ZAGREB RESIDENCY FESTIVAL NOVOG ... - Unpack the Arts

a balance between cultures, and the desire
to escape the given time-space continuum
‘sideways’. In her book, Boym further noted that
nostalgia was a diagnosis of the age of a ‘poetic
science’, made at a time when the two disciplines
were still intertwined and when the mind and the
body were treated together. But as we enter a
post-Cartesian age, it is no wonder that
nowadays, having displaced itself from the big top
into a black box, circus itself aims to be both the
realm of the mind and the body – of mental
activity and kinaesthetic empathy. That same
afternoon, the Croatian critic Nataša Govedić
emphasized the inherent ability of circus ‘to
change the appearance of reality’. Could its
current form of authorship be seen as ‘a strategy
for survival, a way of making sense of the
impossibility of homecoming’?
It was the final performance of our residency
that effectively brought into focus the potential
of circus to integrate the cerebral and the
kinaesthetic, the poetic and the philosophical,
the ridiculous and the sublime. Performed by the
Belgian-based Italian Claudio Stellato, this act
with a man, two pieces of furniture and a red
carpet, performed in complete silence, managed
to achieve much more than some of its more
elaborate, flashy, hi tech predecessors in this
festival did. Taking another basic trick from the
history book, the piece exploits the potential for
slapstick humour contained within the
relationship between a man and a seemingly selfwilled
object. At the other end of the scale this
show contains a Beckettian suggestion that our
whole life is an obsessive rehearsal of an
escapism act – initially from the cradle, eventually
from the coffin. Following a fifty-minute struggle,
the closure arrives as our hero glides – magically
– into thin air, elevated above his earthly
concerns. The title of the piece, L’Autre, alludes to
the dual – conscious and unconscious – nature of
our endeavours, but also more literally to its
technical dependence on another human behind
the scenes, rather than on technology per se. So
after all, what makes circus interesting is the
wonder of being a human being – now, that’s
something to think about, over and over again.
DUŠKA RADOSAVLJEVIĆ 21