Circolo turns the growing pains between sport and theatre into something beautiful

Large spinning steel behemoths, mowing blades or relentless hands of a clock, which grind you as a human being if you don't duck, or jump, or roll away in time. There were two of them during Festival Circolo in Tilburg, this year, and it always impresses. It happened in Un Loup pour l'homme in the Railway Park and at La Chute des Anges at the Tilburg Schouwburg in a festival where, anyway, there was a lot of focus on the relationship between humans and technical things.

In addition to infinite ladders (also coincidentally in both the aforementioned performances), they were also a fragile wrecking ball in Ceramic Circus and a great big rolling chip bag holder at Ripple. The Big Object is the content-determining element. Of course, this is more common and you could even call it a separate genre. Camiel Corneille has been experimenting with it for a few years. Someone like Boukje Schweigman could be called a trailblazer. Attentive readers may remember her performance Wiek, in which dancers battled an unrelenting spinning screen for over an hour. 

From skill to art 

What these circus performances around an object have in common is that they take the physical challenge, which is what much circus is all about anyway, one step further. A laudable endeavour, but of course you run into a limit at some point. In the end, 'holding up signs', or 'diving for a steel pipe' is just what it is. Technically it can be good, excellent or unimaginable, and can be exciting enough for the audience, but it is more sport than art. 

At a festival like Circolo, we can see how circus turns from skill into art. A metamorphosis that is, of course, also the reason circus is taught at a college of arts and not at Papendal. So physical performance is about something else, and we are talking about magic, imagination and meaning. A pianist can put hundreds of notes in a minute, but we ultimately want to be triggered in our imagination, thinking or feeling.

Slightly different

Examples enough of how beautifully that can work. Ceramic Circus for example, is a performance in which artist Julian Vogel saddles himself with impossible things. From an inverted bicycle to a race with a wrecking ball, he plays with the expectations we have in the audience: we want to see performances, but also a build-up to a meaningful bang in the finale. He gives us those, but always just a little differently. 

Vogel does not tell a story, but he does convey an endless pleasure, while it also makes you think about how you yourself are actually mostly running after things where you could just wait. Absurd theatre at its best. 

Collectively looking for boundaries

Where Vogel makes life difficult for himself with all kinds of devices and objects, you can also do without. Earlier, I wrote about the performance La Boule. In it, two women tried to pull off the ultimate fusion, resulting in an endearing and heartwarming hour of theatre. Their project bears similarities to the show Meander, which was shown at Circolo a few days later. Associations with Theo Janssen's Beach Beasts abound: independently operating limbs and acrobats working as a swarm. I spoke to the makers previously about their particular working process, in which no one outside the collective would be in charge. 

Meander is a performance like a nature documentary. We see teeming life above and below water, underground and chased by the wind. To summarise the Complete Attenborough in an hour of circus is quite ambitious, and as most of the show is set in twilight, it remains a bit of a search for meaning at times, but the endeavour produces something quite beautiful. Atmospheric too, and perhaps a little too lacking in concreteness for the very young. 

Ultimately, the development of circus as an art form is about such clubs as Knot on Hands, Felix Zech and Martha&Kim, the creators of Meander. They are the seekers, the experimenters and the toilers who keep pushing the boundaries of nature and their own ability. And then it's all the better if they don't need cross-border leaders to do so.