The acrobatic brothers Bruyninckx open the Festival Circolo in Tilburg with a firm bite

He shows teeth marks on his belt. “This is how our mouth-hanging practice began. Four years ago we thought we could bear each other’s weight by biting into this leather.’ Stop, this is how you lose your teeth, warned an old hand, a specialist in the classic circus technique jaws of steel. But he didn’t want to reveal how that mouth grip was supposed to work.

‘Compare it to magic tricks among magicians. They never give up their secrets either’, says Vincent Bruyninckx (31), the youngest of the two Flemish brothers who will open the eleven-day Circolo Festival in Tilburg on Thursday 20 October with the international hit BitByBita visual conflict about their inseparable brotherhood, produced by Collectif Malunés and production house MovedByMatter.

The Bruyninckx brothers did know one thing when they started their research into mouth hangings and teeth grabs: they were not after the power of muscles like the lonely John Massis from Bruges, who lifted cars with his teeth, stopped helicopters and pulled trains. ‘We thought that was too much machismo. We wanted to use this old circus technique to find out what unites us as brothers, in blood type, solidarity and intimacy.’

As boys aged 7 and 8, Vincent and Simon marveled at the Flemish family generations of Circus Ronaldo, which had a permanent pitch in their village of Muizen near Mechelen. ‘We really wanted a unicycle for our communion party, not a bicycle like other boys from Muizen. We don’t come from a circus family. Our mother was a secretary at a transport company, our father a transporter and night watchman. Our two older brothers also do something different. But Dad did make us a bed of nails when we wanted to do a fakir act like that in the garage. And Mama drove us to a youth circus school in Leuven three times a week.’

Until the age of 18, circus was still a hobby. Then it got serious, with admission to international circus colleges in Brussels, Tilburg and Châlons-en-Champagne (France). Vincent specialized in circling around with a wheel at lightning speed (Cyr wheel), Simon two years older in the bascule: balance acrobatics on a seesaw. In 2009, while still studying at ACaPA (Academy of Circus and Performance Arts) in Tilburg, Simon founded the Collectif Malunés with Vincent and other Flemish and French people, in search of playing experience on the street and on stage. A year later, the collective won the audience and jury prize at an international street theater festival in Ghent. After six years of touring, the brothers went their separate ways, until they decided to make something together in 2018. “We had such a desire to meet again.”

They tried out all kinds of balance acrobatics, with unicycles, wheelchairs and 6 meters high carrying masts to carry each other on shoulders. Until they ended up hanging, pulling, leaning and leaning with a cord on an iron mouth grip. “Now we are literally connected, as if by an umbilical cord.”

Of course they know about the serious accident in Carré, almost three years ago in Amsterdam, when an Uzbek aerial acrobatics duo smashed out of the roof on the edge of the slope after a tooth had broken off on the male half of The Sky Angels. Kristina Vorobeva suffered a spinal cord injury; her partner Rustem Osmanov escaped with a concussion. He hung 40 feet high with his teeth aligned; she circled his leg at full speed, her mouth clenched over a mouthguard.

‘Every circus act involves risks. False front teeth have broken off with us, which we still had due to falls from our youth. But a dentist checks our teeth for cracks every season. Our specially made mouthpiece from a piece of leather, a bolt and melted plastic fits exactly against our palate.’ Moreover, says Vincent, who is also a physiotherapist, the interplay of forces does not come from the mouth and jaw muscles – they can only clamp and release – but from about forty neck tendons. ‘We have all trained them. If one doesn’t cooperate, a blockage arises.’

The brothers copied the art of Formula 1 drivers such as Max Verstappen: ‘When accelerating, braking and cornering, they have to absorb pressure on their neck and head in their helmet of four to five times their body weight.’

During the first year of training, they regularly woke up with huge headaches and cramps in the face. ‘When you sleep, muscles attach to your skull. They can also acidify. But because we had the exact same pain, we knew it was a matter of training. With every circus technique your body has to get used to overload. Now it works without pain. BitByBit is not about masochism, but about our intimate brotherhood.’