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Mimetic approaches to circus dramaturgy displace the formal qualities of circus tricks, privileging the body's capacity to refer over its capacity to affect. In such a context, specific circus tricks tend to become interchangeable, generalized, and ultimately devalued. What if we were instead to build a dramaturgical discourse which takes circus technique itself as a starting point? This thesis seeks to think and write circus technique as a staged material process- as a joining-together and coming-apart of human bodies, technical discourses, and material objects-which brings its various component parts in and out of mimetic referentiality. Such an approach gestures towards the rich potential of an alliance between circus theory and materialist philosophy.

Inspired by Maaike Bleeker's dramaturgical practice, in which a heightened awareness of that which is emerging in the studio subsequently serves to ground rigorous reflection about the possible implications of these emergences, I use the vocabulary of materialist theory to direct the dramaturgical gaze towards four affective parameters. These parameters concern the trick's territorializing force; its revelation of the realm of the virtual; its problematization of agency (as shown in Ilmatila's Gangewifre); and its apparent cause. In doing so, my intention is to enable artists and dramaturgs to think, speak, and perform circus technique with an eye to its real nuance and fullness. [summary by the author]

This film is a story of insides and outsides, and of impossible plans. It was inspired by the memory of our childhoods in the American suburbs, in Connecticut and Orange County. Going into shoot, we had defined a couple of “characters” that seemed meaningful to us as kids. We chose these “characters” also because they had definite imagistic identities as well as social ones, and we wanted to explore character from the outside in: first as an idealized image, then as an idealized image in time and space, and only lastly as the vehicle of an inscrutable subjectivity.

We used improvisation out of practical necessity, and to get closer to the unpredictability that we feel is a part of the social reality, but also because making a huge mess and then whittling it down into a little polished object ready for consumption seemed like the right process for a piece about growing up in America surrounded by lots of beautiful pictures.

The improvisations we did were meticulously organized, but not much of that comes across in the film. Instead, the continuity you see is mostly a post-produced construction. The text that you hear recited over the images was written almost a half a year after the shoot, but before we actually saw any footage—it’s a description of what we think the characters we were representing would have felt in the situations we remembered being in.

We hope that by making this film, more so that had we made a live piece, we have begun to stake our claim within the economy of the image, so that in some small way we can assert ourselves as willing subjects, no longer content to be simply the objects of influence and manipulation.

Created in the framework of the Go! Emerging Artist Commissioning Program (STREB@SLAM).
A special thanks to the Lab:time program at the National Centre for Circus Arts. [authors summary]