Homemade Academic Circus: Idiosyncratically Embodied Explorations Into Artistic Research And Circus Performance

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Introduction

Meeting the professional circus amateur

Self-criticism is a drug to be taken in very small doses. Better realize that you don’t have the faintest idea what is happening, and let out the small talents that you may possibly have, and if you don’t have any, then it matters even less whether you are critical or not. (Billgren, 2010, question No. 13, my translation)

First, exploring first-person accounts is not the same as claiming that first-person accounts have some kind of privileged access to experience. No presumption of anything incorrigible, final, easy or apodictic about subjective phenomena has to be made here, and to assume otherwise is to confuse the immediate character of the givenness of subjective phenomena with their mode of constitution and evaluation. (Varela and Shear, 1999, p.2)

Outline of a homemade academic circus

Recipe for a homemade academic circus:

List of ingredients:

An academic research education

An accumulation of hours spent in the company of chairs, desks, books and computers

An interest in physical activity and physically based art forms Preparation:

• Start by sitting still for many years, reading and studying, preferably the body and movement.

• Acquire an academic research education, preferably centered on the body and movement, in for instance dance. This will lead to even more sitting still. The accumulation of stillness will ultimately push you into something else.

• Start practicing a physical art form. You will soon discover how this creates links to your earliest movement experiences. You will also notice that this not only reduces the dangerously high stress levels of academic research, but also pushes your way of thinking into other directions.

• In a moment of adrenaline kick or general madness: conceive the idea of bringing the two together, bringing the physicality back into your research, and your research into physicality.

If you follow the above recipe the result is far from given. It depends both on the individual who engages in it and on the contextual circumstances. The recipe for a homemade academic circus is therefore not meant as a repeatable experiment that will always bring about the same result. The methodology implied in this recipe is an individual experiment with some of the cultural entities of our society: theory and practice, academia and circus performance, and the outcome is highly idiosyncratic. But along the way the experiment may nevertheless reveal something about the cultural relations between these entities at a given time and in a given place.

This book is an analysis of the processes triggered when I entered into the above experiment, and some of the material and immaterial outcomes that gradually crystalized. One of the (im)material outcomes of this process is what I have come to call my homemade academic circus. By homemade academic circus I mean performative presentations of academic questions and analyses that take place via a physical circus performance, that is, a form of lecture-performance in and on circus disciplines. This book is centered on my work with three lecture-performances which in different ways articulate the relation between theory and practice, concepts and physicality.

However, before discussing and analyzing the lecture performances, the material and immaterial processes they contain and how these articulate the meeting between theory and practice, academia and circus performance, I believe it is necessary to look at the circumstances of their production. As the project deals with the insights, conflicts and discoveries in the meeting between theory and practice as it has been embodied in the work within these lecture-performances, it is necessary to look at the history of this embodiment. In this introductory chapter I will therefore give an account of not precisely the story of my engaging with these processes, but the stories of my alter egos – the academic and fictional constructions that have been some of my tools in this process and which reveal the tensions that have been part of this.

A portrait and history of a professional circus amateur

Professional circus amateur or academic freak

This is the story of a professional amateur in circus performance (an alter ego of mine), or even an academic freak (yet another one). Or of a theoretical researcher who increasingly started engaging in practice-based and artistic research in circus disciplines – a process in which these alter egos became necessary. It is the story of the struggles, pleasures and insights that this brought along. And some of the thoughts that crossed my – or my alter ego’s – mind(s) on the way.

When I first coined the term professional circus amateur to myself, I was still not aware of the discussion that Marjorie Garber (2001) had led about the roles of professional amateurs and amateur professionals in different intellectual histories and contexts, and especially the role they have played in positioning the humanities in relation to other fields of knowledge. But the journey that I was about to embark on did indeed trigger some of the cultural histories, tensions and ambiguities that these words contain. However, these tensions were played out in a very specific landscape, namely a Scandinavian context where contemporary circus was increasingly taking its place as an art form, and where artistic research was in the middle of constructing itself as a field of its own.

But… in order for you, the reader, to follow this journey I ought to provide you with some background information. Yes, I know that this is not part of established academic practice, but I nevertheless believe that it is necessary. Firstly, you might get a glimpse of the reasons why an adult researcher suddenly decides to learn how to climb a rope. And secondly, this book in many ways deals with practice-based knowledge which is embodied and situated within a specific experience. Without this particular experience, the material that I analyze, discuss, and re-interpret would also have been different. Or perhaps it is as simple as this: that the urgency and visceral necessity that triggered this work also makes it necessary to see it in the light of the embodied experience it is tied to, if only because it reflects some of the cultural practices around academia and physicality that this book intends to discuss.

Some fast-forwarded detours into the creation of the professional circus amateur

A turning point was when I finished my Ph.D. thesis on Merce Cunningham and Gilles Deleuze (Damkjaer, 2010). This was the result of many years of trying to understand Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the body and movement, and the way it is choreographed in his texts, but also the way it enabled me by means of chance and coincidence to access Merce Cunningham’s thoughts as they are expressed in his choreographies. Despite the focus on bodies and movement, and despite the visceral and acute physical or soma-somatic experiences that this research brought with it (for instance serious knee-pain due to immobility) this was quite a cerebral enterprise.

However, something had already shifted towards the end of this process. Throughout the official part of the Ph.D. defense I was dressed in serious academic robe, defending my work as if it were a matter of life and death! But afterwards, I suddenly appeared with a friend, in training clothes, engaging my supervisors in a Cage-Cunningham-inspired happening including pair-acrobatics. An academic practical joke or a sign of what was to come?

It took further detours to find the artform that permitted me to combine my interest in acrobatic physicality with artistic reflection. However, there were still some physical difficulties to solve before I was able to throw myself into the project I am about to describe. First of all, I needed an individual circus discipline that I could practice in my own way, combine with my way of thinking, and experiment with on my own. I decided to climb up a rope.

Training in a circus discipline was one thing. But trying to combine this with my professional activity was another. The first attempts were very modest, and belonged to the genre of curiosities: talking about my work while doing handstand and contortion exercises (I am not at all flexible, but I looked quite circusy in my orange trousers); or taking pictures of myself doing acrobatics in the old library at the university (finally I got to climb those bookshelves!).

But the real beginning of this project was perhaps a rope sequence I did around about the same time. In a short semi-professional performance, four of us dealt with an addiction to acrobatics which became confessed verbally in the context of an imaginary AA – Anonymous Acrobats meeting. My character’s confession was one of an academic, who in the middle of a lecture on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome starts thinking about and climbing a vertical rope – wondering about the connection between the rope and the rhizome and whether the rope can be rhizomatic – and draws chaotic lines on a blackboard while hanging upside down on the rope.

How I got the courage to start taking these attempts seriously and expanding them is a mystery that can only be explained by either blindness to my own lack of skill or the desire to go beyond my own limits. It was in one of those moments when one does not really know why or how, but an irresistible urge makes itself felt. But there was also something else to it as well, something that is perfectly possible to explain: it opened another way of entering into the complexities of physicality that I still wanted to continue to explore.

My main tool in this process was to transfer the knowledge I had about physicality and the performing arts at an academic and theoretical level into physical practice. However, even if this transfer was a first step, this does not mean that I already knew how to do it. For it is one thing to be able to recognize qualities, difficulties or problems in movement material, but it is something else to be able to interfere with it through action to improve and enhance it. Not to mention the capacity of executing the movement yourself – and relating to it critically at the same time. I do not by any means pretend to have exhausted this process, but these texts bear witness to the difficulties that I encountered when trying to embody circus performance, when critically engaging with it, and when trying to understand the way it challenged my way of thinking about physicality in circus and performing arts.

So who then is the professional circus amateur (sometimes known as the academic freak)?

Becoming a professional circus amateur is one way of coming to terms with the difficulty of performing circus disciplines in an academic world that does not encourage physicality (at least not for the academics themselves). It is a way to survive in a no-man’s land between amateurs and professionals and the values and prejudices that reign between these. The professional circus amateur is someone who dedicates herself fully to circus disciplines, and includes her circus practice in her work, even if her practice does not have an evident institutionalized setting and she has no diploma to confirm her skill. But the professional circus amateur is not only about me and how I see my activity as a circus practitioner, it is also about the artist. It is out of respect for circus artists and their skills, knowledge, education and dedication that I continued to call myself a professional circus amateur.

What the professional circus amateur is not: the professional circus amateur is not an excuse. It is not an excuse for doing circus disciplines, or an excuse for having less skill than others. It is a description of my way into this work, the conditions under which I have been working most of the time: learning either in amateur contexts or by myself through observing other people working in my professional line of work, or through transferring my skills and knowledge as an academic into the field of circus performance and the arena of such space.

The professional circus amateur is also a symptom: it is a symptom of the cultural division between practicing an artistic activity and being an artist. Being an artist, however, is not only about identity; to be an artist also demands a context and instances which can legitimize that identity. In a certain way the fact that such instances exist in circus performance today is a positive symptom; it shows that circus performance as an art form has developed and has constructed a more and more solid institutional background, which more than anything else means more education. Whereas artists wanting to engage in new circus practices twenty years ago had to access the artform in whatever way possible, artists nowadays have to enter into the competition of getting into the established circus schools.

Why is then the professional circus amateur not an autodidact? The term autodidact seems more noble and glorious, but is there really such a thing? If I were to call myself an autodidact it would not be true: I have received plenty of help and advice from circus artists and teachers in my gradual acquisition of some skills, and I am most grateful for that. I have done courses, taken classes, trained with fellow-acrobats, and not least been helped by the generosity of circus artists sharing their knowledge with me in the non-formalized setting of a training hall. Even if I have worked a lot on my own – which is why I continue to call this academic circus homemade – we always build on skills in a context, however diffuse.

But the professional circus amateur also has a political touch. Though the professional circus amateur is a completely personal construction in my work, it has political implications. It sprang from all the reasons above, but in fact even professionals are often professional amateurs. Since the conditions of artists are difficult and precarious (carrying the heritage of the saltimbanques) the definition of professional is in any case fragile. If a professional is someone paid for his or her work, then there are very few professionals in art (at least if we count all the parts of the artistic work that are actually paid). And in some ways this is also a condition that both artists and some academics share. Though universities are clinging to their status, we are fighting in structures that are often held alive through unpaid work completely con amore; it may not make us professional amateurs, but does make us unpaid professionals (another variation of the same problem). So perhaps there are good reasons to claim the identity of a professional circus amateur.

All this sounds very easy and ironic right now, but the professional circus amateur has also been a sort of personal shielding device for me, not in the least protection against that which crossing disciplinary boundaries also brings along. One day I was a professional academic, accepted as such, allowed into the holy arenas of art; the next an amateur not disciplinarily positioned to apply for workshops for professional artists. In one instance I was wondering if I can really express my viewpoints on the artform as seen from the inside; at another I was experiencing the prejudice that is projected on to you as a circus artist (for instance the assumed lack of theoretical knowledge). These battles may be more internal than external, but they reflect the (often counterproductive, but nevertheless present) tensions between the fields of art (especially circus performance) and academia. And in those all-too-common moments of doubt a personal shielding device can come in handy.

It is in those moments of doubt that the professional circus amateur invents yet another alter ego: the academic freak. The freak, as a historical figure, became associated with circus during the nineteenth century. People with curious capacities, deformities or other oddities (for instance bearded women) were displayed as a feature at the circus. Traces of this are found both in cinema and in literature (Adams, 2001). As my freakishness is a very luxurious one compared to the social stigmas of the historical freaks, this alter ego only seldom appears. It may appear when I send a proposal for a conference and ask about the height of the ceiling and the possibilities of accessing the load-bearing construction of the building. Or when I simply have to do a handstand in the kitchen at the university waiting for the water to boil for tea. Or when I do pull-ups on the beam in the copying room. However, the academic freak also sometimes turns up in circus performance contexts – here it is the academicness that is suddenly out of place, and this clash brings about an unnecessary physical inhibition or impression of ineptitude.

As all these definitions show the professional circus amateur and the academic freak are not simply me and about me. They occur when the enterprise of the homemade academic circus causes my body to be caught up in the historical and cultural constructions of professionals and amateurs, theory and practice, science and circus, art and academia.

Some historical layers of the amateur

If you practice circus arts, but you are not performing and earning your living through it, you are an?.… amateur. Amateur theatre, amateur painting, amateur circus performance, in short: amateurs. Though the word comes from the noble word amour, love, and the amateur is the one who loves a certain activity, the word has acquired a negative ring, and is often used as an insult. However, viewed historically, there are many reasons to respect the amateur. In fact, it is due to the amateur that we have many of the humanities and some of the sciences.

During the Renaissance the amateur came to play an important role. It was, among other things, due to the pleasure and aesthetic experience that the amateur (mostly of a certain social standing) gained through art that the arts acquired their status. The amateurs, the lovers of art, who praised and described art also helped formulate the system of the fine arts as it crystalized during the seventeenth century (Kristeller, 1962). The treatises that amateur art lovers wrote also paved the way for the humanities as they developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century and as they were institutionalized in Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century (Kjörup, 2009, p.44).

But if we have the amateur to thank for some of this, we also have to reproach the amateur with his separation of the practice of the arts and the contemplation of the arts. As practiced by amateurs, the reflection produced by art was produced in the contemplation of it. Abbé Dubos even proposed in 1719 that an educated audience were better judges of art than the artist (Kristeller, 1962, p.178). Somewhat later the kinds of experience produced by contemplating art were defined and explored within the discipline for which Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’. The concept of art as produced by philosophical aesthetics has thoroughly influenced even our current view of art, but what about the reflection produced by art as a part of the production of artworks?

By reclaiming the name of the amateur I do not intend to reproduce this split between producing and contemplating a work of art – even if I am inevitably determined by the discursive layers of the history of art and aesthetics. Instead, I would like to inhabit the position of an amateur in order to gain some insight into the process of producing the artwork. For in the sense that I practice it I am not taking the position of the amateur who only looks at art, but rather the position that was to be found for instance in classical ballet before it was professionalized: the position of doing it.

Thus the professional circus amateur is not only a defense mechanism and