This is a text submitted after RAUM ZEIT ZIRKUS – Site Specific and Time Specific Circus and Performance – ThinkTank at CircusMühle Kelbra in November 2024.
Thais Medeiros
Circus and Performance – Risk and Freedom
When I was a child, I waited for the circus to arrive in the small town of Itajubá… Among candy apples, acrobatics, cotton candy, clowns, and trapeze artists, I had a secret dream of one day living the adventure of running away with the circus… I loved the “Globe of Death.”
In some way, I created this escape in my imagination, and it made me feel at risk and also free… I carried the question: “How do they do it?”
When I grew up, I discovered this was a secret dream for many people… I also had an encounter with my clown; her name is “Esperança” (Hope), and she can’t be cheerful all the time.
I never ran away with the circus…
One day I found in theater and performance that same space/time of freedom, risk, and pleasure that the circus had inspired in me.
Later on, that place of freedom and risk was found in the urban space; in the performances of my works, the street installations in São Paulo, in cities in the countryside of Brazil, and even abroad, where my native language, Portuguese, is not present… Many times, when I’m abroad, I find this space/time when I walk through the streets and hear the sound of voices, the movement of gestures. I feel both at risk and free because I don’t understand — and that makes me see again, imagine again, build stories just by observing bodies in space and listening to speech.
Today, this space/time of freedom and risk is in understanding the body as territory, listening to it and its needs, encountering the other/the spectator, and seeking poetry. It’s in the “non-specific place,” in the occupation of spaces, always in the space/time of the present moment — never forgetting that my imagination and dreams allow me other experiences in space and time…