Emma Magazine - CASE

30My ‘gritty’ new communityThis is still a fringe community, even if the numberof people in circus is exploding, and the people yourun into are some of the most cooperative and grittyyou will find anywhere. The ideal is to have your ownChapiteau (tent) and travel as an autonomous group.That means you are always with the people in thecompany (a bit like Emma, you are forced to get alongwith the people around you, you live with them), andyou share everything. You share the work of mountingand dismounting the tent (no small feat), you sharefood, you share ideas, you share creation time and youshare down time. This is the politic of circus. It is, onone hand, super individualistic because everyone worksfor themselves with their own number. On the otherhand it is ultra-communal. It is an intense combinationand a great balance for me.When you’retalking aboutacrobaticmovementsat 20 feet inthe air—onemisstep andyou break avertebra.More than a dress rehearsalMonthly or bimonthly the whole school puts togethera show under the direction of various artists. Theseshows are nothing like a cabaret, they are full-onproductions with a theme and often carry a vaguestory line. We don’t sleep from Thursday until 3 a.m.Sunday when the show is over and the gym-turnedtheateris dismantled and returned to normal. I wastotally taken aback when I saw the number of peoplethat showed up to the first Circo In Pillole—theschool’s shows have become something of a sensationin Turin and a few hundred spectators come.Reconnecting with my Italian sideI am half Italian and half American. The Italian half isall here in Italy, including my sister who was born andraised here. I was born and raised in the US but havedual citizenship. When I was young I came here onceevery two or three years to see my family, and whenI was 16 I decided to spend my junior year of Emmain Italy to learn the language.Surrounded by colorful charactersThere are students from all over the world—Brazil,Costa Rica, USA (I’m not the only American),France, Spain, Austria, Poland, all over Italy, Sweden,Latvia, Ireland, and so on. I guess the biggest differencebetween the people in this school and the otherschools I’ve been to is that here we all work with ourbodies in an extreme way, for which a certain madnessis a base requirement.Photo: David Sosnowemma