Crying Out Loud Blog

The more I see of the arts industry the more it appears as a dense rhizomic mat of projects and networks, layered and interwoven. The Activate Promoters Exchange at Poole was led by Activate, hosted by the Poole Lighthouse, embedded within the Carte Blanche season, part-funded by the European Commission’s INTERREG IV programme, and a continuation of the work of the network of network initiatives that includes City Circ & the Cross Channel Circus Alliance (together: CCCCCA; each C must be louder than last, the A is pianissimo).

Following on from a similar meeting/gathering at Cherbourg’s extraordinary creation centre La Brèche in February, the Activate Promoters Exchange (delightfully: APE) was essentially a one-day Anglo-Franco meet-up that incorporated some presentations and panel discussions (aimed it seemed at blocking out some big concepts and ideas that could then be elaborated in free-form networking at the event, and beyond), a small showcase of developing work from new and established artists, and a bit of tense market action as artists sold their ideas/projects to the assembled promoters against the clock in the Peachy Coochy format.

Opening with the presentations and panel discussion (titled pragmatically and a touch aggressively ‘British contemporary circus: what can it offer to the UK and Europe?’, and featuring Circus Space’s Daisy Drury, Le Prato’s Patricia Kapusta, La Brèche’s Jean Vinet, Circomedia’s Bim Mason, and Lighthouse’s Elspeth McBain) representatives of each nation did the groundwork of laying out some of the major differences between the French and English models, with a particular focus on France’s radically higher level of funding, activity, skill, and pedagogical and professional resources. But naturally the grass is always greener. To the UK, France is a shimmering emerald green sea, while the French themselves turn jealous eyes to the vibrant, flourishing grass of Belgium. Belgium returns the longing gaze: France’s grass just seems better, thinker and lusher and longer.

I’m not sure who wants to be the UK, possibly no one, but as French arts funding is bitten away at the edges UK operators are seen as wily and entrepreneurial producers from whom the French are eager to learn — particularly resonant was the fact, compared between Jean Vinet and Elspeth McBain, that La Brèche is 80% funded and has to raise the remaining 20%, whereas for Lighthouse the split is exactly the opposite.

There is, as well, exportable work coming from the UK. French commentators who saw the strand of English work at the Cross Spring showcase in Cherbourg picked out the work of Sugar Beast Circus (Milkwood Rodeo & The Sugar Beast Circus Show) and Layla Rosa (What If…?) as being identifiably and desirably English, in SBC’s case responding to a tradition of music hall and variety, and in Layla’s tackling a subject (the Islamic veil) that in France is socially and politically entangled.

Defending the UK’s honour in the panel discussion, Circomedia’s Bim Mason covered a lot of interesting ground, saying that UK circus makes a virtue of its limitations by working with lower-level skills, and investing energy instead into the theatrical mechanisms that frame them; that UK companies are smaller and have greater interaction with the corporate scene, many of them working 50/50 on commercial and artistic work; that there are basically no, or very few, venues with the technical equipment or knowledge or will to host large-scale work; that there’s a diversity of work and aesthetic emerging from artist-led companies where the performers are the creators; and that circus in the UK has emerged more from street arts and outdoor performance.

Some of these key qualities were I think were borne out in a small platform of new work that followed the discussion, collecting as it did four disparate and stylistically wide-ranging pieces: Gisele Edwards delivered Art of Rope, a performance lecture in the style of, and coming out of work with, Jos Houben; Rachel Fox showed her Circomedia end of year piece, The Final Boarding Call, finishing on an impressive and prodigious piece of aerial choreography (and performance); Ilona Jäntti and Natalie Reckert offered a slither of full-length piece Double Dutch, their work together once again abstract and exquisite, like a snowed-on landscape, what you know hidden and changed; and, a man down, Gandini Juggling performed their 2010 Watch This Space commission Smashed!, twenty sublime minutes of Bauschian tanzjonglage (their word, a good one).

Then following was the Peachy Coochy session — where presenters have 6 minutes and forty seconds to talk about their project, the time divided into 20 second mini-presentations that follow the remorseless advance of a backdrop slideshow. Four companies presented their ideas and early workings for future shows. From Paper Cinema, having recently worked with Upswing on their piece Fallen (at the Mime Festival this year, btw) Nic Rawlings showed some of his previous work and spoke of his interest and excitement in finding ways to integrate circus movement with his particular style of crafted micro-animation. The Gandini’s revealed (excitingly!) that they are working with Circo Aereo’s Maksim Komaro, the director of Race Horse Company’s Petit Mal and himself a mean juggler, on a piece that goes back to what is simple and beautiful in the discipline by delving into the dreams of jugglers. Mimbre laid out plans for Bodies Falling Upwards, a projected outdoor work where five performers start in separate locations as soloists, earn an audience, and then draw them to a central point where the individual narratives may entwine and resolve. And Geneva Foster Gluck outlined the next step in The Sugar Beast Circus’ continuing interest in cracking the smooth, dissimulating surfaces of entertainment media – in this instance with a B-movie-esque piece, Event Dimension, staged as a gameshow and about gameshows (also: the nature of time).

I would like to see all of those made, and of course the chances of that increase radically if there’s this intelligent network of projects stretching over the country and across the Channel. It’s anyone’s guess what the next layered initiative will be, though one suggestion at APE was for a consortium of venues to collaborate in arranging tours of contemporary circus work in the UK and France; and beyond the specifics there was an encouraging feeling that everyone present, artists and promoters, were in difficult times willing to band together to become the guardians of circus’ eternal flame.