Nomadic Circus Gallery
Presents
CIRCUS STUFF
An Infra Circus Symposium

April 14th to 17th 2023 (mainly 9.00 to 17.00)
At Kristofferscenen in Bromma, Stockholm, Sweden.

”Making Circus as the Stuff of the World”

Curated and led by Ben Richter and Marie-Andree Robitaille.

With contributions by Cox Ahlers, Jenny Patschovsky, Jay Gilligan, Ivar Heckscher, Circ2M, Ben Richter and Marie-Andree Robitaille.

Invitation to
Professional Circus Artists and Students (18 years old+)
Free of charge. Place limited.

The pivotal topic for the symposium is on our relations to “stuff”; the things we work with, the material processes that are part of circus composition, circus performance, circus pedagogies, and the imaginaries circus enable. By material processes, we refer to all physical processes, such as the relation to objects, making of props, transformation of matter, and we include immaterial phenomena and ethical implications of ideas and concepts that emerge from circus practices.

The symposium proposes a range of circus activities spread over four days which will encompass lectures, practical workshops, displays and sharing of processes, discussions and circus performances. Each participants will be asked to bring stuff (material, an object, a props, a thing, might as well be your body, sound, air,  etc..) which you want to practically explore during the workshops. During the last two days of the symposium we will engage in practical experiment and display through a circus gallery, hybrid of performative installations, entresort, cabinet of curiosity with a general audience and with groups of children and youth participants.

The program is not yet closed and will be forming all the way up to the symposium.
There will be lectures, conversations and workshops guided by:

Ben Richter: The language of Object (TLO)

The relationship between body, objects and space accompanies us for our whole lives.  Artistic practices are often rooted, in the subtle nuances of this relationship and the TLO method can facilitate sensitivity to these nuances.  The dynamics that underly the artistic expressions of our humanity.  We begin the workshop with the object that the human lives inside, the body.  We progress through the TLO checklist, which is a series of questions and provocations, before moving into a phase of playful improvisation and instant composition. Participants are encouraged to view the TLO method as an enrichment of their own existing practices rather than it being an end goal in itself.  There is no right or wrong way to encounter the method, only the way that serves your purpose and intention.No previous experience is necessary.  A willingness to move and play is advantageous for the process. Materials will be provided, and participants may bring objects with them that they are curious to explore.

Benjamin Richter has a passion both for the poetic and the craft in artistic practices.  As a contemporary circus performer, choreographer, teacher, and artistic researcher, he has, since 1990, continuously searched for underlying principles, depth of knowledge and new modes of expression in all his work. He was one of the pioneers in the early synthesis of juggling and dance and the object-oriented question of “who is moving who”?  Inspired by his encounters with post-modernist dance, and various somatic practices, Benjamin began in the late 90’s to think outside of and in relation to juggling, deconstructing his dialogical relationship with all objects.  This led him in 2016 to develop a personal method to facilitate sensitivity to object agency called “The Language of Objects” or “TLO”.  This currently forms his basis and reference point in all of his work.  He has toured worldwide with his solo and ensemble productions as well as performing as a regular guest with Gandini Juggling. Benjamin works as a creative process facilitator for other artists and has supported Andrea Salustri, Koja Hüneck, John-Paul Zaccarini, Luuk Braantjes and countless others with the development of their own artistic expressions and practices.  Since 2003 he has a been a regular guest teacher and course leader in the circus department at the Stockholm University of the Arts, where he has played a major role in facilitating and nourishing the artistic direction of the school.  Since 2016 Benjamin has worked together with Jenny Patschovsky and Cox Ahlers on site-specific processes and performances in collaboration with the Bauhaus Dessau foundation. This has been a further step into finding out more about the underlying principles of what circus is and can be. He is currently concerned with the deconstruction of, and the search for, contemporaneity in clown.

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Jenny Patschovsky: The Bauhaus Movement and its relevancy in circus todays’s context

Jenny will offer us an introduction and a general overview of the various Utopias of the Bauhaus Movement. She will speaks to Gropius’ Bauhaus Manifesto, along with Moholy-Nagy’s theories on theatre, Oskar Schlemmer’s man and body concepts and Molnar’s stage architecture. These will be linked to the various Bauhaus pedagogical principles and curriculum.

Jenny Patschovsky is a circus producer, circus dramaturge, networker and aerial artist. She got to know the French Cirque Nouveau movement in a youth circus school. While studying art history and musicology (MA) at the University of Cologne, she founded the company Atemzug in 2005, which creates interdisciplinary performances with a focus on a reinterpretation of circus. From 2013-2015 she directed the “Labor Cirque Research” in Cologne, and since 2016 she has been researching the intersections of Bauhaus and circus together with Cox Ahlers and Benjamin Richter and designing site-specific performances for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Jenny has been active in the CircusDanceFestival team from the beginning, 2021 for the symposium “Re-Writing circus”. She is also on the board of the Bundesverband Zeitgenössischer Zirkus e.V. (Federal Association of Contemporary Circus) and a member of various other committees.
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Cox Ahlers: Petites Danse_A choreographic method for qualitative changes in motion

In the search for new movement qualities, the petite danse method offers the possibility of discovering them through movement. With the attention to the smallest changes within repetitions, logical movement sequences develop. In the choreographic sense as well as in the sense of content. during the workshop, Cox will give an introduction to the method through different approaches. The workshop is open to all creatives of any art form.

Cox Ahlers is living and working in Berlin. In ESAC Brussels she graduated 2002 as dance-acrobat specialized in site specific performances. Now she is working as performer, director, impulse artist and organizer in the field of contemporary circus. With Benjamin Richter and Jenny Patschovsky, she has been researching the intersections of Bauhaus theory and circus practice and together they directed and curated circus performances for the bauhaus foundation Dessau since 2016. In the same team, she is currently deconstructing clown art in order to investigate the question of the contemporary clown.

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Ivar Heckscher & Jay Gilligan: The relation between art, novelty and necessity combined with manufacturing of dissolvable juggling objects; ivarballs

Ivar Heckscher is born in 1943 I H has had opportunity to teach and learn in Rudolf Steiner schools, as an art school collegue under Vårdinge Folkhögskola as well as Pedagogic responsible for Cirkuspiloterna at Cirkus Cirkör and prefect for the Circus programme at DOCH in times before SKH. As retired senior he has been interested in the development of juggling as a specific artform

Jay Gilligan is an American juggler from Arcadia, Ohio, currently performing and living in Europe. He is one of the most creative and successful jugglers in the world. Jay used to be the main teacher of juggling and creator of the juggling program at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Cir2M Myrsky Rönkä, Marjut Hernesniemi: Becoming with ropes - A meditative playground to make sense (of chaos)

How we treat our stuff in circus reflects our relation with the world. Rope as an object suggests certain things, but what if we think of ropes as material that is always becoming? If we let the material guide us, how it relates and resonates with space, time, and significant others involved? In the workshop, we start from chaos and play together toward the unknown.

Circ2M or M(arjut) & M(yrsky) are a Finnish rope activist duo wandering on the side paths of the forest of circus. Originally M&M worked with vertical rope, but during their MA they got lost in the world of ropes. They graduated from Stockholm University of Arts as Master of Choreography with a specialization in Circus 2022.

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Marie-Andrée Robitaille: The Infrathin techncopoetics of circus

(workshop description to come soon)

Marie-Andrée Robitaille is an artist from Québec, Canada now based in Stockholm, Sweden. With a background in contemporary dance and circus arts, she is currently a doctoral candidate in performative and media-based practices in choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH). At SKH, she was assistant professor and head of the Bachelor program in Circus (2009-2018) where she conducted a series of artistic research projects which explored feminist strategies and alternative modes of composition in circus arts. In her current doctoral artistic research project « Circus as Practices of Hope », she investigate the relevancy and specificities of circus arts in todays context.

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Welcome to a practical circus symposium for reflecting about, experimenting with and making circus as the stuff of the world!


« Rather than contemplating distinct objects as separate from the self,..[we] propose that we think as the stuff of the world. Thinking as the stuff of the world is a mode of thought that embeds theorists, activists, and artists within material substances, flows, and systems…Thinking as the stuff of the world entails grappling with the strange agencies of ordinary objects that are already part of ourselves, as well as considering what it means for other[s]…
Stacy Alaimo, Thinking as the stuff of the World.
O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies
Issue 1 :: Object/Ecology :: 2014
ISSN 2326-8344


For more info marie-andree@kristofferscenen.se