Branching Out: Discovering New Qualities in Circus Movement

With Marina Mezzogiorno-Brown and Natalie Oleinik

Curiosity as our guide, this workshop explores how to create new pathways within each participant’s existing technical framework. We focus on learning to listen to the apparatus, the space, and to our own bodies’ comfort (and discomfort!) zones in order to discover surprising and personal ways to use our circus vocabulary.

A deep dive into specific exercises on movement qualities, tempo, awareness on the apparatus, exploring and challenging our physical habits, and using the imagination as a motor for movement, this workshop gives practical tools for finding new relationships between bodies, objects and space. This research is conducted in a non-judgmental and shared creative space: it is an invitation to imperfection and exploration.

This workshop includes

• Warm-up for the body and spatial awareness 
• Floor work: exercises in quality of movement, tempo, and relationships to each other and the space
• Research with the apparatus (qualities, tempo, object manipulation)
• Guided improvisations rooted in practical tasks and in the imagination
• Sharing our work
• Cool down and stretching

Prerequisites: This workshop is open to a wide range of technical levels, and welcomes students using any apparatus. Students using a vertical apparatus should be able to climb, and all students should have the strength and comfort to spend a few minutes in the air (not necessarily really active minutes). Students should have a few moves they feel comfortable with.

About the Instructors:

Marina Mezzogiorno-Brown and Natalie Oleinik have been working together for eight years.

Their performances are deeply connected to their visual arts practices, both in the attention to aesthetic detail and in the ways they create. Together and individually they have developed a sensitive approach to circus as a series of refined relationships between bodies, space, materials, objects, and intuition. While rooted in this shared approach, they have very different ways of moving and presence on stage, which brings exciting contrasts to their collaborations.

Together with the company Catalyst they created the show Amygdala, which they performed both in chapiteaux and as a site-specific piece. They played Amygdala at the Avignon OFF festival in France in 2019, at Sansusī Festival in Latvia, and with Dinamico Festival in Italy, among others.

Both perform with many different companies and projects now and over the years. These include Natalie with the Colporteurs (FR) and Nat & Jo (FR/CH), and Marina with MagdaClan Circo (IT) and Collectif And Then… (UK).

They also have a nascent print collaboration called Butterknife.