There he sits, at the top, enjoying the view. Camiel Corneille has just conquered his own work, a hellish instrument made of a four-by-four wooden plate that can turn in all directions except the right one. A moving balance beam that can also give you a big whack. Camiel Corneille designed it himself and tackles the thing with enviable tenacity. After struggling for three quarters of an hour, the way up is found.
Or actually not three quarters of an hour, but at least two years. Corneille, son of youth dance pioneers Wies Merkx and Charles Corneille, brother of choreographer and musician Guy Corneille of De Dansers, is looking for connection between man and machine and presented a first exploration of this work at Festival Circolo last year. Rudimentary still, but the power was already there then.
Count
So this year a sequel, next year another step further, because that is what the Tilburg circus festival does: follow artists and invite audiences to go along with them. Art, and circus has now become art thanks to the innovation within professional circus education like in Tilburg, takes time.
Especially in the performing arts, it is very difficult to work quietly on one project for a few years. Those who don't make themselves heard or speak with something new at least once a year soon no longer count. I know playwrights who deliver several plays a season, bands who present a new album every year, theatre collectives who release two completely new productions a year. All not even bad. But a lot. Especially now, when the corona reservoir is emptying while new generations already want to go back to the farm with their work.
Novelist
This weekend, at Circus Festival Circolo in Tilburg, I experienced how things can be different. Or maybe it has to be different. After all, a modern circus artist is not someone who puts together a work in a few months. The stakes (your own body and goods) are too high, the training too essential and the audience too demanding. As a circus artist, you can spend years working on a show, just as writers can spend years grinding on a novel. The advantage after that is that, if all goes well, you can tinker with that one successful production for years worldwide, because you are not language-bound.
Festival Circolo shows how circus has evolved from a form of "trick variety" to an art form in its own right, where a unique combination of technical ability and spectacle is no longer performed as a short act, but the audience is introduced to the inner world of the artist in performances ranging from half an hour to full-length, exploring boundaries of human ability.
To your teeth
This also leads, for example, to the almost totally sold-out performance BitbyBit by brothers Simon and Vincent Bruyninckx. They have used an old circus act, the one in which, to name but a few, you pull a tractor off the motorway with your teeth, as the basic material for a five-quarter-hour show that is not only terrifying, unimaginable and overwhelming, but also tells an incredibly tender and moving story, in a movement language that leaves no one unmoved.
They have been working on it for a year, which, given the presentation they put down, still seems incredibly short. But they can continue with this for years to come, where their close collaboration can serve as an example to new generations.
Encourage
Those new generations are being prepared at more and more schools for a practice that is becoming increasingly competitive with each new year full of eager graduates. At Festival Circolo, you can see the young artists, often recent graduates of the ACAPA (Academy of Circus And Performance Arts) in Tilburg, still eagerly cheering each other on, because there are not that many Dutch graduates yet.
Beating the shit out of each other is not necessary. Only in the years after such training does the wheat separate from the chaff. Until then, it is wonderful that an internationally renowned festival like Circolo offers these makers space to experiment and learn.
One rope
This applies, for example, to the three young groups who, thanks to money from the Keep an Eye Foundation could work on a project undisturbed. One ensemble stood out right now. They had spent six months working on what the four of them and one thick rope could manage. The result was touching, here and there powerful and sometimes hushed and sensual: enough material to continue working on in the near future.
Hopefully in the same calm that a man like Camiel Corneille now exudes. Because hurry, that's no good in art.
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