With a dual career path in circus and architecture, Dora Komenda is an aerialist who takes a conceptual approach to creation. For Circus Without Circus, she collaborated with Ilon Lodewijks in Reims and Cristina Gallizioli in Ghent – and found herself leaving her circus skills behind her.
Your formal education is as an architect. How did you get into circus?
I always had a background in some kind of physical activity. I did gymnastics until I was 20, and then went to architecture school. As soon as I graduated, I kind of wanted that part of my life back. I saw a circus show in the street – an aerial silk number, and I thought, Yes, I want to do this. I just started training recreationally, at that point I was 25. One thing led to another, and I started performing, but I never had a formal circus education. There are no circus schools in Croatia and besides, I was older, and I had this parallel career as an architect. So I just started working on my own and producing my own work.
Do the skills you have from your architecture training make their way into the circus work?
It’s only in the last few years that these ideas have really crystallised for me, but I think the main influence from architecture that I use in circus is that I develop from very clear concepts. I find I need to conceptualise an idea at the start, rather than begin with doing and then kind of think about it after. I think both approaches are legitimate, and do I use them both, but I think coming from architecture pushes me towards this conceptual way of working.
Reading the logbook for your first residency with Ilon Lodewijks it seems like that was quite conceptual and worked-out. Do you wonder if it could have been better to begin from more of a blank slate?
I actually don’t think it would have been. I think we had a really strong rapport, and I was quite satisfied with those early conversations and where we got to in the meetings.
And you say we conceptualised a lot before arriving, but I feel like we actually had a very vague idea of what we were going to explore. It had to be general because if you’re creating for public space then of course the most important thing is to get there in order to have the real input. So we ended up exploring different areas, and those areas dictated different solutions. The general idea was to make little disruptions in how people use public space, and at some point we arrived at the idea of creating games for passers-by.
But the problem with this first residency was that I put myself into too much of an unknown space. I was fascinated by the idea of participatory art because it was something completely new to me. I didn’t know what it was until I met Ilon! So I was fascinated by the idea that you could create performance art without actually performing in it.
I decided to just leave my circus skills out of it. I didn’t want to perform. And we kind of agreed that together: that we weren’t going to perform in a classical sense, because in circus it’s hard to get away from being the centre of attention.
It seemed very interesting to go a different way. But then the result of this decision was that I was unable to actually give anything to the duo, because I come with circus skills, and if you remove those… what’s left? I was lost. This was a first unknown factor.
A second unknown factor was we chose to work in public space and I’d never created there before. As a concept I liked the idea of a democratic performance space, one where everyone is invited, but it was a complete unknown. And that led to a third unknown which was working with the public themselves.
It was still a very valuable residency and a very valuable exchange for me. I learned a lot, and one of the things that I learned is that actually my circus skills and my circus expression are very important for me. Which should have been obvious, but then I had to go through the experience to relearn this fact!
Related to that idea of circus becoming the centre of attention, do you think that in an interdisciplinary exchange it’s hard not to fall into a relationship where one discipline is the dominant one?
I feel it’s always a compromise when you’re combining skills. At least that’s been my experience with Circus Without Circus. In the second residency, the question of circus skills came again, because my partner there, Cristina Gallizioli, wanted to perform too, but she works in the domain of performance art. So that meant that if I was doing some attractive circus skills, they would for sure become the dominant thing. So we kind of agreed to tone things down and to make sure the circus stuff was not the central point.
At the end of your logbook for the first residency, you say it gave you an idea for an aerial performance that’s dependent on the audience. Did you end up exploring that?
Yes – I did end up working on it because, as I said, I had too many unknown factors in the residency with Ilon, and I wanted to bring the idea of participation into a more familiar context. So I did some tryouts, and actually developed two small projects. One was just the general idea of a performance influenced by the choices of an audience who are also on stage.
The second one went a little bit deeper. It’s about how circus is underappreciated in Croatia and how it will take a long time for it to gain recognition as an art form. So it’s called Make Some Noise, and the movement depends on the noises that the audience makes. They’re asked to ring a bell if they think circus deserves official status as an art form – things like that. So if the audience acts, there is a performance. If they choose not to make a connection, then we don’t have anything.
If the first residency put you into the unknown, the second was with the architect Cristina Gallizioli. Were you on more familiar territory there?
I asked to be paired with an architect, or a person who does something related to space, because I wanted to connect my circus creation and my architectural creation. So far they have been very separated in my life. I just design buildings in my office, and then I do circus shows. They don’t overlap in a direct sense. So I kind of wanted to go into that.
But then in the end circus played a very small role in the duo. I don’t have a problem with that, and I actually quite like where we got to. It’s still performance and I feel like what we made was a performance artwork, with an architectural approach. None of it obvious. It’s not obviously circus and it’s not obviously architecture, but the approach we took was one that was very conscious of space.
With this one as well you began with some pre-residency meetings. What ground did you cover in those initial conversations?
Cristina’s was interested in bodies as spaces – something she’s been researching for some time, not just in this project. I came from a different direction, a different idea. I was more interested in building with bodies. I suppose that’s a circus approach.
When people read about us, they think we’re really similar. But in reality we just have the same education, and that’s where it stops. Cristina trained as an architect but then went immediately into doing conceptual projects and performance art. For me, I do very conventional architecture. So our architectural pathways don’t really have any common points.
That kind of comes through in the logbook where you seem to see things from very different perspectives – and sometimes disagree.
Yeah, we actually had different wishes when we talked in the very beginning. What I said, based on the first experience, was that it was very, very important for me to use circus, and that I definitely didn’t want to work in public space.
And Cristina said the opposite. Like she really, really wanted to explore public space, and she wanted to perform, which meant we needed to find some kind of common ground for us both to perform in – like a frame that would fit both of us in it.
Another thing that comes through in the documentation is that you really made a show. At some point, you even say it: ‘We’re developing a show.’ Looking back on it, did you have the final presentation in mind from an early stage, and did that shape the way you approached the residency?
I have to say, unfortunately yes. And I say unfortunately because when you think about the end product your approach is totally different. At some point you start thinking about how to show this, how to structure it in a way that people understand it and think it’s interesting. So this takes away from the freedom of research.
But then again you learn so much by showing a creation to people. You learn so much about it, and it’s a very important part of the process. So I don’t know, it’s just different mindsets: freely researching versus having to think about having a product at the end.
Looking back on the two residencies, how do you feel about this kind of ‘blind date’ format within Circus Without Circus?
The format has benefits, and also a lot of risks. For me, it worked. Both times I was really enriched by the people that I got to work with, by their ideas and their approaches, even when those were different from my own or we couldn’t agree on certain things.
Are there any new projects that have come out of your experiences?
I started thinking in different ways. Just the fact that I didn’t know what participatory art was in 2020, and now I’m working on a project that deals with it – that’s an obvious result!
But then also the work with Cristina is something we’re developing further. We got some residences and some support for it, so it’s going to be a project that lives on outside of Circus Without Circus.
At the start of the project I would never have said that I could be on stage without doing circus. I can’t really do anything else performance-wise, so the idea of removing this part would make me feel very insecure.
But then this project completely changed my idea of what it is to perform. Who am I as a performer? What can I bring to the stage? I got the chance to experience trying to perform without actually doing any circus.
Interview by John Ellingsworth (April 2023)