Post-colonial Symbols in Circus: Staging Ko’Ch Ritual in Patrick Masset’s “Reclaim”
This article is part of the “inter-magazine Circus Festival” projects that is a collaboration between the UP – Circus & Performing Arts Festival, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and five international circus magazines, Around About Circus, Malabart, Juggling Magazine, StageLync, and Dynamo Magazines, all part of the INCAm network. Students at Université Libre de Bruxelles share their thoughts on current stage and circus performances. Their diverse backgrounds—ranging from literature, journalism, acting, to cultural studies—bring unique perspectives, whether familiar with the art form or newcomers. They are united by a curiosity for performing arts, which led them to the MA Arts du spectacle program, offering exposure to various art forms, including the circus. As part of the Circus|Studies, an interdisciplinary and international research project led by Dr. Franziska Trapp, theatre students explore circus dramaturgy, collaborate with emerging artists, and engage in performance analysis and critique. Their experiences culminate in MA theses or articles like the following.
«Reclaimby circus troupe T1J, written and directed by Patrick Masset, is described by them as ‘an act of resistance’. Reclaim is an imaginary ritual freely inspired by the Ko’ch of Central Asia, in which women attempt to build an egalitarian rapport with men, with the aim of offering a more equitable world to future generations. What is offered here is not a show, but a collective experience. This project is seen as a necessity, a form of secular prayer. »(TN: the term used in French is ‘laïque’ not ‘séculaire’, ‘Laïcité’ is a French concept which refers to the policies and principles where the state plays an active role in excluding religious visibility from the public domain).
One by one, we, the audience, enter into an igloo-like circus tent. We then sit on benches arranged in three rows, almost touching the circular stage. The circus performers are sitting among us in the front row at the start of the show. On stage, a lyrical singer, two cellists and five circus performers. We’re plunged into darkness, and a smell of incense wafts through the dome. The slit in the tent through which we entered lets in a beam of light (which will later appear as a place of contemplation), as if to signify the “outside zone”. The first image to be unveiled is that of a circus performer carrying a wooden puppet in the form of a child. Later she wraps the puppet in white fur. This puppet appears as the central figure of the show, and the ritual may even be performed for her. The second image is that of the other circus performers rising from the audience to gather and form a horde. The five of them, to the sound of drums, move forward, shouting “Ha! Ha! Ha!…” in a clear and powerful way, yet sounding almost imploring. After the horde, they transform into a pack, all of them embodying human-animal hybrids wearing dog-skull masks, imitating feline gestures. A few weeks later, in a review of Reclaim, I read “Five bodies grouped together, as if decerebrate “1.
Dehumanized beings? The men are shirtless, powerful. They all represent unpredictable beings, frightening us, pretending to jump at our necks to bite us.
Reclaimfollows its course, and numerous succinct images have us alternating between feelings of fear, anger, sadness and then incomprehension…
What does staging a non-Western ritual mean as a white director?
When I left the show, I was overwhelmed, feeling as if I’d been transported into another time and space, in which I couldn’t place myself or what I’d just seen. I was overcome by many emotions, some of which I couldn’t even name.
Symbols come to us as if they were self-evident, and resonate with our social imaginary of “primitive” communities. An unspoken trust established itself during this experience. We committed ourselves to believing what we saw, to entering into this ritual, to accepting the trance-like state, as well as the proximity with the circus performers, without knowing any of the specifics and modalities of the Ko’ch ritual. As audience members, we were entering a process of self-seeking and healing. Added to this was a total lack of clarity as to the origin of the images, which had ritual, spiritual and/or religious connotations.
Can the artistic experience be devoid of all precautions and vigilance with regard to what will be shown? To me, this narrative is linked with our way of recounting History. In Françoise Vergès’ Décoloniser les musées 2, the author and decolonial activist considers how we should recount History. Why do we tell it through objects and representations? Why take objects out of their environment, why tell a story through them? Why use them when they invoke connotations totally removed from their context? In the case of Reclaim, the stage is made up of elements and objects that all refer to ritual, shamanic and/or spiritual aesthetics. Isn’t the very fact of appropriating culture from Anatolia and using it FOR ourselves, a neo-colonial way of plundering resources, even non-material ones? What do we, as white people, have to stop perpetuating?
How can we decolonize artistic and performance spaces, which are themselves embedded in institutions and, more broadly, in societies that are not decolonized?
This “imaginary” ritual is performed without words, and staged around dehumanized bodies that seem to be animated by their animalistic side. Reclaimclaims to be “an act of resistance, a return to the circus of our origins, characterized by savagery, circles, strangeness, sometimes monstrosity, hyper proximity and fear.” But what is savagery for a white man? Savagery, comparable to barbarism, is a term that has been theorized numerous times throughout decolonial thinking. These colonial representations appear to remain present in contemporary shows. Isn’t the savage/barbarian automatically outside the self? Patrick Masset answered me in an interview: “I don’t stage savagery; once again, it’s within us and I simply make it visible (…) as humans, we have the potential to be monstrous as well as beautiful.” But then how is monstrosity created? When does it arise? Louisa Yousfi discusses the (literary) figure of the savage, activated by the civilizing discourse, presenting itself at first, as benevolent.
The savage, the wildman, exists in the state of nature, before civilization. It is a being waiting to be educated and civilized by man. This theorization is not rational; it seems to stem from a sort of fascination with the savage, the barbarian. Almost mythical. So this is where we come back to Reclaim and the image of the “other” that many white directors have. Our artistic intuitions are shaped by the colonial imaginary. This same imaginary is nourished by a fantasy of what men can be between savage beings and divine beings. How far would we go, how would we transform ourselves if society made us monstrous?
“Our monsters are born of an excess of you (…) an excess of empire “3
Ever since that show, these questions have been playing in my head, obsessing me. How can a ritual be used in European shows? Do we have the right? Do we have the need? We have to move beyond the simple question of legitimacy and focus on a broader realization. As you’ll have understood, I don’t have the answer, but I do have a few proposals that might help us get started. Decolonizing our relationship with the world involves self-awareness. Becoming aware of one’s whiteness begins by revoking the idea, the point of view about oneself, that one considers neutral and therefore innocent. And, more broadly, becoming aware that cultural authorities are monopolized by rich, white, Western people. What does it mean as a white Western/European person to draw on non-European cultures to create?
“Reclaim means being able to retrieve, to reappropriate what one has been separated from”. Who is this “we”: white people. Who is Patrick Masset talking about? This sentence invisibilizes the people who have really been dispossessed, whose property has really been plundered, and emphasizes the idea that whiteness is “neutral”.
Staging the ritual for the circus
The Ko’ch ritual from Central Asia was chosen for its cathartic aim, as well as for its aesthetic appeal. Reserved originally to women shamans in Tajik and Uzbek societies, this ritual allows them to organize themselves to combat the patriarchy. Here, the Ko’ch ritual is a staged inspiration designed to ” mimic ” the trance, which the circus performers aren’t likely to experience at all. During the performance, we don’t ask ourselves whether what we’re seeing is real, true to the genuine proceedings of a Ko’ch rite; we let ourselves be carried away by what we see. This ritual, undoubtedly unknown to the majority of the audience, is represented using many of the aesthetic codes of ” non-European ” rites. Various symbols are presented on stage: shirtless men, human-animal hybridization, traditional objects (fur, incense, animal skulls, candles, axe…), all refer to representations encompassing numerous connotations of “primitive” peoples. It all adds up to an essentializing “whole”. What are we looking at? Where are we in Reclaim? Why are we experiencing this now? What’s happening here is atemporal, and we immediately into enter a fiction that doesn’t allow us to question the origin of these images and symbols.
This performance emerges as existing outside of time, the fruit of an artistic intuition that plunges us into “otherworldly” connotations, through an emotional bias that draws us in, draws us in, draws us in… towards abstraction. Out of its original context, the Ko’ch ritual seems reduced. Also, Reclaim promotes universalism and equality for all, without taking into account the distinctions and individual parameters of each person, as well as the discriminations they may be victims of based on race, class, gender… As does the ambition to create “a form of secular prayer”, thereby rejecting all forms of religion and echoing the term “religiophobia”, the fruit of colonial “modernity”.
Putting a stop to the lingering colonial imaginary
Let’s take the question of spirituality seriously, but then how can we really question it? How can we rediscover a form of spirituality while taking into account the parameters that structure it, and at the same time being aware and contextualized? What form would a show take that would tackle these questions head-on? Exploring them without capitalizing on them for aesthetic value? We live in a time and in societies where spirituality seems to have been demoted by the rise of capitalism. Where time is only money, where productivism distances us from nature, where individualism takes precedence over the collective. However, this doesn’t seem to be the main theme of the show. Reclaim is an act of resistance, a means of immersing ourselves in a space-time where the emotions summoned transform our own emotions, and hence our relationship with reality. This same reality, shaped and constructed from scratch by the Western imperialist powers that have tried to tell History in their own words. History is told, perpetuated and maintained by the same people. Those who can speak, those who can write, those who survive. I therefore think it is a “duty” to stop allowing ourselves to let a conscious vagueness creep into our work. A vagueness which, for me, is akin to a factory of abstraction and depoliticization within the art world, instilled in us right from college.
Re-politicizing spaces of performance
The unlocated and the unlocatable produce universalization through abstraction. Everything is part of everything. What I mean by abstraction is to justify our artistic intuitions by granting ourselves the need to situate and explain them. Confidantly, we perpetuate the colonial myth by representing, through the fruit of our imagination, rites and customs of which we are know nothing. We (white people) legitimize our own artistic creations under the guise of inspiration from the unknown, from mystery. But mystery is an error here: what we are given to see is in fact part of reality, like any artistic work. Art cannot be a machine for depoliticizing. Creating beauty is more political than ever, but neither exoticism nor neutrality are the answers. Nothing is neutral. Decolonizing art institutions is not just a question of what is shown, but also of WHO is staging it. Cultural imperialism acts as a system of control and monopolization of production spaces. Let’s question what we see and what we learn. Let’s re-interrogate what we know, what we take for granted, let’s reject the bizarre state of abstraction, or rather, let’s question it. That’s why I feel betrayed, because Reclaim is still very much under my skin. Something affected me, it worked, but I refuse to ignore why.
References: 1« Reclaim » aux Halles : De la sauvagerie au collectif, Jean-Marie Wynants, LeSoir https://www.lesoir.be/500228/article/2023-03-10/reclaim-aux-halles-de-la-sauvagerie-au-collectif [consulté le 03/06/2024] 2 Programme de désordre absolu, Décoloniser les musées, Françoise Verges, Editions La Fabrique, 2023 3 Rester Barbare, Louisa Yousfi, Editions La Fabrique, 2022
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