Forget the big top, the red clown nose and the ringmaster. If there is one branch of the performing arts that is innovating in all directions, it is circus theater. From April 25, the Circusstad Festival in Rotterdam will show how acrobatics, dance, music, visual arts and theater merge into compelling, sometimes poetic, sometimes hilarious performances, which are often only vaguely reminiscent of traditional circus acts.
One of the must sees it is wonderful Food (8+), created by Austrian circus artist Michael Zandl (1989). In an Amsterdam café, Zandl talks about his creation. He came up with the idea Foodhe says, after seeing the classic film La Grande Bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973), in which four rich friends are so bored with their routine lives that they decide to eat themselves to death. Zandl: “I couldn’t get a bite in my throat, as if I had stuffed myself with food while watching that film. I found it fascinating how visual input can have such a physical effect on you.” He knew: his new performance had to be about food.
Michael Zandl
Photo Philippe Vogelenzang / De Schaapjesfabriek
Zandl had met three of the players with whom he subsequently created the performance in a previous project: the Swedish acrobat duo Karin and Hedvig Brodén and the German Jakob Vöckler. The latter specializes in the Chinese mast, a type of acrobatic pole dancing in which the artist climbs a tall, thin pole.
As the fourth player, Zandl wanted to find a so-called ‘competition eater’. Zandl: “This is a popular phenomenon in America and England: people who set records by eating as much as possible as quickly as possible. The original idea was that this person would sit at a large, set dining table at the start and that he would continue to eat throughout the performance.”
‘Fidel liked to eat’
Zandl did not find a competitive eater, but circus artist Fidel Rott did, and it amounted to the same thing: “Fidel liked unusual ideas. And he liked to eat. When it was lunch time at the circus training, I was told, half the table was full of Fidel’s lunch.” The idea of the dining table died, but food would rot. After entering a setting of pristine white paper, the player is confronted with various objects into which he always carelessly – and silently – sinks his teeth. From a microphone to a herb plant, from a white cabbage and a load of apples, to chips and candy and an indefinable gray derriere.
Zandl: “For inspiration, we watched a documentary about how the food industry makes people sick. Sugar, for example, is poison if you consume enough of it. It is hardly a free choice whether you expose yourself to it, that’s the bad thing. In South America a bottle of soft drink is cheaper than water. I wanted to refer to that in Food: to the way the food industry appropriates our bodies.”
My parents had nothing to do with theater. I didn’t even know what it was
The work of film director David Lynch was also an inspiration, Zandl says. “I love Lynch. How humor and bleakness intertwine in his films. How he shows a seemingly normal world, in which some things are a bit off are. That creates an interesting tension. You are more receptive, more focused, if you are presented with a universe in which the rules have changed a little bit.”
It was by no means self-evident that Zandl would end up in the theater world. He grew up in an Austrian Alpine village. “My parents had nothing to do with theater. I didn’t even know what it was.” Juggling did play a role early in his life. “When I was about six, my older brother came home with a set of skittles. I wanted to be able to do everything he could do, so I started practicing with them too, becoming more and more obsessive.”
Food performance by Michael Zandl
Photo Jona Harnischmacher
Together the brothers started visiting juggling festivals, where they quickly felt at home among the performers. Zandl’s brother enrolled in a circus school in Madrid, where he specialized in clowning. After Zandl completed a study in agriculture and climate management in Vienna, he moved to Rotterdam in 2012, where he specialized as a juggler at the Codarts circus training course. Initially with cones, later increasingly with everyday objects.
No booth
With bowler hats, for example, in his first longer solo performance, the Kafkaesque Janus (2019), about a man who awakens in a world controlled by a theater technician. “I had started to find acts that were only about virtuosity more and more uninteresting. I tried to use my technical skills to create images that made me laugh or moved me.”
The internationally acclaimed performance Sawdust Symphony (2021, a collaboration by Zandl, David Eisele and Kolja Huneck) can still be seen this year in Romania and the Czech Republic, among others. The stage is dominated by sawdust, nails, glue and tools, resulting in an ode to human craftsmanship that is as poetic as it is humorous.
Food is Zandl’s first production as director. Is it circus theater? Performance? Visual arts? Zandl: “I wanted to make an accessible performance, understandable for everyone. Nothing elitist. Recently, a seven-year-old child explained flawlessly to her mother afterwards what the performance was about. But there is no box into which the performance fits. I like that. That visitors have to laugh, and are touched, and shudder, and that ultimately, when they come out of the hall, they say to each other in some dismay: ‘Gosh… I’ve never seen anything like that before.’”
