EFFEA residencies
hosted by Roztoc Fest (CZ) in partnership with Ana Desetnica Fetival (SLV), Periskop Festival (HR) and Cirkus Danas (SRB)
Premiering a new show is always nerve racking, there are just so many unknowns. This is especially true for a participatory show, in the first few iterations of which, we were not even sure if enough people would volunteer. While that didn’t turn out to be a problem at all, it was still great to know that we would have a few opportunities, in very varied settings, to try out everything that we had dreamed up. Having received the EFFEA Grant already a month before the premiere on the 23rd May in Trafó* gave us the confidence to commit to more risky ideas and ultimately helped us make a better show. Additionally these opportunities are crucial to a young company, as you have to be seen to get invited, and a new piece has to be performed to develop and find its final shape. Having a variety of partner festivals also gave us the opportunity to explore what kind of venues our participatory circus piece might be best suited for. We've played in an industrial building, a circus tent, an opera hall, a black box theatre and a public park, all of which added their own atmosphere and provided meaningful challenges.
At the beginning of July we had the pleasure to perform at the 27th edition of Ana Desetnica Festival, the largest and most diverse artistic cultural and social event in Slovenia. It being a street art festival without an indoor venue, we faced the challenge of playing in an urban environment open-air. After a few months of getting google map coordinates, scouting google street views and discussing locations over video messages, we settled for the Park Slovenske Reformacije and were hoping that the trees are in fact strong enough to be rigged from.
The experience turned out to be magical: To start with we had to set our “stage”. That meant throwing ropes, climbing 10+ metres up on several trees, connecting all the rigging, making sure the street lights were disconnected and testing all our battery powered technical equipment. We were still in a city centre public park but managed to create an intimate atmosphere which made the show feel like a seance with our audience.
We loved playing the show in this way and it felt like we were on to something. Here is the feedback from the official photographer of the festival:
“The last performance of the day, entitled "InThisTogether" by the Hungarian group OneTwoMany, is practically a social experiment, and a great one at that. When completely random spectators unknowingly find themselves in situations where they have to cooperate and co-create an acrobatic performance, and they succeed so superbly that you even wonder if they might have been set up. From a photographic point of view, they created the best scenes when they dynamically illuminated the scene and the performers with hand lamps, as if they had a pre-planned choreography. And finally, the play has a nice message, which it has been building since the very beginning of the play."
Our next adventure took us to Roztoc Fest in the middle of August, an international gathering for lovers of circus and flow arts. Here InThisTogether was the closing performance of the 4 day festival, where we filled a 400 seat circus tent to its limits, the atmosphere was sparkling, people ran at us as soon as we invited them to participate. Unsurprisingly this show ended up the most playful and engaging one of the tour, and it felt amazing to experience our participants explore the possibilities of our creation. With our largest audience to date and a beautiful circus tent as the venue, we got some of our best pictures on that day, not only of us but of the participants and the audience as well.
Many people stayed on afterwards for the discussions, which only ended because the festival ended and the technical teams wanted to finally start packing up. We touched on many topics and what the performance meant for individuals and the group. Maybe one of the most exciting pieces of feedback from Roztoc was that people felt our performance to be very inclusive. Our intention was always to leave the choice open and to just invite everyone and anyone on stage that is willing to participate. It is not always easy to make an invitation truly inclusive, maybe on this day and hopefully moving forward, we managed.
Our location in Rijeka was Exportdrvo, an industrial building in the harbour that has been renovated to host all kinds of events, from markets, to expos, to cinema. An empty concrete hall with 12 metre height in the middle and 2 levels on the sides, supported by columns. Under us just the bare concrete covered with dance carpet, and our background: a four metre high rusty metal door. While one would think this is not the most inviting place to spark connection and trust between strangers, our light technician Virág Rovó and our sound designer Márton Csuzi ended up creating a wonderful atmosphere.
Persikop Festival offered us a great experience and by this point it felt like we were coming into our own with the show, getting more and more comfortable every time. The venue created a stronger contrast to the feeling we want to create and in many ways amplified some aspects of the show. Here is an excerpt of a critique which we are quite proud of:
"At this moment of a drastic jump in right-wing populism, while we are slowly losing faith in the ethos of solidarity, and while new conflicts are growing around the world and new borders are threatening, the play InThisTogether , as a staged social experiment, reminded us that there is still reason for hope. It invites us to look back at all our interdependencies and to activate in ourselves the question of responsibility for the various life plans that we create together."
You can read it in full at https://kulturpunkt.hr/kritika/cirkus-kao-kolektivni-cin/
We also developed two workshops connected to the performance, we will share more about that after the last residency. At each festival, after each presentation we held a discussion and interviewed our participants. We were met with a tremendous interest, many many questions and lots of emotions. All of these discussions have been recorded and we are working on publishing the best moments in an edited video.
“Our 10th, 11th and 14th experiment conclude here. If nothing else we found out that 11 of us are afraid in the dark. 24 of us find it difficult to say no. 28 of us think that most people would pocket a lost wallet rather than returning it. Three of us had to realise that there is always a choice. 260 of us sacrificed for just 33. And 33 of you took on some risk and responsibility. Thank you!”
