The circus body
Contemporary circus director and scholar Louis Patrick Leroux says, ‘In circus the action is not between bodies, but rather on the body’. The phenomenon of the body as the site of action within circus dramaturgies is currently creating productive tensions in the working practices of circus artists Villads Bugge Bang and Ward Mortier, and director Søs Banke in their development of new work, HUMAN CAN at the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (NTL). As a researcher and performance maker documenting a large portion of this process, I want to begin to examine how these circus bodies are forging new working languages at NTL.
The notion of being ‘acted on’ in circus dramaturgies can be illustrated by a moment in rehearsals, where I noted,
Performers follow a set rhythm by taking turns flicking and slapping their chest, arms and thighs. They pummel their bodies to this rhythm, looking for variations in their physicalisation. Their body both asks and answers: What will this part of my body sound like when coming into contact with my hand?
Camilla Damkjær proposes the ‘organism, signification, and subject—are particularly intermingled in circus’, yet, in this moment between the performers, there seemed to be less room for signification. Performers are of course aware of the signifying potential for the rhythmic organisation, and their various physical capabilities while cohering to set rhythms. They also build the sequence together knowing about its visual cohesion and suspense as rhythms accumulate complexity and speed. But first and foremost, they were bodies hitting and being hit.
But first and foremost, they were bodies hitting and being hit.
Drawing from influential performance trainers such as Philip Zarrilli, I have previously conceptualised the various layers of embodiment for theatre performers as the terms: Subject and object. The subject is the ‘acting’, semiotic body and the object is the phenomenal body being ‘acted on’. Mortier and Bugge Bang’s rapidity of actions, and sheer physical demand modifies my understanding of these.
In my experience of making and observing theatre, performers’ subject and object embodiments oscillate as they respond to stimuli. They develop impulses toward actions, with such actions being caught, picked up and extended by their interlocutor. Impulse has a long tradition in the working languages of NTL – Barba related impulse in his earlier work to a pre-expressivity and thus the thrust before the action. When making circus performance, Mortier and Bugge Bang’s subject embodiments are secondary. The obstacles of the organism are centred. Instead, subjectivities exist within the container of the object embodiment, something only developed after repetition and setting the score. This notion of ‘acting’ as a subject seems to be attached to impulse more than the object embodiments, thus leaving impulse to the latter stages of experimentation for the circus body. This new body has an entirely different relationship to signification, and thus the spectator.
This was revealed to me in the first two weeks of Mortier and Bugge Bang’s collaboration on HUMAN CAN: A trick would be discussed and the demands on each performer agreed upon, before being taken up by them. This often included balances combined with acrobatics but also music and dance composition. First and foremost tested were the limits of the body and the bodies in unison. Once the performers ‘got it right’ through repetition and spoken guidance, and felt safe, they extended the sequence through impulses.
The sole purpose of the subject embodiment wasn’t to be semiotic or to signify but to mediate the object embodiment. It is a supportive a link between the spectacle of the phenomenal bodies and spectators – not about showing but seeing and breathing.
Not about showing but seeing and breathing.
The key differences in the circus body produced productive tensions between performers and Banke, the latter with whom has an expansive repertoire of theatre performance with NTL and beyond. Despite this, Banke looked at me at one point and said:
‘I have never created work this way before.’
She explained how she usually has performers set the score and the text, learn the text and then rehearse. Yet, she quickly realised how this approach is fundamentally unintelligible to the circus body – in many ways working against it.
The idea of setting a score of course exists in circus dramaturgies, but it seems to be set for the organism (performer), not the signifier (spectator). The spectator will follow because they are waiting for the impossible to be achieved and after this the circus performer can access their subjectivity to return to being in the same room as them.
Banke, Mortier and Bugge Bang have developed several strategies for supporting the circus body while interweaving others more familiar to Banke:
- They have harnessed improvisation across spoken languages in support of the organism, rather than as a guide for it.
- Banke has also repeatedly left the room so that the performers can focus on scaffolding their sequence, before returning and finding ways of connecting them back to the spectator and the emerging arc of the show.
In this way, the team behind HUMAN CAN are not just creating new physical vocabularies but also new working practices for NTL.
These are productive tensions because they concern the very essence of performance and its relationship between bodies. The questioning and augmentation of signification is a priority for post-dramatic theatre, shifting how meaning is made for performers and spectators, and locating who is most prioritised.
Mortier and Bugge Bang have made me aware of the opportunities of the circus body. As individual artists with no previous relationship to NTL, new working practices like this a big part of NTL’s future, and a commitment of Artistic Director Per Kap Bech Jensen. Circus and acrobatics have a long history in the theatre, and perhaps it will be in these non-hierarchical practices of negotiation with people of different training backgrounds that will most resonate.
HUMAN CAN premieres at NTL on the 13th of May 2025, Holstebro, Denmark.
© All photos and footage by the author
