Circus Whispers | Season 4 Episode 3 | Apparatus | Jakob & Berkey

The do-it-yourself mentality in circus is strong. So is that of the Maker for a Week exploring what future circus could be. Host Maaike Muis sat down with Berkey and Jakob Jacobsson. What is usually in the shadows, is what they put in the spotlight, such as rope artist Jakob's light installation or Berkey's inventive Chinese pole structure. In this episode, there is much to say about the relationship between the performer and his apparatus, and about ingeniously stretching one's own limits. And all trends and waves aside, during this conversation Maaike discovers a quality of circus that is absolutely timeless.

De doe-het-zelf mentaliteit in circus is sterk. Zo ook die van de Maker voor een week die onderzoekt wat toekomstig circus kan zijn. Host Maaike Muis ging om de tafel met Berkey en Jakob Jacobsson. Wat gewoonlijk in de schaduw staat, zetten zij in de schijnwerpers, zoals de lichtinstallatie van touwartiest Jakob of de inventieve Chinese paalstructuur van Berkey. In deze aflevering valt er veel te zeggen over de relatie tussen de performer en zijn apparaat en over het vindingrijk oprekken van de eigen grenzen. En alle trends en ontwikkelingen ten spijt, tijdens dit gesprek ontdekt Maaike een eigenschap van circus die absoluut tijdloos is.

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Makers - Jakob Jacobsson & Berkey
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

00:00:00
Maaike: Welcome to Circus Whispers, a podcast by TENT House for Contemporary Circus. My name is Maaike Muis. I'm a freelance moderator, podcast maker and a former circus director. In this episode, you'll hear two makers for a week Jakob Jakobsson and Berkey. Both of them work with highlighting what is usually not highlighted. In a very literal way, Jakob puts the lights on the light, so to speak, and the vertical rope is part, but not the main part of his scenography. And Berkey has created a whole new structure to highlight the partnership between performer and the circus apparatuses. And also there are similarities in the way visual arts have inspired and influenced their research. I've talked to both of them separately. I visited Jakob in Likeminds Studio and Berkey in NDD Studio. To get to know them better, this is how Jakob and Berkey found their way into the circus.

00:01:05
Jakob Jakobsson: My name is Jakob Jakobsson, or Jakob Jakobsson if you're Swedish. Um, that's where I'm from originally, but I've been living in the Netherlands since I started Codarts several years ago now, and I work primarily in two different circus companies Revue Regret and the Nordic Council, and I am currently in creation for my first solo show.

00:01:28
Maaike : What got you into circus?

00:01:30
Jakob Jakobsson: Music, actually. I was playing accordion in a jazz bar where I was working, and I was not very good at it, but I was good enough that someone said, I'm starting a cabaret and we need a musician. And I said, I have no idea what a cabaret is, but all right, let's go for it. And that kind of led from one thing to the next, and this big kind of domino effect began. And then a few years later, I started training aerial rope.

00:01:55
Maaike : But why did you choose aerial rope?

00:01:58
Jakob Jacobsson: That is a very valid question. I think there's something about the simplicity. It's it's a straight line. It has no inherent, It doesn't have a fixed shape, but it takes the shape that you give it. It adapts to the movement, to the technique, to your vocabulary. It offers verticality, but it also connects to the floor. Um, yeah. I think it feels like it can be anything and nothing at the same time.

00:02:24
Maaike : But then there's your physique as well. Would you be so kind to describe yourself?

00:02:29
Jakob Jacobsson: I would say that I'm extremely lanky. 

00:02:32
Maaike : What’s lanky?

00:02:34
Jakob Jacobsson: Like long limbed, dangly, um, like a fistful of overcooked spaghetti in the air, you know? No, actually, my height is the most prominent thing when I'm on stage. It is very rare that I get to stand next to anyone in a show, and I'm not an entire head taller than they are. And during my four years of Codarts, I don't recall a single presentation where commenting on my height wasn't part of the feedback, as if that's something I worked on. And I can tell you it's it's it's it just happened. I'm born like this. Uh, took no effort. Once you get over the initial frustration of trying to look like everyone else and you start looking at what your body actually does, because there's a lot of material that because of my height, I find this way more agreeable than I've realized the most aerialists feel.

00:03:20
Maaike : Yeah, I was just thinking, actually, it could be your advantage to really create your own signature, like in movement, because there's no one like you on the aerial rope, right?

00:03:33
Jakob Jacobsson: Exactly. And there is something else to be said for this, that a tall person can get stronger and get strong enough, but a short person cannot get taller. So, you know, with the hands were dealt, we have to celebrate what we have and what we can and can't do, and everyone has a different body. And so I think in my in my first year of school, I think I was extremely frustrated because so much of what you're asked to do in an institution is based on arbitrary exercises, or how many leg lifts can you do? How many handstands can you hold? And then it was very difficult to, to kind of be at peace with how I was built. When I see all these people who are 30, 40cm shorter and three times the acrobats I'll ever be. But once you get into your own artistic practice, I think everybody is valid, and I think everyone eventually discovers their own movement quality in their own interest. And I think this is why circus is so beautiful as well, that it doesn't really exclude the way a lot of typical sports do.

00:04:32
Berkey: Well, I'm Berkey. I am, guess I'm the maker for the current week. I rig things mostly nowadays. I started with circus multiple years back in Sweden. Um, as a way out of the current study that I was doing at the time, I was studying economy, which I'm really thankful for, but also thankful to have done, be doing something else. And then that circus journey has kind of taken me, uh, throughout Denmark and then all the way down here to Netherlands, which I've spent the most of my last 4 or 5 years.

00:05:15
Maaike : How did you fell into the circus in Sweden?

00:05:19
Berkey: Um, well, I was I was in a midsummer celebration through the scouts. There's a lot of young people and mixed with older people. And there was this very cool boy who was spinning these things, and he told me it was called poi. And I was like, that sounds really cool. You're really cool. I want to do the same thing that you do. So I went home, I went to the Google mat, I went to YouTube, and I built myself some poi and kind of went in to circus through the, um, the fire, the fire path.

00:05:47
Maaike : For people who don't know what is a poi, what does it look like?

00:05:49
Berkey: So poi is a weight on a string, to put it simply. And then this infinite variations of this. But it's infinite principle. It's a, it's a weight that you spin around you on a string.

00:06:02
Maaike : And then if you go further, you might light it up and, uh, spin fire around you.

00:06:08
Berkey: Pretty much, yes. And then light lives in the same family of other, um, fire disciplines such as staffs and anything you can put your fire put, put flames on pretty much.

00:06:18
Maaike : From where it all started to where they are now, just like Berkey and Jakob. I love circus that uses height, but this also requires rigging and both Jakob and Berkey disciplines, Chinese pole and vertical rope, face challenges with rigging in several spaces, so their research started from a desire to tackle this in a different way.

00:06:42
Berkey: I do doo doo doo. I got inspired by a, um, American artist called Kenneth Snelson, who worked a lot with uhm with tensegrity. And he has a piece standing in Arnhem, I believe, over a lake that uses the same principle, not the same shape, but he has one of his pieces.

00:07:02
Maaike : In Kroller Muller I guess. At the Hoge Veluwe.

00:07:06
Berkey: If it's a lake, then yes, it's probably the right thing. Yeah. And then initially this came from trying to rig a pole in space, realizing that the rigging points I would need are very specific, and I didn't have access to those specific rigging points, which is very frustrating to be to be to be, uh.

00:07:26
Maaike : As a Chinese pole artist, you mean.

00:07:30
Berkey: Yes. Initially this whole structure was, came out of the the wish for independence. And the wish of not needing to rely on the space that I'm in and not having to rely on their rigging points and whatever they are happen to have in whatever. Yeah, whatever how they made those.

00:07:47
Maaike : How would you describe what we're standing next to?

00:07:50
Berkey: Hmm hmm mhm. Yeah. How do you describe it. It's a big bunch of steel pipes and a few piece of strings that holds it together as a, as a starter. And it's, uh, it's a structure that's based on tensegrity, which is a principle that's, uh, the relationship between structural integrity and tension. And the two, uh, being in balance creates a body in space that takes up, yeah… That, yeah, that can exist, um, in hermitage, so to say it's it's an independent structure.

00:08:28
Maaike : Yeah. Well, just just going back to the integrity of the material. Do I say it correctly?

00:08:35
Berkey: Structural integrity. Yes.

00:08:36
Maaike : But what. But what is structural integrity? What my mind goes to is that it doesn't break.

00:08:45
Berkey: That is essentially. Yeah. No, it doesn't break. So the steel power poles are able to handle the tension that the wires put on them. So as long as the steel poles doesn't bend, we'll be fine. And we can have a structure that… We build a structure, so to say.

00:09:01
Maaike : How many people did you use to build this up?

00:09:05
Berkey: It is built on one. And so we built it on one.

00:09:10
Maaike : Wow.

00:09:12
Berkey: Um, but yeah, mechanical advantage, uh, compensates for a lot.

00:09:17
Maaike : So what do you mean by that?

00:09:19
Berkey: Uh, so by using pulleys blocks and blocks and ropes to be able to compensate for being alone and then just being able to tie that off, I can pretend that I am multiple people at once.

00:09:31
Maaike : So structure, which I would compare to big steel Mikado, you know that game with the little sticks. And rather than letting them all fall and picking them one by one, this is all held together by steel strings. So with Berkey, it started with trying to create an independent structure where you don't need any rigging for it. And they found inspiration in the visual arts. For Jakob, the visual arts showed him a desire to perform within the visual arts. But in many museums or gallery kind of spaces, there's no rigging point. So how do you combine light art with circus?

00:10:15
Jakob Jacobsson: Very often when I've gone to light installation shows, exhibitions and stuff like this. To me it always looked like a scenography. It looked like a perfect setting for movement, for dance, for music, for anything. And it's extremely beautiful in its own right. But I, of course, as a very biased circus artist, always felt this like this pang of jealousy that why can't I perform in this installation? Why can't I perform in this? And the more I looked for it, the more I also found that there are a lot of opportunities for this, there just so closely missing each other in terms of where movement artists and and dancers and musicians meet light design. But there is always this kind of, uh, this lack of infrastructure for both. That in a music venue, you very rarely have, you have ambient light from a bar. You have all these things you don't probably, don't have time to do setup for an installation and vice versa, that in a lot of the, let's say, museums and venues where I go for light installation work, it's also not super plausible to do a circus performance, and…

00:11:17
Maaike : Especially not if you need to rig something from the ceiling or a grid.

00:11:21
Jakob Jacobsson: Precisely. And secondly, if you're in a museum or an installation, the exhibit the, the format is always that people can come in when they want to. You can't tell people you can come to the museum, but only at for half an hour a day when there's a circus performance.

00:11:37
Maaike : Unless you're Marina Abramovic and you say there are performances, but we're not going to say when. Just to come, and maybe you'll see them and maybe you won’t.

00:11:45
Jakob Jacobsson: Precisely. And these are the moments like, I've seen quite a few performances like this, and they really inspired me to, to pursue this research. There was a fantastic exhibition in Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam with Olafur Eliasson, and there were dancers from Codarts performing within the the exhibition of the light installations. And in the same way there was, there was no real warning when the dance would happen. But if you happen to be there, there was this sense of something magical kind of appearing out of nowhere. And these moments really inspired me to kind of continue this, because this was years ago, and I still think fondly of that particular and similar events that I've been lucky enough to bump into.

00:12:21
Maaike : So we have the rope, the vertical rope, which is about five meters high. We have you, which is approximately two meters high. But then there's another material that plays a key role into your research this week. There are three of them. At least, this is what I see now. I see three TL lights. Can you tell a bit more about that material?

00:12:46
Jakob Jacobsson: So the three fluorescent work work lights that I have are a part of it. But I also have my strobe scope, my trusty Atomic 3000 at the top and a little LED par with me as well, but they are obviously part of the the regular grid, so they, they hide away a little bit. But yeah, so the light fixtures that I've suspended around the rope is kind of the, the main focus of this week. It's to find kind of the borderland between installation light installations and aerial circus or actually floor based circus as well. But it's the research about where where lights and circus meet.

00:13:21
Maaike : Where lights and circus meet. We'll come back to that. First we go to where body and apparatuses meet. There's always been sort of a hierarchy that bodies come first and that apparatuses are just tools. Berkey approaches this differently.

00:13:39
Berkey: Coming from Chinese pole, it's a lot of circus apparatuses being a object of use. We are using the pole to climb. We're using the club for a trick. We use the trapezes to do our tricks and to get up in the air or whatever. And I looked at the structure and concluded that that's, that would be a bit weird. And that would be a bit of a shame to, to not, um, highlight this, this collaborative aspect that I was before on about, um… How it changes to how it reacts and it almost feels, um, more like a partnership instead of working with a, um, to another person that you need to consider before you do things. And that kind of spawned the, the process of how canwe be balanced on stage because it is also this is sizably bigger than a human being, so it could easily take over visually. And also, we are so used to seeing a performer using an object to degree that we could also easily fall over to the, um, being about the performer doing something.

00:14:52
Maaike : So it's also a sort of a way of looking at power, maybe. Or this is an interpretation of me like, humans having power or thinking they have power over all sorts of things, like their surroundings. And now they have to work together with the surroundings.

00:15:13
Berkey: I mean, it's not, it's not irrelevant. It was like, it's not, it's there somewhere. Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. And in some sense, yes. Was where the ideas come from the like. But it's I can see how that also it does have that aspect to it to some degree.

00:15:31
Maaike : Another thought I had is that you could also then describe it as partner acrobatics.

00:15:36
Berkey: I think it. Yeah. No, it is a partner acrobatics. Like you, when I build it up, um, there is a moment of, of checking in and seeing how she's doing. And, like.

00:15:47
Maaike : The installation. You mean you you call it a she?

00:15:51
Berkey: We've concluded that that is the most befitting way of it. Feels most adequate to say her about it. Um, because she has her days. Not all days are the same. And some days we come in and she's a bit cranky and, you know, so there’s, there’s a moment of checking in and like, feeling in how, how it is and how it will be today if we need to make any changes to accommodate for where she is today. So in that sense, it becomes quite human in that aspect as well.

00:16:21
Maaike : From how the human relates to the apparatus, back to where light meets circus. Jakob decided to start his research not with circus, but with the lights first.

00:16:32
Jakob Jacobsson: I was looking for ways where, because of course, when the lights, when the lights go off and the stroboscope goes off, I can move myself in space. And then when the lights come back on, I can repeat the action, creating these, these loops and so on. And this is where I realized that those things I find extremely interesting because again, there are things that are only possible because of the lights that if I did this with regular lights or regular stage lights, it would just look ridiculous. But now because of the lights, it creates a completely different experience for the audience. It's a very practical action light design often, and light design the way it's taught is very often based off of theatrical light design practices. And of course, in theater, the priority is that you see the face of the actor, you see the scenography clearly, and there's less time spent on like abstract installation. This week I tried to build something that I was, that was inviting for me to go into the space with when it was on, but to not make the circus first, but to build a light first and then see what that invites in terms of circus. Because the lights I've chosen all are picked because they have the ability to to flicker, to stroboscope, to go on and off at very particular or erratic intervals and as, as an as a circus artist, as a mover. Um, normally what we say in venues is that, you know, like, the technicians always have to announce a blackout. You have to be aware when the lights go off. Um, both for safety, of course, but also for the continuity of movement. And so I instead now I'm looking into the inverse, basically, of making something that, uh, kind of fragments the movement that distracts it, that distorts it, that a lot of the times, especially with the stroboscope, I can do a phrase in the rope and you cannot tell which a single movement begins and ends. And for me, that is very appealing to kind of start from the kind of like a backwards relationship. Um.

00:18:21
Maaike : But does that also mean that sometimes you as a performer, that you can work in complete darkness?

00:18:30
Jakob Jacobsson: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's, uh, that, that happens.

00:18:32
Maaike : So, like, theoretically speaking, or maybe actually you tried it out. Can you, can you do the rope blindfolded, like, or in complete darkness?

00:18:43
Jakob Jacobsson: Yeah. For sure. It's, there are, of course, some techniques and some tricks, some movements that I would not do in complete darkness. But actually, I think rope is one of these disciplines that is very practical for this, that as long as you don't forget how many times you've climbed upwards, you kind of have an idea of, I mean, the rope goes from the ceiling to the floor. Um, not so much else can happen. It's very hard to you can't swing so far out of the rope that you will hit something else. So I would say the rope is a particularly good discipline for for performing or working in the dark or again, with, with very intense stroboscope, because stroboboscopic light as well, it can be blinding, and especially if you hang it up in the light grid, It means that for me as an artist, it's extremely close and directed immediately in my face. So a lot of the times when I work with this, and sometimes when I perform with the stroboscope, it is easier to simply not look for anything to either not necessarily close my eyes, but to to simply not watch.

00:19:40
Maaike : Funny that working with light consequently also means working with darkness, and whether it's experimenting with light as an apparatus or a new structure. Each Maker for a week faces their own challenges by stretching the envelope of what future circus can be. Inventions and new apparatuses don't come easy. For example, when you build a big structure by hand, by yourself. The do-it-yourself mentality that is big in circus, has its pros and cons.

00:20:13
Berkey: I went the first half a year doing this by myself, and then I quite quickly realised that's a very good way to get burnt out. And I, for health reasons as well, was unable to work. So I started, I reached out and got a colleague involved, Swantje Kawecki, who also graduated from ACAPA a few years before me. Um, so I've taken a step back from trying to do everything all at once to to do the rigging and the technical aspects and direct. And then Swantje is the performing body at the moment.

00:20:52
Jakob Jacobsson: I think there's a lot of kind of semi punk, DIY kind of you, you become what you need to be in, in circus. And the same for me that because of the shows that I've made and because they were often largely unsupported, I had to take some technical responsibility in my own creations. And so then I had, you know, 10% knowledge of how to switch on and off lights, how to make an easy light setup, how to make a program that runs on its own. And then, because I had an interest in photography when I was younger, I know how to handle like how to how to do a setup that can video stroboscopes, for example, in the dark, and… I'm alone, but there are several versions of me working at the same time to kind of make this happen. So there is, you know, cueing the music and the lights, switching on the camera, getting in the rope and then reviewing everything in hindsight. So it's a very slow process. It's also very fun to explore this way because I get I feel like I get to put my hands in the dirt in several fields at once, and I've sometimes felt in circus that if you, you know, if you if you make a solo when you're in the with with a rope, for example, and that's the only thing you do, you put on a song or knot or a soundscape and you're in the rope for hours and hours and hours, and it's easy to kind of you're staring at, at the same little one centimeter square in the floor from, from ten meters up. And you're just wondering, why am I here? And whenever I run into one of these spots, when I get either bogged down or caught up in something, I can switch to one of the other disciplines that I'm interacting with so I can edit a different soundscape, change the music. I can change the light plot. I can reprogram things, I can move things around in the space. And so while it takes time, I also feel like I never get stuck.

00:22:31
Maaike : Like Jakob says, it also opens up new paths of creativity. And in the case of Berkey, their research is driven by what they call artistic rigging. I read in the application you send in for TENT. I read this interesting word which was called artistic rigging. What does that mean to you?

00:22:52
Berkey: Actually, I borrowed that from, um, from Saar as well. And I think that it mostly comes down to a step forward for the position of rigging in the, in the, in the field or in the like in the, in the overall vision of what's happening on stage and how much that affects what's being seen. It's very clear in this case because this all that you can see partially like it's not quite true, but like it takes up a lot of the visual, but how much that takes up in, in regular performances as well, if they include rigging and how well the similar works. So the artistic value of rigging and in this case I am using the way that I am developing the direction now. It is a lot of rigging that is being used for the artistic value of it.

00:23:47
Maaike : So making the invisible rigging visible and sort of taking the rigging out of the wings, where it's usually, people are usually going long ways to hide the rigging in circus and you sort of do the opposite.

00:24:03
Berkey: Kinds of. And I mean, there's just there's definitely like a value and a choice to be invisible. But then also that the it doesn't have to be and that it can be fun to see.

00:24:13
Maaike : I'm very curious to see how their research will evolve and which new paths in circus they will open up. What keeps them going in the circus.

00:24:21
Berkey: Well, my personal interest does lie a lot in the technical aspect of things, and, um, I do enjoy the problem solving that comes with supporting someone else's idea somehow. And finding solutions to things that maybe wouldn't have come up on the table if they knew how tricky it would have been to make. There’s a blissful ignorance somehow, which I may know. Let's try with blissful ignorance, can feed,  make really interesting ideas that might be really tricky to figure out how to make.

00:24:59
Maaike : Can you say a bit more about blissful ignorance?

00:25:02
Berkey: I guess that like, looking at myself and in making… Well, craftsman that craftsmanship wise, making things I somehow or occasionally, skip making certain things because I see that the amount of effort is going to take to make it. It's just like, no thank you. I don't want to do that right now. Um, but if I didn't know how much time and effort it would take to make it happen, I probably would try. And I guess that's what I mean with the blissful ignorance.

00:25:33
Maaike : What keeps you going?

00:25:36
Jakob Jacobsson: It's a very, very good question. I, I wish I had a succinct, clever answer, but I'm not sure if I do, actually. I've had a lot of these moments of of doubt, I think. And there's a lot of times, especially during the pandemic, of course, where work wasn't easy to come by or at all happening, and you were definitely at that point, I was definitely asking myself questions on, you know, how to how to continue and how to stay motivated. But it seems like inspiration keeps finding me for these kind of projects. And this is always the the kind of reason to continue. I think there is a little bit of inspiration from one of these several avenues of, of research, and I think it's sometimes I, I, it's not that I try to switch it off, but sometimes I try to focus on a different task, a different job. I have an application to write for a funding or a budget and or I'm, you know, riding my bike to the grocery store. And during these moments, I keep getting ideas and it's really hard to to turn them away. And I think this is maybe what what keeps me going.

00:26:34
Maaike : For a long time, I thought circus was about defying gravity. But the more I talk to circus makers, it's about defying your own boundaries and stretching them in a resourceful and creative way. And another thing I learned from circus is the endless attempts of trying to solve insolvable problems. So maybe I can apply this approach of blissfully ignorant solving problems too. And otherwise, I can just follow the work of Berkey and Jakob and experience their ways of inventing new apparatuses and ways of making and presenting circus. Next episode, we dive into the role of the audience with IF circus and Cia Insurgentes. Thanks very much for listening. Interview, production and editing by me Maaike Muis. Music by Bluedot sessions. Big thanks to Jakob Jakobson and Berkey, 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 Jakob Jakobsson. Berkey, Michael Zandl, Cecilia Rosso, IF circus and Cia Insurgentes. This production was possible thanks to the support of TENT by Performing Arts Fund Netherlands and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst. More info via TENT.eu.