Circus Whispers | Season 4 Episode 4 | Identity | IF Circus & Cia Insurgentes

Anyone who stands on stage dancing and laughing in Chile or Mexico paves the way for an audience to laugh. But how do you transmit this piece of culture to a new audience Itzel and Micaela of Insurgentes Company wonder aloud? Mar & Shalom from Catalonia and Italy instead found a key in the stories and labour of their ancestors and connect with audiences while knitting. This episode is all about identity. Host Maaike Muis brings together the stories of two maker duos whose identities have great significance for the circus they make.

Wie in Chili of Mexico op het podium staat te dansen en te lachen, heeft het publiek op de hand. Maar hoe breng je dit stukje cultuur over op een nieuw publiek, vragen Itzel en Micaela van Insurgentes Company zich hardop af? Mar & Shalom uit Catalonië en Italië vonden juist een sleutel in de verhalen en de arbeid van hun voorouders en maken al breiend contact met het publiek. Deze aflevering gaat over identiteit. Host Maaike Muis brengt de verhalen samen van twee makersduo's wier identiteit van grote betekenis is voor het circus dat ze maken.

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Makers - IF Circus & Insurgentes Company
Hosting & editing - Maaike Muis
Production - TENT house for contemporary circus
Music - Blue Dot Sessions
Made possible by - Dutch Performing Arts Fund & Amsterdam Arts Fund

Transcript

00:00:01
Maaike: Welcome to Circus Whispers, a podcast by TENT House for Contemporary Circus hosted by me, Maaike Muis. In this podcast, you'll hear two Makers for a week. IF circus comprised of Mar and Shalom and Cia Insurgentes comprised of Itzel and Micaela. Both these duos work around the topics of identity, cultural identity and heritage, and how to translate these themes to the audience through their performances. In their Maker for a week research, they try out different ways to connect with the audiences. How do you do that without words? Maybe through literal interaction with the audience. Make them accomplice through knitting, for example, which Mar and Shalom investigate. And how do you connect? How do you make the translation of different cultural backgrounds and identity? Well, this is a topic Itzel and Micaela will talk more about. But first I talked to Mar and Shalom and Itzel and Micaela online. They were all in different places and sometimes even in different time zones. I talked to Mar & Shalom first and then to Itzel and Micaela. Michela. How did they meet?

00:01:20
Mar: Hi. Um, I'm Mar. I'm creating a circus show with Shalom called, Melic. That is also the name of the rope that we are knitting and using on the stage. And we are IFcircus.

00:01:39
Shalom: Hi. I'm Shalom. I, um, I am a circus artist dancer, and I love photography. And I am working with Mar on the project Melic. Ma and I, we met in, uh, ACAPA in the circus Academy of, uh, performance art and circus in, uh, in Fontys, Mar is a circus artist. Uh, very clear with her choices as a circus artist and as an artist. Uh, yeah, that's how I. I met her in school itself.

00:02:19
Maaike: Itzel and Micaela met even before they started in school.

00:02:23
Itzel: We met at school, actually, like, during the auditions. It was quite funny because, uh, I don't know why, but I was being very social with Micaela, and Micaela was having more serious than I thought, like she didn't like me or something. And then, uh, during other audition, we met again, and then we were more friends, and it was, um, kind of an immediate connection somehow. But at the same time, like, we were very different with each other and then each other.

00:02:53
Micaela: I don't remember that I was so serious. With Itzel, for me, I think maybe I was just so focused on the audition or. Or I don't know. And then, yes, we became friends quite fast, actually. I think because we connected through our language and our like how we are, it's just different. It's a different energy than other people. And every culture have their own. I, I call it energy, but it can be personality or identity. And for me, there was just this clique that we understood each other quite fast.

00:03:40
Maaike: Talking about this identity Itzel is originally from Mexico. Micaela from Chile, Mar from Catalonia, and Shalom is from Italy. In both cases, their background and identity resonate in the name of their company and the name of the piece, for example, Itzel from Insurgentes.

00:04:04
Itzel/Micaela: We're trying to find names, and we had to do register our company in order to apply for some projects. So we were like rushing, rushing so much to find a name. And then we said like, why we don't put like a subway station name, like metro station, metro station. And then Micaela start bringing like some names and uh, from her country, from Chile. And I start bringing some from Mexico City. And then, like I said, like Pino Suarez, Vella Sartez, Insurgentes, and then Insurgentes sounds so cool, what is the meaning? And then we start looking for the meaning. And it means, like people who stand up for causes.

00:04:45
Maaike: People that stand up to causes. Even though at first it felt like quite a casually found name, the meaning people that stand up for causes now really got an extra meaning in my conversation with Itzel and Micaela. They stand up for their cause of being who they want to be. And talking about identity, the first place your identity is defined literally, is your belly button. The starting point of where you come from. And this Melic, which is the Catalan word for belly button, is a carefully chosen name by Mar and Shalom for their piece, where they knitted their interpretation of a Melic, which also resembles a womb.

00:05:30
Mar: Since I was like 17 years old, I was uh oh. Why not knitting a rope a rope? Because with a little rope, maybe I can knit a big rope. So then because my grandma teach me how to knit when I was a child and then I was it was really, really my my hobby and my passion. So I was knitting socks and a scarf and I was, okay, if you can knit a scarf, maybe it's possible to knit a rope. Even before I start ACAPA. I need the first rope and then in ACAPA. I was trying to knit other rope structures like this belly button rope that it's the one in Melic.

00:06:13
Shalom: Mar was searching for people who could dance inside the knitted needed, uh, Melic. And it feels really like, um, to be like, uh, in the womb of, uh, like in a belly. It feels like this is the feeling of being inside the Melic. How I found myself approaching circus was uh a lot about the fabric. So I was starting with silks, I did silks in school, and then somehow the image of the silks, it always gave me the sensation of labor, of certain types of labors. And labor, it can also be circus, circus can also be labor, so for me first inspiration about the silks was that.

00:06:29
Maaike: More about the Melic and the audience interaction with it later. Let's start with the research question of Itzel and Micaela. That language could be a barrier is something that both companies experienced. Micaela and Itzel performed last year at Circolo Festival, and they felt a lack of connection with the audience. As if the audience, by not understanding or not having the translation key to their Latin identity, made it hard to connect. This is something they want to research further during their Maker for a week week.

00:07:04
Mar: Like for us, I think this research question was our main focus after Circolo, after showing our work in progress in Festival Circolo. Because our performance was created from a very deep and intimate place. So it's like the first thing that we thought about it. It was not like body movement research. It was more like storytelling and like our need from our guts to share our culture in a different country and to embrace our identity.

00:07:51
Itzel: We have a small part where we kind of party like we do love to party. And we thought like, yeah, this is gonna be incredible. It's gonna bring all the way up to the audience. And it didn't happen. Like they all just stayed quiet and serious.

00:08:08
Micaela: I just felt a huge gap of cultural differences, which made me actually quite sad because then I understood like, okay, first, like we are creating something different because we are Latin Americans, but we do have a big privilege to be in Europe. So we do want to tell this story. So it just made me like quite sad that some people couldn't like, enjoy. It made me feel really sad. It made me feel like I don't belong here, because maybe my to not make myself understand is one thing, but to not make my art understand is like a way bigger topic that we discussed this a lot. When you are like an immigrant, you start questioning your identity and your culture and thinking sometimes maybe if this is good, like for us it was like, are we too loud or too chaotic? Is this really bad? And at the end, actually it's just differences and nothing is bad or good somehow in those things. So for us it was a way of embrace our culture.

00:09:38
Itzel: I think like we always said, like bodies are political. Like we definitely do not look European. So to put ourselves on stage and being like us there, I think it makes like a big impact about where we come from. Like we are sort of different than the rest in. Yeah, I think that comes like, like our bodies, our history. In this occasion, we want to share more about how our roots make us to be be together and to, to develop this very deep friendship, that friendship that becomes into a single individual. Like we are both like separate. And how do we blend together?

00:10:33
Maaike: How the roots will bring Itzel and Micaela together is what they will research in their Maker for a week. Mar and Shalom also wanted to connect with their roots. They started by talking to their grandmothers, and these conversations gave them the inspiration for a universal starting point for their performance, on how to connect the stories from their ancestors into circus techniques.

00:11:00
Shalom: With Mar, we always started from asking, uh, our grandmothers questions about who taught you knitting, from where it comes from, where do you come from? As a grandma, you know. And these opens up a lot. A lot of beautiful, beautiful answers. So we started from this connection already.

00:11:24
Maaike: And if you think back about these conversations with your grandmother, what are things that she told you that stuck?

00:11:31
Shalom: Talking with my grandmother. Uh, she's from the south of Italy. And, uh, at her times, she had to move from there very young and to go and live in Germany, for example. But she really didn't want to live in Germany and work in Germany. So she was 16 and she was already working in a, um, in a sewing factory, actually. And everything. Yeah. Somehow, um, it's always connected. And then she never wanted to. So she kind of alone with 16, took a train to go back in the south of Italy, you know. So there's various like small stories that come that are really beautiful and like, they live the life, that it's completely different than ours. Way slower way, uh, it for I feel like they really had to fight against certain things way more than we do somehow. Or yeah, we still do it. But they kind of opened us the story, the possibility to think differently already. And my grandma was the first woman in the south of Italy that decided to divorce, for example, in her little town. So this was, for example, one of the stories that came up through the question of who thought you knitting?

00:12:58
Mar: And for me, it was like my grandma was talking about her grandma. And then I realized how she was admiring her grandma, as I was also admiring a lot. Like I'm also admiring a lot of my grandma. And this I was like, wow. And it was also her grandma teaching her how to knit like she was teaching me. And this I was, yeah, I was really I didn't know until I ask her and. And yeah, also like, she had a really hard life. Like she had to take care of the of the sheep, of the like.Yeah, of the animals. Then she also had to knit for the, for the children. She was also explaining me. Yeah. How to take off the, the wool from the animal and then to, to spin it, to wash it, to spin it, to dry it, to color it. Yeah. When you realize that to knit it takes a lot of time. And then you realize that actually to do all the whole process until you arrive to knit it, it takes even more time. Shalom was doing a project about the, the women that were cleaning in the river. And this is really like the old historical memory of, yeah, like because she's doing tissue like the circus discipline in the school was tissue that she had to do an act. And yeah, she had like all this project about how this tissue, um, yeah, is being being washed and how to carry this tissue. And then we were having these super similar of, like, my project that it's about how this rope is being knitted and it's like transform and also all these historical memory of the women having to do this job. Then we were talking and he was like, yeah, but you know, I want to do this project with you. And I was, oh, I'm so happy, I want to do with you. And then we start.

00:15:07
Maaike: From the sheep to the wool, from the wool to the knitting and the old image of women washing fabric in the rivers. It was all connected for Mar and Shalom, connected to the history of women and the history of their grandmothers.

00:15:24
Shalom: And the labor, for me was one of the first, uh, click that came, I guess, because also, um, for me, it's related to the ancestors that came before me. And like, also, this is for sure something that is coming and it's very relatable between Mar and I, but it's also just, uh, something that came without having the first attempt to go there. Yeah. Like from the object to the labor, from the labor to the ancestors. And then for me, this is where I did the connection of historical memory, of knitting, of knitting and of, for example, laundry washing. And I kind of discovered how I like to approach an apparatus which is very physical. And I work really a bit as a scientist, I divide. Okay. I'm observing the silks, then the silks become something else because I give the space to transform and give images, and then somehow with the, with the, with the ropes, with the knitted ropes of Mar, which are really very clear. There's like a very clear texture, a very clear image, which is the womb image, the Melic, the belly button. I kind of, uh, I kind of always relate to the silks or to the fabric or to the structure, to the material. And from there, everything is possible.

00:16:55
Maaike: Not only are there grandmothers and ancestors a source of inspiration for their research, they also want to make new connections and collect new stories during the Maker for a week, they invite each day 16 people, grandmothers to knit with them.

00:17:13
Shalom: So there's a part of the of the research that we have done until now. That is the connection with the audience. So we kind of, uh, ask the audience to hold a part of the rope that we are knitting and we create ehm, we create a connection with them, which is very physical because they have to hold a part. So we want to research this. How do we actually connect with them? The idea is to everyday make a run of the full performance and to, um, invite different people every day. So we invite, uh, a circle of 16 people, because the first row of our show is 16 people, and we try, uh, the interaction with them, we create like, a, um, spider net or like, um, a knitting net or circus tent. A lot of people give different, uh, different, uh, images to it, but, uh, we create these. And then with that, we want to see how we can interact with the audience for what are we doing that and what are we using? Why are we actually connecting with them?

00:18:32
Mar: Like for us, it's not, uh, really important that they know how to knit because sometimes they are like, ah, we don't really know how to knit after we start to ask questions and obviously they know how to knit. It's really crazy. Always like the the all women arrive and say, no, I'm not really good at this. And then they know.

00:18:53
Shalom: For me it's connected to the historical memory and to the image of grandmothers sitting in front of their houses and knitting together and talking as the image of the laundry, women doing the same. So there's something about, um, like, uh, we are we are actually knitting the two of us as a form of connection. And in a moment we actually need with everyone. But that's what we try to do. So we actually create a net of people knitting.

00:19:30
Maaike: As an artist, it's so important to make that connection with the audience. After the experience of Itzel and Micaela, where they did not feel understood by the European audience, it was quite a search for them to find their artistic voice that they could connect with here, while staying honest to themselves. This also means that, in a sense, that the type of art they make is a political choice.

00:19:56
Itzel: We think at some point, like, yeah, we we do not fit so much with the kind of art that is made here in Europe. And we did try it like we even wrote about it. We developed, uh, some sort of body research, movement research, but it just didn't happen like in like we tried to get some funds with it and some, um, residencies and it didn't work, like… And then we just realized, like, we are not that like, how can we share something that we wanted to be honest, if we are not being honest with ourselves? Like this is a real truth. Like, I don't know, personally. Like I think I can adapt to the culture in here, but I will never be European and I will never be like the rest. And as a Mexican, I have seen in a lot of South American people, we make fun of our current situation, political, economically, everything. And it is kind of their way of of taking their things.

00:20:55
Maaike: As a way of Providing or.

00:20:56
Itzel: Yes, it is a way of taking the things like we could be crying, but this is not something we do like. We try to take the things light and keep going and try to do our best.

00:21:05
Micaela: Do things something like political and cultural that in Chile, with my friends, we are all the time talking about politics and like how things are bad and in the world and in everything. And we don't talk in an intellectual way, so we don't do performances inspired by books or by movies or by interviews. We do performances by, I think, our gut or what we feel we need to say. Here, there were a lot of, like I call it, more like conceptual art, which for me is an intellectual art, which it means that not all social classes will understand this art. Actually, it will be high class for me personally. Of course, I don't want to do an art form that just one social class will understand. I want to do something that everybody with their background, their education, can understand. This is something that like I, I felt that there was a lot here and is it also makes me, yeah understand there is just another political situations in in the countries and it's just different. Like in Chile, the majority of people, they don't they can't access to good education so they will not be thinking about, uh. To understand a performance, you need to read this book. And this book is. I think it's just something more about your feelings or emotions. So this was something for me, very different. And the way I want to do art, it is a political decision that I want to everybody from different social classes can understand and have fun.

00:23:16
Itzel: I said in very similar way. I think like it is true. It is a decision. Um, I think like in here, um, young people have different needs than us in Latin America. Like, I think we are worried for very different things than they are. Like, that's why they can have this privilege as well of having time or the the initiative of reading a book and experiment other kind of arts. For example, me as a woman in Mexico, um, it it is a very hard thing to be like, you can be killed. You can be raped. You you have to be always aware in the street like nobody's following you. And yeah, I think that's one of my main problems because I'm also in a very privileged position. Like, I don't have to worry for so much things, but I cannot go out in the night or even in the day in certain places, and I cannot wear certain kind of clothes. And here in Europe, I can feel like the big, big difference, this kind of freedom. I feel like in here I can be independent and in Mexico I cannot, because I always have to be aware that I'm not in a dangerous situation. Of course, like here. Like I could sit in with my classmates like they they never felt in the same way I felt.

00:24:36
Maaike: Different experiences, different perspectives. It shows again and again what art can give us. What is it that Itzel and Micaela hope to bring to the audience.

00:24:49
Itzel: I think like a new perspective of seeing people, not only see us as people or immigrants, but also feel like the good things and the bad things we have in order to immigrate like it. Like how it means a lot to us because it is a privilege and a possibility, but also, um, how we feel and how we relate with our surroundings at us immigrants.

00:25:16
Micaela: Or at least like to, to make other people uh, to have empathy with our culture or to also share with them. I think we want them to also have fun seeing a, a different culture.

00:25:40
Maaike: Both IF circus and Insurgentes will go into the studio some months after the release of this podcast. I asked Itzel and Micaela, what they would do first when they enter the studio and see each other again after a long time.

00:25:56
Mar: I think, I can't imagine ourselves being so tired and being like playing a song and we like, okay, let's just like run, dance and laugh and just music. Yeah, music and dance and then laugh for five, ten minutes dancing and just being like kind of Latino kids that are like trying to dance and.

00:26:19
Itzel: Just make a sarcastic joke.

00:26:23
Maaike: And I asked Mar and Shalom what they'll think they'll make when they're 75.

00:26:29
Mar: Yeah, I don't know. I imagine we have like a knitted tent. Like we go crazy.

00:26:36
Maaike: Thanks very much for listening. New episodes of Circus Whispers will come out after the summer of 2024. Interview, production, editing by me Maaike Muis. Music by Bluedot sessions. Big thanks to Micaela, Itzel, Mar and Shalom and big thanks to Ruth Verraes for editorial advice, and Cahit Metin and the rest of the team of TENT. The makers of a week of 2024 are Michael Zandl, Cecilia Rosso, Jakob Jacobsson, Berkey, IF Circus Shalom and Mar, and Cia Insurgentes with Itzel and Micaela. 

This production was possible thanks to the support of TENT by Performing Art Fund  Netherlands and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunsten. More info at tent.eu.