While we were devising the festival concept of women’s circus, certain circus connoisseurs claimed there was no such thing as the „women’s circus“. They would even, while counting notable circus female artists using their (male) fingers, attempt to prove that circus development history pertains dominantly to men. Indeed, few letters have been written considering the women’s role in the circus (is it because a male-dominated circus history was written mainly by men?). But since no lead role is to be measured in the side role’s sex, Zagreb New Circus Festival aims to point out the publicly undermined performative spaces that had such an outstanding influence on a circus genre as we know it today.
Read the full story »
Mingling with the mythological freak show icons, in the performance „Éloge du poil“ Jeanne Moroj appears as a bearded lady. Emerging from our perceptions of circus fairs of a time long gone, a wondrous freak one points a finger at, she demonstrates a form of misterious femininity, both repulsive and alluring at the same time, acquiring a beard, as a masculine attribute, onto a woman’s body.
What happens to a woman when meeting a child? A child bestowed to her guardianship, her own child or the child within? How much magic must we make to tame the child, yet leave it the joy of creativity? And what is Magic anyway? These are some of the questions that led Dubravka Crnojević-Carić and the three acrobats on a performing journey.
Mélissa Von Vépy reappears, after three years, in front of the Zagreb audience. There is a comparable amount of discomfort and anxiety connected to “Mirror, Mirror“; instead of a five and a half meter high parallelepiped as a difficultly conquerable fort for two acrobats (the performance “I look up, I look down…“, FNC 2006), a large mirror is on the stage – facing a far lonelier individual.
“Bambula” solo performance is dedicated to the matter of the body as a container of memories, the site of continuous battles of the Self divided within. The dimensions of that Self become blurred, opaque. Reality and imagination, lucidity and delusion, subject and object become devoid of their unique meaning.
In the form of conventional Gladys, Laura Herts attends a concert of a famous wild female rock star she adores. She ends up on stage “by mistake“, confronted with the spectators. Slowly but surely, she dismisses the initial uneasiness, basks in the lights of attention and loses control over her middle-aged self as she becomes possessed with the ancient spirit of our sister Janis Joplin.
“Human Document“ is named after one of the books from the series where Olive Pixley, English spiritual medium, describes the story of intensive psychic connection that outlives death, the story of her brother Jack who, after being killed in the battlefield in 1917, returns to make contact with her from “the other realm“.
Twitter: fncirkusa