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His Lucky Stars: Yaron Lifschitz’s C!RCA at the TOHU

More: C!RCA, Circus, performance art, Pina Bausch, Tohu, Yaron Lifschitz

by Jordan Arseneault on February 13, 2012

Shirtless Australians and a meditation on life and death come to the TOHU this Feb 15 to 25, with a production by Brisbane’s avant-garde circus troupe Circa. Director Yaron Lifschitz’s “radical combination of entertainment and the search for meaning,” by the light of stars that are no longer

Circa_TOHU_Justin_Nicholas

When speaking to C!RCA artistic director Yaron Lifschitz on Skype about his upcoming show at the TOHU, I felt like I was talking to a professor or collaborator from another life. “All art has to have in it some degree of exile, like in the very metaphor you ‘run away to join the circus.’ I think this is why it’s a postmodern art form,” he intoned, the kind of starter that makes you know the main course is going to be, shall we say, a little heavy. It’s the very combination of heavy-hitting themes and effortless, sexy performance that has made C!RCA one of the world’s most acclaimed companies in a realm known more for over-the-top nonsensical camp. So acclaimed, in fact, that the seven-person troupe will be coming to Montréal from a 2-week run at the iconic Sydney Opera House.

“I agree with Andy Warhol that sex and parties are the two things you still need to be there for – and I think circus is the third,” Lifschitz intoned, reminding me of why I must like parties so much.

The fact that live circus offers unmediated experience of bodies in space makes it the antithesis of the flat utilitarian landscape of our computer screens. Coming at the circus genre from the stuffier milieu of theatre, Lifschitz says he is “interested in something that is in the nature of the strength-vulnerability binary that can only be expressed in cirque.” But he doesn’t just mean that trapeze and rippling bodies are fun to watch. Though he may pretend that they’re “just a dumb bunch of people doing tricks,” you know that he’s the kind of person who always has something else up his sleeve.

Even Lifschitz’s performers sometimes have a hard time understanding what he’s getting at, asking him what a given scene means, but like the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch (“Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent”), he’s not interested in words. “We have a great range of experiences – we have monumental discontinuous events [in our lives]. The Montréal style is emotionally powerful but simple. It’s much easier to understand why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.” Which is to say that C!RCA’s style is to be more enigmatic, using the sense of unease that cirque is known for, to explore emotions that surpass us.

While working on by the light of stars that are no longer, Lifschitz witnessed the slow, painful death of his sister, which led him to explore the notion of why we hold on, and how. “What are the things that are left with us when we die? And that we are looking at stars that are already dead…” he muses, referring to the uncanny astronomic fact that makes us wonder about time itself, and our place in the universe.

Yaron Lifschitz is a family man, but like anyone in the performing arts, he has known and befriended many queer people, and relates to their struggle. “When I sat my family down and told them that I was an artist, it’s almost worse than coming out as gay! One of the things I respond very deeply in the experience of my gay friends, is that it’s driven by the inner experience of the way they are, is not the easy way,” he says with admiration. “There is an element of the heroic struggle of things to become themselves, and that resonates very deeply with the way we work and the kind of work [we] make.”

The profundity of Lifschitz’s practice extends all the way to how he recruits and treats his dancers, including newcomer Valérie Doucet, a Montréal-born contortionist and hand-balancer. More akin to élite European dance troupes, C!RCA only accepts dancers on 2-year contracts, full-time, keeping the ensemble ensemble even when they are not doing shows which is in stark contrast to certain Montréal companies’ tack of hiring artists for short periods and firing them when the big top comes down.

“How can you make beautiful art if you’re an asshole?” he asked rhetorically.

“People becoming who they truly are together, is really the theme of what [we] do. As the lights go down, you don’t have ideas or information, you go. I know these people. I am closer to these people in a very profound way.’”

“As long as we have the capacity to be moved in some way, we really have a chance,” he concluded, leaving me with a refreshing sense that the spirit of Pina may be living on now, somewhere on a plane from Brisbane to Montréal, by the light of stars that are no longer.

C!RCA
From Feb 15 to 25
At La TOHU, 2345, Jarry Street East (Montreal)

www.tohu.ca

www.circa.org.au