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In Auch, a Vibrant Art: the 35th CIRCa Circus Festival

In its 35 editions, the CIRCa festival in Auch, France, has become a proud showcase of the variety and vibrance of contemporary circus art. Pascal Jacob offers a breakdown of the creative scope and spaces of the shows on display at CIRCa 2022.

In Auch in 1975, the Abbé de Lavenère-Lussan founded the Pop Circus, a leisure school dedicated to the city’s young people, somewhat along the lines of the Centre Immaculée Conception in Montreal, where a circus school would be created six years later as a prelude to the future National Circus School. Between 1974 and 1990, circus schools multiplied throughout France. The growing idea to create a federation that would bring these schools together in a space of exchange and confrontation became reality on October 27, 1988, when the city of Auch hosted the first National Meeting of circus schools, chaired by Jean-François Celier. And so CIRCA was born.

Initially conceived as a competition, CIRCA was transformed in 1995 under the impetus of National Center of Circus Arts of Châlons-en-Champagne Director General Bernard Turin and Ministry of Culture Inspector Yves Deschamps into a selection of schools invited to present acrobatic sequences and workshops in a friendly setting. In parallel with these meetings, the CIRCA organization solicited circus companies to perform in a village of tents, installed on a vast plain of the lower city. This mixture of transmission and creation would become the DNA of modern CIRCa. In 2006, at the instigation of Henri Guichard, director of Toulouse’s Lido-Centre des arts du cirque, Occitanie fait son cirque was created as an invitation for a dozen circus companies to perform on the IÎe Piot during the Avignon Festival. Finally, in an effort led by the city of Auch, the region of Occitanie, the Gers department and the State, the project of le Centre d’Innovation et de Recherche Circassien (the CIRC) materialized in 2012 in a gesture fundamental to the development of contemporary circus arts—a great cultural tool at the service of both the population and the actors of the territory.

A city street in Auch, France, by night
Auch by night: the spirit of the city Photo @ Pascal Jacob

Located on the site of the former Spanish barracks, the CIRC building combines elements of wooden and stone architecture, steel structures, and canvases. It also serves as the heart of the CIRCa festival, the meeting point for professionals and the public, with several venues, a bar, dining and conviviality spaces, a shop, and reception desks for the different types of festival-goers.

For about ten days a year, the Gers prefecture becomes the setting of a bustling festival marked by the great diversity of spaces offered to artists. This diversity is probably what best characterizes CIRCa: its wealth of artistic proposals is exceptional. One of its advantages is that it does not have to restrict itself in terms of temporary structures.

For this 35th edition of CIRCa, five chapiteaux have been installed in different parts of the city, creating a real urban network effect to best meet the expectations of the invited companies. This plurality of art and artists is decisive. Some of the creations are linked to the spaces they are presented in, and here the principle of the scene/room relationship takes on its full meaning.

The festival programming has a “tile” effect, offering three or four performances to each invited company. As the days go by, these shows are juxtaposed with and gradually replaced by others to ensure artistic continuity throughout the festival, giving spectators the feeling that there is always something new to discover from one day to the next. The eclecticism of the works on display is exciting, mixing small and large forms while drawing a sensitive map of current circus trends.

Out of the Blue is a play written for two acrobats who have chosen to explore the possibilities of apnea by dancing in an 8,000-litre aquarium. Underpinned by an ecological discourse on the fragility of water and its challenges for humanity, the show is also a hypnotic and masterful piece of choreography. Out of the Blue is a subtle variation on the theme of love and solidarity, the result of a long exploration of breathing and movement—a captivating performance nourished by a deep awareness of the body’s mechanisms when faced with extreme situations. A kiss exchanged underwater by the two partners, beyond its symbolism, is also a way for them to share oxygen, to live in these moments of immersion and make them stronger. A child saw it as an act of love and survival: magic…

Far from this micro “world of silence,” the vibrating sounds made by the nineteen musicians of the Surnatural Orchestra plunge the audience of PIC into a real bath of energy. PIC‘s setting is a vast big top with 700 spectators installed around an oval playground, a bit like a small arena. This show is a creation of Inextrémiste, a company well-accustomed to questioning social mechanisms and playing with the social codes and limitations around live shows, and it is truly jubilant! Because you have to dare to summon a flock of children—some of them very small ones—to lift and move a… trampoline! And it works! Carried by a stripping humour, the show mixes influences in forms such as a fun, unprecedented ceiling walk, interwoven with references to the fairground. It superimposes curiosity onto the spectacular, creating a spread of acrobatic sequences that end up enthusing or exasperating the audience according to their sensibilities.

More of this brute force can be found in the Foutoir Céleste, a creation that celebrates the Feast of the Coyote—an unlikely creature embodied by a Flatland BMX virtuoso, who acts as both guide and witness to an acrobatic ritual wherein the body is constantly investigated. This intense physicality is also at the heart of Barrières, a powerful construction from the Bêstîa company with very strong scenography: a wall that seems impassable but will, however, open, crack, and finally collapse, abolishing all sense of limitation. Ten acrobats mix techniques throughout the show, playing with the visual perspectives offered by the gradually falling wall fragments, and weave together a narrative form full of surprises.

If Barrières is definitively designed to exist in a frontal relationship with its audience, Terces is born for and within the circle. Created by Johann Le Guillerm, this show is a suspended moment—an enchanted parenthesis in which objects come to life, where nothing is truly acquired, and where (almost) everything is transformed…

This inanimate poetics is overwhelming. A virtuoso and instinctive character, Johann the Guillerm blows, manipulates, warms, and assembles objects in order to, in the end, trace out a path of ineffable joy for his audience in a display both breathless and transcended by the littlest of his gestures. This new opus is one part of his Attraction, a research project started in 2001 which questions the notions of balance, point of view, form, and movement as embodied in live shows, performances, objects, or sculptures. Johann Le Guillerm is a magician of the real; he never ceases to reject our certainties, and builds a circus that belongs only to him.

Perhaps one of the best reasons to make the trip to Auch for CIRCa is that each edition is an ephemeral mosaic of circus art, each fragment of which obeys very few rules. At CIRCa, aspects of the world and our society are echoed with acuity, sensitivity, and the jubilant spirit of moving from an ample work to a more intimate proposal like La Boîte de Pandore, a creation of the company Attention Fragile that fights, with great delicacy, the silence that often surrounds rape. With the help of small objects, a smooth rope, and an electric guitar, Marion Coulomb relates the threads of a vivid story, evoking an unfathomable suffering with which we must continue to live and grapple. Here, the act of making art is both a quest for and a mode of liberation—a way to open this box of secrets so that it will never close again.

Pourvu que la mastication ne soit pas longue is a short and brutal piece on police violence. Together, an actor, an acrobat, and a musician materialize a story of the killing of Amadou Diallo, a young man shot by New York City policemen who thought that he was armed. The show crosses emotions—anger, impotence, and pain—but its integration of circus technique into its storytelling makes for a formidable tool to help nourish our understanding of the text… a strong way to combine writing and acrobatics in the service of a political discourse.

Performers in the contemporary circus show "Pourvu que la mastication ne soit pas longue" depict a scene of police violence with two men in a ring, the dark-skinned man waving a white flag of surrender
Pourvu que la mastication ne soit pas trop longue © Murat Arslan Rymo – Ateliers Médicis

Writing is undoubtedly the common point of most of these presentations, and it reveals itself with great acuity in the 23 Fragments de ces derniers jours, a circography by Maroussia Diaz Verbèke. Somewhere between fakirism and acrobatic dance, verticality and balance, these fragments are an echo of Maroussia’s previous creation Notes on the circus, which itself resonated with 100 Objects to Represent the World, a “prop opera” by Peter Greenaway. These intuitive assemblages altogether build to an elaborate parable about life, its doubts and its reasons. It is both playful and dizzying, formidably intelligent, and the public was not mistaken in offering these 23 Fragments a standing ovation.

Auch is a circus territory where life seems to be constantly overflowing. Lontano is another pleasant cause of vertigo: a short play by Marica Marinoni, alone on stage with her Cyr wheel. Her mastery of the apparatus is both unprecedented and extraordinary. It is a fabulous hand-to-hand act, becoming one of those shared moments that remain long engraved in the memory of its witnesses and that delineate new fields of exploration for single-discipline creations.

It is by tirelessly juxtaposing these aesthetics, by inviting both living legends and talented beginners, by constantly playing out tiny or gigantic proposals and offering them to an audience always at the rendezvous of great stylistic differences that CIRCa has asserted its identity over the years.

The presence of several dozen circus schools at the event remains an essential element of its very structure. Beyond the obvious allusion to its history, it creates a positive sort of artistic contamination that keeps everyone talking. Confronting generational gaps and motivating vocations is another way to inject unique vitality into the smallest crevices of a major art form.

But CIRCa is also an operation that has been designed over time, like a year-long residency conducted by the inhabitants of a city district. In Auch, more than 350 people got to experience the pleasure of walking on a wire, playing music, or rappelling down a building’s façade in workshops led by the Basinga company. These workshops had been completed over the months before the festival and culminated at the event in a final Traversée between two buildings in the Garros neighborhood, offered by tightrope walker Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga. The company also presented a funambulesque show on the forecourt of the Auch Cathedral, reviving the old traditions of rope dancers, performing in the hearts of cities since Antiquity…

CIRCa is a bit of autumn breath, a time of meetings and exchanges on the threshold of winter. It is also, to a certain extent, the second part of an intuitive diptych with the Occitanie fait son cirque of the Avignon festival. These programs are both very different and yet perfectly complementary to one another. With nearly forty artistic proposals spread over the two events, the circus arts are celebrated a few months apart in all their diversity. This visibility is vital and reassuring. It unambiguously affirms the richness of an art that is constantly reinventing itself.

Click on the image for the detailed program and full line-up:An illustration of a circus tent as a hot air balloon. The cover of the 35th CIRCa festival program


Teaser of shows mentioned in the article

Out of Blue Teaser

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Foutoir Céleste

Barrières

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Traces

Pourvu que la mastication ne soit pas longue

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Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga

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Main image: Traversée – Cie Basinga © Oihib SOUALMI

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Pascal Jacob
Designer, Artistic Director and Historian -FRANCE
After completing university studies in performing arts at Université de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, Pascal Jacob, over the course of ten years, developed a career as associate director for the opera. He then concentrated on costume and set design and artistic direction.
The circus has long been a passion and his interest for this singular form of live performance has led him to create costumes most notably Rainforest and Living Carousel for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Salto Natale for Rolf Knie, Au pays des clowns for Cirque Phénix. He also created the costumes and the set designs of Barnum’s Kaleidoscape for Feld Entertainment as well as those of India for Prime Time Entertainment. Of late, working as an artistic scout and creative director, he contributed to the development of several projects for Dragone Entertainment Group. As such, he was artistic director and production designer for Odyseo, the Chemistry of Dreams celebrating the 150 years of the Solvay group, and for the Dai Show for Dragone Entertainment Group in Xishuangbanna in China. Last year, he was involved as production designer and artistic director for the creation of Era The Spirit of Shanghai in the Shanghai Circus World permanent building.
Alongside his work in design, Pascal acts as art consultant for the Européenne de Spectacles, artistic director for Cirque Phénix as well as for the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain. He is also lecturer in the history of the circus for the Montreal National Circus School and the Fratellini Academy in Saint-Denis.

By tirelessly collecting all things pertaining to the circus arts through the ages, he has worked as exhibition curator for many museums in Europe and in America, collaborating with many institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Tohu in Montréal. He has published more than forty books as well as numerous articles dedicated to the circus, the zoo, and the opera, he also lectures on these topics.

He was born, lives and works notably in Paris.

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Pascal Jacob

After completing university studies in performing arts at Université de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, Pascal Jacob, over the course of ten years, developed a career as associate director for the opera. He then concentrated on costume and set design and artistic direction. The circus has long been a passion and his interest for this singular form of live performance has led him to create costumes most notably Rainforest and Living Carousel for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Salto Natale for Rolf Knie, Au pays des clowns for Cirque Phénix. He also created the costumes and the set designs of Barnum’s Kaleidoscape for Feld Entertainment as well as those of India for Prime Time Entertainment. Of late, working as an artistic scout and creative director, he contributed to the development of several projects for Dragone Entertainment Group. As such, he was artistic director and production designer for Odyseo, the Chemistry of Dreams celebrating the 150 years of the Solvay group, and for the Dai Show for Dragone Entertainment Group in Xishuangbanna in China. Last year, he was involved as production designer and artistic director for the creation of Era The Spirit of Shanghai in the Shanghai Circus World permanent building. Alongside his work in design, Pascal acts as art consultant for the Européenne de Spectacles, artistic director for Cirque Phénix as well as for the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain. He is also lecturer in the history of the circus for the Montreal National Circus School and the Fratellini Academy in Saint-Denis. By tirelessly collecting all things pertaining to the circus arts through the ages, he has worked as exhibition curator for many museums in Europe and in America, collaborating with many institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Tohu in Montréal. He has published more than forty books as well as numerous articles dedicated to the circus, the zoo, and the opera, he also lectures on these topics. He was born, lives and works notably in Paris.