Anthropic Traces: teasing a message out of disparate art forms
29 Jul 2022

by Drew Rowsome - photos Neal Kuellmar

With most of the world either on fire or flooded, there is no question that climate change is now a crisis that can't be ignored. Not even at the circus. That ever-evolving art form reacts to the cultural zeitgeist by absorbing and expanding to meet the needs of the audience. From tawdry to spectacle and back again, the circus is infinitely adaptable in its quest to produce awe and magic. Anthropic Traces fuses "contemporary music, circus, dance, theatre, mask and multimedia" in service of messaging about the severe danger humankind has placed our planet in. The result is performance art on a large canvas - there are 10 performers and eight musicians on and above the stage - or circus on an intimate scale.

After a long land acknowledgment which spells out the themes of Anthropic Traces, the clowns burst onto the stage which is now a railway station. They scurry about, just the right mixture of creepy and comical, with masks that obscure but also define. Instead of raucous circus music or driving pop pastiches, the score is minimalist and fragmented: contemporary. It teases, constantly threatening to settle on a beat or a melody but instead skithering or startling. It is the opposite of hypnotic or dramatic, timed to the performances but not supporting them or driving them on. It veers from off-putting to eerily seductive, demanding attention but refusing to pander. An awkward fit with the usual circus razzle dazzle. 

The first act of Anthropic Traces is almost anti-razzle dazzle. The aerial act is underwhelming and designed to set up an impassioned speech about Indigenous identity and the water crisis that is choking the reserves. The water theme, reflected in a leotard under traditional Indigenous clothing, proves prescient. This is followed by an act that moves through contortion and juggling to a duo balancing act. Samantha Halas and Louis Wei-Chun Barbier use large building blocks, some covered in light-catching tin foil, to build walls between each other. It is a simple metaphor stretched past its limit and I ached to see what these performers could actually do. Again it is teasing, and slightly disturbing, without the usual circus build from technique to flash to dazzle. 

The second act achieves the fusion that the creators were aiming for. A scrim takes us on an ambiguous exhilarating train journey, with the clowns guiding us through death, grief and rebirth before leaving us mysteriously underwater. The traditional hair suspension (Nicole Malbeuf) and bungee (Lara Ebata) take on an entirely new perspective when performed 'underwater.' They are not defying gravity, they are moving gracefully and mysteriously through a threatened world. The set erupts with a blunt and brutal metaphor that hangs above the stage adding not just a visual punch but an aural constant that ties the minimal music into knots of sumptuousness. The point has been made stunningly, but Natasha Danchenko drives it home with a silk act performed using sheets of unforgiving and loud plastic instead of sensual fabric. It is a breathtaking evocation of the three rings as our attention is inexorably drawn from act to act, from metaphor to statement. 

While the creating companies Balancing on the Edge, A Girl in the Sky Productions and the Thin Edge New Music Collective are riffing on the new age concept of the Anthropocene era (the current era defined by humankind's impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems), they are also illustrating the Anthropic Principle. British astrophysicist Brandon Carter explains this as "the universe has the fundamental parameters that it has, because it is created to generate observers." Just like a circus. Anthropic Traces deconstructs the circus to make us look at what we have done and are doing. But they also only exist because we are their audience. An audience haunted by the final image of hope.