Year round, SANCA’s Artist in Residence (AIR) Program provides rehearsal space and support to circus artists creating new work. Usually, the artists develop a show to perform on stages around the US and beyond. Not this time! Recent Artists in Residence, Leah Jones, Emma Curtiss, Laura Burch and Danny Boulet took their vision not to the stage, but to the screen. With their video ready to be seen on small screens everywhere, Leah and Emma took some time from teaching, training and performing to tell us all about it. – Susie Williams, AIR Program Coordinator

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did this project come about?

Emma Curtiss: Leah calls me one day and is like, “Emma, here’s what’s going to happen. I have a vision. There’s going to be a video. We’re going to do it. You, me, and Laura. I see the color red. There’s a song.” And that was about it. 

Leah Jones: Yeah. That sounds about right!

So the song sparked the idea?

LJ: Originally, I had the idea to a different song. The first song was more hard hitting and intense. I was thinking about the fact that Emma and Laura have this natural intensity and power to them. The second song is much more playful and chill, and I love juxtaposition. So I thought, oh, this is much more interesting to me.

What made you think of it as a video and not as something you would perform live?

LJ: I have visions only in video editing.

EC: This is something I’ve learned about Leah—one of her art departments is purely from an editing mind.

You mean like an internal art department?

EC: Yeah, internal department. She’s got a few different departments. Some of them have escalators that cross-pollinate a little bit. But one is just editing. It’s all about how she can imagine putting something together in a video. For this you came with these ideas about, I think the phrase is ‘match cut’. 

LJ: I wanted it to almost feel like you couldn’t always tell . . . one woman cut into the next woman and . . . We were all representing the same kind of ferocity . . .

How much did you work with Emma and Laura before you started filming?

LJ: The prompt I gave them was to make a minute long sequence and it doesn’t really matter what it is.

EC: And I didn’t do that. I just improvised the whole time. 

LJ: To Celine Dion. 

On purpose? 

EC: I did. Yes. She inspires a lot of really solid movement out of me. It’s true. And Laura came in with a pretty fierce sequence.

Did you have the actual song in advance? 

EC: We definitely did. You’d think I’d improv to the song but Celine really brings it for me.

How many times did you repeat a sequence? Or were you improvising the whole time?

EC: There were a few things I repeated because I was hoping we would get them [on film] but so much of what I assumed we would take to use in editing, we didn’t. Leah is really looking for these very humanistic moments that I don’t know how to describe. 

LJ: It’s like a charcuterie board. I know I want this cheese, and I know I want this other thing, but I don’t know the specifics. In making the board, that’s when I realize—oh, this cheese is actually slightly too salty. As it’s happening, I have really strong opinions about what I want and don’t want. It’s totally intuition, and it just comes out through the process.

Leah, do you feel like what you know about circus skills and apparatus plays into your instincts about what will work on camera?

LJ: For me, it doesn’t feel so much about apparatus as knowing the artists’ work. Knowing how Emma moves, knowing how Laura moves . . . 

And knowing what [videographer] Danny can do. 

LJ: Which is limitless! Danny and I always have conversations ahead of time. I’ll rarely use technical terms. In this case, the only one I used was match cut. Other than that, I just say I want it to feel like this and he can always do it.

Leah, I know that you and Danny are married. How does everybody else know each other? 

EC: I met Laura through Leah very recently. I knew she was a circus person around. I’ve met her up at the [Bellingham Circus] Guild. I really dig her style and dig her tissu. Leah and I really got to know each other when we were at 12[th Avenue Arts], a year and a half ago for [Acrobatic Conundrum’s] Volume 9 show that we were in together. 

LJ: One fact that I want to get in is that Emma was Laura’s tissu idol. I think that’s a really sweet connection. Laura and I met because she came to my straps class at [Versatile Arts, now called New Moon Movement Arts] seven years ago or something like that. 

EC: And now you’re part of like this core group of people, four women. The pride of lions. 

Leah, Laura, Dream [Frohe] and PJ [Perry]. The lionesses. 

LJ: There’s a crew, there’s a strong crew up there [in Bellingham].

So then why’d you guys come [to SANCA] to film this?

EC: I really like the floor here. The floor is really good and familiar. Also, I’ve done projects at SANCA in the past, but not in a really long time. So it was an interesting experiment to see how the AIR Program was going to work out for us. 

LJ: And also the black backdrop. If we wanted to do more circular roaming stuff, we couldn’t have done that at the Guild without having a totally chaotic background.

So let’s talk about the residency program. How did the program support your project?

EC: It was amazing. It was super supportive. 

LJ: There weren’t too many hurdles. It was nice to have the green light.

EC: It felt effortless to make the idea happen. The issue isn’t coming up with an idea. It’s beginning to move forward and have momentum with that idea. It’s crucial to keep that momentum. Sometimes just collaborating with other artists can be a problem, just scheduling or you just lose steam . . . let alone figuring out a space and what kind of red tape could exist and all that. So it was really wonderful to come in exactly the way we wanted and the way that Leah envisioned and execute the vision without feeling impinged in any way. It was really awesome. 

I want to ask you both, with this project—what are you most happy with/proud of/excited about that happened on purpose? And what are you most happy with/proud of/excited about that happened on accident?

LJ: I guess the obvious answer is that the match cuts were so effective. I love the idea of taking three artists who each have their own style and then uniting them through the editing. I think it worked. It was a total through line and it wasn’t jarring to watch. It just felt fluid. Something that happened spontaneously was when Laura threw the fabric. Danny thought it was cool, and said let’s do it again. So she did it over and over again. It was perhaps, sorry Emma, but perhaps my favorite visual.

EC: That’s ok! I was the one filming it! In video, what’s really special is that you take these moments that we all can experience in live performance that are over so quickly—just the way that someone moves their head or the way someone tosses their apparatus. It’s something small. By playing with time and the angle of the camera, it’s almost like you get to suspend yourself in that really delicious place and luxuriate. 

LJ: You can see all the frames. In real life it would happen too fast. 

EC: In real life, we’d still be struck by this feeling and we’d enjoy it but we wouldn’t be able to feather it out into a fine detail like under a microscope. That’s what’s so cool about videos. You get to really indulge in things that light you up about circus. 

LJ: You also get to play outside the realm of physics. Like with the throws, I got to rewind them and punctuate them in the middle—which would never happen. You get to change the laws of movement.

It’s interesting because often people think circus artists can already resist physics. But as a circus artist you truly are very beholden to it. You’re trying to understand: how can I work with physics? 

LJ: You’re completely in a partnership with physics and to be liberated from that—but you still get to have this beautiful movement—it is just incredible.