Experiments Arts and sciences

Falling. A little sociology of juggling for a counterproductive job

The first time we talked about the job was on the phone between Paris and Angers somewhere in 2018. Then there were snippets, meetings, discussions, essays. Here we go. This time we’ll talk about it for real. Of our gestures, of our ways of looking at it, of deciphering it, of analyzing it, of shaping it, of doing and redoing it without knowing if it leads somewhere. We crossed our virtuosities and talked about our failures, trying to have something to say about this micro-politics of the body at work.

Agathe Dumont

Agathe Dumont is a researcher and dancer, with a doctorate in performing arts and a degree in sports performance expertise. After a career as a dancer, she turned to teaching and research. She is a professor at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Angers and teaches various dance and circus courses. She also collaborates as a researcher, expert or author for different projects around circus and dance (circusnext, the CCN of Créteil, Nantes, the CND among others). Finally, she is a dramaturge or an external viewer for artistic creation projects (Cie Sans la Nommer, Cie Leste). In 2015, she began a collaboration with Mariam Faquir for an artistic research at L’L (research in living arts) completed in 2020: https://www.llrecherche.be/traces-de-recherches/

His research focuses on the work of artists, on virtuosity and risk, particularly around issues of health and care in a socio-ethnographic approach. His research is collected on the site

“Listening to the work”. His next book is to be published in 2023 by L’L Editions (Brussels), Déclinaisons du quotidien. Putting the body to work.

Guillaume Martinet

Guillaume Martinet is a juggler and considers himself a passionate craftsman. Graduated in biology, self-taught in juggling, he continued his training at the Lido in Toulouse in 2007. In 2009, with Laure Caillat, he founded the company Defracto whose ambition is to create a body language and juggling. The desire is to work together without hierarchy between individuals, in detail at the highest level and with the sensibilities of each. Co-author, performer and initiator of all the company’s projects, he has been developing research on expressive juggling and physical humor for 14 years. Today Defracto has performed its juggling jokes more than 700 times, in over 40 countries, on all five continents.

Retrocausalities

Becoming what you are

Bypassing your own identity

Drawing vanishing lines

In contrast to their respective universes, the researcher and artist Eve Giustiniani and the artist and researcher Roxana Küwen invite themselves into a laboratory where art and science intersect, question and imagine each other. Between doubling and contortion, they try to explore parallel worlds and contradictory trajectories.

Roxana Küwen

Roxana Küwen is an antipodal juggler of Iranian-German origin based in Toulouse and Cologne. After years of touring with her acts, short formats and her latest creation “Play Nice” with the duo Ariane&Roxana she created the Cie بلبل bolbol. His long format solo “OMÂ or the privileges of the potato” will be released in November 2023. She is also one of the founders of the German collective “CiNS” which has developed a scientific, artistic and educational work on the circus under Nazism in Germany.

Eve Giustiniani

Eve Giustiniani is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies (though of Anglo-Corsican origin) at the University of Aix-Marseille. After a doctoral thesis and various publications on the cultural and intellectual history of contemporary Spain, she wrote a book on the returns of the 1939 Spanish anti-Franco exile in the Spain of the democratic transition. Juggling between her job and her passions, she seeks escape in an amateur artistic practice that leads her to question the scientific discipline from its creative margins.