ZAGREB RESIDENCY FESTIVAL NOVOG ... - Unpack the Arts

Recommendations

Info

Circus as the Time and Space for Thinking D U Š K A R A D O S A V L J E V I Ć The Thinking Time It is a Saturday morning. Thirty-year old Finnish magician Kalle Hakkarainen is sitting at a part baroque/part mdf table covered with fruit and sweets at the office of the New Circus Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, surrounded by an international group of journalists. In a flash of inspiration, they want to know whether he is nostalgic or not? The night before Hakkarainen had presented a technologically elaborate performance about a tiredness-induced car crash under the title Nopeussokeus (Speed Blindness/Motion Blindness) to a relatively underwhelmed, though sufficiently hypnotized, audience. The hypnotic effect was largely the work of the music and sound designer Samuli Kosminen in combination with Hakkarainen’s own visual projections conjuring up the onset of sleep at the wheel of a moving car. In just under thirty minutes, the piece had set out to explore the moment of fatal impact from different points of view, though the moment at times seemed to stretch into infinity or fold back into itself in a dream-like way, leaving the artist’s intention generally unclear and the critics generally indifferent. It all begins to make a lot more sense when in this impromptu press conference Hakkarainen reveals his departure points. Largely disillusioned by contemporary magic, the Finnish wiz kid often resorts to history books for his inspiration. It was the claim that drama and magic cannot be successfully combined, made by the English magician David Devant about a century ago, that prompted Hakkarainen to attempt such a feat. A newspaper article about a woman in a car crash provided a dramaturgical framework for the reinvention of an old trick in which a rope can be seen to penetrate the body of the performer. And a poem about car ‘motion blindness’ by Harry Salmenniemi provided additional semantic content for Hakkarainen’s projections. ‘I like to create a time and space for people to think’, Hakkarainen declares. It might have been some sleight of hand that made me miss what he said in response to the question of nostalgia, but it certainly prompted me to think about it too, in more ways than one. There is the dimension provided by the history and the form of circus itself. Only two nights before we had seen Le Cirque Invisible – the third edition of a repertoire, created (in 1990) by Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin who had in fact been working together since 1969. Threaded through this show is a sense of homeliness and enchantment, which could easily cast any audience member into his or her five-year old self. Whether it’s Thierrée’s Christmas Daystyle close up magic or Chaplin’s spells which turn common household items into mythical creatures and elaborate wearable musical instruments – this is the kind of spectacle that thrives on poeticizing the mundane in a simple, child-like way. An inherent emphasis on eccentric playfulness and mesmerizing inventiveness rather than sheer technical prowess, despite the fact that its acts are decades old, results in a show which is timeless rather than dated and therefore nostalgic in its form more so than its content. I felt the way a five year old might feel at any point in time, rather than the way I felt when I was actually five years old watching a dancing elephant in a big top and waiting impatiently for the clowns or the trapeze lady in sequins to come back again. DUŠKA RADOSAVLJEVIĆ 18
WHS – Kalle Hakkarainen – Nopeussokeus © Petri Virtanen So then there is also the personal dimension. I am a domiciled Brit, at this moment in time on a visit to Croatia – a country which was once part of what I considered home. Incidentally, on my flight here I was reading a book which informed me that nostalgia was in fact a term invented by a seventeenth century Swiss doctor to designate a malady of extreme longing (algia) for a return home (nostos). Even though in the twenty-first century the phenomenon of nostalgia, with its intrinsic tendency to sentimentalize the past, has acquired connotations that can be seen as politically problematic, it is nevertheless a condition that must also be somehow validated. Not least because, traditionally, members of the circus – whether personally nostalgic or not – are very often displaced persons themselves, and so are, increasingly, a lot of the rest of us. Rather helpfully though, writer Svetlana Boym attempts to redefine nostalgia not as a conservative longing for a particular place in the past, but as a desire to escape the given time-space continuum ‘sideways’ – as ‘a strategy for [the displaced persons’] survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming’ (http://www.iascculture.org/eNews/2007_10/9.2CBoym.pdf, p.9). This understanding of nostalgia makes it possible to make sense of much more than that. But more of that – later. The Thinking Place – context This time and space for thinking, it is worth noting perhaps, was taking place on day three of the ‘middle part’ of the Zagreb New Circus Festival 2012. Taking the form of the classic circus act of a lady being sawn into three parts, the eighth edition of the international festival which had began spontaneously thanks to the endeavours and personal savings of the former journalist Ivan Kralj in 2005, was on this occasion programmed in three distinct sections some weeks apart. As in most previous years, there was an element of making virtue out of necessity in coming up with the three part programming concept, as Kralj wished to include a number of artists with availabilities very far apart. Out of this also emerged the theme of ‘new magic’ for this year’s festival, and the festival brochure is suitably arranged to function as a magic trick. Due to limited means and a lack of support, in previous years, the festival has taken the form of a ‘one day festival’, or a mock election campaign in the year DUŠKA RADOSAVLJEVIĆ 19
Page 1 and 2: European residency programme for cu
Page 3 and 4: In Search of the Other Stellato: In
Page 5 and 6: other company in residency had lock
Page 7 and 8: tired of the dance world, which he
Page 9 and 10: that I’ve understood the process.
Page 11 and 12: The ‘New Circus’ in Search of S
Page 13 and 14: However, going back to the focus of
Page 15 and 16: ehind a translucent screen, the pie
Page 17: a kind of shell, sometimes a featur
Page 21 and 22: a balance between cultures, and the
Page 23 and 24: The subject matter of Gravitation i
Page 25 and 26: performances based on amazement and
Page 27 and 28: well yourself. In rehearsals, howev
Page 29 and 30: still so small that there are not v
Page 31 and 32: In Between Child’s Play, Visual A
Page 33 and 34: comforter of big and small sorrows.
Page 35 and 36: extreme reactions, including the re
Page 37 and 38: The show offstage M I Q U E L V A L
Page 39 and 40: his hand! Certainly, in his show (L
Page 41 and 42: victims is very much part of the pi
Page 43 and 44: fact, during Raphaël Navarro’s i
Page 45 and 46: Let us recall the 1970s, that stran
Page 47 and 48: same. Each festival reflects its to
Page 49 and 50: Slovenian auditorium, proclaims the
Page 51 and 52: From Le Cirque Invisible to today a
Page 53 and 54: cooperate with the artists in a fri
Page 55 and 56: Claudio: “I feel closest to the c
Page 57 and 58: classic circuses for their opinion
Page 59 and 60: WHS - Kalle Hakkarainen - Nopeussok
Page 61 and 62: Le Cirque Invisible “We’re all
Page 63 and 64: ises and the magic begins. A quirky
Page 65 and 66: countries exist, borders have shift
Page 67 and 68: To me working on a new show is like
Page 69:
This project has been funded with s
show all

ZAGREB RESIDENCY FESTIVAL NOVOG ... - Unpack the Arts

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?