Juggling with death
Which deity will we embody?
Death inhabits the circus, it haunts it.
Most circus disciplines summon up the fear, the fear and the desire of the accident, of the fatal accident.
Sadistic art, maso art. But in spite of this, sacred art.
Because death is there, it prowls between the trapeze and the seesaw.
The history of the last twenty years has unfortunately shown us that the circus, despite its latest revolutions, has not at all driven the Grim Reaper out of the ring and schools. And this time and time again.
The circus has to do with death.
But when it comes to juggling, you have to wonder. One cannot imagine the juggler in mortal danger when practicing his art…
If circus performers defy death, what specific death do jugglers face?
Perhaps to a symbolic death: the shame of failure. Because no matter what happens, the object will eventually fall.
We could ask the “best” jugglers, Delanay Bayles, Wes Peden, Anthony Gatto, Viktor Kee or Nathalie Enterline: nothing to do, it falls.
Juggling would then be like a superhero’s priesthood: always ensuring while the fall is inevitable.
Of course, but something else must be possible.
Maybe death is not there for us jugglers.
If what we were juggling with was death itself: the death of others!
What if each object thrown, held in balance, manipulated, was the symbol of another human being, of the other who risks dying, of the other who will die?
Of the other who would do well to live, spin, get thrown and dance before the end?
The object is already dead, inert. It has no other destiny than to return to its eternal rest – that of the toy abandoned by the child who has grown up.
The artist can take the risk of killing him again. He doesn’t care.
Unless the object kills?
Speaking of “best juggler”, isn’t that what happened to Enrico Rastelli? A kind of revenge of the object.
We don’t know anything about it, it’s probably a legend, but too bad if it’s not true, it will have given us something to dream about… Here is the story:
Enrico Rastelli is considered one of the greatest jugglers of all time. Known all over Europe, he presented the first full-length juggling show.
He was so popular that when he died in 1931, German radio interrupted his programs and thousands of people followed his funeral in Italy.
So one day, Rastelli asks someone in the audience to throw him a ball that he will catch on his mouth stick.
But the ball is thrown too hard and the stick hurts him. Bad luck: he was a hemophiliac. He will die from complications of this injury. Thanatos, cunningly hidden in I don’t know which devious microbe, comes to finish the work.
And if the object does not kill, what about death and juggling?
There is an artist, a juggler who has worked magnificently on these questions: Jeanne Mordoj.
In his show L’éloge du poil, death is present in many ways.
The artist manipulates animal skulls that she makes speak like puppets.
She also rolls dozens of snail shells whose sound evokes the ebb and flow of the sea. The dead remains of living beings serve to bring into existence the central element of all life, water.
But above all there is this famous scene of juggling with an egg yolk. Yellow that can only die. It is inexorable. Yellow who is like a stillborn, an embodiment of a potential for life but above all a potential for imminent death. Jeanne Mordoj even says it on stage, she gives “to the being who will not be born a glimpse of the world from which he escaped”.
She makes a dead man dance.
And then in her next show, Adieu Poupée, which moved me to tears, Jeanne Mordoj makes ghosts evolve.
Like a farewell to childhood and a fundamental questioning of what we are, what we do, what she is, what she does, what she juggles.
It was already in the Old Testament:
Havel havalim, hakhol havel.
Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
Vanity of vanities and all is vanity.
– Ecclesiastes 1.2
So, we were told and it’s been a long time.
To write a juggling show is to be confronted with this terrible conclusion: how vain it is!
What’s the point of throwing objects to catch them?
What is the meaning of writing a juggling sequence?
We could think that the artist is simply looking for beauty, as an escape from this world, a consolation. The same goes for a musician or a painter…
But when you spend several hours a day picking up dropped objects, you can’t help but think: what a waste!
And in art, how is usually represented what is called a vanity?
By a skull, a skull.
Oh dear, I would like to digress but everything brings us back to this.
Ultimately, this leaves us with two possibilities.
Either you identify with the juggler and you are now defying God, death and quantum physics.
Either we identify with the object and we tremble at the idea that we will be let down, that we will be killed, that Daddy will not always be there to save us.
Well, no, Dad isn’t always there. Dad is failing or Dad is dead. Mom too, for that matter.
Identifying with a bullet may sound sweet… ambiguous too.
To let oneself be juggled, to enjoy the height, the caress of the contact, to let oneself be brought to life by the other, to give all one’s confidence while knowing the inevitable end.
The fall.
But this inclination to want to be the object is problematic.
#metoo, Black Lives Matter and others keep reminding us that we are all beings and not things. Care and non-violent communication invite us to address the other as a subject, distinct, unique and full of complexity.
But there, one would value the return to the object and the manipulation. We would be masochistic.
No, we are actually multiple.
We are not white geese, we have our shadows.
“Worrying strangeness” would say Freud, “Beyond good and evil” would say Nietzsche…
Whether on a personal or collective level, we are governed by forces that are not just the wishful thinking of Enlightenment thinkers. There is irrationality, there is the ” dark side of the force “. We’ll have to deal with it.
So we would be juggling dead people.
Funny idea.
Why not?
And we get paid for that?
Making bread from the death of others, it may seem strange.
He looks like a warlord or a neoliberal cynic who plays with the lives and deaths of his contemporaries.
It is not for nothing that Chaplin, in The Great Dictator, played Hitler juggling with the Earth. And obviously at the end of this scene, the Earth explodes.
Hitler juggles with the deaths he is producing by the millions and with the world he dreams of dominating. It dominates and kills.
Jugglers as agents of delirious capitalism!?
No, it would hurt too much.
I may have learned that since Astley and the invention of the modern circus in the eighteenth century, this art is deeply linked to commerce, but there must be some transcendence in it.
And the sacred in all this!
Redemptive juggling embodied in a savior?
No, juggling is not sacrificial enough for those who practice it to embody Jesus.
It would be something else then, something much more pretentious and funny: Shiva.
Shiva?
Shiva dances.
Our objects dance.
Juggling: an art of making the dead dance.
And to make the other dance well, there is nothing like dancing yourself.
Then it would be a question of dancing while making the others dance, the dead on probation, in a near-life-experience as Tyler Durden would say in Fight Club.
Like a bullfighter or like Francis Brunn juggling a ball, Kō Mirobushi dancing from the depths of darkness, Pina Bausch so intensely in Café Müller.
Shiva dances, destroys and transforms the world. New life can only come through death.
Among the Hebrews, the seven-day mourning period is called Shivah.
And in France, Shiva is a home cleaning and ironing company.
Death, dance and the household.
Juggling Triad.
There is a lot of cleaning to do. In every corner and especially under the carpet.
A good cleaning of our patriarchal, sexist, racist behaviors.
A fundamental cleaning of our relationship with “nature”. By starting to evacuate this very notion of nature, purely Western.
We could already put away our balls, clubs and other rings in well-designed trajectories, mastered rhythms to the soft sound of the
siteswap
*, grandiose figures full of surprises.
We would be in control like never before. No room for nonsense.
Well, yes!
The big cleanup is not what it seems.
If juggling dances with death, then the household is not one of order.
A household of life, cry and jump. The opposite of entropy!
The household of a good regenerating exultation.
To embody a divinity, yes but then a divinity of the disorder which saves.
I have the impression that Johan Swartvagher is on this way, Idriss Roca too, respectively Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols) and Charles Baudelaire of the juggling. Punk and spleen, both majestic. And there are certainly others.
A household that we have been waiting for for a long time.
A juggling act we’ve been waiting for.
An incarnation that we have been waiting for a long time.
Dionysus
Ishtar
Shiva!
What is this about death and giving life to the dead?
Ten years ago, during a butoh workshop with Richard Cayre, I participated with my fellow students in a sweat lodge. A Native American ritual, it involves spending a few hours in an overheated hut, singing and sharing something like a trance with fellow sweats.
We sweat together and almost burn. Worse, much worse than a sauna.
We burn from the outside and the inside. Each breath is like a flame in the bronchi.
And yet something essential is happening.
There are phases and repetitions.
After the fourth sequence, I had visions.
In this hell of suffocating heat, I saw myself asphyxiated in a gas chamber, I saw myself burning with my millions of ancestors in the ovens. But above all, I saw them encouraging me to live, live, live and live again for them.
This is the most beautiful lesson of our deaths, isn’t it?
Encourage us to live!
Live life to the death, the final extermination, the Armageddon.
At the bottom of the ball
Of ball
Of ball
What’s next?
Afterwards, I did The Mud Man, my first solo.
I was standing there trying to live and throw those clubs as high as I could but with my feet in the clay. And to fall and get up again and again on this slippery and unstable ground. Dancing.
And Claude Louis-Combet had written texts for this show about the word that arrives, the word that is not yet there but is in gestation, the word that is missing. Something deeply Jewish somewhere, that word that is missing, the name of God.
Hey yes, my name is Nathan Israel, I can do anything, it’s there.
The golem, the relationship to the word, a kind of tender despair, fragments of a vaguely metabolized Jewishness.
No matter how much I tried to think like an existentialist, like an anarchist, how much I tried to free myself and even to flee from any form of Jewish community or other, there is a story behind it.
There is that I was made to read as a child that my ancestors were banished from Egypt, there is the Shoah, there is the fundamental feeling of being an other, a foreigner, there is Albert Cohen and Spinoza, there is the Sephardic food cooked by my Turkish-Greek-Congolian-Belgo-Italian grandmother in total contrast with the moules-frites of my native Belgium, there is the expulsion from Spain by Isabella the Catholic, there are all the pogroms, there is… there is my name: Israel.
In the Bible, Jacob fights an entity for a whole night. And in the morning, he discovers that it is God that he has been fighting. And now his name Jacob is changed to Israel which means “fought against God”.
So there you go, it had to be in my name.
Fighting God, fighting death.
Dancing with God, dancing with death.
What’s next?
Afterwards, the last human being, proud and sad, will juggle with the millions, the billions of women, men and children who were.
This being will juggle and while his left brain will grieve as he scrupulously organizes each step and throw of this latest choreography, his right brain will deliriously dance this dance in a drunken renaissance.
But nobody to see, nobody to identify. This person will be alone and, in his self-hypnosis, will give reason to the first line of “Tobacco Office” by Fernando Pessoa:
Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
I am nothing.
I will never be nothing.
I cannot want to be anything.
That said, I carry all the dreams of the world with me.
Thanks
I would like to warmly thank Luna Rousseau, Cyrille Roussial and Jean-Michel Guy for their reading, feedback and encouragement. Without their patience and generosity, this text would have been a shadow of its former self. Thank you!
Thanks also to the editorial board and Erik Åberg.