Circus of the Subconscious

“I hate circus.” This is how one editor’s email starts (not Fest's). No niceties. No hope-you're-wells. Circus-hating. My pitch—circus-centric as it is—is clearly dead in the water. “Well,” the email backtracks momentarily, “I don’t hate it. I just don’t think it’s art.”

Coming from the arts editor of a national newspaper, this is a big statement. This is someone, after all, who decides the art that you get to read about. That, in turn, affects what we value and accept as culturally significant. If they say, "Classical Ballet, yes; Scottish Dancing, no," that matters. It comes with consequences. It determines whether something is deemed high or low art, who gets to hear about it, whether it’s in or out. Circus, apparently, is definitely out. Not art. Case closed.

There’s no better rebuttal to that position than Circa, the Australian outfit that emerged from the ashes of Rock and Roll Circus in 2006, under the leadership of artistic director Yaron Lifschitz. It’s not that Circa revolutionized circus—companies like Circus Oz and, dare I say, Cirque du Soleil had already pushed it well past sawdust and screamer marches—but they pared it back to something stripped down and raw. As contemporary circus had grown in confidence, it had also grown in size and sweep, serving grand spectaculars for a global audience. Lifschitz and Circa returned it to a human scale: of bodies, of effort, of expression.

“The tradition of contemporary circus had been to take the act and layer it with a sort of literalness: put lycra on it, give it a context or a story and assume that it’s going to mean something,” Lifschitz tells me over Skype from Melbourne. “What I did was to say, ‘Let’s get rid of everything. Let’s get rid of characters, costumes, sets, story. Let’s look at the fact that there seems to be a specific gravity to everything we do, a set of basic operators: line, shape, form. That’s where our early work started.”

Since then, Circa have spliced circus with Shostakovich, twisted it into contemporary dance, filled cathedrals with angelic aerialists, and, in this year’s Edinburgh offering, Beyond, toyed with Darwin’s theory of evolution and the notion of animal spirits. Last year, the company won a special Total Theatre award for their influence on a new generation of circus companies: Pirates of the Carabina, 3 is a Crowd and A Simple Space, to name a few.

All this stems from a different approach to theatricality: not more dramatic, but more absorbing and intense. “Circus tends to be added to,” says Lifschitz, “More tricks, more people, more set, more theatricality. Then we wonder why there’s nothing very present, artistically.” Lifschitz does the opposite. Presence is all.

Lifschitz, who describes himself as a “failed theatre director,” drew his inspiration from companies like Complicite, DV8, Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. “What I craved was heart and intensity.” He turned to circus not out of any particular pull to the medium—“As an art-form and an aesthetic, circus isn’t really my thing,” he says—but rather because he “was interested this idea of the human body pushed to an extreme where it becomes a kind of emotional thing.”

That, according to performer Rowan Heydon-White, lends Circa’s work an authenticity that sets it apart. “Seeing your muscles work,” she says, stretching out as part of a post-show warm-down, “Seeing us sweat and pant and breathe, putting our all into something, is part of what makes it beautiful and interesting.” Circa tries “not to hide that from an audience and go ‘Ta-da,’ but to go ‘Look what our human bodies are achieving'.”

Heydon-White has just come offstage in St Étienne. She’s both a base and a trapeze artist, which means that, in addition to flying through the air with the greatest of ease and whatnot, she spends much of every show with other members of the company—usually men—stacked up on her shoulders. One routine in Beyond, sees her solve a Rubix Cube while strolling about the stage with a man stood upright on her head. She frowns with concentration. Her neck muscles brace themselves. It’s not spectacular or showy, but it’s certainly impressive and engaging. You know how much it takes. You live that with her.

“We don’t make our routines by stringing our hardest tricks together,” Heydon-White explains, still touching her toes in the teddy-roll position. “Circus can be more than a wow factor. In today’s world, you can get your wows anywhere. You can see Olympic gymnasts on your television or a man jumping out of a spaceship online. Our world is so saturated with the wow factor that it’s not enough any more.”

In other words, Circa’s less concerned with virtuosity than with expression. “It’s not just ‘I can do this trick,’” continues Heydon-White, “It’s ‘how else can I do this trick?”

That playfulness, pushing at the possibilities, governs Circa’s process. Lifschitz sees his role as akin to “the grain of sand that irritates an oyster into producing a pearl.” He’s constantly “asking impertinent questions: ‘What if you did that back to front? What if you did it blindfolded?’” Every act is put through its paces, “pulled apart, folded back on itself, explored.”

In that way, Lifschitz and Circa are able to imbue each show with a very specific flavour. Their last show, Opus, was “monumental: big music, big ideas.” Beyond is more playful and delightful, “like your subconscious on a really good day.” Not that Circa’s shows have a fixed meaning. They’re more abstract than that. “I’ve never been worried about the ‘abouts’ very much,” says Lifschitz.

All of this puts the emphasis squarely on personality rather than pure ability. “I say to my performers that everything they do could be done much better by a well-trained monkey. We’re a weak, inflexible species. What makes circus amazing is our humanity.” As such, he looks beyond hypermobility and concrete abs to “artists who have brains and hearts.”

As if to prove it, I mention that editor’s reaction—“great as acrobatics, but that’s all”—to Heydon-White. She sits bolt upright, legs still at some stupidly obtuse angle, and scoffs. “Art is, by definition, anything that can affect you emotionally, change you or change your perspective on the world. It has the ability to revolutionise the world, be that in the minute details of one person’s life or an entire culture. If circus isn’t an art, then I don’t know what is.”