People often ask me where I got the idea to create a little circus with toys for artists and numbers made of sound. My musical activity had previously been split between the saxophone and different electroacoustic practices, both on stage and in the studio. I’d always been interested in the idea of making music from objects or situations that weren’t intended for that purpose. Playing with everyday sounds, rearranging them, mixing them together and so on. The ABCs of electroacoustics, you know ?
I was also fascinated by those cheap little mechanical toys that, when you open them, reveal a mechanism that is as simple as it is clever. Its movements create friction, rotation, tapping and beating which, when lightly amplified, provide all kinds of material for the ear.
My desire to make a circus in particular came from old friends who started up the first « new » circuses in the 70s. They didn’t know how to do much, not having been circus kids themselves, but their ingenuity and their humor made for really great shows.
I love to recycle. All these toys that you generally find on the kid’s table at a flea market get to have a second life. As for the ring, it was constructed almost entirely from salvaged material and neglected utilitarian objects that had been lying around in my cupboards, some of them for twenty years.
Some people see these toys and tell me that I’ve regressed back to childhood. But the real return to childhood is in the DIY (do-it-yourself) construction that this performance has brought about. In the past I enjoyed constructing things out of odds and ends, a tube of glue and few nails. I started doing so again for this project, in a very non-professional way (as I’m not a visual artist), by assembling what I’d found in the back of my closet with some super glue. Who knows how long it will last!
It was all of these things together that created Le Petit Cirque : certain musical demands, an attraction to small mechanics, a return to DIY…and a desire not to take myself too seriously.
Laurent BIGOT
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