Watermill Center Presented The Circus You Didn't Grow up With

The circus came to the Watermill Center on Saturday. There were acrobatics, juggling, and feats of strength and balance, all of which left the audience awestruck. But because Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkor is a contemporary circus with roots in experimental dance, theater, film, music, and visual art, the group’s open rehearsal of a work in progress was a mesmerizing, haunting, and entertaining evening quite unlike the circus most of us grew up with.

Cirkus Cirkor was founded in 1995 by Tilde Bjorfors several years after a life-changing experience in Paris, where she had been working as an actress.

“I was living in the same house as some circus artists,” she recalled. “They were young like me, not at all what I expected, and I followed them through their training process. People were running on the walls, flying through the air, constantly experimenting with crossing the limits of what was possible. It was a different experience from the traditional circus I saw as a child.”

She discovered there were many contemporary circuses, or cirques nouveaux, in France. “They were all very different, but all had materials from the circus. The only thing you knew when you saw a contemporary circus was that there would be some kind of circus and you would be surprised,” which pretty well describes Saturday’s performance.

At 6 p.m., the audience of 70 people followed a violinist from the center’s lobby to a lofty enclosed courtyard traversed by a bridge, where a performer was juggling. From one high corner of the room a woman descended slowly on a rope, knitting her body with it until a male performer “caught” her. She balanced on his upraised hands until, once in the room’s entranceway, he stepped aside as she suspended herself between the walls solely by the extension of her arms.

The audience then followed the performers into the woods surrounding the center, where another female performer stood on a six-foot-high stone raveling and unraveling a ball of thick yarn, to the haunting accompaniment of the violin. She then climbed up a tree branch from which she hung three dolls made of yarn, then slowly withdrew a strand of yarn from her bodice like an umbilical cord.

Outdoor lighting illuminated a male performer balanced on ropes suspended between two trees. He played the violin while walking on one rope, then managed a perfect handstand, and finally entwined his body among several lengthsof rope and proceeded to spin like a gyroscope, his whirlwind motion accompanied by the whine of a leaf blower aimed at the forest floor.

The audience then returned to the main building, where Ms. Bjorfors spoke about the group’s origins and aims and screened a trailer for their performance “Knitting Peace,” from which the outdoor actions drew.

While in France, Ms. Bjorfors discovered a great deal of infrastructure for contemporary circus, including 300 circus schools for children as well as high school and university programs. “People from all different backgrounds entered the circus, while at the same time directors and choreographers, among them Peter Brooke and Mnoushkine, became interested in the circus, how it was communicating internationally, and started to bring circus performers into their work.”

She met more and more Swedish and Scandinavian artists who were training in Paris or working in the circus, and “we started to dream together of bringing it to Sweden. And then, finally, I decided we have been talking so much, now we have to do it.” On her return to Sweden she created a festival and invited all those fellow artists.

“It was a little like, in Sweden, everybody had been longing for it without knowing it existed. We very quickly had big audiences in Stockholm, and we also toured from the beginning. That was also our idea, to come to the people wherever they were. To tour the world was also in the dream from the beginning.”

For its first 10 years the group had no space of its own, which often led to collaborations with other art forms as well as to some unusual venues. “We did ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and for another piece we covered an entire bridge on which we performed and projected video and hung rigging underneath. We also did things in art galleries.”

“For me, circus is constantly challenging borders or boundaries. Traditional circus has very specific forms and tools you interact with. We are using very untraditional objects.” For “Knitting Peace,” the performance space was filled with yarn, cotton waste, ropes, and threads.

“We worked with lots and lots of yarn and getting human beings tangled up with it and doing all sorts of activities like rolling a huge ball of yarn, doing acrobatics on strands of yarn, climbing ropes. We set ourselves an impossible goal: to make peace in the world, to knit peace.”

More recently, Ms. Bjorfors has been working with borders. “We have a massive immigration from Syria, and in Sweden we are not used to it. We haven’t had any wars, in part because we are so far north. But now it’s very close to us. How the European borders are treating the refugees is very dramatic, and I’m quite sure the future will blame us for not doing anything to help.”

“We are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year, 20 years of transcending boundaries. So the next show will celebrate that and what we can get out of that at a time when people are dying at borders.”

Next on the Watermill Center’s agenda is an open rehearsal of a work in progress by the resident artists Manuela Infante and Teatro de Chile, next Thursday from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

One of Chile’s most innovative theater directors and playwrights, Ms. Infante has worked with Teatro de Chile since its inception in 2001. The company is one of Chile’s best known avant-garde theater groups, having performed in festivals and on stages in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. The rehearsal is free, but reservations are required and can be made at the center’s website.

The center has also begun accepting applications for its international summer program. The deadline for applications, which can be submitted via the website, is Jan. 15.