Translated material
Master of Trajectories
The French Circus Isi performs in Moscow's Kolomenskoye Park.
Last year I already had to write about this amazing circus: then Joan Le Guilherme’s performance “The Secret” was invited to the program of the Avignon Theater Festival for the second time - an unprecedented honor. A small tent of the “Circus Isi” was pitched there in one of the lyceum courtyards of the Old Town. Our Guilherma tent with the same play “The Secret” was taken to Kolomenskoye, where the Chekhov Festival always shows a show by the Zingaro horse theater. I'm afraid that the people who came to see another luxurious French circus were not ready to see Guilherme's performance, and some may even have been disappointed. And this is a pity, since the “Circus Isi” of a 40-year-old clown and tightrope walker (with such “specialties” Guilherm completed his circus training), who turned into an object tamer, a rider on iron rods and a unique tightrope walker, and, first of all, an architect of the circus space, is not at all less of a miracle than Zingaro.A year ago, a brutal half-naked hero (and “The Secret” is practically a one-man show by Joan Le Guilherme), gloomily sparkling with his eyes and hissing like a snake, trained some pieces of pipes that rushed to his feet and stopped dead in his tracks next to him, and then plopped down on the floor with rags or jumped up in pyramids, like lions sitting quietly. There was “a head in the mouth of a leopard” (Guyerme climbed into the “mouth” of a spotted pyramid and, without a doublet, crawled out of its opposite end), and the taming of an obstinate spring, and the spell of snakes (Guyerme magnetized the roll with his gaze, and it very slowly unfolded in rug). And dressage (amazing precision work with gangs and buckets; the trainer, standing in the center of the arena, drove objects in a circle in different directions, in ranks and staggered with blows of a whip). And horseback riding on a bunch of metal rods with a saddle. His tricks with “construction” were especially amazing: he made a horse out of books that inexplicably maintained balance, like a house of cards, and, balancing dangerously, rode backstage on it, and then created before our eyes a huge branched tree from boards connected ropes, and climbed to the very top of the swinging “branches”. The “construction” itself took a lot of time, but it seemed that Guillerma did not care that the audience was waiting until he prepared everything for the trick, although in all the circuses of the world everything is done so that the audience does not wait a minute and, God forbid, gets bored.
The actor was right: this very construction became an intense attraction, accompanied by disturbing music, which was immediately performed by Guy Azhagen and Mathieu Werkowski, improvising on electro-acoustic instruments. It was not about the final trick itself, even if it was unique and record-breaking, but rather about the path to it; it was impossible to tear yourself away from observation, just as it is impossible to tear yourself away from any creative process taking place before our eyes, whether a sculptor carves a statue or an obsessed mathematician solves the problem. Today, this magic of constructing the architecture of a circus space can be observed firsthand in Moscow.
When talking about the play “The Secret” a year ago, I did not mention one circumstance that now seems especially important. The fact is that during the entire Avignon festival, a gigantic exhibition of objects and videos of Joan Le Guilherme was open with the subtitle “Mental Circus”. And this proximity meant a lot for understanding the play “The Secret,” just as the fantastic exhibition called “The Lump” looked completely different to those who saw the play. The Moscow audience was deprived of this context, and it is worth explaining what was going on there.
Behind the wall of the Old City, in a huge industrial hangar, there is something similar to the courtyard of a scientist, sorcerer and astrologer. In the center of it, on a green lawn, there was a gigantic round block overgrown with moss, which was surrounded by a spiral edge, as if it were a fantastic shell, broken off and smoothed by the sea almost to the state of a ball. A winding path was laid across the lawn, and all the time that the exhibition was open, one could see how the block, without any visible effort on the part, very slowly rolled, turning barely noticeably, exactly along the path, as if its edge were a rail. In a separate glassed-in section of the exhibition, Guilherma's story was heard from the screens, despite his exotic appearance and hairstyle with shaved temples and two pigtails at the back of his head, he looked more like a professor than a circus performer. He explained how such an exquisite trajectory is obtained, talked about the shifted center of gravity and the influence of the location of the edge on the surface of the ball on the pattern of the track. And nearby, on the display cases, covered with sand and painted with unimaginable paths, lay small blocks, each with its own ridge.
The rest of the hangar space was filled with numerous smaller objects, also with detailed video explanations by Guilherm. For example, he showed how he cut the skin of an orange in one continuous movement along a complex trajectory, and under the glass were laid out straightened skins that looked like strange animals and oriental hieroglyphs. Spectators looked into the eyes of unusual devices; various mobiles cast amazing shadows and lined up in complex structures, from different sides similar to celestial systems and Sumerian writings. It’s not easy to describe all this, but this exhibition made a fascinating impression, further confirming that “The Secret” is not a set of once and for all established tricks, but almost a scientific study.
At a press conference in Moscow, Guilherm also spoke about this exhibition, calling it Attraction Monstration, where the first word is both attraction and attraction, and the second connects the monster with the demonstration (however, in Russia, after the recent scandal around the Novosibirsk “Monstration”, this the word has other connotations). He said that the exhibition block of two and a half meters is a model of the earth, the movement of which we can finally observe from the side (he dreamed that it would be 12 meters in size, that is, one millionth of the planet, but he had to make do with a reduced size copy). And he immediately explained that for him the circus is a combination of instruments that influence the imagination of the viewer, where everyone can see their own. For example, “Glyba” is a plant circus. In general, the exhibition, like the play “The Secret”, is part of a large project “Observatory around a point”, which also contains an endless film about the universal alphabet that can be found in nature and culture, there is a part “Trace”, where traces act , left by previous parts of the project, and much more.
Guilherme's explanations are dark and complex, he speaks very quietly, seriously and intently, like a pedantic scientist, maybe a little crazy, but a genius. And until, suddenly smiling, he begins to talk about his childhood, when he climbed through all the dumps of his small town, pulling out amazing things from there, and about how he was delighted with the nomadic life of the gypsies, you will not understand why he still, first and foremost, a circus artist.