FLOODESIGN

T raditionally in the West, acrobats have presented as costumed people (versus theatrical characters), doing tricks in which the stakes are physical rather than psychological or circumstantial. But beginning in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has suggested that circus is theater. The company's circus is allegorical and fantastical, with fable-like stories in which acrobats perform as characters depicting experiences beyond the scope of daily life. When an aerial act features two lovers swinging airborne, wrapped in fabric, literally dependent on each other for support, it dramatizes the sense of loss they'd feel if made to part from each other — the danger of death, in other words, is used for the sake of storytelling. More recently, new circuses (I'm thinking of 7 Fingers, and Daniele Finzi Pasca directing Cirque Éloize) have used acrobatic acts as the dramatic expression of human experience in recognizable circumstances. There's a playfulness that grounds the work of these groups in more ordinary situations rather than in the allegorical forces of nature. Circus action is at a personal scale, the theatricality is minimal, and storytelling is rooted in the individual. In this new theatricality, acrobats can dramatize a variety of human situations: the banality of apartment living in a scene around a table, the deliberation of a jury, the strivings for professional success or the conflicts inherent in religious faith. I think of theatrical masks (those worn on the face) as operating within a paradigm similar to that of acrobatics: rules and techniques are needed to sustain the particular idea of personhood the mask proposes, with the design of the mask dictating an appropriate way of moving. The stylization of movement must somehow match the stylization of the mask — the colors, shapes, angles or lines are echoed in some way by the performer's movements — in order for the viewer to accept the idea that the mask is part of the person. If the viewer doesn't believe in the mask, it is reduced to a mere physical object on someone's face. Performance principles that can help animate the mask include moving only one part of the body at a time, since every movement has a heightened meaning in this context; breaking broader movements down into a series of small movements; and taking more time between movements. These actions help convert the rigid mask into an expressive instrument. Through the mask one can speak about the pace of thoughts (masked characters can seem to think very slowly); the power of single gestures; and the complex articulation inherent in silently shared long looks. In recognizing the truth of a mask, we accept the substitution of the artificial face in exchange for a closer look at how thoughts and feelings move through people in incremental and obstructed ways. Just as the masked performer moves in a manner appropriate to the mask, so the story told by a circus must take place in an exaggerated world that encompasses both human storytelling and superhuman control of natural laws. And here, for the circus viewer, is a conflict deeper than the narrative one: the conflict between theatricality and sport. In "fatal charades," a first-century Roman practice in which executions were staged as mythological enact- ments, the existential threat was real and put to dramatic use; failure demonstrated how death was transformative, along the lines of the myth being enacted. Circus reaches for the mythic through storytelling, and acrobatics uses the mortal danger to the performers to deepen the effect of the performance. When I think of fatal charades, I think of clowns. For me there's not enough clowning in the circus. The clowns tell the viewer that the acrobats are wrong to think of limitations as inflexible — they're porous — even while the acrobatics and its risks are real. The clown element tells the viewer that, though perfect in itself, the technical virtuosity of acrobatics misunderstands the lesson of boundaries. Without the clown element the virtuosity becomes commonplace, the stories too earnest. Similarly, the lesson in boundaries offered by mask performance is that while the viewer is asked to accept the truth of what they're seeing, they're also watching people with things on their faces. The humor of it hums beneath the whole enterprise, and the self-awareness of this is important. Whereas the success of a theatrical mask relies on a viewer's acceptance of a world stylistically appropriate to that mask, in dance typically there's no object anchoring the rules of style. The dance's stylization relies on the performers' consistent adherence to its philosophic or aesthetic program. One of the things the experimental Judson Dance Theater movement asks us to believe, for instance, is that non-performance is possible, for performers on stage, in front of people who've come to see them. Whereas the stylization of mask and acrobatics is enforced by external factors (the mask itself, and gravity), dancers must enforce the stylization internally, themselves. An individual dance defines its own limitations. Can the dancemaker show the viewer that the limiting forces are genuine and constant for 12 | PEAKPERFS.ORG J U S T A S T H E M A S K E D P E R F O R M E R M OV E S I N A M A N N E R A P P R O P R I A T E T O T H E M A S K , S O T H E S T O R Y T O L D B Y A C I R C U S M U S T T A K E P L A C E I N A N E X A G G E R A T E D W O R L D T H A T E N C O M PA S S E S B O T H H U M A N S T O R Y T E L L I N G A N D S U P E R H U M A N C O N T R O L O F N A T U R A L L A W S .

• Cover