CIRCUS ELOISE

Circus, Performance Art, What's the Difference?


Alan Roche
Race Horse
Company's Rauli Kosonen and Kalle Lehto in 'Petit Mal' at SummerStage
from: wsj.com
by: By PIA CATTON
August 25, 2013
Contemporary circus, the kind without a tent or animals, has made its way to New York
There's Cirque du Soleil every time you turn around. There's the Broadway musical "Pippin," with its addition of zero-body-fat tumblers. And City Parks Foundation's SummerStage has just concluded its first International Contemporary Circus Festival, a series of free shows in public spaces.
Along the way, I've crabbily dismissed it as a trend. It seems, however, that while I've been rolling my eyes, circus technique has been evolving in ways that are increasingly connected to the performing arts.
 

 

Valerie Remise
An elaborate juggling act from 'Cirkopolis'.
That, at least, is the message coming from the circus folks. Last week, the 6-month-old advocacy group Circus Now (which has no headquarters and is run by volunteers) led a half-day seminar in Manhattan for journalists, circus practitioners and arts presenters.
I attended mainly because I couldn't imagine what a circus-advocacy group would look like or what they would possibly have to say. I hoped they would be carnies evangelizing the artistic merits of juggling.
No such luck. Circus Now is led by a few well-groomed individuals who ran an informative series of short talks, followed by question-and-answer sessions. Its national director is a Fulbright recipient, Duncan Wall, who wrote "The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey Into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present."
His aim with the discussion was straightforward, he said: "to increase cultural literacy around contemporary circus and give it context."
I can't say that all those big words suddenly revealed the beauty of juggling on unicycles. But to be fair, I had been giving short shrift to this scene. From my perspective, circus acts—no matter how Gallic they are spelled—typically fail to provoke emotion other than "wow." And there is little, if any, sense of musicality to the movement.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323407104579034872070639700.html