This accessible page is a derivative of https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1702122/2057340 which it is meant to support and not replace.
Page description: On opening the page, above the title, a large video is playing entitled 'Circus stellar 2022'. Keywords on the page are highlighted in blue and, when clicked upon, open up a window featuring a poem, in French, by Sabrina Sow. These windows show the printed poem and also contain a sound file of the author reading the poem.
Video description: Within a wintery blue scene, underlain with the sound of orchestral strings, the image of someone standing on the rump of a walking horse becomes apparent. Pixels flutter down like snowflakes, and the horse circles, passing close to the camera. At this point a particular detail of the rider’s legs comes into focus. There is a slight receding movement and a circle starting from the rump changes colour as it progresses across the rest of the canvas and makes the whole thing shine. At the end of the video all the lines and strokes expand and disappear in a final burst of light.
And what about the dramaturgy in contemporary circus performances with non-human animals? If we assume that circus engages in a continuous dialogue with its historico-cultural context, we must ask how contemporary circus performances with non-human animal performers can be read as a response to current discourses and problems. According to Richard Grusin, ‘almost every problem of note that we face in the twenty-first century entails engagement with non-humans—from climate change, drought, and famine; to biotechnology, intellectual property, and privacy; to genocide, terrorism, and war’ (2015: vii). Consequently, he demands ‘future attention, resources, and energy toward the nonhuman’ (2015a: vii). This perspective is shared by many thinkers of our time: the so-called non-human turn ✿ encompasses a variety of ideas, such as new materialism (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010), speculative realism (Harman 2018; Bogost 2012; Morton 2013), animal studies (Haraway 2020; Despret 2016), and posthumanism (Haraway 2004; Hayles 2010; Wolfe 2003). These thinkers focus on non-human entities, processes, agency, and performativity as a contra position to the dominance of anthropocentric perspectives ✿.
This turn is by no means limited to academia; it is also evident in artistic performance, which includes the contemporary circus. In contemporary performances, diverse staging strategies — ranging from the focus on non-human performers and objects, the use of nature as a performance space, to a specific rigging to underline the natural powers at stake, or immersive scenographies — are used to subvert the anthropocentric telos. Performing with non-human (domestic) animals can thereby be a means to ‘challenge the unthinking anthropocentrism of drama and theatre and ground a growing art practice that thinks humanity beyond the human’ (Chaudhuri 2017: ‘Introduction’). Therefore, the interplay between human and non-human animals onstage and in the ring becomes relevant in the frame of the ‘nonhuman turn’ (cf. Grusin 2015). In this context, non-human animals in performance might well provide:
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- the possibility to focus on human and non-human relations in a way that transcends questions of climate change, environmental disasters, and technological enhancements, which are currently omnipresent in the discourse on the non-human turn
- a focus on the presence of non-human animals, which are vanishing in urban society and often limited to pets and zoos
- a possibility for animals to enter human cultural spaces such as theatres in non-voyeuristic ways, which allows a break with the nature/culture opposition and heterotopias of ‘nature in culture’ (Chaudhuri 2017: ‘Animal Geographies’)
- a conscious effort to avoid the reception of animals as nostalgic markers of a lost rural idyll or as representative of commodification and domestication of the alien, the exotic, and the natural
- the confrontation with possible alternative etymologies and ontologies by focusing on the animal gaze (cf. Chaudhuri 2017: ‘(De)Facing the Animal’)
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- a means to question human communities while observing herds and other animal forms of animal cohabitancy ✿
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- an opportunity to create new forms of human and non-human animal companionship (cf. Haraway 2004)
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- a high degree of non-human presence on stage (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2008)
Despite promising potential, the mere presence of an animal performer onstage or in the ring does not automatically create a non-anthropocentric focus. On the contrary, as noted in the previous paragraph, animal acts in traditional circus consciously underline human dominance over non-human animals, so that they become emblematic of an anthropocentric worldview.
In contemporary circus, there is the paradox that mastery in handling animals is required if mastery onstage is to be problematized or subverted. What does this mean? In contrast to theater performances of the 1970s, such as Beuys’s I like America and America Likes Me and Abramovic’s Dragon Heads, where artists with no training are performing with unpredictable and untamed non-human animals, (contemporary) circus performers usually have an established relationship with them. Human and non-human animals are taught how to work together, which mean they both share mastery. Both human and non-human artists draw on their performance skills. It could be argued that the relationship between human and non-human animals is never unilateral. In the words of Donna Haraway: ‘We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species ✿” (2020: 2). Or one could point out that the training of animals is fundamentally based on the input of each individual non-human animal; their impact on the performance outcome needs to be highlighted: ‘Circus acts used an individual animal’s capacity for performance, which prompted the larger underlying question of whether animals perform for their own kind’ (Tait 2012: 2). However, if we exclude the possibility of non-human animal improvisation onstage at this point (the topic of improvisation will be discussed later in ‘further reflections’), it is the human animal directing the course of the performance. A non-improvised performance with non-human animals is determined by the cues of the trainer, who also provides the stimulating environment necessary to provoke a specific behavior on the side of the non-human co-performer. Human mastery is thereby required, so that the human being can be decentered only through specific staging strategies.
How and in what ways does the staging of non-human animals in contemporary circus differ from those of traditional circus performances? This question is going to be answered through an analysis of Dresse-toi (2018) by Cie Equinoctis. This performance has been chosen because it presents a variety of the most prominent dramaturgic strategies currently found in animal performances of the contemporary circus. The proposed reading is conducted by a circus scholar and dramaturge who has never worked with non-human animals. Even though I spent several weeks with Cie Equinoctis while working on this article, the insights on training and working with non-human animals that I gained during our collaboration are left aside at this point. The focus is on the reception of the piece.