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Throughout my circus career I've been fighting against an overwhelming sense of impossibility: physically through the acrobatic feats I've tried to accomplish; and administratively as I've battled to create a financial situation where I can use my hard won skills to create the performances I was dreaming of.
For various reasons, in other countries (France, Belgium, Canada) new circus companies have been more able to realise their ambitions and potential than in the UK, but things are now changing.
As a result of lobbying, the Treasury has included circus in its tax relief for theatre (pdf). This is not just significant because of the fiscal benefits we will be eligible for, but also because it marks another step towards the legitimisation of an artform that has been on the periphery for hundreds of years and with legitimisation comes renewed possibility.
Square Peg Contemporary Circus and Cirquit Productions, the two companies I run, are currently doing research on best creative practice and how to facilitate that with the work we do. We've looked at methods used in theatre and dance (two of our industry's closest cousins) but have identified one enormous difference between the needs of these artforms and those of our own, which I believe is at the core of the difficulties experienced by UK circus companies: training.
In Square Peg we do a lot of group acrobatics. It's difficult, demanding and dangerous, and in order simply to maintain our abilities we need to take regular training whenever we're not performing. If we want to develop our technical vocabulary in preparation for creating new work, we need to train even more, ideally for a few hours every day for several months before the rehearsal process can start.
I know that other performing artists need to train as well, but for circus the requirements are considerably more intense. It took our group of well trained and experienced acrobats six months of consistent training to be able to safely build the three-high human tower that we open our current show with. This trick takes about 10 seconds to perform and the whole performance lasts an hour, so I'm sure you can appreciate the scale of the undertaking.
This is something that in many other European countries is addressed by a social security system that pays qualifying artists a stipend, which allows them to continue their practice even when not performing or rehearsing in paid projects.
In this country funders and other supporters of circus are starting to understand this and in turn, we're starting to feel more sustainable as we become more able to facilitate the conditions we need for best practice. But there is a long way to go and I believe it starts closer to the ground. As circus has always been non-building based, audience development is slow.
Couple that with the fact that formalised degree-level circus training in this country is only 15-years-old and that there is very little critical discourse surrounding the artform, and it will be clear that it is largely the artists, training institutions and producers who are shouldering the burden of audience development. This is incredibly difficult when you consider the costs of the long rehearsal and training periods required. But there we have it: a new artform, based in a tradition with no recognised formality trying to find its feet in our contemporary, commercial context.
Maybe we need a national theatre for circus in the same way that Sadler's Wells is a effectively our national theatre for contemporary dance. We need purpose-built, circus-producing facilities as there isn't a single one in the whole country; a PR campaign to escape the collective childhood memory of stripy-tent-with-a-lion circus also wouldn't go amiss.
Saying that, the future bodes well. The jugglers, acrobats and aerialists are no longer self indulgently trying to find their inner clowns. Instead, they are creating accessible, beautiful, technically accomplished and entertaining performances that are contemporary, while respecting the long tradition from which they have grown. The theatres are starting to programme them and the Arts Council has just welcomed two new circus organisations into its national portfolio.
Tim Lenkiewicz is director of Square Peg and Cirquit Productions
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