Circus Oz 2015, But Wait…There’s More, performers Ben Lewis (top) and Sharon Gruenert. Photo by Scott Hone.
The “ta-dah!” moment – the completion of a trick followed by a pause for applause before moving on to the next routine – is a common element of contemporary circus. A carry-over from the art form’s traditional roots, such forced applause points are an opportunity for the audience to express their delight or awe – but according to Kim Kaos, a circus artist and teacher turned academic and dramaturg, the ta-dah moment also has the potential to damage the art form’s development.
‘I feel that that ‘”tah-dah!” moment, that training of audiences to respond, is creating a situation where the palette for the performer or their vocabulary is a bit limited,’ Kaos told ArtsHub.
‘And a lot of contemporary circus is moving away from that ta-dah moment … We want to applaud people because they’ve achieved whatever difficult thing that they’ve attempted, but if that’s happening within the context of a larger narrative, or a sense of story or place or space, then applauding at the wrong time kind of throws the atmosphere that’s being built.’
Which is not to say that Kaos is against applauding circus artists – far from it.
‘When it bubbles up spontaneously it’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s when its manufactured that [it becomes problematic]. In classical circus the deal was that you saved up your big, blow-off trick, as it was called, for the end, and you would never get it on the first go. But you’d practice it enough that you knew you could deliberately fail twice and nail it the third time to make that ta-dah moment even bigger,’ she said.
‘There’s something incredibly visceral about circus and so you get people sitting in the audience who can’t do these skills; they identify with the performer and have that sense of elation that comes from the successful nailing of certain risky – usually risky – tricks … But yeah, I don’t know if we have to milk it in the same way.’
As circus artist Skye Gellmann points out, contemporary audiences have been – at least to a degree – trained to expect applause points in circus shows; so much so that the lack of applause can occasionally be confusing for artists, even dispiriting.
‘For example when I was a kid we used to go and tour our circus work around regional South Australia, and we found that the children that we performed to, out in the towns, didn’t applaud as much. And at first I think a lot of the people I was performing with, they thought that they were doing a bad job because we’re not getting the applause around the ta-dah moments that we were creating; but actually it was just that they had a different understanding and hadn’t seen as much circus – it wasn’t part of their everyday,’ he said.
‘It didn’t mean they didn’t appreciate it, they were just quieter.’
Gellmann’s own attitude towards applause points and ta-dah moments has changed over the years.
‘Originally I despised it, because my work started as a reaction to the corporate work that I was doing with circus, and so I didn’t want to feel like I was a performing monkey. But as I learned more about the audience I guess it’s become clear that … you kind of have to accept that we work in a form that has traditions and people know those traditions and have been conditioned to interact in a certain way,’ he said.
In his most recent circus work, Bodies Over Bitumen at the Melbourne Fringe Festival – a live art/circus hybrid performed outdoors, on the streets of North Melbourne, and co-created with Naomi Francis, Alex Gellmann and Kieran Law – Gellmann was occasionally discomforted to hear audiences applauding at intervals throughout the production.
‘There were some times when the audience would applaud during my street pole movement piece, which wasn’t necessarily what I wanted. It makes me question how different contemporary performance, live art and circus actually is, because if I make this live art circus on the street with a real disconnection from traditional circus and people still applaud, maybe live art and circus are more related than people think,’ Gellmann explained.
‘I guess it’s up to the makers to really question the way that spectacle and tricks read; and to interrogate how they want their audience to be in that space and what is the communication between the performer and the audience? Is the audience a quiet watcher or is the audience a spectacle-watcher who applauds and makes noise?
‘What are the other ways that you can show appreciation?’ he continued. ‘That might be a question for circus performers who are dealing with audiences who are confused as to whether to clap or to stay silent. Like, what other ways can the audience collaborate with the performance? That’s a very large question though.’
Skye Gellmann and Naomi Francis in Bodies Over Bitumen; photo by Ponch Hawkes.
Circus Oz Senior Artistic Associate, Antonella Casella, notes that as circus continues to evolve, practitioners will need to consider the presentation of their work to audiences more carefully.
‘As a lot of contemporary circus is moving into a more fourth-wall – for want of a better word – version of circus, and it’s a great move and it’s a beautiful move and it’s a really interesting artistic move; but there’s still a whole other traditional of contemporary circus, and traditional circus, which is where there is no fourth wall. Where, you know, it’s almost like you’re at a dinner party and someone says something fabulous and sometimes you might spontaneously laugh and clap your hands together; it’s about a direct relationship with the audience I think,’ she said.
‘I think it’s really important that when applause does come it’s really spontaneous and genuine, and that’s about structuring your act properly and having the right music and the right arc to the individual act – and great skills, obviously as well, at one end of the spectrum.
‘And then at the other end of the spectrum is the stuff where, you know, for example the music that is being worked to is very, very important and you don’t want to interrupt that any more than you want to interrupt the physical action,’ Casella said.
One risk the circus arts face – if the milking of applause in ta-dah moments continues – is that audiences will come to expect that constant interruptions of applause are mandatory. There’s also a risk that applause points will become near-obligatory in the teaching of circus, according to Kaos.
‘If you have classical circus performers teaching, then they’re going to get their students to do routines that have in them the body language that signals “Now you can clap,” or “I’ve done something good, isn’t this amazing?” or “Bask in my glory!” I think that needs to be deconstructed – the way that we structure routines or the way we encourage people to explore,’ she said.
The future of the form
What we know as contemporary circus is a relatively young art form, approximately 40 years’ old. Discussions around the place of forced applause are just one of many conversations the circus sector is having about the future of its art.
Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of Circa, laughs when asked about his predictions for the art form’s future.
‘I’d be a lot richer man if I had a crystal ball into the future – I wouldn’t be wasting my time on circus, I’d be buying stocks. It’s hard to know, but what I hope is that the richness of the art form that I have enjoyed encountering and had the privilege to work with, continues to produce a large and diverse range of different approaches that are as different and varied as the artists who work on it,’ he said.
‘In a way I think the answer is that I’d like to see lots more approaches, things that you would never want to clap; things that are a perfect, abstract form of something, and then things that are absolutely about the moment of clapping and all about the moment of ta-dahing and everything in between.’
Describing circus as ‘a young art form with fairly hardened arteries,’ Lifschitz believes breaking away from tradition is necessary in order to help the circus arts grow.
‘To be a really genuine art form I think you need a real richness and diversity over time. I mean, not many of us go and see Elizabethan-style masques these days, do you know what I mean? We don’t go and see a whole heap of 19th century style melodrama. But we do go and see theatre and we do sometimes go and see opera and ballet because they have this sense that they’ve evolved from their particular time and place into something rich – a rich, ongoing dialogue with their past and their present,’ he said.
‘The question for me is not “can we give people meaningful hours in the theatre today?” but can we contribute to a legacy of exploration and diversification that creates something with a sufficient amount of opportunities and questions and research to take the art form forward, into the future? Or does it become a weird, late-20th century, beginning of the 21st century kind of artefact?
‘It will also be around in some form though. If what we know as contemporary circus doesn’t exist there will still be circus and there will be something amazing to come. The question is, in evolutionary terms, are we the appendix? Are we the bit that’s going to cease to have [a necessary function], to not be very important in the long term, or are we some kind of new thing, the wing that’s going to help this thing fly into a new iteration? And of course that’s not up to us to answer,’ Lifschitz concluded.
Antonella Casella is equally excited by what the future has to offer.
‘It is interesting that with such a young art form, not only are the performers still in a constant state of innovation – and I think there is a sense in contemporary circus that we’re all innovators, that we’re all still exploring something that is still a new idea,’ she said.
‘It still feels like a new idea, circus being taken seriously as an art form and not just, you know, a divertissement – and I think we all still feel like we’re in an exploration mode. I don’t think there’s any contemporary circus that would stand up and say “We are the quintessential, this is how you do it, this is how contemporary circus should be done,” and that’s because it’s new, and also because it’s so incredibly diverse.
‘There are so many different ways that you can choose to put contemporary circus together, so many sub-genres … And I’ve got to say, as a performer I used to love the ta-dah moment, there’s no doubt about that,’ Casella laughed.
‘But I also really love watching an idea being explored in a way that doesn’t necessarily call for applause because you’re going down maybe a dark emotional path or an intellectual emotional path, and you really don’t want to be pulled out from that just to clap a trick, you know? I think I’m just out to encourage all variations of the art form, that’s my main thrust.’
Kim Kaos also laughs when asked about her predictions for the future of circus arts.
‘Oh that’s a big one, that’s really big one! I think really there are no limits,’ she chuckled.
‘Back in the Seventies, in 1978 – I can remember it – somebody said to me “Why are you doing circus? It’s a fad, it’s a flash in the pan. You won’t have a career, switch over to theatre,” and I was going “No, no, there’s so much potential here,” and also I loved the challenge of it because I don’t see an end. I can learn the skills, I can become proficient in them, but there’s always more, there’s always some place to go, there’s always something else. I’m not confined to the limits of my body only because there’s props and apparatus and how you interact with them.
‘At that point there was one circus school here and I knew every single juggler in the UK, all 12 of them and now there are thousands and thousands of people! I’ve just come back from Sweden, where after having exposure to circus skills in primary school you can go to a circus high school and then on to the University of Dance and Circus, and have that kind of continuum of learning.
‘So with those kinds of foundations I think the physical vocabulary of performers is going to become more complex, and more nuanced, and what they’re going to be able to do with the form is just – I kind of think it’s a bit limitless, really,’ Kaos concluded.
The Sydney season of Circus Oz’s But Wait…There’s More runs from 30 December 2015 to 24 January 2016 at The Showring, Moore Park. See circusoz.com for details.
