ESAC’s Collective Projects:

During supervised collective projects, students are confronted with directors, choreographers, or circus artists, chosen for their artistic quality and their ability to lead them in a creative process. These situations aim to expose the student to original artistic languages that they can use to express their creativity while being aware of the entire creative group with which they are evolving. These projects result in public presentations and allow for the exploration of all facets of contemporary circus performance. From conception to realization, the student takes part in the design, construction, and implementation of the show, serving as a performer under the direction of a stage director.

This year, the collective of 3rd-year students is directed by Claudio Stellato.

Description:

A phrase as a working basis: “I can be whatever I want, when I want.”

The body and emotions are pushed further, in search of other circus languages. It is a project that aims to encourage artists to face different expression techniques in the world of performance.

You will find no political or social message here, but simply an artistic vision of who we are in this madness called “life.”

Performances:

• Friday, 15/12 at 8 p.m.
• Saturday, 16/12 at 8 p.m.
• Sunday, 17/12 at 3 p.m.
• Tuesday, 19/12 at 7 p.m.
• Wednesday, 20/12 at 7 p.m.

Cast:

Director: Claudio Stellato

Assistant Director: Alessandro Travelli, Roberto Magro, Valentina Barone, Margot Janssens , Nicanor De Elia, Anne Catherine Jornot, Xavier Lavabre, Joan Catala, Ute Classen.

Set Construction: Camille Neumann

Lighting Design: Hugo Oudin

Production Management: Benoît Escarmelle

Technical Direction: Jean-François Keller

Stage Management: Sarah Faucon

Photography and Teaser: Stanislav Dobak

Production: ESAC

ESAC & not standing / Alexander Vantournhout

Having studied both at ESAC and P.A.R.T.S., Alexander Vantournhout’s physical language bears the influence of both contemporary dance and circus. In 2022 he’s returning to ESAC to collaborate with the third year students, who’re the final year of their training. Together they re-imagine the circus apparatus and question how the discipline they studied for many years can become more human and more collaborative.

Join us from 16 till 21 December 2022 at Les Halles de Schaerbeek!

Concept & circography: Alexander Vantournhout

Artistic collaborators: Axel Guérin & Emmi Väisänen

Created in collaboration with and performed by 3rd year ESAC students.

Outside eye: Charlotte Cétaire & Mélusine Lavinet Drouet

Light design: Tim Oelbrandt

Production: ESAC

Co-production: not standing

The form you will discover is a performance, a mixture of processes from the darkest to the most brilliant which arise from the spirit of collective work.

You will be guided through dark corridors and twisted corners where roles are freed from any archetype.

It is a physical manifestation, in the same way as the steam of boiling water which must find its way out by any means. Accompanied by techno melodies from the 2010s, isn’t that the best way to let go? It is in this fleeting moment that you will perceive the power that emanates from a group – the collective.

Concept and direction: Micha Goldberg with third year students from the Higher School of Circus Arts.

Third year collective workshop staged by Gaël Santisteva and the Gilbert & Stock company.

Going through an art school course is a bit like entering a fermentation phase.
We could playfully make an analogy between the deprivation of oxygen necessary for fermentation and the setting in specific conditions induced by the intensive learning of an artistic discipline.
In both cases a process of transformation begins.
This mutation can portend the worst as well as the best and even alternate from one to the other in an unpredictable way, a bit like when we make lacto-fermented preserves and we seek a delicious, wonderful, excellent result.
Based on this observation, we tried to explore the question of ugliness, of the unwelcome, of the unsuitable, and to accept these unexpected things with derision.
We mirrored all of this with the unvarnished reality of a life of training, without ever forgetting the brilliance of certain flashes specific to the circus, and we managed together with the 18 students of this promotion to build a stage object:

REAL // UGLY // SPARKLING
REAL // UGLY // BRILLIANT

It’s Now is an invitation to pause time, to look, to feel the space and then to get involved. Place the apparatus on the ground and compose. In search of harmony, made of rhythms and colors, breaths and bodies in apnea, the white page fills little by little, images appear and dissolve into ordered chaos. A crossing from North to South, to the rhythm of the songs of the Pashiva Choir, mixing additional writing and performance.

directed by Fatou Traoré

A show directed by Claudio Stellato
and Nicanor de Elia with the third year students
from the Higher School of Circus Arts of Brussels

Bang! appears as a series of brief sequences,
without a guiding thread other than the bodies of the performers, pushed to the limit. Limit states, excessive physical demands, contradictory action imperatives, are the key words of these acts on the border of performance. To try to produce, in a dramaturgy emanating from the body, all oppositions of strength and fragility, resistance and surrender, endurance and exhaustion, a burlesque of the extreme, a humor (necessarily a little dark) of mistreated identity.

With: Sergio Alvarez Pardo, Diego Arias Guirles, Joris Baltz, Josefina Castro Pereyra Soler, Oscar de Nova de la Fuente, Laureline Dubois, Julieta Martin, Audrey Minaud, Sergio Ortiz Cabrera, Guillermo Pastor Lopez Beltran, Hanan Vandenberghe, Violette Wauters, Léah Wolff, Juho Yrjola

A show directed by Roberto Magro, music by Simon Thierrée with third year students from the Higher School of Circus Arts.

Inspired by the idea of a “unique and happy moment” as evoked by the poet Mario Benedetti, Roberto Magro suggests that ESAC students focus on the moment and its importance. How could even a flash of extraordinary joy arise from the routine of everyday life?
How can we overcome frameworks, habits, comfortable certainties? How can we bring about the epiphany, this revelation to ourselves of what we didn’t know we were hiding, let’s say the promise of a butterfly?

One minute ! Do you smell this scent of emptiness?
With the help of Jean Michel Guy, Milan Herich and Sara Sguotti.

Halles de Schaerbeek
Rue Royale Sainte-Marie, 22 1030 Brussels
information and reservations: +32 2 218 21 07
reservation@halles.be

A show staged by Christian Lucas and Cheptel Aleïkoum with third year students from the Higher School of Circus Arts

“As iron sharpens iron, so sharpens man with man” (Proverb 27:17).
Cheek to cheek, which could just as well have been called “joute against jouxte”, declines like so many games the attributes which characterize circus collectives: commitment, insolence, provocation, confidence, pleasure, pain, affection, tenderness, eroticism. Variety of proposals and frivolity of games. A party, so as not to take yourself seriously and for the mask of fantasy to release the gravity of its heaviness. A rejoicing, where it is not a question of “having the skin” of the other, but of traveling there.

Halles de Schaerbeek Rue Royale Sainte-Marie 22, 1030 Brussels
Info and reservations: +32 2 218 21 07 reservation@halles.be

Show staged by Milan Herich and Petr Forman with third year students from the Higher School of Circus Arts.

What is the reason, the sense or motivation for which a circus artist chooses such object, such instrument, such tool, as a constant partner? Is the relation to the object more important, more exciting and more interesting than the ability that we have to practice with this one? Rather than being our opponent, could the object become our partner? The relationship between both of them is at the heart of the new collective show of ESAC. Through internal exploration, cooperative research and unlayering, twenty young artists look for reconciliation with the tools which share their art in day to day.

creative team:
Milan Herich / direction
Petr Forman / director
Simon Thierrée / music
Emilie Koang / musical collaboration
Vladimír Nemeček / lights
Aymará Parola / collaboration
Martin Kilvady / collaboration
Manuel Ronda / collaboration