Moral has nothing to do with circus.
~ Tristan Remy ~
PROJECT
Side is a project of alternative circus, “ alternative ” understood as all forms of circus
that distinguish from so - called circus tradition in order to take an adventurous way
of artistic research and experiment with the languages of scenic arts.
Side is an original project and intentionally independent, created by a collective of
artists that stimulated by their respective experiences in avant - garde circus and
music shows as well as on the technical fields, decides to equip themselves with
an own theatre.
Side kunst-cirque is a chapiteau theatre ready to host and program theatrical
circus creations, performative arts and music. The basic idea is to create a space
where artists and public can meet and enable the exchange of ideas and to diffuse
the modern culture of circus.
The artistic and technical choices fall under the non - principals expressed in the
declaration of Kunst - Cirque (see below), in which the collective manifests itself.
Good evening.
WHY SIDE
Side is the passion that praises extremity, the periphery. The marginal value of
a handle. In the area of perception, architecture, art in general. Side is the feeling
that recognizes laterally non - defined spaces, like the white marge around the page,
on which notes, designs and personal reflections concentrate.
Side is the vivid interest for anything beside anything else; for everything next to what
human beings hereditarily perceive as “centre”. Like, for example, himself
… the tree is its leaves, the spider his web, a being nothing else than its extremities:
hands and ears.
Side is all that cannot be neither in front of nor behind you, neither over nor under,
like culture or ignorance, like the feelings, the family, like death.
HETEROTOPY
The cities are interconnected with ever denser webs, distances can be covered by highways, flights and high velocity trains in a period of time
that is also necessary to move in one single city.
The homogeneous aspects of the cities intensify the impression of one only “World-Town” (Marc Augé) without borders. However, the towns tend to
incorporate the ethnic and economic diversity of the entire world and become “Town-Worlds”. The singularity of historical centres assume their last
destination: their exclusive aim is to be taken on a photograph by tourists from all over the world.
Side understands itself as a foucaultian “heterotopy”, a “non-place”, that penetrates the city centres using the web of European towns and excites
an attention towards the art that exists outside of mainstream cultural industry.
Metaphorically, SIDE means the ambition to concentrate on exceptional, renegade or simply different sides of a society that shows a tendency
to confuse prefabricated phrases and advertisement slogans with the so-called “own opinion”, declaring their sudden expertise in economy,
geopolitics, theology and cultural sciences, arbitrarily mixed with nutrition tips, details of the intimate lives of celebrities and friends or advantages
of a certain detergent.
Side is an ephemeral place for individual creativity that concentrates on the little side streets and abandoned backyards in the “City-World”’s
growing web of main roads and shopping streets.
STRUCTURAE
The intentionally reduced dimension, eleven per fifteen meters, is meant to allow the structure to insinuate easily into urban centres, to crest the
trails that lead into the mountain villages as into the big cities. In this way, the circus can reconquer the historical centres that saw originate circus
and that the traditional-commercial circus had to abandon due to its oversize.
Side is a totally self-produced project. It is open to any kind of production that helps to realize its mission, but it is conceived in all future declinations
as an artistic collective: Side is not and will not be a cultural enterprise. The profit will not be put in front of the qualities of the proposals and actions
that the collective will decide to autonomously undertake in order to conduct the project.
The election of a travelling theatre is founded on the original desire to transport art, culture and knowledges in an autonomous way to places
where theatres don’t exist or where the theatre and circus program is either absent or serving the establishment of cultural industry based on
exchange instead of artistic quality.