The French aerial artist Bambou Monnet and the British contemporary dancer Elliot Minogue-Stone worked together from 5 till 18 April 2023 in Split (HR).
The meeting
We find ourselves in this research laboratory as a circus artist and dancer. We started the week with a big brainstorming, a blank sheet of paper to fill. From the beginning we talked a lot about our disciplines, our relationship to the practice, to our bodies, to research, to the artistic, etc. But also about our relationship with the imposter syndrome, with our fear of not being good enough in our discipline, with our fear of not being up to the task. To the feeling of being unworthy. We had this in common, the feeling of not corresponding to the expectations of the collective imagination of our disciplines.
It was therefore interesting to define circus and dance (which we will detail below). But before that we had another big question in our minds: what can we do between circus and dance that hasn’t already been done?
Dance & Circus: what’s new?
It’s been like thirty years that dance and circus worked together, and it’s a very common mix. When we met each other, the first thing we have noticed is the fact that we are very similar. Our lives, our art, our practice, are very similar.
Also, in circus school Bambou had a lot of dance classes, and in dance school Eliott had acrobatics classes. On top of that some circus disciplines are called: acro-danse, trapeze-danse…
So this is something that already exists before us, that we carry the heritage of two disciplines that have worked a lot together, and it seemed impossible to come into a research laboratory without taking this into account.
What can we do with these two disciplines, is innovation still possible? After these pessimistic thoughts and given this context, the right question could be: What can we (Eliott & Bambou) do? How does our circus and dance collaborate? (in order to come back to ourselves, today, in this project, and to get out of the idea that we have to find the answer to a big question)
The Legacy
As we said before, and in order to define our disciplines, we began asking questions about definition and legacy. Not our legacy specifically but rather what we are inheriting? What do we inherit as a circus artist and a dance artist? And how does it inform our work? For our art forms we deal with an intangible legacy – live performance is difficult to document so often we’re dealing with the idea or memory of something rather than actual material. Regardless, we came to some questions:
For example:
- What is circus/dance in the collective imagination? What was it, what will it be?
- What is circus/dance for us? Now, today, but also what was it in the past, when we were ten, and what is it going to be for us in 20 years?
- What is circus/dance for my mother for example?
- Or for my dog, for my neighbor, for my high-school teacher? For you?
So, as you see, there are a lot of possibilities to define circus/dance, you can find a lot of points of view, and find many different answers. So we have chosen to answer this question: What is the legacy we carry behind us?
DANCE
- Beauty! You have to be beautiful. Ugly dancers don’t exist! There’s this pressure to make beautiful things – movement, music and of course people.
- Grand theatrical frontal spaces. We’re here to see a spectacle. The audience-performer relationship is clear and unchanging.
- Technical prowess / virtuosity – showing off a practiced skill, something that most people cannot do. The nature of the skill can be less clear (unlike circus) but there’s a sense of prowess nonetheless.
(A little note) – I was thinking about Pina Bausch when I was coming up with this list so perhaps this helps you gain an insight into the process.
CIRCUS
- The risk (of dying): Initially that is what is in play: being high up, without protection & do the famous “salto mortale”. The fact is I (Bambou) never knew how to do a salto, I’m very afraid of dying, and as a trapeze artist I have vertigo, which is really inconvenient…
- The circular/ring architecture: Traditionally the circus takes place under a big top, which is in circular. For some circus purists, circus in a frontal space is not circus anymore.
- Physical prowess / extraordinary capacities / physical particularities: In circus you can see the most flexible person in the world, the strongest person in the world. AND we come (basically) to the circus to see something extraordinary.
There are also a whole bunch of other much less funny legacies that we carry, like the relationship of domination of human beings over exotic animals…
But! Here, in our laboratory, there is no lion, there are no elephants, there is not so much death risk, so much prowess, and the audience is in a frontal disposition. So today for sure, it’s circus without circus.
So this is what we inherit: it exists and we don’t wish to ignore it, but we really believe that dance, or circus can be everywhere, dance can exist without beauty and circus can exist without prowess.
What brings us together ?
MOVEMENTS
We also worked on the notion of dance in the circus, especially on an aerial. First, we made improvisations danced on the ground, with the feeling of ecstasy, of pleasure, of idyll. The goal of these improvisations was to choose a music that evokes this feeling, to put it as loud as possible, and let the movement come. After these improvisations, I wanted to transfer this research to the trapeze. But it was not conclusive, since it is very difficult to find the same freedom on a trapeze, for safety reasons, physical reasons – I am obliged to always pay attention to my hands, my feet, which prevents me from moving in total freedom. So we chose to have fun with it, and to propose to the public a spoken improvisation on the trapeze around this very point: the trapeze as a prison, where I am not free of all my movements.
JUMPS
We chose to work around jumps, because it is something that unites us and that we have in common:
Eliott: I sometimes tour with a piece from the company ONAF led by Ehren Verrelst. The work, called Combination Theory, is about exhaustion and community. The choreography is 30 minutes of unison jumping. What’s nice for us is that it brings a clear physical material. One of our challenges here has been putting our conversations, discussions and discourse into the body. We’re both physical performers but often the two realms (body and intellect) struggle to connect. These jumps, although not especially linked to our conversations do provide a clear thread between our art forms. It also just looks interesting, maybe that’s enough!
Bambou: So I suggested adding trapeze on this material, because jumping is something that already exists in my practice because obviously, I need to jump to catch my trapeze. This was a question I had when I was in circus school: what can I do with this very short moment in between. You are on the ground, you move your arm, you are jumping, and then you are in the air. It’s just a half-second jump. Even if you want to blur it, you can’t really, because it exists. So we have decided to work on a succession and repetitions of this little moment between the ground and the air and deal with this moment that is usually rather ignored.