Crying Out Loud Blog

Jugglers make difficult choices. For French company DeFracto, Guillaume Martinet and Minh Tam Kaplan, it’s a sequence set to Chopin’s Op. 10 No. 04: the two of them sat at a black table with a spread of white balls that they juggle, pass between each other and frantically rearrange into precise yet, to us, opaque configurations. As a scene it’s definitely reminiscent of Collectif Petit Travers’ juggling symphony Pan-Pot, with the same appreciation for the sublime drop, but DeFracto accelerate and shrink it and add an extra layer of difficulty — matching the high, technical beauty of the étude but also mirroring its defining characteristic as a piece where the melodic line is passed from one playing hand to the other.

‘We built the thing two seconds by two seconds,’ DeFracto say after, and you sense that this is how they like to work: slowly and painstakingly, with difficulty as an inspiration. At Stratford Circus for a week-long residency organised as part of Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe, the company are one of ten to have been selected as recipients of the Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe award to support new and emerging artists in contemporary circus. As a JTCE laureate they receive a mid-size grant, but the value of this is matched or surpassed by in-kind support. Asked what the scheme has given them, Minh Tam says immediately: ‘Everything. It changes everything. It’s almost embarrassing. It’s strange, the difference between before JTC and after, because before we were struggling to get residencies, places to play, visibility, but immediately after — money, residencies, support. Before it was the street, now it is the theatre… When we started we created this piece on our own and we wanted to play it, so we went outside on the street and played in the street. And now we’re playing in great theatres with technical teams — it changes everything.’

Any artist — any artist — will benefit from free space and time. For a company like DeFracto, progressing in two-second units, there is no other way for them to complete their project, Circuits Fermés, which eventually will become a full-length piece. They’ve had residencies in France and Sweden already, but alongside developing new material they have work to do adapting their street characters to the cooler aesthetic of Circuits Fermés‘ crisp set and lighting (cf these amazing photos by Pierre Morel) and its fragmented music (by David Maillard, built from samples, all tocs and taks). At Stratford Circus they had a half-day with director Emma Bernard to work on stage presence and character as expressed through posture and mien rather than movement or action, and they plan to bring in a director to work extensively and finally on the project further down the line.

In the meantime they will do what they do: work on the micro-scale, as jugglers, choosing the most difficult thing. Next DeFracto go to Paris for the final JTCE showcase, where they will join the nine other JTCE laureates for a two-day showcase before an industry audience of promoters, programmers, directors, journalists and miscellaneous other bigwigs and players. It will be by some distance their most intimidating ever gig. Guillaume: ‘If we do something good in Paris in November we will have money and residencies; if we do something bad we’ll have the street again.’