 Theater Center here, the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henshka, I'm the director of programs and executive director of a center that bridges academia and professional theater, but mostly also international. In the American theater, we're the home of the Prelude Festival as well as the Penville Voices Festival. And in our work, which we have done here over a decade, also the work of circus and circus performance has been central. We have done a couple of events. We consider it as a most significant art form that is in a dialogue that becomes more and more significant. And as I said earlier, we feel very strongly that this is a form that comes even more from the future than from the past. Most of the time, or often, we speak about the past when it comes to theater and performance, but the work of circus, contemporary circus, and performance and the truly astonishing collaboration that comes to opera, ballet, side-specific work and others is truly at the forefront of what we haven't seen. We haven't known about yet. And it's an experiment in the sense of an experiment that you don't know often, but comes out. We are extremely proud here at this Eagle Center. And I really mean it to have had this day here and with us tonight, extraordinary artists. In chess, they would be grandmasters of the game. They are the Boris Spaskis and Boris Fischer of the game. And it's really lucky also that we have them with us tonight and I would like to thank very much my co-curators, Bruce Wichler and Patrick, who helped us to put this together. We are also celebrating the publication of his book on contemporary circus and performance. So it's truly a day which I think rivals most probably anything you will see in all the Americas for this year, but perhaps in a for sure in Canada. This is a much more customary view to really have a circus as part of the contemporary dialogue. Hans-Tis Lehmann, who was here who wrote the post-traumatic theater book, did say that theater is a house and a house has many rooms. And in this house here for us, but also in generalizing, circus has a very, very big large space. And we are going to look at this much closer. To have Jaron with us, Sean, Gypsy, and Jennifer is extraordinary. We are incredibly lucky that this worked out. And again, we would like to express our thanks. And they are all here. The format of the evening will be that Ruth will talk a bit about the organization she now works for. It's this Tohu in Montreal, Canada, a most significant organization I didn't know enough about. And then Jaron, Sean, Gypsy, and Jennifer will talk about their works all about 10 minutes at a time. Patrick will talk about the book he worked with. Two other co-curators and co-editors. And he is at the Concordia University in Montreal, what he found out and what surprised him and what answers or best new questions he has. And then we will have a discussion here on the panel about contemporary work for theater performance in the context of circus work. Perhaps our questions will be coming a little bit more from the scholarly side. But it's a great, significant, and I think also meaningful dialogue. And we hope it's just the beginning, the afternoon panel. I don't know if you were here already said perhaps there should be a collective. There should be a bigger push also in the New York City scene to connect with the Philadelphia scene or Montreal. And I hope that this event today is a small contribution. There will be a little reception here afterwards. So I hope you will stay in case you have additional questions. We will not be able to get to all the questions even in the afternoon. We went, I think, almost 40 minutes over time. And there were more people who could not ask their questions. So I hope you will forgive us. But as you saw before the event started, everybody is talking to each other. And that's a significant and meaningful in itself. If you have a cell phone, now is the moment take it out and make sure the ringer is off. I'll do the same. And now I am going to ask Ruth to start off and tell us a bit about Tohu, the organization you work for, what it's all about. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Frank, for making space for this topic in the Segal Center program. And thanks to our amazing panelists for being part of this and to Patrick for collaborating. I was taking photos. We are also live streaming on HowlRound at the moment. So this is a dialogue that will not only be witnessed by you, but also by anyone who's looking on the internet for the appropriate address, HowlRound.com. And if you can text that to people, doesn't it? It stays on the internet, online right after. So I am a sort of connecting link here because I've worked with Frank for many years before becoming a programmer of contemporary theater and performance, and then eventually becoming a programmer of circus at Tohu in Montreal. So Frank has given me a little platform to kind of explain what I do. So thank you for that. Can we do the first slide? OK. So and also I do come from a circus background as an artist originally as well. It was part of the circus community here in New York quite a number of years ago. So my job now is called The Translation of the French is that I'm the deputy director of Programming, Development, and Touring of Circus Arts. And what's interesting about that title is that it's not just circus arts in a particular place, but it's circus arts as a discipline, which reflects the institution I'm working for, which has the mission to promote circus and contemporary circus as an art form. And also I'm working on development of the art form and on programming for the venue I work with, and then on helping the art form to tour more in North America. Next slide. So I want to give a little bit of overview of contemporary circus as an art form. At the four-point panel, we talked more about our kind of urban ecosystems for contemporary circus in New York City and Philadelphia. These are artist communities. And this is a much broader overview. So contemporary circus is a performing arts discipline like theater, like dance, and has the infinite variety therein, which is an invitation never to be reductive about contemporary circus and to say it is one thing or another thing. It has many characteristics. Thank you. And actually, Patrick as a scholar will do more analysis and has more smarter things to say about the art form than I will go into. But I do want to just say that it's an international art form. And there are countries that provide more support for the development of the art form than others. And it's an art form that has special needs in terms of space, equipment, emergencies, health care, all kinds of things. So some countries have decided that this is a national imperative to support creation, training, development, touring of the art form. And some countries haven't. And so the countries that have are some of the ones that I've listed in the top section and regions. And then when I wrote Emerging Sectors, that is basically saying that there's a lot of really strong, talented creators and artists making work. But maybe the country isn't providing that kind of support. And so from these countries, you often see a lot of migration. So artists that are like brain drain artists who migrate to the countries on the top because of the levels of support that are available. Of course, that is leaving your own place to go somewhere else is a big cost. But it's just sort of a fact that that's, I would say, more true in circus than in other performing arts disciplines because the needs are greater and more specific for circus. Thank you. So Montreal is currently, which is where I'm based at the moment, is a global capital of contemporary circus. And I just, talking with Patrick, elaborated some of the reasons why or some of what makes that true. And we talked at four about the idea of an ecosystem. And so I think in Montreal, there's quite an amazing ecosystem. So I just wanted to hear, elaborate some of the components of the ecosystem. So not only is it thriving companies that both show commercial success and also non-profit success. There's a ripple effect of having those companies based in the city, which is that so many resources are present, similarly to film in Hollywood. The resources are there, present. The National Circus School of Canada was founded in 1981. It's extremely good. And again, Circus Training takes a lot of special equipment, special knowledge, coaching. And they provide that. The student bodies, 60% Canadian, 40% international. And again, the students are staying in the community after they graduate. So that creates that pipeline. I'm not gonna read out the next paragraph, but it basically says that with the Ministry of Culture at the city level, province level, even national level of Canada, the amount of not only just dollar and numbers, but also strategy, the way that a Ministry of Culture can look strategically at the needs of an art sector and support that art sector is extraordinary in North America. It's much more the European model. And then, as we discussed earlier, having a venue that is dedicated to Circus is an important component of an ecosystem. So Tohu where I'm currently working was opened in 2004, so it's just celebrated 15 years of presenting Contemporary Circus year round and in a summer festival. And its offer is to be a home for Quebec companies. So to take risks on presenting premieres of Quebec companies, Tohu, as I'll explain, is quite large, so physically. So it's best for larger productions, but having, and it's a summer festival presents work of many different scales. And then finally, there's all the dialogue, and I forgot to put journalism in here as well, but research, scholarship, documentation, library, museum collections, discourse, history, talking, reflecting, and also the other thing I forgot is Alpiste, as you mentioned earlier, and a professional association of Circus, professional Circus artists as well. So those are journalism and a professional artist association are two things missing, and maybe Gypsy you can add, probably left out. Any key things, but it's a complex ecosystem that supports the development and sustainability of an art form, and having paid employment in the performance is a really important component of that. So even if you could say, well, Circus Lay is a sort of large corporate entity, it does provide paid employment for quite a lot of artists. Next slide. So I am working at Tohu, next slide. And this is the inside of it. It's a round venue. These are its contexts. Gypsy knows it much better than I know. So funny that we're there. So the story is that in 1999, the professional artist association, Circus Artist Association got together with the National Circus School of Canada and Circus LA, and proposed, creating a campus called the Circus Arts City, which is located in the north of Montreal. And Tohu as a building is the venue that welcomes the public onto that campus. And so the National Circus School is right next door. The World Headquarters of Circus Lay are right next door. They don't have an opening to the public, but we are kind of the town gown relations venue. And we're also next to a giant dump that stopped accepting trash in 2000 and has been being redone as a park since then and is officially opening fully in 2025, but just last year opened partially to the public. So part of our job at Tohu is to animate the park. And then we're also next door to basically the Jackson Heights of Montreal called Semichel, which just in 2009 got the first designation in North America of like Little Italy, Little Migreb, Little North Africa. Next slide. Oh, my G fell to the bottom. Oh, my God. This happens with a PowerPoint. Anyway, so what do we do in this beautiful venue? We welcome contemporary circus productions for a full season and then in the summer festival. And we also do quite a lot of programming that is less well known in the circus world, which is to, we're a officially sanctioned city cultural center for our neighborhood. So that means offering a whole slate of free multidisciplinary family programming events and participatory activities for our neighborhood. And this is again what you have when you have a Ministry of Culture, you have this idea that each neighborhood should have a cultural center that has cultural offer. And so our contract with the city, our contract with the city includes, is that me? Okay, I'll talk really fast. You can read basically all the things on this slide. Next slide. So these are just, you don't have to absorb all this. Just know that there are really wonderful numbers related to how many people we've reached and how many things we've done. Next slide. We have a summer festival. It's really big. Over 400,000 people attend. Outdoors, indoors all over the city. And we have an international circus market for professionals and researchers that we work with Concordia. And everyone is invited to take the very short trip up to Montreal for the festival next summer. And then market if you are a circus professional. Next slide. Oh, this is the trailer from last summer's festival just to give you an eyeful. So one thing you can see about our marketing department is appealing to audiences who are used to coming to other disciplines to say, hey, look, we are crossing disciplines. So two of our panelists' work is in the video. So that's exciting. Okay, next slide. Oh, that's our website. .ca is Canada. Yes. So I actually don't want to take any more time because everyone else on the panel is quite extraordinary and so I'll be done. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. So really something we all should know, know more about and I think we should go to the theater festival visit. Yaron, I would like to ask you who came here from Australia as it happened to be in town and his famous circus organization. And he's really one of the great, great directors in the world working for circus and performance and theater. Thank you for being here. True story. So ladies and gentlemen, nine minutes to talk about life, circus, art, theater, poetry, the reasons why and the reasons why not is not a lot. So I'm gonna possibly just overload you with things. I can't promise where it's gonna land up. Nine minutes. What's it about? I don't know. I thought from the fringes of empire sounded a little pretentious but not all together inaccurate. So before I completely lose all my credibility, I love this quote, today that art can only be made from the starting point of that which as far as empire is concerned doesn't exist. Now there's no place more further removed from empire than the circus. The circus is kind of anti-empire. So we get reviews all the time that say I'm sure you guys do as well. What's this, why is there juggling at the Met? And is it amazing how this thing is somehow with a player or a site-specific thing manages to be moving, poetic, beautiful? Isn't that extraordinary? It would be great not to get those reviews, right? It'd be great to get reviews that said, well of course this is this art form full of extraordinary people doing beautiful, amazing, heroic things on a daily basis. But I also worry that if that were to happen, we might become part of empire and then people would expect that and then we would atrophy. So I don't think any of these things for me are completely simple. I come from Brisbane, Australia which is about as far from empire as you can get. We are the edge of the edge and that has given us an extraordinary freedom to be ignorant of and ignore most things. I'll show you a little clip. Hopefully this plays. You're not getting a sound up there. So this is the piece that we've just had in New York. It's from the, this was the premiere season. And I guess it just kind of, it's marketing, they pick the good bits. But that's their job. I love this quote from James Baldwin that the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. I think one of the things that I've understood a lot about circus was that when I start and I don't come from circus and can't claim any genuine, I've had to learn everything on the job. I've been a kind of 20 year work experience boy. That there were a lot of people who told me how things had to be. You couldn't put these kinds of acts together. You couldn't do that this way or this way. And so again, coming from the edge of empire, coming from not the place where it was always done properly, we didn't have to listen to that. And that was a great liberating thing. It would allow us to be iconoclastic, punk, poetic, whatever we felt like and not do things by the rules. And so one of the things that we do that I encourage people when I teach or when I work with students in all capacities is to say, look, what we're gonna teach you is only what's known, right? Your job is to find the new questions, the kind of stronger and more interesting propositions. I just wanna show you a tiny excerpt from the opera that we've just opened. This particular scene got a really bad review, got singled out by a critic who hates me. As a piece of, it was called Egrarius, which is a pretty strong word. Egrarius? Egrarius, egregious. Oh. So that sort of meant to be her, and in my mind, this was a kind of forest tree kind of world that she was crossing. And he's been singing about how sad he is for about 10 minutes now. This is not new information. But this trick was seen as being somehow denigrating the art of opera and the quality of his morning. So just to show you that that's what marketing probably doesn't want me to show you. Martha Graham said that the body never lies. And I think circus work is always based in the truth that the body brings. And that truth is not a single truth that's probably a misnomer. It's the truths or the questions that the body brings. I've learned a lot, most of the things I've learned by opening my eyes and looking at what's in front of me and allowing myself to be surprised by its poetics, by its density, by its contradictions. Circus is known as a place that's gender blind. We don't have slightly different things like operas. We're trying to tell a fairly codified story, but even so, we've been able to bend it. But we don't have male and female roles. It's about ability. It's about preference. It's not based in the essential truths that are housed in these things that we have that are called bodies. We work in, we do a lot of work in theaters. And some of the work that we're doing, like on Mass and the Opera that I've shown you, are both kind of fairly posh pieces. They're designed to kind of upsell us to empire. And the great thing about empire is that it pays. I was, we were, normally when we work, it's me and a computer and a couple of screens, but I've just been spent a month making an opera and I've had three stage managers and assistant director and associate circus director, a video designer, a line designer the whole time. I've had understudies. Like, it's been incredible and it's such a blast. People write down things so that you can remember them. Like, it's amazing. So I love that, it's great. And it's beautiful to visit. But it's not a world that I want to live in. The world I want to live in is the world of people making beautiful, powerful things wherever they are. So we do a lot of work. We're at the same time as I'm working on that. We're working on a project with 60 Down syndrome kids and a symphony orchestra. We're doing the first ever circus setting of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. We're doing a project in February. These three projects all happen, unfortunately, in February next year of our show, Leviathan, which is 18 circus artists, almost our whole ensemble, with 18 community members, a project that we embed to teaching artists in a community for six weeks before we open and it's a big new creation. So we work from the kind of high-end posh stuff to, I'll just show you, this is a sort of a trade-off peep show if it works. This is the sort of less of the posh stuff. But a show that I'm incredibly proud of because it takes cabaret, it takes it to the nightclub and then blows it right open in a way that I thought would never work. And I think the, I just keep talking as that's going because we're going to run out of time, but I think that the interesting thing for me is that at the core of this, that questioning and that doubt and fear about will it work is incredibly powerful. It's a driver of every artist that I know. Let's not stuff this up or slightly rude of variations of that seem to be essentially mottos or driving forces for us. I really love, I came across this, technology's not my strong suit. This was a W.S. Merwin quote that I particularly like to come across the other day. I asked how you can be sure, he's asked talking to the poet, John Berryman, that what you write is really any good at all. And he said, you can't, you can't. You can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write. I really love that thought that if you have to be sure, don't do it. The constant questioning of truth is out there. It definitely will not be found by knowing what it is when you start. I love the idea that we should have these kind of bitter, obstinate questions that we have at our heart. What makes this work? Why is that thing in the air? How high should it be that every single part of what we do is already rich with poetry and meaning? And our job in a way is to stop that or interrupt it long enough to learn what it might be able to tell us. Circus work has a lot to do with restriction and obstacle. It has to do with interruption. So by breaking things, by making them harder, by adding resistance or tension or obstacle or questions. We create things that are from the circus but no longer look or feel like the circus. I'm very conscious that most of the things that I do, it's very difficult to talk about empire as a kind of middle-aged white male. So I think that it's particularly good to note that I come to you kind of late in the middle of a creative career and that if there's any purpose for listening to people like me talk, it's to say that there's a much whatever comes after us, that our legacy and our contribution will be how interesting, engaging, amazing, the things, the extraordinary work that will come after us will be. So I look forward to seeing all of that that happens. Thank you. So he just came on his bike from the Lincoln Center rehearsals of Echinaton with Philip Glass Opera through the New York traffic and so we'll give you a moment to set up. My experience with these things normally never works out. I'll be so happy if this dongle works out. And they all had... Oh, yeah, I flew on a business plane recently and all the businessmen had really old Microsoft computers broken. They had lots of money and bad and I realize all the artists are suckers for these Apple things that never work. We've been scammed. Let me see. So I've come straight from rehearsal so I had the most perfect day. So this morning, my wife and I, we got up at seven and we cycled and we did ballet class at nine in the morning and then we had choreographing an opera at... The Metropolitan Opera House of Philip Glass Opera with 12 jugglers and then we had half an hour and we started working on a piece which is our homage to the legacy of Merce Cunningham who's one of my heroes and the piece is called Life and we did half an hour in a tiny dressing room and it was the first thing we made and it buzzed me up and I realized, talking about, to me, it's those moments in the kitchen where you make a little something that we can talk about all the things and you need money and I think I saw an interview with Merce where he said you need clothes for the artists and insurance and a place for them to rehearse but at the end of the day, it's not about that and I think that thing of making something in your kitchen is kind of what it's about for me anyway and let me just see if this beautiful thing works. It's a VLC playlist. I don't have PowerPoint. Let me see. Chuck, oh go on, be nice. Is it playing? Do you see my computer? Oh wow. Oh by the way, the thing that was showing before, this, this is a juggling score for Steve Wright's clapping music for two jugglers and it stayed open. So my wife who's here, the delightful, ever so talented, Cathy Ullahockala and I have run this company. We did originally call it Ullahockala and it was harder for people to pronounce so I guess in a sign of empire it has been named after me but it's very much my wife and I and we've been making pieces for 30 years. When we started, there was very, very little contemporary circus and for me what contemporary circus is above all, I feel a lot of contemporary circus is, I've always adored circus and classical circus but I feel like, and a lot of contemporary circus is just classical circus disguise pretending and it's all exactly the same and I love it but it is naughty, naughty contemporary circus. There's a lot of naughty contemporary circus but for me one of the things that's really exciting about contemporary circus is opening to disciplines, different disciplines and the fact that the discipline in itself is interesting. I feel like circus has 17 random disciplines why those 17 disciplines are not the other 804? It's funny to go that discipline is in, no you out. And juggling is considered one of the circus disciplines so from that point of view we're circus but our interest in juggling has always been filtered through the aesthetics of dance, dance and mathematics so I feel sometimes closer to a ballerina or William Forsythe or somebody that's writing trigonometric equations than I do to a beautiful seawheel or I love flying trapeze but I know absolutely nothing about flying trapeze so for me to claim I'm from the same world would be being an imposter. So we made 30 pieces over 30 years and about 10 years ago we made a piece about Pina Bausch, we made it in a week blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, piece made room and we thought it wouldn't live and for some reason it's become this slightly, I hate the word iconic but it has become our piece like the hit, is that the word, that's the word. Which disturbs me because it's one of our least us pieces but it's become us because we do it so much. So I'll show you a trailer for that. We had an amazing experience with Dominic Merci who's one of the main dancers with Pina who came and worked with us and this was a rework we did for 20 people. I hope this works, I've been saying it's gonna work, go on, be nice. I had the most like a triple espresso before coming so my hand is... Hey, it works, yay. I always wanted... And for our first 10 years we were very academic, very anti-narrative and anti-theater and then at a certain point we embraced theater so this was our little hello to theater. Next year is a 10 year anniversary so we're hoping we do this big verse. This was a bit of a crazy. Kim's here doing a canata. Lots of the people here are in a canata. She was a fantastic pregnant opera singer. We need to work more with pregnant opera singers. That was a controversial scene. We don't need necessarily to talk about controversy but I'll probably run out of time so I'll stop it. Doesn't want to stop, I'll let it just go. After we made that, we made a trilogy of pieces which are love affairs, tinder dates, tinder dates between juggling and some of the empire arts, the classical art forms. So we made a piece that's juggling, talking with ballet and I wish it would stop. But this is it. And this was an imagining if Louis Catoros who's the hypothetical father of ballet had liked juggling instead of ballet, we would have juggling houses around the world and ballerinas doing street shows. And it would be a kind of fictitious. And so this for us was a little bit imagining, you know in ballet they go this is proper, this isn't proper and it's such a small difference and I would love it if you had no, no, no incorrect way to begin the five walls. Five walls must be begun like this. And so it was a little bit imagining what juggling would be like in this context. And we then made a trilogy, I don't know it sounds rather pretentious, I made a trilogy, a quadrilogy. And it's three of the empire art forms. Ballet is one of the empire. And it was a little bit looking at the traces that this is a deconstructed very mathematical pattern. How the traces, the watermarks that one art form can leave on the other. This was the first of the trilogy. I actually don't know how to go to the next. I would love to go next. Yeah, well somebody, I should be juggling this is supposed to be nerdy on computer. This is spring, we're playing spring in New Jersey, Montclair University. Yay, and Jenny's here from, and this is the third part of the trilogy. It's juggling and contemporary dance. And it's the most lived in, it's more than a tinder date. Maybe they moved in together for like a couple of months. And it has, we commissioned music, and maybe I'll stop it. Hey, hey, hey. And then we made a middle piece which is juggling and classical Indian dance. And classical Indian dance is funny because it's part of an empire, but not our empire. I'm hooking onto your empire. We've also had a collection of good, bad reviews and it was interesting. Now jugglers at the opera, somebody, they met for a couple of weeks, put something up saying, we have these jugglers at the opera, Philip Glass, and underneath, I went, oh, let's get some, you know, you get internet love, a bit of it. Somebody likes your Instagram posts. Ooh, love, love, love. And then there was just no love. It was just, oh my God, Philip Glass' music is so pouring. And then in a way it invigorated me because it made me realize how much work there is still to be done in convincing, I mean, it's random which art forms are higher or lower, but convincing the world that the things we do could be considered high art and not that one has anything against the lower arts. Ventriloquism and whatnot. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. There's a man in my gym who loves juggling but he hates ventriloquism. He's an elderly, and he always comes up to me and says, you haven't seen any of those ventriloquists, have you? So, oh, and it always makes me think they are the lowest, you know, the most acrobats, you know, bad ventriloquists. I don't know how to go next, so I'm just gonna go. I think that after this, I just wanted to show you two minutes. We made a piece a few years ago that acrobats are always very in the erotic sphere of circus. And I wondered what if, what was the eroticism of jugglers or the more perverse side? And it was a piece that got, it was very controversial. So I could show you just a trail. He's wonderful, he's West Peden, and he comes and guests. He will be in Montclair. A bit of a rather extraordinary juggler. I would like to go next, but I don't know how. Let's see what comes next. I think it's Clowns and Queens next, but let me see. Let's see. I'll let, just for something different. And I guess what we've been doing is these dialogues. We love collaborating. We love being in a studio with somebody new. That kind of buzzes us up. So this is the most pure circus thing we've done. And we got some money off an English group to research body parts as experimentation for outdoor art, but we didn't tell them which body parts. So we made a series of colored penises. And then when we showed them the, they didn't want to, they, well, that was the end of that collaboration, but. It was a shame because it was kind of fun material, but. So there's also markets. We tour a lot in France and in France circuses program. There's the poetic thing. So you have a dance show that can cross barriers. You have a theater thing. And then circus, even if it's edgy, has to fit into the poetic category. And I guess this didn't fit into the poetic enough. And it has, it had this beautiful scene, these surgical tables with Doreen who's here. They had an amazing text about juggling the inner organs of the body. It's kind of very Rembrandt. And I think it was quite a torturous journey for Doreen to talk about the organs and the juggling. But this kind of referred to all of that. And then I will stop after this. It was naked men as well, but yeah, you can't put them up on the internet as much. And just as a fun aside, the, oh no, I can't leave it on that. I'm frightfully sorry. Yeah, that's the time. A little bit more. But that's it really. The main thing is we absolutely love making things and we're making about three things at the moment. And we're at the Met. I'm a little bit, the other night, I went to watch Orfeo and Yuridice. And then a screen came up on a choreographer. And I went, oh, I wonder who the choreographer on that is. And it went Sean Cantina. And how do you get to the Met? But I don't know if there's rhyme or reason. When we started out for about three years, everybody's going, what the fuck are these people doing? And I feel like as long as we remember to occasionally get that reaction, then we're doing the right thing. That's enough, isn't it? Yeah, thank you. Yes, please, and it worked, and it worked. So Gypsy, here we go. Hi, I'm going to take a slightly different approach, one that does not involve visuals. Because I simply didn't bring any with me. And I'm also going to try and address a little bit of the conversation that happened here this afternoon in a way that people who just showed up for this can understand. So I'm Gypsy Snyder. I am one of the seven fingers. The seven fingers is a collective of seven directors. Originally, we were seven artistic directors, friends, colleagues, people who had performed together for years. And we founded the company in Montreal in 2002 with two very clear ideas of what we wanted to do. The first was to create a show that we would write together as seven people, that would feature us as seven people, but that would also really force us to create together, which was not something that we had experienced so much in our careers. And the second vision for the company was to create a company where the seven of us could fulfill any and all dreams and fantasies of being creative, whether it meant from the spoken word to music, to circus, to movement, to anything. The company was really to just create an infrastructure within which to create on any level. And we were really, really very clear about those visions and continually over the last 17 years have continued to renew our commitment to each other. I should mention that after two years one of the seven actually decided to go off, the youngest one she decided to go off and have a child and continue with her own career and touring and she was then replaced with an administrative director who really had lived a world in the empire with a tie and was an entrepreneur and someone who was very, very far from the creative world but felt a creative burning inside of him and he replaced her and facilitated our business model and I hate to use that word because I really believe his whole idea in joining us was to be as liberated and creative as we were with what he specialized in which is business and communications and actually political science. So the collective became six artistic directors and one doctor of political science and entrepreneur. And to work in a collective and to commit to six other personalities the way that I have in the last 17 years is a challenge that I can say requires a level of sacrifice and a level of commitment and a level of creative collaboration that very few people that I know have actually done and actually achieved something from in over a 17 year process and it's something that I now can never see myself walking away from and it's something that creatively it's really challenging for anyone in this business to evolve your voice and to speak from your truest, darkest and most beautiful spaces but then to actually be able to collaborate and give your body, heart and soul to the people around you and accept their energy and darkness and beauty and voice as well to then create a third thing that is neither yourself nor that person but something beyond you is absolutely the vision of the company and it's become now my creative mantra. When I come in to create a show I definitely have an idea and I have a voice and I have something that I absolutely want to say but I cannot create that vision without the voices of all of those people that are creating it with me. Specifically the artists, the set designer, the lighting designer, the stage manager, there's a whole community that goes into making a show so I think for me the creative process has been how can you nurture every single individual within a room to be as expressive and true to themselves as possible while delving into a world that is not my world, it is not their world, it is a world that we can only create together. That has become the mantra for the seven fingers and in every piece we do we come from circus and circus is in and of itself a rebellious form. It has existed for a very long time and is very rooted in traditions and ideology. There's so much imagery and power within the circus that dates back to generations and I'm often very, very surprised to what extent contemporary circus doesn't necessarily root itself in that the way that dance maybe would or theater would and I think that's because in and of its nature it must be rebellious. Of course when we define ourselves as artists we sometimes have to negate art. We have to say well this person did it this way so I am now rebelliously going to do it this way and that's what makes me unique and individual but I take great comfort in knowing that actually contemporary circus is something that has existed for a very, very, very long time and that is because I define contemporary circus and I think the other fingers would agree that contemporary circus is when you use a form or a discipline to express an idea or an emotion or to paint a picture, an idea or to stimulate the audience and to emotionally open their hearts or their minds to something that they hadn't realized before they were not aware of before. So, wow. I feel that I need that, it nourishes me, it keeps me going and it dictates I don't know, actually I think it's something that I need in the world today to sort of understand that right now time is moving much faster than it's ever moved before and people are having a much more difficult time actually communicating and coming together even though communication has been facilitated to levels that are beyond our actual comprehension. So, to actually get into a room and sweat with someone and be with a group of people building something that might seem very small is actually incredibly powerful and comes from something that has a very long tradition so I feel rooted in that and I think that we all can feel rooted in that even though I completely support the rebellious forward thinking going into an empty, dangerous and risky space. That said, where the Seven Fingers is going is interesting I'm about to be 50 and my children are about to leave the home in that direction and I'm trying to place myself in a world where when we created the Seven Fingers there really wasn't a lot of contemporary circus obviously France had really opened the doors to what was possible. Now, I think a little bit, Yaren said this as well there's this feeling of hoping that I've opened some doors and that the Seven Fingers have created a world within which other people can move and play and be excited. I definitely know that everyone here has done that for this incredible art form. Some of the places that circus is playing Seven Fingers has never played before or would never have even considered it because he's opened a door to an idea of movement and circus in a completely different way the same with all the visuals that you see from Gandini and Juggling the idea is that each individual, one of us should be using our voices to open these new doors and this idea that I need when I go to a show I need to feel that I'm being stimulated from the moment I open the door even from the moment I buy the ticket or see the publicity to go buy the ticket or hear from someone else the idea is that I'm actually being challenged and not placating or just resting swimming in the realm of art that we know or that makes us feel good or that's life-affirming and empowering there's a lot of words that we tend to fall back on in circus because it is such a family-friendly sort of art form it actually can be used to really make people feel and think and open their hearts and minds to possibilities things that even the artist or the creator are not able to grasp so I think that that's definitely a responsibility of contemporary circus to keep pushing to open those cracks and to get in there and to be uncomfortable and to fail I love that we've all been victims of criticism but that criticism is because something has rubbed the audience in a way that is challenging them and I personally love that I love being uncomfortable and I think the seven fingers if there's anything that we just continue to do with our ages to put ourselves in rooms that are challenging so that's all I have to say and there's no visual behind it but there you go Jennifer thank you I have to work I have to work I have to work now are people putting their computers out? so I need to because we recorded it I wrote some stuff out so that I wouldn't take my time oh I'll take my time great I'm not going to start until you have your pages ready am I on them? okay good hello so I'm Jennifer Miller I direct this circus called Circus Amuck which is a New York based free one ring no animal queer political circus spectacular I we originated and developed in the same building as Stephanie in the Bindle Stiff Circus that we talked to earlier so we all come out of this circus building in Brooklyn we do shows in the parks all over the city annually we do a month we do four different parks a week so we go to 16 different parks that's 16 different populations 16 diverse neighborhoods 16 different publics and that many more counterpublics every year we've been performing this festive revolutionary theater to use Claudia Orenstein a Cuny person I think term in the parks since 1994 each of our shows has a social justice thing so the environment immigration health care housing climate change of course and many of these we've cycled back to because they've become incredibly important in the 80s and the 90s and the odds we use traditional forms and I'll show you in a minute you know there's jugglers there's stilt dancers there's acrobats there's a brass band there's a ringmaster I'm the ringmaster though not in the side show we also use less conventional elements and you know we're seeing circus as interdisciplinary here we're bringing in big puppets we're bringing in text sometimes plots sometimes not sometimes a postmodern dance every now and then a ballet we come we'll hear our show we come from our political theater influences are from the bread and puppet theater who we need to bring into our circus realm as we talk about these circus disciplines to wringling brothers to the Pickle Family Circus my first circus was Make a Circus in San Francisco to the Bindle Stiffs queer theater very influenced by the New York drag scene the theater of the ridiculous ethyl Eichelberger happy face worked in clubs worked in theaters worked as a dancer and brought it back out into the parks I'm going to show you just a little bit so you can get a sense before I go on it's the South Bronx St. Anne's Park Tompkins Square Park South Williamsburg Drag The Empire will never have us we don't worry about how to get there health care it's not just political theater stick it's dancing tea cups take care of yourselves drink herbal tea I'm going to stop this here or actually we could turn the volume down can I do that or can you turn that all the way down while I go on a bit so I wanted to just give you that introduction but what I really wanted to talk about because what I think of the singular thing that Circus and Muck does is we're queer public space we talked about sort of queerness and queerness in the club you know family entertainment not family entertainment queer sanctuary tends to be in the club public space doesn't really want us and we don't want to go out there because we're going to get bashed you know as advanced as all things are I was a little afraid coming here tonight in my skirt as I am when I go out in my skirt and dress we are free we don't try to elevate Circus to an art I always kind of feel like we're faking Circus actually we're a bunch of Circus performers who are pretending to be Circus performers that really tends to be what we do all of our juggling acts are like in drag as if we're being like street jugglers or Las Vegas jugglers because I was so traumatized by the misogyny of all of that when I was growing up so it's Circus about Circus in many ways and it's Circus and when I talk about queering public spaces I'm going to go to Munoz queerness is an ideality we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality and making it our magic queer spaces that's what we want to do this was a millennium piece I hear the text another time when we wanted to go outside and had all these confronted the fears of getting gay bashed and self-censoring we found out that that didn't happen this was a piece we did years ago called the Amnesty International Report in which we talked about people of color who were shot by the New York City police I don't remember what year this was but it was at least 15 years ago and here we are in this moment again that's Sarah Johnson from Lava, Adrian Tresca that's great Circus people in there but what I want to do now is actually I'm going to turn this off and talk about how we specifically queer public spaces and I'm going to do that by showing this clip command F so this show we were doing was in 2006 I think if I can find the right page there was an anti-immigration bill up at that time as we have now there was a huge outcry in the streets and we like to work with actual political work that's happening at the time we like to imagine that we're actually going to effect change by raising energy by asking questions by giving information so at the same time our political allies Jayfridge were working with to organize domestic workers to get domestic workers rights nannies and house cleaners and they were mostly immigrants at the same time because we're always looking for a little hope it was the moment of the pink tide so it was the moment when all of these socialist leaders came into power in South America Kerschner, Michelle Bachelet Lula and at that time that was very exciting it's gone back and forth but it was so here we have in this show these group of nannies that's what you see here Circus Act back together so that they can go to Argentina and get health care so we'll watch that and then I just want to parse a little bit about how gays are used, how audience plants are used and how gender is represented in Circus Amak I've come in near the end of the juggling act here that's Michelle Matlock by the way she just came off 10 years starring in Circus Soleil as a what? a ladybug the famous ladybug they argue and they move closer and closer to the stage and then we realize eventually that they're part of the company and they all immigration to the scapegoat issue and we see the goats from the earlier goat act come out now I just want to take one more minute if I can because in my mind I think well everyone wants to know how to queer public spaces right and so I have to serve that a little bit it's not just that we're out and we're nice we're here to get used to it that wouldn't work so I'll just take one second to go into the strategies that we use to destabilize the heteronormative center and to create a queer utopic space which is fun for the whole family number one we got a ringmaster as a lady with a beard not in the side show ringmaster the interlocutor yes this is the norm this is the one that says it's okay people here with me I'm going to take you into this world of extraordinary bodies and magical people but I'm the norm and we're all together so hooray let's join in on that together it's all a little slippery and look at the bodies we don't know what's what and who's who and what gender anybody is from the beginning it's very slippery so now I'm going to use slippery as our definition for queerness it's something that destabilizes and opens us up to who knows what potential futures the story is slippery the main characters want to leave the country even though the agenda of the show is about the right to stay though we live in this queer world that we're creating the gays are not the good guys the bourgeois lesbian performers parents are the bad guys so in this case our strategy is to contest heteronormativity homonormativity by the fact that it's not just about the dykes it can be moms too but we place them there and then we make them racist and bourgeois resisting stabilizing gay identity or even valuing this identity character over anything else and then there's me I go in and out of character even asking the audience what voice I should use should I talk in the character voice so they become directors I ask them to bring in their immigrant history I ask them to think about how we should make the theater and then there's the audience plants two layers of them who open up the discourse so who's the audience, who's the actor who's in charge the rules are broken open there's cracks in every circus these are cracks through which the story erupts but also cracks through which the audience slides in becoming citizen players in the queer sanctuary that we're creating out in public space together we welcome them in so Patrick you worked for a long time on the book on contemporary circus so tell us a little bit about your work Patrick of course is also one of the co-curators together with Ruth for this day at this circus okay so first of all wow tough act to follow all of you thank you to the artists who presented and who shared their insights and thank you Frank for having all of us here Ruth and Frank for basically making this possible we initially spoke in the summer very briefly and I said yeah we've got this book coming out maybe I can talk to your students about it a few months later we've got a whole day wow thank you so I've been thinking a lot about this issue of contemporary circus during the afternoon panel a number of you talked about this what is contemporary circus seriously how do you think they define contemporary circus you know Philipp Astley they call it the modern circus it was modern it was new it was different horses and acrobats military acrobats there was a strange proposition a few clowns were introduced especially in France what was contemporary circus in France in the 1830s while it was basically the idea of constructing circuses hard circuses so they basically created a whole network of circuses in the US late 19th century early 20th century what was the contemporary circus it has become a nostalgic sense of circus now you'll see I've got a number of images that I sort of put in a paradox you've got Guy La Liberté when he still had the hair fire throwing and Joanne Le Guillaume what looks like matches it was an interesting paradox to illustrate so what do we mean by contemporary circus while the French who like to theorize and who have been doing it for 40 years now give us a specific date they say oh yes the contemporary circus of course comes after Nouveau Cirque late 70s 80s and in 1995 Hungarian director Joseph Notch directed a show at the Knaak in Chalon-en-Champagne Le Cris de Camélion The Cry of the Chameleon 1995 that's when it started but seriously once you start actually looking into this you realize that there are different strata different ideas of how we define this so is contemporary circus merely of its time basically based on a historical temporality or is it of its time in the sense that it's our era zeitgeist so are we tapping into something essential in what we do here or is it also at the same time because there is a traditional circus of course and various forms of traditional circus that coexist so we're in a sort of logic of cotemporality as well I know I see you're thinking that that's not satisfactory you know we do contemporary circus we do something more than that more than cotemporal complicit circus so with my colleagues Katie Lavers and John Burt we ended up doing so two Australian scholars who had the pleasure of working with across continents, across oceans we started thinking about this so how do we actually think about the contemporary circus articulate it, explain it as well because I am a professor I end up in situations where people say what's this circus research what do you mean like what do you mean exactly I end up in South America and they define contemporary circus as so art for social change but in the matter of Cirque Soleil trained trainers who bring the sort of theatrical theatricalized form of circus there their sense is very different as well so what we decided to do is to start interviewing as many people as we could basically rather than to come in with an answer rather than to come in with sort of articulate theorization we thought well let's base this on grounded theory let's talk to as many people as we can we had a few criteria we wanted it to be we wanted gender parity we wanted people from as many continents as we could South America did not end up in this book unfortunately we have a number of interviews but we'll be in the next project and I feel there's a lot more work to do so we interviewed 24 circus artists and what did we realize well we realized that the portrait was a lot more complex than we had ever imagined we heard extraordinary basically takes on 24 different perspective of what contemporary circus is and can be not should be, can be there's a sense of potentiality that's extremely strong here there's also a number of paradoxes we heard quite a bit of discourse about being on outsiders basically outsider position but also hearing that circus really works out best when you actually have infrastructure support when you have funding in other words when you are integrated into a sort of normalized funding structure as we've seen in Quebec since 2001 as we have seen also in France over the similar period but slightly before that as well what did we notice as well there's a great artistic diversity in form voice and narrative a few other paradoxes that came up there was a sense of I guess contemporary circus artists being more autonomous less linked to families and being quite proud of their do-it-yourself sort of ethos but at the same time during the same era you've got a hyper-specialization of schools you've got a new school in Philadelphia you've got you know you've got the National Circus School in Montreal you've got the you've got to go on but you have these these elite schools basically growing and imposing a certain number of I guess specializations but also trying to bring artists to their full potential but it brings up the level and this is something that a certain number of artists also express the level keeps going up every single year so what do we do how do we compete how do we fit in that well you don't you adapt in a different way you rethink your relationship to the apparatus you rethink your relationship to new work development you rethink your relationship to the normate do we need 20 year old live white bodies always on stage you saw this afternoon the Quebec companies you know it's often five six guys on stage perhaps one female or two and so what we're realizing also worldwide is there are a number of companies that are questioning this so the grand conclusion I guess that we came up with with this first exploration into contemporary circus which was supposed to be called contemporary circus or and the art of contestation but the publishers would have none of it so it's been branded you know sort of blended I should say contemporary circus so we this isn't the authoritative book on contemporary circus this is one take drawing on those 24 interviews that were generously given by extraordinary artists some of the interviews were absolutely moving we conducted them basically all three of us at different moments not always together for instance I did the ones in Europe mostly for example because it was easier because of language but essentially we come up with a book with four sections so questioning mastery through the apparatus contesting the normate through a circus and politics section I guess moving from superhuman to vulnerability to human to human relationship in performers in contemporary circus and finally the move from act based circuses to more exploded, atomized spaces in the last chapter new work in contemporary circus I guess I'll stop there because we're really running late and I'd like us to have a few minutes to exchange with everyone so thank you okay well thank you so much this was on a timer time I'm very impressed circus artists a little bit of timing so I think that's all come up here a little bit of time and maybe first of all really thank you all for coming I think this is once you're too much this is for the future circus artists in New York who hopefully will come out of this just to begin what is a question you wish you would be asked as a theater artist what you normally don't get asked I'm going to give you the mics and also put them on so what is it maybe we can start with you what do you feel I wish somebody would ask me what the question I wish I would get asked was I'm a satisfied man you know often I do think you talk a lot about the peripheries the edges you're not part of the kingdom and meanwhile I think the engagement was the body on stage the dramaturgical work of the circus is quite a significant quite a significant so how do you approach for example with you how do you approach this different than let's say on the street I think Kathy and I were saying the other day we did a show in Venezuela a few years ago and it was a little school show and it was all these lovely little kids and we got so nervous because it felt so important to work for these kids and it was just a favor we were doing to a friend and sometimes that's more important the opera is just the same I mean like Aaron said you have seven stage managers and we're not allowed to touch our own balls so if we need to move seven balls it goes through four people and they move them that's the main difference I don't think I would want to live in that world where you can't touch your own props but it's the same really it's exactly the same just framed differently so for you if you work on your your opera how do you approach it how do you approach that work I don't know that I really have an answer I think you try and find a way in you stare into a void for a long time and you see the imminent collapse of your career the hunger in your child's eyes the lack of your mortgage payment how am I ever going to do this and then somewhere you learn to achieve to a kind of a music that you hear sort of something that's like a little whisper kind of get it to tease it out of the shadows and maybe it comes to you and sometimes it does and often your conscious kind of processes kill it they just sort of take over and you think oh yeah that's great we've now got it and then you kind of and obviously an opera it's very difficult to go back because you've designed the set and you've made all this stuff happen however what I discovered inside this recent process was the extraordinary freedom that you have where you can literally say actually this scene is going to change entirely I also decided the one part of the because usually it's like I do most of the creative functions myself but I was going to keep the set design who's going to be me and that meant that I could say oh no the set designer wants this and that would be great so it kind of it allowed it allowed me to sort of belligerently kind of break my own ideas I think the thing for me is that you never know whether it's a good idea or not you just have to kind of trust your instincts and learn from your mistakes and you know if you're lucky enough to do this long enough you sort of get competent it's not like you you know like some people just genuinely luminously talented that was never my lot my lot was to kind of be good at being able to do a lot of work and just kind of keep going and if you do that for long enough eventually people start giving you geeks because you're still there Gypsy also a question for you you talked a bit about you and having worked for decades what is what you would have liked to know when you started out what you know now what is I think I think I would have liked to know more how okay it is to fail I think that I definitely come from a generation where there were norms like that was one of my favorite things that Yaron said was that him coming out from the outside of the world allowed him to do things that maybe I would have felt much more constricted in doing having you know especially having my parents be in the business as well where you know you're looking up at like the Bill Irwin and the Larry Pozones and the Jeff Hoyls of the world and going how do I or even my mom how do I match that that was very difficult and I think you know instilling total freedom to create your own voice and do it the way that you want to I think is huge and I think actually on the one hand I feel like the next generation is so much more courageous I think actually underneath there's a lot more fear because the possibilities are so infinite so dealing with that fear should be one of your first tools and that's also something that Yaron just said is that there's this void in front of you that you have to absolutely give into it's insanely stressful it's insanely stressful but you also have tools and work ethic that if you just keep working through the darkness things just sort of roll you just let go of this preconception because you're just working within the darkness and moving forward every day moving forward and for me it's he said music for me it's definitely tension I always try to go to some place where there's tension if you can create the tension or live in the tension then there's going to be a release at some point and there in you will have a story but without the tension you there is no story and so I feel like when I talk about negativity or the void or the risk or the fear those in and of themselves create tension and you can use them to be creative you just have to work through it and I have a question for you to use to fail to use tensions to work through things have you been approached by opera ballet Broadway New York City to collaborate would you do it have you I would do it and back to your question about what would I like people to ask me would be like what do you need ? ? but yeah no I'd love to work in the grand spectacle so yeah you can approach me opera or the movies I do feel like movies start and would be a great soft landing because what we have to do is so hard on the body and when I'm out in their part yelling into the void a big gesture with the movies they just come you just talk not that I don't love circus and think it's an important art form so so Patrick in your research you interviewed how many circus artists was your colleague so 30 initially we retained 24 so what did you discover what surprised you the absolute diversity but you know had we interviewed a different set of artists we would have had a very different book so I came from the the heart of the circus empire I guess Montreal I was in national circus school I worked on research there and came sort of from a place in the know and that knows best maybe and I don't feel that way but it's that sort of ethos and it was really great because Katie pushed me I said don't interview too many of the artists you already know because I've done 60 interviews with all the Quebec scene already I said let's go abroad come to Australia let's go to other places where they have a different sense of circus and I think that's how we ended up there there are other research projects other books that are in the in the pipeline but this one all of it surprised me I knew the work I've been teaching the work but the articulateness of these 24 artists as well absolutely touched me can I respond to that my experience of it was almost the exact opposite I was absolutely astounded by how heinous I sounded in the interview and I haven't been able to read it since I sort of edited it to a point where I could potentially see it published but for me the thing about circus is actually this kind of pursuit of the ineffable and even putting it in words often feels like a violation we thought you respect and love and yet you did and it sounds better than you think it does I think one of the big problems with contemporary circus that I'm not sure necessarily New York is feeling but there is a certain standardization that is happening and that's not inherent within the form and that's why I growing up what I really remember was always being on the outside of society and always wanting to be normal I always wanted to be a Brady Bunch member but I was living we were all communists and anarchists and political and it had to be something that was always on the outside so there's a big part of me that kind of just wanted the 80s to come so we could just all become standardized and now what I'm realizing is to that circus has to watch out for that it really does have to watch out for that well we had a beautiful conference attached to the circus conference in Montreal a couple years ago which was the circus in its others and so that's where we began to see the circus it wants to become a discipline and then within the discipline we have the marginalized disciplines and that was very, very heartening for me as someone who's always felt marginalized within the circus world to be with other people marginalized within the circus world and to make that a world and that was I don't know maybe you can mention some of those a lot of those companies are in the book and that conference actually was extremely instrumental and basically opening my eyes to the wider world and the different approaches to circus making Ruth, in your work you now have a significant position what is your vision what are you going to change what will you do different now to take the energy but also inject ideas, visions what are you going to do? I'm in a gatekeeping position so that's a thrilling position but also dangerous and I take it very seriously so I think I don't know I don't need to go through my whole agenda but I certainly think that recognizing there's work to be done for developing audiences for this form there's work to be done developing the kind of acumen and awareness and consciousness of the field of presenting certainly for this form I think I'm so new to the work I'm doing in Montreal that I don't know I'm getting still to know what can be done there so I don't feel authorized to talk about that yet but can I ask a question of folks? so one thing that we were just incredibly lucky to have everyone here this evening and so that's kind of the makeup of the panel has to do with everyone being in the book that Patrick edited and also this confluence of people being in town for this particular day and all this so but it strikes me in hearing from everyone that in a way you're of a similar generation and so I'm just wondering if you could you've got multiple decades each of you to practice under your so I guess my question is if you could talk about your mentoring activities with or younger artists that you're helping bring forward or what you're seeing in younger artists and younger companies that's exciting to you where I would love to hear that anyone who wants to say just because we're talking about the new generations and I don't know artistically but tricks, tricks wise and I feel sometimes I get very uncomfortable when we talk, when we get together and talk a lot about circus because I feel like circus is being in the studio and there's such great tricks it's the golden age of tricks I mean sit like just in our little world there's so many so much great juggling, more juggling than ever and the acrobatics that surround at the moment the aerials the seawheel tricks, the tita board the Scandinavian tita board tricks and I think that is circus as well I think we get lost in this pseudo poetic this that the other but it's the tricks and the tricks are healthy the tricks are so good the kids are great, we have no worries the kids are way better than we ever were so I think there's no I think the future is bright and it's the golden age of tricks but it's true even some like some of the jugglers are here they do crazy things I mean I'm sure on instagram you watch they flip and they turn and they've broken the rules I mean how that fits into an artistic concept in a way who cares maybe it doesn't need to in juggling there's a lot of people that don't perform, they're very very good maybe they're as important maybe we don't need to make shows I mean he says at the opera house but but I think it's not just this kind of and I think I worry I love the academia's for me I used to flirt in the world of dance artistically and dance has conferences and things one day circus will be like that and now the more circus has conferences the more I worry they will become and we cover it all in an ocean the words are fantastic but we mustn't drown in an ocean of words one of the things that keeps coming back in my feeling here is that I feel insanely privileged and I feel like there's a lot of people who were here this afternoon who were talking about contemporary circus in the United States and what's really tough for me is I feel like a lot of people feel squashed or feel like they have to fight to do what they want to do or where's the money, where's the money where's the money, where's the space where's the support, where's the money and giggling and trying to make it happen so I feel it was really difficult for me to talk actually today about with the amount of privilege that I have had by actually leaving this country and now seeing you know it's different I see now the United States mostly from the outside although I try and come in as much as possible something really interesting is happening when we created the seven fingers there were not really any other contemporary circuses in North America and now I feel like every artist that leaves our company starts a company but what they're not really experienced which is awesome and incredible and we absolutely want to support that kind of individual creativity but what I'm feeling now is the responsibility of having a company and what that means to all the people for example who are employed or who are seeing the shows and being affected by the shows like this deeper sense of responsibility that is becoming heavier and heavier that I definitely also felt my parents deal with and everyone at Make a Circus and everyone at the Mime Troop that this deeper responsibility for what art is and I think if there was one thing I would want to pass on to all those very privileged people who are making their little companies or all those people here who are really struggling just to survive is that there really is a greater responsibility to take care of art in general and that it can't really just be about your voice and you surviving even though that's barely what some people are able to do but it's really about supporting that community around you supporting and creating those audiences and finding and building a bridge toward that's why I asked the question today toward your governments and toward your the wealthy people that seem to walk the streets here with obscene amounts of money I moved to Montreal and very quickly found myself lobbying to the government which was crazy because I was an American on a work visa and lobbying for it as an art form which now I don't even think necessarily is really the mission to be had but I felt there was a void and a movement and I joined that movement I did not drive that movement alone there were a lot of people who got behind it and said well not necessarily that we have to be together and create everything together and yada yada yada but participating in finding a way that your work is also giving back to the larger community and creating space which I think for most Americans right now is really difficult because you're actually in a competitive area and that's not a wonderful place to be so if I had a movement I'm running around in circles but it's like somebody there has to be some kind of nurturing of art and I know that that can only happen if we all kind of come together and band and form that and nurturing the responsibility that that also carries on If I may to answer from the academic perspective the future what I'm hoping for and what I'm seeing is basically former practitioners who are basically in their late 30s 40s thinking what have I been doing all this time and wanting to basically dig deeper and come with the embodied knowledge of circus and they're doing their masters, they're doing their PhD and that's the future of circus scholarship I think this actual mixture of both the scholarship and the embodied knowledge Maybe we go since we are a little bit on time and to audience questions Michael if you could put some lights up and at the very end I would like to maybe ask you or what you dream about if someone would say what do you need and you had unlimited means you know what would you do, what is your what is the project you say this is the what I always would have liked to done but we have a great audience here and we need good theatre, we also need great audiences and so for you all to come and take your time thank you for doing that it really means a lot to us so are there some questions or remarks in the audience and we start here with the Bond Street Yes, my name is Michael McGuigan and I'm with Bond Street Theatre and I know many people and are meeting new people but we come from Bond Street Theatre it's a physical theatre company that has a foot somewhat in circus arts and ensemble theatre and our mentors were San Francisco Mime Troop and Pickle Family and Bread and Puppet Theatre all those folks that we're talking about and even open theatre and living theatre which reminded me as we were discussing ensemble element that I know in the theatre world the artists creating the show they were their own directors and actors and technical builders and prop makers that ensemble spirit so I'd like to hear if anybody has any comments about how that is working in the contemporary theatre as we're hearing it now how much of it is ensemble and how much is it oh they're great performers let's pull them in and they can do their act as opposed to like creating the show I can only really talk for us our model is an ensemble so we employ 21 artists all year round on a full time wage and therefore we commit to pay 1.6 million dollars a year we don't have and then we have to try and send them out to make that money in a whole variety of different ways so it's easy it's a piece of cake and we often don't have money for sets or time for rehearsals because we have to take that other gig or do that thing but the sense that all our artists are employed on two year contracts they get paid the same if they're rehearsed, if they're sick, if they work because I think artists have a right to buy a house and to invest in a future and have a family and one of the things I like the most is that most of our company the ones that stay it's not for everyone it's like a forced 21 way marriage most of the time but the artists who stay they have mortgages and they have for life and I think that's a really great gift to be able to offer and that's the key form of my mentorship I can tell you the psychological health of every single one of my artists at every single point in time and I carry that load that's my responsibility in terms of creation I'm the director they work with me and for me and we create together some shows quite prescriptive and opera there's a limited bandwidth for collaboration some of our shows are fully improvised creating a strong culture that unites everyone and a very shared methodology that's based in belief and mutual trust and the kind of psychological safety is incredibly important but also deeply flawed and impossible to achieve I'll answer really quickly because so many of his the way that he works is so fundamentally actually also how we work which is amazing because I think our shows are completely different we tend to actually feature the acts we are victims of that and one of the reasons is because we were all circus performers and the evolution of expressing yourself on a trapeze or juggling within the act to really create that beginning middle and end and have the tricks evolve so that you've seen it in one way but then you're seeing it in another way and going to the actual full expression of the act is something that we being ex-circus performers really value and also want to give our circus performers and we want to give them that platform to speak fully through their discipline that said we're also an ensemble and many of the possibilities of the ensemble that Yaren has we share where all of our shows are basically created through improvisations that are guided by one of the seven fingers depending on who's directing so we will write, direct and choreograph however movement and character interpretation happen completely through improvisation which then evolves over time so even if someone's come with an act we will rewrite that act and restructure it within the global of what we're trying to create as an ensemble yeah we're an ensemble too and we want everyone to also pay their mortgages and raise their babies and I'm a benign dictator as well and a lot of it comes through improvisation I never said benign we didn't get this way with the benignness and so we supply everybody with a thousand dollars a year to go out and do that but we do care and I do know about all their psychological well-being it's almost the same we just need that another hundred million dollars a year one or two more questions or thoughts, circus talk here yeah hi just a simple question about the categories of the book which escaped me now I read half of it I know the first one is apparatus but how did those categories come about and what isn't in there or what were options of a way to categorize the fabulous information that came from these interviews in a nutshell there's contesting basically ideas around apparatuses contesting the norm made through politics so circus and politics so some of the trends we've been seeing in terms of dramaturgy in terms of working from the act-based model to a more hybrid, as I said, atomized model and what's the last one new creation new creation I said that, sorry it's been a long day sorry I'm blanking out there was a lot of debate a lot of back and forth a lot of discussion and this could have been a great number of books, quite frankly and I think that's rich, we're in a period where there could have been many books there can be many books on this extremely vibrant hybrid art form what's missing I guess is the more normative models of circus following you've heard me talk about this in other instances but looking at different meaning-making strategies that's another project maybe one more thought question I'm just going to jump in really quickly with something that addresses a few things we've heard about future and mentoring and what's missing which of course is the diversity of our populations and of our work how do we look internationally how do we look to the global south to find out what's happening in contemporary circus there, how do we make circus that's meaningful to all of the Americas and even in North America in which our colors and our ethnicities are changing all the time and we need to make space and figure out how to bring people of color into the circus world in much larger numbers and that just goes back to segregation and everything that is white nationalism in this country so that people don't come up with the time and privilege to practice these tricks which we love so much to do self-hating circus person as I am I love to juggle but how do we how do we break through the nationalism that we're living with and make all of this work available and ticing and affordable to the rest of the population that we don't see represented can I say one thing along those lines actually the best some of the best juggling in the world at the moment is in South America at the traffic lights and to me that's very intriguing because I feel sometimes in the first world we moan I wish I had that grand to make that show and I can't make that because I don't have 15,000 and then they make some of the best work in the world just the traffic lights so I think if we want to make stuff we can make stuff I think but we also want to eat so they're doing great juggling they're not paying their rent well they make quite a lot of money at the traffic lights actually they do quite well one more thought observation question who are you here yes can you take the microphone please this is probably a longer conversation in general but there's been a lot of discussion of circus being something that comes from the fringes there should be the fringes but I'm curious really anyone's thoughts on what the role of like you say representation representing what we're actually seeing in our everyday lives seeing in our communities where is what is our responsibility as artists to be representative and not just make the things that we either dream about would like to see in the world or want to just like give a middle finger to the man where is the role of representation I guess well I'll just as the one who's the angry feminist I will just say you know for people that want to want to deal with representation that's great and people that want to deal with social change and politics that's great and you know hallelujah for people who who don't and are making beautiful beautiful dances and circuses I think the response I don't know if the question is responsibility or just the space for all different kinds of work I love Yates formulation that out of our quarrel with others we make rhetoric and have a quarrel with ourselves poetry and I think there's places for both in the world I know that my journey is to make poetry and every time I try and tell anybody anything I tell nobody nothing and in a way that really bores them so I've worked out that's not my journey I mean I would say today my thing would be that this clearly needs to happen more often I think that there it would be great to create spaces where forums could actually happen and I think when companies like yarns are here organ dinis are working if there's ways to encourage companies to and I know you guys do this quite often workshops forums so that new perspectives can help enlighten communities where they are I think everyone needs to make an effort to include diversity in any kind of projects that they're doing and that just has to become the active strength in like I want to do this so I want to do this with people that I'm not I need to find these people and bring them in and build the bridge to making that happen and I think what's really tough in New York City is so much about surviving and not necessarily about creating but I know that there's a community now I mean I'm just hearing about House of Yes and what the music is doing like if there's ways that that community those communities can solidify support each other by tickets to other people shows when they're going or not accept salaries or conditions that are actually going to compromise people's health I think there's so many subjects in and around what's happening in New York City right now that could actually be addressed as a community as a whole if there was a forum for that well I hope the day perhaps contributes you know to create such a forum as I say again we would be happy to offer a seminar room here out there once in a while and I hope that will be done but the last question to our circus theatre artists, performance artists if you really could do what you want someone says it's unlimited what is going to be a project a vision you have that you always would have like to do or would love to do how would that look like? Actually I have to say I do a lot of what I like doing I could do it on a bigger scale with some of my fantasy people but I I am quite happy like I say my wife and I work together we make things in our kitchen I don't need much more than that but talk about community next weekend at Brooklyn Museum 40 community jugglers and a choir of 60 beautiful youngsters singing and an orchestra of 70 very good musicians and it's free and yeah one does do that sort of thing thank you is there a project you I know you work on four or five things parallel now but is there one something you really would love to do look I think like Sean I'm very fortunate that I get to make some of my obscure dreams and fantasies reality I think what I long for is smaller and more time I think I would love to have six months or a year with five people in a room five people who didn't get injured or sick or wig out it would be really great but like that kind of scale and time and not lack of pressure and ability to start again and we've kind of been able to read humans that you saw a little bit of in Roots thing the poster that was kind of a show that was called Untitled for a long time and I took 10 weeks and we didn't have a purpose to it but I think to be able to extend that journey of just following your nose and instincts would be a rare gift I would also have to say I'm pretty much doing the things that I want to be doing and that's absolutely I feel blessed I also would like to be able to go smaller and one of the things that I think I'm fighting with is when I try to really do something different it doesn't um it's it's that's not the seven fingers and so really being able to create a company where we actually can try things that really don't have anything to do with what we did before I would really love to evolve our reputation to be able to actually try things and again as Yaron said to make them better because right now one of the main problems is that you can create something but to really achieve it's full expression or to get good at it it takes time so when you try something new and risky you need that time to get it over over the hump well this is so beautiful that we all really love what we do and feel like we're doing it I mean that my career you know queer circus in the park that's what I wanted to do and my answers also the same to have money and time to actually get better at it you know to not have thrown it together two weeks ago but to develop it and throw it out and try again and not be stressed and put more skill back in and more research and just to really let it grow and finesse it well these are wonderful answers again thank you all for coming thank you for coming here thanks also Jet who presenting lots of circus at Montclair State University is one of the supporters so Ruth again I have an idea Patrick with the book and all of you though really coming out here right away at the rehearsals and you happen to be here you flying in for it it really means a lot to us and I really hope that in the sense of a trample maybe it gives a little jump that you jump higher than you maybe normally do and I also hope that the discussion in the afternoon to create something a little critical mass and it always starts with baby steps maybe this is the beginning of it I would be happy to help others too so as thank you all for coming we hope you will stay around a little bit so you can talk to the artists and follow their work and the opera and go to the mat and to the circus and to the Brooklyn Museum thank you all for coming thank all of you guys for bringing this together