation that worked really well. Ward is amazing at that – he’s so comfortable improvising with an audience. At one moment we had this kid on a yoga ball that was connected to a balloon that another person was holding up in front of them – and bouncing on the ball would blow air into and inflate the balloon more. We knew that it was fine, but of course the person holding the balloon feels like it’s going to blow up in their face – and the audience expects that too – and the kid is just bouncing up and down on the yoga ball, oblivious. It was a really beautiful moment – and very circus-y in its way, as everybody has an understanding of what failure is, which is the balloon bursting.
What do you take away from your experience at the residency?
I think the residency was a way for me to explore and hone my own ways of working in the circus and performance world, and seeing how my skills can translate to it and be articulated in a way that’s useful to people in that world – so I learned a lot about that.
I also feel like I learned a lot just about collaboration in general. Because it’s very weird to explain to people that it can be challenging to get paid to spend two weeks playing around with someone in the Champagne region in France – but I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s emotionally very challenging to spend two weeks with someone you don’t know. With Ward, I think we synced up in a way that we dealt with it quite well, but it’s really nonstop. One of the other artists said to me that the best way to describe it is like having a fever dream. You’re sort of living in this alternate universe, and you’re kind of in it and out of it at the same time – it’s so strange.
The second residency you did was with Noémie Deumié. Did you go into that one with some ideas you wanted to explore?
We had a couple of very simple ideas, and mostly agreed to turn up with those on the day and see what happened – knowing after our previous residencies that everything can change once you arrive.
Noémie had this idea of making an infinite loop of silks, and then on my side I had this idea of using the silks and the energy of movements there to make other lighter things move, by using the air they displace or by connecting the silks to other things to have knock on effects.
So then we tried those ideas out very roughly. We threw a lot of old black curtains together to make an infinite loop, but quickly realised that the big difference with this residency was that Noémie works suspended high from the ground – and you can’t half ass that stuff. So the whole idea of prototyping doesn’t really work when someone has to hang off it and trust their life on it.
So our big, pure ideas died fairly early on, but from the ashes of those burned ideas came some new, Frankenstein ideas – ones that were more hacked together, more unpredictable, and more intriguing. And we chose to do that because otherwise it would become the thing that I was trying to avoid, and that I think Noémie also didn’t want, which was me acting as more of a consultant, where we have an idea and then I can do it but I have to sit down for a week to do some proper engineering drawings, and then access the right facilities to actually make something. So instead we tried things out and then if they didn’t work would just say, OK, but what did work with that? And then go further in that direction. So there was a lot of serendipity.
How did your ideas evolve then?
We had rigging and anchor points all around the room, so we ran fishing line through those and then connected up little paper characters and puppets and started playing with them. When they fell, they’d float down in quite an interesting way – softly, not like a 70 kilo body hitting the ground and breaking bones.
Eventually, that evolved into tying fishing line to rope, to the silks, then another set of silks to chain them together. I’m a really passionate, obsessive fly fisherman, so that was another skill or practice that came in with tying knots and testing the strength of the line.
What we showed in the final presentation was our kind of Frankenstein loop – a fishing line attached to a fishing reel, which was then attached to some rope, and then some thicker rope, and then the silk.
The way we showed it, it wasn’t an illusion; we didn’t want to create magic. So it started off with this very bright pink rope which looked like it just came alive out of nowhere, but was actually attached to the fishing line. And then that would travel up into the ceiling and round a ring and then round another ring, and then it would take another angle and kind of move over the stage space.
And we choreographed that movement until eventually it scaled up to something Noémie could hang onto. So instead of having normal, very secure rigging, we were playing with the security and tension of these materials that shouldn’t be used. Because really, they shouldn’t be holding up anything – it isn’t what they’re designed for.
Did you give a final presentation in Split?
Yes. A funny thing about this project is that there’s no expectations for the residencies, but then when you have to show something to an audience at the end suddenly it really matters. It changes a lot.
In Split it was in a circus tent with like 150 people piled in. We had this delicate thing with all this fishing line and it’s not like if something went wrong we’d be able to just improvise. If something went wrong, we’d have to just switch the lights back on and that’d be it.
Luckily it all went quite well. It was much more a show than the first residency, and a very nerve-wracking experience.
Has the experience changed anything about how you view circus, or how you approach industrial design?
I think my perception of circus changed in that I left my definition behind. Even if it’s very convenient to come up with definitions and generalisations in trying to understand this world, actually the cool thing about circus is that you can’t define it. If you try and put it in a box, it will always jump out.
For industrial design, my design education was really focused on how you use objects. When you design an object or product, you ask how do you design it so it’s intuitive and anyone can pick it up and understand what it is and where it comes from. You become a master of giving people exactly what they need, and showing them how to use it. But everything I’ve done that engages me creatively and is more in the circus world is exactly the opposite. How do you take things and misuse them?
Circus is about doing things that you shouldn’t, with objects or the body, but doing them for so long that it’s like a craft. That space between misuse and use is something that I find really interesting.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)