This accessible page is a derivative of https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1702122/2057388 which it is meant to support and not replace.
Page description: On opening the page, above the title, a large video is playing entitled 'Out of vision 2023'. 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: A single camera shout has slight distortion but relatively natural colour and sound (birdsong and flies buzzing). It introduces a horse in close up, tracking slowly from the eye and head to the rump. Responding to this movement, the colour changes from blue-grey to the warmth of the horse’s coat, giving the impression that a ray of sunlight passes over the subject.
Are there other ways to decenter the human being and the anthropocentric ✿ telos in circus? The final paragraphs reassemble a small collection of ideas by contemporary circus artists working with non-human animal performers.
What might come to mind is improvisation, a strategy that has been used in theater performances. According to Fischer-Lichte, however, such performances in the 1970s, e.g., Beuys’s I like America and America Likes Me and Abramovic’s Dragon Heads, escape the possibility of ascribing a ‘set of meanings and functions to the animals present onstage’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 102). In both cases, the human performers working with wild, untamed animals were inexperienced. In circus, however, as argued, if it is understood in terms of skillful ability, then the mastery of animal training and its subsequent presentation would be the prerequisite for subversion. Therefore, animals improvising in the circus would not just be ‘thrown’ into an unknown situation or space; it is rather the animal trainer’s responsibility to teach them ‘that performance space is a play space. A space in which each of its proposals is right and there is no right or wrong answer’ (Dray 2022: 326).
The French researcher and equestrian artist Charlène Dray worked on training her non-human animal co-performers, Listan and Luzio, to improvise. She stated, however, that her horses usually use the improvisation space to ‘do nothing’ onstage. Therefore, the ‘nothing’ has to be transferred into ‘something’ by dramaturgical means (Dray 2022: 326). One strategy used by Dray in this context is the implementation of an onboard sensor system to transpose the horse’s movement into sounds.
The ‘correspondence’ between movement of animal and the sound generated by our device transformed moments of non-activity into musical silence. Each breath, each gesture, each sound became a kind of dialogue without words. Through our device, immobility suddenly takes expression of a gestural intention. In the studio or on stage, the suspension created by our companions immersed us in an active listening. (Dray 2022: 327)
Approaching a non-human entity by focusing on the diversity of human senses is a strategy that is currently also used in object manipulation. In this context, the juggler Ben Richter developed the phenomenological method, ‘The Language of Objects’, ‘designed to facilitate sensitivity to the agency of objects’ (Richter 2022). During the collaboration with Cie Equinoctis, we applied this method to non-human animals to reduce the associations, anthropomorphizing, and metaphors that are connected to our common cultural animal practices — while simultaneously erasing the possibility of an interspecies encounter. Sight, smell, taste, touch, movement, sound, and holding the horse were (re)discovered while submitting to the idea of ‘knowing nothing’ (Richter 2022) about horses. The visual artist Natan Hansi Alberca turned this approach into an artwork. It could be argued that this approach still focuses on human experience and is thus fundamentally anthropocentric, and I would agree. However, applying the Language of Objects to human–non-human animal encounters allows a subversion of the human telos and a perception beyond common western practices, be it regarding an oedipal vision of the animal or in connection to its symbolic meaning in our cultural context. At the same time, this act of dehumanizing the non-human animal while approaching it as an object could be fundamentally criticized. In this context, the question arises of how we can face the animal Other ‘without either defacing it […] or entirely effacing it’ (Chaudhuri 2017: ‘(De)Facing the Animal’). Furthermore, we could move beyond the human gaze, which is a central aspect of the non-human turn, and focus inversely on the animal gaze (cf. Chaudhuri 2017: ‘(De)Facing the Animal’), which would offer a confrontation with alternative etymologies and ontologies. The idea that it is not only us looking at the non-human animal but also the non-human animal looking at us is thereby crucial. Staging strategies applied to allow a focus on the animal gaze often work with new technologies, especially video installations (see, e.g., the experiments of Cie Horsystèmes (www. Charlenedray.com)). So far, they have been used in the context of laboratories and not yet turned into (reproducible) performances.
Lastly, I would like to draw attention to the fact that animal performances offer the possibility for interspecies encounters outside the shows, an opportunity taken up by Cie Equinoctis. A co-presence of human and non-human animals was established by inviting the non-human animals into the theater space, letting them walk around the foyer, and by welcoming human animals to observe open trainings while enjoying wine and snacks in the circus tent, which was installed at the very center of the grazing areas of the company’s residency space.
The potential of interspecies encounters can be broadened while leaving the actual performance context: initiated by Elise Coudurier-Boeuf, Cie Equinoctis is currently creating a permacultural space entitled ‘La Bonnette’, located in Saint-Marcelin de Cray, Bourgogne. On forty hectares, the space has a circus tent, a farmhouse, an artistic residency space, a metal workshop, a yurt for writing residencies, immense grazing areas for the company’s twelve horses, a beekeeper, and a home for five chickens. The overall project is dedicated to the realization of smaller projects and artworks ‘en lien avec le vivant et sortant des processus de domination’ (Coudurier-Boeuf 2022). Based on the cohabitation of human and non-human animals in the context of art and performance, ‘La Bonnette’ offers the possibility to question human communities while observing herds and other forms of animal cohabitancy; it offers the opportunity to create new dimensions of human and non-human animal companionship.
Still in the beginning phases, this space — just as much as all other projects dedicated to the subversion of the staging of traditional human dominance in animal circus performances — gives us reason to assume that other modes of performances and artworks (re)valorizing the animal and redefining human and non-human animal companionship will appear in the circus.