Works

作品

The first work in FOCASA’s Crossover Trilogy, How Long is Now? draws inspiration from Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. Challenging the traditional idea of sculpture as something permanent, Wurm isolates a single action from the flow of time, bringing bodies and objects together in strange, humorous and fleeting poses. Beginning with the idea of “one minute”, A Moment of Light uses the circus body to ask: what is a moment, and what is eternity? Onstage, familiar everyday objects such as toothbrushes, buckets, watering cans, pots and pans replace conventional circus apparatus and become performers in their own right. Introducing the idea of object theatre into circus practice for the first time, the work uses throwing, catching, stacking, balancing and physical composition to rethink our familiar relationships with objects, opening up another way of seeing circus. Once everyday objects are removed from their original functions, a toothbrush is no longer simply a toothbrush, and a bucket no longer just a bucket. What else might they become? Beginning as a playful experiment with objects, A Moment of Light gradually turns towards larger questions about the relationship between people and things. Do we create objects to serve our needs, or do objects in turn shape the way we live? Ultimately, the work returns to circus itself. What is circus? When virtuosity and specialised apparatus are stripped away, what remains at its core?