SIFA 2015: Daniel Buren’s Cabanons is no ordinary circus

SINGAPORE — The circus is in town, folks. Or should we say, the anti-circus?

If you’re catching renowned French conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s Cabanons at the Singapore International Festival of Arts, be prepared: This is not Cirque du Soleil, which, incidentally, will also be coming next month with Totem. It also doesn’t feature a lot of jaw-dropping displays you’d normally associate with circuses or carnivals, like some of the performances in the recently concluded Night Festival.

But while there are no dancing horses or lions or tigers jumping through hoops, there *is* one interesting elephant in the room. And that is the question of what a circus is.

In this production by BurenCirque (a collaboration between Buren and circus pioneers Dan and Fabien Demuynck), ideas of spectacle, entertainment and even the audience do a bit of somersaulting. Here, a ringleader gives an art lecture, tents are seen as artworks, audiences are not quite passive and performers become more “real”.

Cabanons isn’t so much circus-as-theatre but circus-as-performance art or performance installation. Instead of having a big top where people converge to wait for fire breathers and kooky clowns to come to them to wow them, audiences here go to the performers found in each of the three stylised small tents echoing Buren’s colourful, striped aesthetics: Acrobats in one, a high wire artist in another, and aerial silk and cyr wheel artists in a third.

The small spaces also change the way one approaches spectacle: You see them perform pretty much up close, sometimes straining at what they do, and the illusion that distance would offer in a bigger venue is diminished. That illusion is also casually done away with in the way it brushes aside notions of the show as an experience in an enclosed bubble — Cabanons is situated at the field opposite Bugis Junction and you occasionally hear incidental noise, such as applause from an adjacent tent or the sound of nearby traffic. At some point, through a briefly opened “tent flap”, I could even see the traffic at Rochor Road.

In this stripped-down, deconstructed version of a circus, the acts become more “honest” but that also means they’re a bit of a hit and miss. The acrobats tumbling and leaping around doesn’t quite put you in awe mode. But your heart definitely skips a beat during the high wire balancing act, the element of danger still intact as the all-smiles performer bounces, walks backward, does splits and a headstand a few metres off the ground with a stylised — but completely useless — “safety net” beneath her.

Whatever the show doesn’t offer in terms of drama, excitement and tension (which may disappoint some), it compensates for in visual terms, which is perhaps something to be expected from a work conceptualised by an artist of Buren’s status.

Aside from the tents’ design, you had wooden board props done in the French artist’s signature requirements: The planks are uniformly 8.7cm-wide. The use of sheer fabric also adds a poetic glow to proceedings. One particular performance, that of the cyr wheel artist navigating mirror props that act like a mobile maze, shrewdly juxtaposes circular and rectangular shapes. And seeing as these mirrors are twirling around and you occasionally see yourself in them, they could perhaps be also read as a kind of self-reflexive (and self-reflecting) mechanism that poses questions about your place as an audience member in this circus-like scenario.

And in bringing us directly into the circus conversation, it’s possible to think even more about what else a circus functions as. Conventionally a space to showcase the weird and the wonderful, the unusual and the “other”, what does it mean when a ringleader — someone who hypes up performances — is giving an introduction into the art-making process of Buren? Is that a nudge-wink about the idea of the artist as a freak or the art world as a circus? It’s also interesting to note that in the context of SIFA’s Post-Empires theme, you had elements that refer to France’s colonial past: The acrobats are seemingly of Cambodian descent and the circus performances in two of the tents were accompanied by traditional West African music and dance performers.

Cabanons runs until Sept 6, 8pm, at the open field opposite Bugis Junction. Tickets from SISTIC. For more info, visit https://sifa.sg/sifa/