Contemporary Circus Dramaturgy: An Interview with Louis Patrick Leroux
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Louis Patrick Leroux is a playwright, director, and professor who holds a joint appointment in the departments of English and French studies at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is also affiliated with Resonance Lab and matralab. His academic research and graduate supervision has focused on self-representation in Québec drama, cultural discourse, literatures on the margins, research-creation, and contemporary circus. He is the founding director of the Montreal Working Group on Circus Research, and, during 2012–14, has been a resident scholar at Montreal’s National Circus School, where he is also an ongoing collaborator with the Canada Industrial Research Chair in Circus Arts. He has recently coedited Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries (under review) with Charles Batson, and Le jeu des positions: Discours du théâtre québécois with Hervé Guay (2014).
In this interview, Leroux speaks of his gradual understanding of what circus dramaturgy might entail, following his recent experiences working with 7 Fingers (Les 7 Doigts de la Main) and the National Circus School.
Why has dramaturgy started to become a popular topic in contemporary circus studies?
Circus, while a performing art, often integrated elements of narrative and always featured strong performances, but did not tell stories in the same manner as theatre. Action was projected onto bodies; the sense of risk and danger, and the very investment of both performers and audiences, was heightened by actual experience rather than imitated or represented authenticity. You can’t fake a tumble, a jump, a fall. I’ve been working on a model of circus, which is Québec-based, and basically branched out from the French Nouveau Cirque model. The Nouveau Cirque (New Circus/Contemporary Circus) was born in the 1970s in France and was basically shedding away of the circus clans, circus families tradition, and opening up circus to a more artistic and sociopolitical engagement. Attempting to give sense—political and aesthetic—to the circus act beyond its own spectacle. Once you start using circus to tell stories to make a point, other than just entertain, the issue of dramaturgy does come up.
What influence did Cirque du Soleil have in this evolution of circus arts in Canada?
In Quebec, basically, we have a huge locomotive called Cirque du Soleil which used the French Nouveau Cirque model—high-level technical acrobatic skill, a keen sense of theatrical dramatics, and the codes of dance—and made this mix into very profitable entertainment reaching audiences worldwide (with the help of some very canny business decisions and aggressive marketing). So, growing out of cirque nouveau, something that was supposed to be purely artistic and socially engaged, they actually managed to draw the world’s middle class to spectacles of evasion through the fantasy of the possible transformation of the self through the acrobat’s sheer will and effort (a constructive and more realistic variation on the Disney “dreams come true” mantra). Basically, Cirque du Soleil proposed elite art for all, following Aragon’s “art élitaire” formula.
What drew you to circus arts? [End Page 269]
My interest in circus came through this paradoxical model from which Cirque du Soleil emerged, but which also informs the work of other companies seeking to radicalize that initial proposition (7 Fingers, for example, turning the focus on the individual—for instance, the named performer in street clothes who can do just about anything except hide behind makeup and shiny Lycra). I wondered what Cirque du Soleil was, in fact, telling us through its productions? This has to be more than just mere “entertainment.” Because you wouldn’t have a billion dollars worth of revenue, a constant stream of people coming just to be entertained light-heartedly, and also you wouldn’t have all these theatre-folk, the best Québec has to offer—directors, writers, designers, various people coming from “legitimate” theatres, building careers with Soleil, and then returning to theatre with a renewed sense of possibility—if there wasn’t something more than just the tricks, the acts, the entertainment.
