(Note: originally written in 2019)
Last week I experienced an incredible moment. While at a gymnastics open gym in the middle of Vermont, a fellow participant (whose round-off back tucks I had been admiring) asked, “why are you using the equipment that way?” A simple answer would have been, “to practice a hand balancing style for canes (a set of wooden blocks roughly the size of the hand elevated by a set of poles) rather than the floor .” Instead, my natural impulse to justify my actions and their relevance to my life’s journey took over; I blurted out:
“Because it’s more similar to practicing on hand-balancing canes and I want to improve my handstands because I want to use handstands and other acrobatic or aerialist movement as a way of using a different gesture vocabulary for musical expression and there is so much done with visual interactivity but I want to investigate sound interactivity and I want to collaborate with artists who are more skilled than I but feel I also need to have an understanding of my solo or rather self-practice as well to work through the rough experiments, sketches, and prototypes of some of these ideas and then there is this activist-leaning side that wants to use this artistic expression to interact with people and I see much of the contemporary circus community doing that already in interesting, captivating, and helpful ways and I want to be involved in the dialogue and give others another possibility in how they might be expressive using sound and/or technology too...”
...I think I babbled on for a few more sentences before tentatively pausing my monologue enough to allow a response from my newly acquainted fellow tumbler. He simply exclaimed, “Oh, so you’re trying to combine music and artistic expression with engineering and software development and athleticism, then maybe some other tangents off that as well? That’s great!”
So there you have it: the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) and Xarts (interdisciplinary arts often with technology or new media) concepts roughly encapsulate many of the elements I’m interested in. One of the light bulb moments that clarified this was when I choose to study Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) at Oberlin Conservatory of Music for my undergrad. Not knowing exactly what direction I would take in the world of experimental music and technology I took an introductory course in circuitry and interactivity with sensors taught by John Talbert. So many projects had been done with dance and visuals; I thought why not apply these concepts to circus? Cheesy as it is, the seed had been planted! At this time I had also been introduced to circus through partner acrobatics. It was through our mutual base(aka our strong lady who holds us up), Molly Barger, that I met my wonderful friend and collaborator, Linnea Kirby, who also happens to be incredibly talented and interested in similar concepts and, long-story short, we created CirqueIT.
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