Juggling with shit
Preamble
We’re in deep shit.
Socially, inequalities are growing and tensions are exacerbated. Politically, the situation is becoming increasingly polarized, with the far right in power or on the brink of power. And ecologically, it’s an absolute, total catastrophe.
We’re up to our necks in shit.
The use of this word is crude, but a pale reflection of the situation. So I use it without the reserve of propriety.
This text is a journey full of detours on our relationship with the shit we’re in, the shit we want to hide or not. Shit in all its various guises, and what juggling can say about it.
Noble or not?
All the arts have their letters of nobility.
But some more than others.
In the West, we intuitively associate certain arts with refinement, with the elite, and others with the commoners, with a certain disdain.
Some might say that music transcends, theater cathartizes, dance elevates, poetry reinvents language, or painting and sculpture open our eyes.
At some point in history, each of these arts has served or thwarted power or religion in an attempt to attain the sublime and the sacred.Each of these arts has at some point in history served or thwarted power or religion in an attempt to achieve the sublime and the sacred; to gain recognition from the aristocracy and the status of a major art form.
But some art smells like shit.
In this case, horse shit: the circus.
An immanent, down-to-earth art form (even for trapeze artists), the circus has long sought its nobility where it is practiced: in the mud, in the mire. And all the glitter, brass and gold in the world can’t hide this fundamental smell, this thing that sticks like a stigma to all social defectors.
In my work, shit appears on several occasions.
With Gadoue (2018), in a way, I’m immersing myself in it. In this show, the character I play, all respectable and well-dressed, finds himself in the awkward position of having to perform on a clay-covered runway. He tries it without getting dirty, and that’s the point. But finally, after the first few small stains, he finds himself in his underpants and immerses himself in clay, earth and muck to reach something primal in himself, a truth of his being, a dignity in poo. And the children are not fooled when they laugh to see me with a mud stain on my underpants. It reminds them of the not-so-distant days of diapers.
Longer ago, I created two pieces with Volodia Lesluin and Paola Rizza that dealt with animality and power relationships: Lard (2011) and Lardon (2008).
In these two pieces, I was juggling a brown substance that fell from the sky, like shit from higher beings, shit from God. There was something terrible and funny in this juggling act.
The laughter provoked by these shows and scenes is indeed a sign of discomfort and inner turmoil linked to this issue. The question of dirt and odor is of course the first that comes to mind, but we can look for other things behind it.
So, what’s the big deal?
Shit and juggling today
What’s the big deal about juggling?
What’s the shit today?
First of all, shit is that part of us that falls out of our bodies almost every day.
You squat, you sit, peristalsis does its job and it falls.
But juggling is all about managing the fall of a body.
This is perhaps one of the first lessons we humans learn from the fall.
Of course, we first need to prevent ourselves from falling, and it’s already quite a task to achieve bipedalism and relative stability: to stand upright. We also try not to drop too many objects around us.
All right, sometimes we have a good laugh at dropping something, seeing it disappear and then reappear thanks to the good-enough parent who gives it back to us.
The concept of a good enough parent was coined by a psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, who defined three essential functions of the parent with regard to the little child: the handling (manipulating the child, letting him feel his skin, envelope, texture, musculature, etc.), the holding (carrying the child, offering the security of always feeling carried and supported) and object presenting (introducing the child to objects, the outside world, weights, surfaces, otherness).
As for the disappearance then reappearance of the object, this is the famous “Fort-Da”, identified by Freud, of the child who rejoices to see that something that has disappeared can come back, that it is not lost forever.
But the ultimate downfall, once you’re out of diapers, is poo. The gift we can give to the world, or not. That part of us that we leave behind, whether we leave it or not. I’ll come back to this later.
Secondly, to talk about the relationship between crap and juggling today, I’m going to propose a major historical detour that will lead us to the question of form and the possible posture of the artist today. In a nutshell, it’s a question of reflecting on what has contributed to the weakening of the notion of transcendence in the West, and asking whether the “future” of transcendence lies in shit (in every sense of the expression).
A number of factors have contributed to modernity and and paved the way for today:
I’m thinking of the technical and industrial revolution,
I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s death of God,
I’m thinking of the gradual grip of capitalism,
I’m also thinking of two major poetic challenges. On the one hand, Baudelaire’s view of what a poem can say: beauty is not what you think it is. The paradigmatic example of this is the poem “Une charogne”, in which Charles Baudelaire offers us, with all the grace and subtlety of his language, a rather horrifying description of a carrion. It’s beautiful and terrible at the same time. Baudelaire ends by reminding us that we will all be like this carrion, rotting and definitively dead. On the other, Rimbaud’s questioning of the form of what a poem can say. He said of Baudelaire, whom he admired, that he was absolutely revolutionary in content, but that the form remained old-fashioned. He therefore sought to rejuvenate it. In particular, he developed prose poetry.
Finally, I’m thinking of the long process of aesthetic revolution and deconstruction that accompanied the tragedies and absurdities of the 20th century.
All these things lead Samuel Beckett, interviewed by the American academic Tom Driver in 1961, to this terrible sentence: “The challenge for modern writers is that they have to deal with the world of destruction, and they have to get a form out of it. If you’re not equal tothe waste, the debacle, the disaster, the devastation, you’re not a modern poet. But if you can’t find a form, you’re not a modern poet. “In other words, contemporary art must find a form to match the destruction, the chaos, the formlessness.
In short, we’re in deep shit.
Capitalism destroys so much, digests so much, that art has nothing left to destroy.
Shit is that.
Shit is precisely that.
And to juggle or play with shit is to honor the Beckettian project of dealing with the formless.
Shape and form
We could imagine a kind of anarchist pedagogy project on formlessness.
Pedagogues wonder whether they are transforming, shaping and/or distorting students… And why shouldn’t they inform them? Here I mean both senses of the verb to inform: the strict sense – to give information – and the unusual sense – to get out of form.
So I’m looking forward to learning to juggle through this crucial stage: the fecal. Or at least informs it.
Like a return to our roots as much as a novelty.
Back to basics, because according to Freud, shit and money correspond to each other. And as I said in another text (” Juggling with death “), the circus has long had to do with commerce, with money. The modern circus is a business with enormous costs (big top, animals, etc.). So you have to aim for profitability. Didn’t the traditional chains make a killing by selling popcorn and other merchandise alongside the show, and charging admission to the menagerie? So juggling with crap is a very honest thing to do after all. The quintessential circus: playing with money. If we’re going to be immanent, let’s be trivial and venal to the end.
And a novelty, because to be honest, there’s no such thing anymore – well, not enough. Truth is no longer a considered value in our hyper-connected capitalist society. What makes a speech valuable is its publicity, not its veracity. So juggling with shit, honestly, that’s revolutionary.
As an example of this question of veracity, let’s consider what Amber Heard went through during the trial that pitted her against Johnny Depp in 2022, and the extent to which malicious individuals manipulated her image via social networks, harassing her ignominiously to the point of wondering whether the “judicial truth” had not been altered by this pseudo-media discourse.
Think, too, of the growing success of political speeches that are notably misleading but so appealing as to get a Donald Trump elected.
Let’s look to the poets, if not for truth, then at least for veracity.
“Where it smells like shit / it smells like being” said Antonin Artaud at the beginning of his poem “La recherche de la fécalité”.
We’ll have to listen to Artaud in all his anger: LE CACA!
Listen to the poets again, and go against the grain of artificial intelligence and dematerialization. Materialize!
In Diaspora, a hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan, part of humanity becomes so artificialized that it can only be held together by programs and atomic chips. Humanity seeks to travel through all dimensions to find an answer to the enigma of life, in vain. At the beginning of the book, these people who have begun to stop being organic meet humans who have made the opposite choice of returning absolutely to the organic and accepting its limits, including death. I recognized myself in them and felt much more disgusted by artifice than by the triviality of the corporeal.
This leads me to appreciate differently the fact of existing, of being. But when it’s there, it always smells…
Juggling with shit
To my knowledge, few artists have tried.
With the formlessness, it reminds me of Laurent Chanel and his Cthulhu mon amour project (2019). In this performance show, Laurent Chanel grows large tentacles made of foam skilfully blended with helium, oxygen and soap. These tentacles grow spectacularly, undulating in the air currents. We’re faced with something that moves, breaks and changes shape. Laurent Chanel plays with these outgrowths. We don’t associate these things with crap, but the shape isn’t stable. The strangeness throws us into awe and fascination. Shapeless and ephemeral have been given an existence.
And as for juggling with shit, I think only dancer and performer Mathilde Monfreux has really ventured into that. It was about ten years ago, and she was manipulating and juggling some sort of large guts filled with a brown substance. It looked as much like a huge intestine as a pudding or a turd. It was dirty and smelly. In a performance she devised for an event I supervised at Les Subsistances in Lyon, she worked on the tube represented by our digestive system. Anatomically, this tube is considered external, even though it’s inside our body. What connects our mouth to our anus is a kind of internalized exterior, a place of exchange.
Glands are divided into two categories: exocrine and endocrine. The endocrine glands release their substances into the body – hormones. Exocrine glands secrete them outside the body, like sweat from sweat glands. Well, digestive juices are considered exocrine because they are discharged to an outside, but which is temporarily inside: the stomach, intestines, and so on. This raises the question of our permeability and, consequently, our exchange with what is ingested. In the digestive tract, we sort out what we receive and what we give back. This question of exchange is crucial, I can do it, I can do it.
During her performance, Mathilde Monfreux said a phrase that carried a lot of meaning: “When you’re born, you scream; when you die, you shit! Hearing this connection between the digestive cycle and the cycle of life, the act of handling the intestines seemed to me comparable to a form of ritual.
The question of ritual fascinates me, and author Bruno Remaury’s words on the subject speak to my heart, guts and brain. In an interview published in Ballast magazine, he says:
Rituals shape the world and make it habitable. This “broad horizon” […], or immensity, is frightening. Either you embrace it wholeheartedly, which I can’t, or you give it shape and surround yourself with signs. And that’s both Pollock dancing on his canvas, or storytelling on Instagram, or wrapping yourself in music or objects. Yes, it’s giving shape to the world.
I would add: giving shape and form to the world.
And I’d like to underline the expression used at the end of this quote: “wrapping yourself in music and objects” could be a clear bridge to juggling.
Hold back or let go
The joys of the anal stage in psychoanalysis. Let’s talk about it.
Hold or release. Control or surrender. To give or not to give.
On this question, jugglers are rather masters in the art of holding back, of rigorously, methodically mastering everything.
The most insane example of this inclination is probably thehe show
Holy
by Emil Dahl (2020). Visit This juggler’s technical mastery is astounding. It does what no one else does, and does it with the utmost precision. Every gesture is mastered. Emil Dahl develops balances of rings that he holds simultaneously on his head in an atmosphere of meditation. Her ass, our asses are extremely tight during this performance. The extreme nature of this proposal verges on a cerebral, out-of-body sacredness.
What this aesthetic experience brings out in me is precisely that: cerebrality, the repression of the organic and the power of letting go.
Fritz Zorn writes about this tragically well in his autobiographical essay Mars. This writer was born into a Swiss Protestant bourgeois family, in which refusal – saying no – and, more broadly, conflict were unimaginable. Everything was done to ensure that every member of the family repressed any personal desire that might thwart the family’s decorum. In his book, Fritz Zorn talks about his cancer, describing it as the stigma of this infernal repression, this refusal of the body and the power of negation. He was educated to death. Everything was clean, tidy, smooth, lifeless. I might as well be dead…
…Or choose the release, the outlet, the great relieving defecation.
In 2003, to compose the technical presentation for my graduation from the Châlons-en-Champagne circus school, one of my teachers suggested that my class make a gift of the presentation. A gift for the public, a gift for the teachers who had accompanied us for so many years, a gift for us.
The gift.
The cacadeau.
During this presentation, I did a combination of dance and contact ball, while comrades came to feed me and give me something to drink without me stopping. Naturally, this overflowed and became a messy, even filthy, force-feeding, and buckets of water ended up falling from the dome of the marquee. These included Nutella, spoon-fed to me first by Marie Jolet, then by Victor Cathala with a soup spoon and many spills.
All this is on the opposite side of the shit, towards the mouth. But finally, there’s a kind of correspondence between what we eat and what we defecate.
The gift of self
To give, to surrender, to dare to offer the most intimate and even the filthiest, is beautiful.
A gift, a real gift, doesn’t require a counter-gift, it’s a gift. This is extremely rare, perhaps even impossible.
In the capitalist system, nothing is free. What is, pretends to be.
So a gift that isn’t a sacrifice (like a religious gift) would be an act of resistance.
Capitalism devours and digests everything. So, let’s juggle with the droppings, with what capitalism has shunned, with what it has left us, with what’s left to us: waste, garbage, scraps, detritus. Let’s be rejects ourselves.
The society of self-promotion generalized by social networks, this Narcissus power that embraces us all, this need for absolute control over self-image, is a new prudery, a ravage of precious and precious ridiculousness, of artificiality, a self-control that we think is individual but that plays in the court of a systemic control. This constant self-advertising turns us into products on a market.
Let go.
Let’s drop the farts,
Let’s let go of the poop and the moorings,
Let’s get away from the inorganic delusions of control over everything by everyone.
When we fall, when we feel bad, we say we’re shit.
Let’s get up, let’s be standing shits!
Let’s be “Them”, the eponymous pronoun of Henri Michaux’s poem:
“Them
They didn’t come to laugh or cry,
They didn’t come further than the shore,
They didn’t come in twos or threes,
They didn’t come as we said they would,
They came without protection, without reflection and without sorrow,
They came without begging or ordering,
They came without asking for forgiveness, without relatives and without food,
And they haven’t worked yet.
Well, well, well, that’s the way to get beaten by someone more abandoned than you,
We’ll be defeated and lie naked on beds prepared by the victors,
We swallow our shame in pleasure or in pain,
And many will greet the revelation with gritted teeth,
And without wanting to admit it to themselves.
Love! Love! And once again your name is applied all wrong.
Let’s be Them and all that’s left for me to do is write a third and final rant after “Juggling with Death” and “Juggling with Shit”: “Juggling with Love”!
But first, let’s get to the bottom of the business: a souvenir.
I don’t know how old I was, I was in the bathroom and I couldn’t do it. I called my mother, who came to see me and put her hands under my bottom to help me. And then I succeeded, my gift was able to come out, I was able to offer this poo to my beloved mommy.
Thanks, Mom.
I love you, Mom.
You died almost thirty years ago, and this act is perhaps one of my earliest memories.
It’s weird, but it’s not.
It was a gift from me and a gift from you.
So what can I do today but offer it to the world in my own way?
Gift dear reader.
Gift